The Void Stared Back With Countless Eyes
----------------------------------------
Repopulation report.

Male. 100% active. Unconscious. Size unchanged. Suppressants fully engaged.

Female. 100% active. Healthy. Size unchanged. Suppressants fully engaged.

Warning: no repopulation plan given

Warning: male active levels exceeded (<=4% expected given suppressants, 100% actual)

Warning: female active levels exceeded (<=0% expected given suppressants, 100% actual)

Publish repopulation report (Y/n)? y
n
nnnReport sent.

$ jlfskd

-----
Distant mumbling and muffled rustling echoed from the edges of Drash's consciousness. He squeezed his eyes shut as the light seemed too bright even though his lids were closed. The voices trailed off and his bed was rustled. He tried to look at what was going on, but could only see vague blurry puddles. Head thrumming with each heartbeat, face scrunching up at the pulsing ache. He blinked, slowly. The blue and gray hues melted in his vision, flowing into clearer shapes and fixating into place, the picture becoming clearer. A horned creature with large, round eyes and a rectangular mouth, looking right down at him laying before it! The life rushed back into his lax limbs and he sat up from his semi-conscious stupor stammering: "What are you?"

The azure dragoness adjusted her glasses and pulled off her facial mask, amber eyes examining him from tip to toe. "With that suit of yours I thought I was a mechanic for a while." She pulled a medical scanner out of her uniform's belt with one hand and pushed the gray dragon back onto the examination table with gentle force. With swift, ingrained motions, she moved the probe across his spined head and down his chest that was totally covered by a scale-tight, red suit that only left his head, tail, hands and feet exposed. Treated like a uniform, his shoulder was adorned with his rank and unit, while the other usually carried his vitals monitor on it, but was missing now. Granted, he probably didn't need it while surrounded by much more specialized devices for that kind of task. As the scanner reached his crotch, the medical officer raised an eyebrow, which would have made Drash uncomfortable had she not seen him in far more compromising states before, but instead took it as a point of pride that he could at least subtly impress someone who'd seen and treated the best and worst. "But looks like I still make a pretty good doctor as well." She motioned him to sit up again and continued to check up on his back. Drash rubbed the bridge of his snout. "So, why'd you hit me over the head, doc?" With a scoff, she put the probe to his temples another time, then shook her head. "You were in an accident down on the planet. Another away team found ya and brought you and Sheyla back here-"

"Sheyla!" The dragon's relaxed posture went rigid with shock as the memories flooded back in. The away mission to the sixth planet. The forest. The cave. The sudden spike in gimel radiation. Her gasp and wide eyes were the last thing he remembered before he woke up in sick bay. The beds empty aside from him, his friend nowhere to be seen. "What have you done to Sheyla?!" He almost yelled with a quiver in his voice, trying to quell the unease welling up in him.

"Brought her back from the dead." He calmed as soon as he heard her voice. There she sauntered through the doorway as if nothing had even happened. Sheyla's white scales and curved horns glimmering slightly in the stark, cool light, green eyes fixated on the little apparatus in her hand as she walked over to Drash. "Sorta like what I did with you," the doctor quipped, holstering her equipment and turning around to note down her report. Sheyla placed the vitals monitor back on his shoulder and tapped on her own that was attached to her suit, matching his aside from the cyan color to fit in with her department, just barely showing a few of the black stripes running down her neck before disappearing under the collar. The wall screen turned on at the behest of her expectant gaze and she stared at the numbers scrolling for a moment, raising her eyebrow as it got to the bottom. With the quick press of a few buttons, the screen was cleared from its data, then shut off before the doctor even turned around.

"Well, if your box is working again, you're clear to leave. Try not to get yourself irradiated in the near future, at least not before the residue in our tanks has broken down." The medical officer reached over and bumped a small, flat polymer container against his chest. "And take these with you, I already filled them up for the week." Sheyla turned around just in time to catch her own pill cartridge, sliding it into her waist pocket. "Yep, vitals are normal and above, as usual. Thanks again, we'll get out of your frills and recover in our quarters." Drash's ears perked up and he tried to hide his excitement as best he could, which certainly wasn't enough to succeed in this case. "Y-yeah, thanks for saving our lives again, doc. I swear I'll stay out of trouble and on my meds." He said hastily, scrambling onto his feet and following after the dragoness that was already in the hallway. The doctor puckered her lips and tried to suppress a grin. "Run along now. The prescription is rest, you really need it."

-----
Drash slipped through the door and quickly pressed his palm against the scanner on the wall, watching it slide shut and lock, glancing at Sheyla in anticipation. While their quarters were in a secluded, non-residential section of the ship, situated between engine manifolds and power conduits, he followed protocol on this matter. The privacy concerns were one thing, although anyone knowing what their suits were for probably had very clear ideas of what they were doing anyway. But it was really a matter of safety: their capabilities of stand-by planetary repopulation could only be suppressed to a certain degree, so anyone stumbling into the fray was at risk of incurring collateral damage. Something he'd learned the hard way, with the most embarrassing reprimand and series of personal apologies in his career.

They didn't need to talk about it. On the surface it might have been strange to go from unconsciousness to intercourse in the span of a few minutes, but their urges didn't take breaks, neither for work stress, nor for intruders on board, and definitely not for laying around conked-out for a few hours... or however long it had been. Hopefully not long enough to break their schedule. Luckily that hadn't happened yet by a comfortable margin, but definitely another thing he'd rather not elaborate on with the personnel officer.

Her suit opened up at the front with a decompressive hiss. The full-body overall came apart in two halves, her engorged, head-sized breasts bouncing out with a wobble that made the plump, pink nipples swing about. It wasn't something most dragonesses sported, especially not the ones closer to the bestial side of their ancestry. Despite not having a use in regards to their purpose, aside from maybe minorly aiding in hatching, and requiring additional suit capabilities to keep them from impeding day-to-day activities, Sheyla definitely found enjoyment in them anyway. As did Drash, happily watching her bury one hand in a soft mound as she held onto to the metal railing around the bed anchored firmly to the floor in the middle of the room with the other. Her legs were forcibly spread apart by the thick, engorged lips of her vulva. With a hefty splatter, thick globs of liquid welled up from it and hit the smooth chrome ground, pulling strands for the entire length of her legs. The suit zipped itself open entirely, elegantly escaping the seemingly unavoidable stains, held up only by a single button on her wrist raised high. She undid it with a flick of her claws and tossed it over to Drash as she shuffled over to throw herself onto the mattress. Her legs quivered with every motion of the sensitive flesh rubbing against her thighs and itself, each little shift eliciting an involuntary gasp and even the minute air movements caused by her curling tail bringing enough stimulation to make another surge of her juices pour down into the pool around her feet.

After removing the vitals monitor and medicine cartridge, Drash threw the cyan garment into the washing unit, a luxury he was thankful for. The self-cleaning mode was convenient in situations where they were unable to take them off, but it made his scales crawl whenever thinking about how it felt. He braced himself against the machine and quickly undid his own suit. The heft of two ten-pound nuts and a two foot shaft to match bent his knees as they were released with a heavy whump. The veins upon the surface of his draconic cock pulsed, his knot bulged and the head flared, unleashing a rope of precum that easily matched Sheyla's output in volume, but instead of forming a rising puddle on the ground it splashed against the far wall, with a few streaks lining both floor and ceiling on the way there. With a grunt, he threw his clothes in after the others and started the washing cycle, before hefting himself over to his partner. Sometimes he felt self-conscious about his relative lack of upper-body strength, but this was a regular reminder that he needed all the focused training he could get to simply handle his own body.

He grabbed onto the base of Sheyla's tail, his member hitting the mattress as he leaned forward and its tip thoroughly coating itself in the slick lubricant that was pouring out like from a faucet. He could feel the heat wafting up, her scent clouding his thoughts faster than he could realize what was off about the exceedingly familiar feelings. How the bed creaked against his shaft as he got in position, how hard it was to pull it up with one hand, how deep his tip sank in before he even thrust his hips. But none of those pangs reached the conscious mind lost in the stormy waves of primal desires, just a low-pitched growl rose from his throat, a challenge answered in kind by a slightly higher, but no less demanding one from the dragoness.

Drash's eyes went wide as he groaned in surprise. His teeth clenched as he shoved his hips forward with all his might, but was met with a tightness that stopped him halfway. He stumbled in a daze, trying to bring his thoughts into order, but was interrupted by a squealing, ecstatic moan from Sheyla as her walls contracted around him with such force that he felt like his shaft was bear-hugged by a creature twice his size. Involuntarily, he humped forth again, sliding half a foot deeper, but it also felt like his member swelled up by the same amount. Which together only served to amplify the euphoric screams. He fell forward as his lower body went on autopilot, beastly thrusts driving him deeper and deeper into nethers that clutched his cock for all it was worth.

His arms tried to find purchase, but instead found themselves struggling to wrap around his lover's body bulging with the unnatural girth and broadening breasts. He could feel his urethra pulsing right through her scales, letting out a confused whimper as worries and woes pushed themselves to the forefront of his mind. His endowments had already doubled from their regular size, nutsack swinging precariously close over the ground and four feet of dick throbbing with such force that it sent a shiver up his spine every time. Clearly Sheyla didn't share either this lucidity or attitude though, despite her parts gaining in size to match his levels of growth at the very least, legs spreading wider as her vulva became ever thicker. Instead she opted to grasp at the cock head protruding under her visibly enlarging bust and gave it an encouraging squeeze as she descended into what wasn't just one orgasm. Her roaring screams of pleasure only added to the cacophony of churning, stretching, sliding and splashing, Drash's shaky squeals drowned out entirely.

His body however wasn't influenced by his hesitant mumbles. Hips slamming down with relentless force despite the raging rivers of femcum not just pouring, but outright blasting out around the point of entry with such force that the spurts knocked out an integrated ceiling light and tore the handle off of a storage cabinet door. Pulling himself out to the very highest point despite the vice grip around his member and ramming back in with such force that it snapped off one of the bed's anchors and cracked its frame. His balls pulled tight, then shook the entire quarters as they hit the ground in a sudden surge of size making them large enough to serve as a beanbag chair, splintering the glossy surface into a thousand scraps of paint being washed away in the floods. His back arched and his knot swelled out, but from his wide-open jaw came only a gurgle, a tiny indicator of the totally ineffective efforts to restrain himself.

The bed outright snapped in two as the rope of seed bloated the already overstretched belly totally out of proportion. A pair of unhinged screams, one utterly terrified, one deliriously ecstatic, fought in volume against the massive blasts of cum spewing out around Drash's knot. The shots hit with such force that they left dents in the walls, turned the corner desk into a fine spray of polymer pellets and punched a hole clean through the viewscreen. The attempts to stem the flow were only met by his leg getting hit in the fray, the searing pain putting a stop to his futile endeavors immediately. He was helpless to watch the scaled sphere of Sheyla's gut swelling up far too quickly in front of him, pressing her convulsing body against his chest. He watched it reach the ceiling after just a few shots. Then the entire breadth of the room shortly after. Then he shut his eyes as he heard the creaking and groaning of the surrounding structures bulging against the enormity, his feet sliding backwards, claws finding no purchase on the slick ground. Her screams had gone silent, her voice blown out, but he didn't dare to open his eyes to see how she was doing. Any moment he felt like a horrible bang would be the last he would hear of her. He gasped and shuddered, clinging onto her tightly, trying to whisper an apology into her ear. He breathed in, his lips parted and-

His legs simply gave in. Still shooting an idle rope of cum from the tail-end of his climax, he was caught up in a rush of his own seed, the waves pulling him off of his feet and slamming him into the wall. He hacked and coughed, clawing at anything within reach until finally finding purchase on the edge of the cleaning unit and pulling himself up, his strained legs barely even reacting to his demands of them kicking in the tides. The sheer size and weight of his shaft now easily matching his own height and mass, its continuous spurts making it all the harder to steady himself. In panic, he wiped his face free with lids squeezed shut, then opened them and held his breath as his vision focused.

He exhaled with relief as he saw her still lost in raw pleasure. An expression of pure, carnal joy, her fingers squeezing into her slowly receding gut that didn't even show any signs of strain. Her tits taken together as wide across as she was tall, engorged nipples bursting surges of milk with each violent contraction of her nethers only plunging her into ever deeper throes of bliss. Her moans became muffled as his field of view was taken up by a dark barrier falling from above. His body relaxing as he floated off, both figuratively and literally, into unconsciousness.

Flump.

"Come on, you gotta give me a hand with this one at least."

Drash was welcomed by a dark-red mass as he opened his eyes. Until he pulled the suit she'd thrown on him off of his snout, revealing the war zone that their romp had left behind. The small quarters were in nothing less than ruins. Just a single light was left illuminating the room, but from the torn-up walls glowed conduits and lights. The furniture strewn about the ruined floor like a two-hundred piece jigsaw puzzle each, puddles of water pooling in the cracks on the ground and only slowly seeping into the drains, leaving it wet far longer than it used to when the smooth coating was still intact. All manner of equipment and belongings were haphazardly strung up on whatever protruding edges available, their usual storage locations either out of commission or outright disintegrated. Although he couldn't even see all of it, considering just how much of his vision was taken up by the gigantic, body-sized shaft spreading his legs apart. Despite being flaccid, each of his now speeding-up heartbeats made it pulse audibly, the fat sack of nuts below eliciting a constant, deep rumble. He looked up at Sheyla, his lips quivering before finally blurting out what he couldn't formulate for so long.

"I-I'm so sorry I-"

Laughter interrupted him before he could formulate an entire sentence. "Hahahah, *you* weren't the cause, *we* are in this together! Don't think I would have let you sleep in while I cleaned up all morning if you had just blown our quarters apart on your own." She reached out a hand and pulled the dragon up on his feet, reaching under his arms to steady him as his massive endowments shifted around.

"No, I mean, if I hurt you or something, I couldn't..." His stammering trailed off into a sheepish smile at the theatrically puckered lips. Even after an experience that left the panic lingering in his limbs, she managed to calm him down and alleviate his woes with such ease.

"Tsk, tsk," she shook her head, "to cite regulation six dot nine-hundered fifteen: 'emergency near-immediate repopulation couple units are ready to produce and bear hundreds-strong broods at a time.' You might be kinda big for such a unit, but that bit of stretch is nothing against what I'm built to deal with! Now come on, I'll help you put on your clothes."

Drash just nodded, his unease calming by the moment. He attached the suit by the button on his wrist and pulled it along his back, the zippers on the front melding shut immediately as it wrapped around his arms, chest and legs. Only the obvious, gargantuan mountain of maleness was too much for automatic confinement. "You think the compression can handle it? I don't want to be walking around with what looks like a giant stiffie under my chin..."

"As you can see, yep!" The dragoness drummed on her chest and spread her legs demonstratively. There was nothing unusual to see, reassuringly. "Whilst you were snoozing, you didn't even get to see how much larger than you I ended up! Well, maybe." She winked at him, then grabbed the sides of the fabric around his crotch and pulled them towards herself. Drash's back straightened out involuntarily as he felt it close off tightly around his knot and balls, reaching up higher and higher until it enveloped his tip. With a hiss, the compression engaged and the big, red bulge retracted into the usual, slender form. He could still feel the heft, but at least it *looked* normal enough now.

"Thanks Sheyla, you're the best. What are we gonna do now though? We're gonna get hullhauled for this!" He motioned across what was left of their quarters in defeat.

She grabbed the multipad that she'd squeezed into a crack in the wall to keep dry and turned it on for a moment to check that it still worked. "Don't worry, I already called in the favor from Kardow."

"Ah yeah, Kreamy Kardow." Drash chuckled. "And he's doing it, just like that?"

"Hey, as you said, I'm the best! I told him of the accident and that this mess only happened because we were out of commission for too long to get through our usual routine." She handed the pad over to him and unlocked the door. "And he bought it!"

"Hm?" Drash looked up from the morning announcements listing off on the pad's blueish screen. "Wasn't that the *actual* reason why it happened though? I mean, we got knocked out for who knows how long and didn't-"

"...Drash, we were out for like 20 minutes tops."

His mouth opened, but he couldn't formulate anything to say. So he let it hang there in bewilderment instead.

"Now, take your meds and let's get going! I'll tell you the plan on how we can deal with this along the way." The door slid open and she sauntered through into the hallway, curling tail beckoning him to follow. He fumbled the square polymer container from his pocket and ejected an oblong, white pill from it into his palm. He gulped it down and hurried after his partner in crime. As he entered the lift with her and turned around, he saw the stout figure of a kobold staring at them from the entrance to their quarters with a mix of anger and pity on his pale, blue face, clearly still processing if that favor was really worth that much. Drash mouthed a voiceless "thank you" before turning to Sheyla as she began to explain what she'd already set in motion.

-----
Repopulation report.

Male. 100% active. Mild distress. Estimated erect size (length in feet by diameter in feet): shaft 8.341 by 3.932, shaft 8.772 by 4.013. Average productivity (milliliters per minute): left testicle 434, left testicle 459, right testicle at 442, right testicle at 436. Suppressants fully engaged.

Female. 100% active. Healthy. Relaxed size (diameter in feet): vulva 4.812, left breast 3.132, left breast 3.201, right breast 3.159, right breast 3.183. Ovulation detected. Suppressants fully engaged.

Warning: no repopulation plan given

Warning: male suppressant active levels exceeded (<=4% expected, 100% actual)

Warning: duplicate male size reading.

Warning: duplicate male production reading. (1 identical warning suppressed)

Warning: female suppressant active levels exceeded (<=0% expected, 100% actual)

Warning: duplicate female size reading. (1 identical warning suppressed)

Publish repopulation report (Y/n)? n

Cancelled.

$

-----
"You sure you wanna go down?" Drash unburied his face from his hands and looked up at the shuttle operations chest emblem. Then he craned his head back further, until he finally met the eyes of the towering red giant whose smooth, round face was furrowed worriedly under a pair of jagged, looming horns. "I mean... I don't mean to intrude, but I heard y'all had an incident on the surface yesterday and you don't look so fine and, well," the heavy-set dragon twiddled around on the tiny goatee on his chin, his eyes darting all around the room with no attempt to make contact with any other pair, "we've had some trouble recently on these ships and I could tell them that this one's been making weird noise so that you can get out of-"

"Nono, don't worry about it, Gris!" Drash leaped up from his seat on the bench and made a gesture to lay his hand on Griswald's shoulder. He quickly realized how high of a reach that would have been though, so instead he transformed it into an awkward gesture of feigned nonchalantness. "They didn't *make* me go already, I, we, Sheyla and I, we volunteered to go!"

The scowl on the face looking down on him only got deeper. "Y'all just gonna jump back in like that?! I saw you and, I mean, I was just in the launch bay when they brought you back and they carried you out and, oh, weren't moving as they tried to rouse you, I... I thought you were dead!" His voice became as shivery as his body, lower lip trembling at the thought of it, putting his crimson fingers on Drash's shoulder and weighing it down like a brick.

The far smaller gray dragon gave the digit a reassuring pat. "Oh, it was nothing, they had us back walking in no time with no harm done!" Gris raised up an eyebrow. "Look, we cleared it with the doc, she said if we can handle it ourselves we don't need counseling. Besides, we been on this planet before - no radiation, only trees up into the sky!"

The finger lifted from him again, but the expression firmed up. He straightened his posture, the comparative runt in front of him subconsciously taking a step back from the hulking beast. "You're lookin groggy and unwell, crewman." His voice was no less imposing than his statue if he tried, echoing through the entire hall and drawing more than a few pairs of eyes toward their conversation.

Drash let out a laugh. It might have been a little louder than intended. "Hah, that's just a lack of caffeine! Haven't had any coffee since before bridge shift, but I promised Sheyla we'd have one together on the way. She still hasn't-"

"Shown up!" The dragoness came bouncing through the shuttle bay entrance, clutching her barely packed-up gear in her arms. "Sorry, busy day, we'll have two to make up for it. Hi Grizzy, thanks for holding open our spot!" Drash briskly walked after her to get out of further questioning, climbing up into the small ship and waving out as the side door began to close up. "Yeah, thanks Gris, we'll see you at supper! I promise we'll be in one piece, all limbs in place." The door shut before Griswald could do anything more than wave them goodbye.

They sat down around the small table in the back of the craft as the autopilot took off toward the green jungle planet. The gray dragon closed his eyes for a few minutes as his friend started fumbling with her equipment. As he opened them again, she was already hunched over one of several pairs of pan-sized rings, thin claws setting the orientation of every single one of the countless superspacial emitter nodes arranged on the inside. He sighed. "Can't believe you can concentrate on *that*. Today felt like my thoughts were just a scrambled mess."

Sheyla didn't look up from the machinery to answer. "Don't remind me, it's been a torture all morning. I don't think I could last another day like this. Which, if I'm as on-track as I think I am..." With a click and a soft whirring, the insides of the rings began to glow a shimmering off-white, drawing a triumphant smirk on her face, "...then we won't have to!"

Drash shook his head and pushed button on the wall. "Two coffees, black." The command was acquitted by a ding. "It still sounds like witchcraft to me. If I hadn't seen your hand come out of a magic portal-"

"Quantum superspace connector." She corrected.

"-from a quantal space connection four rooms away from your body already, I'd call it pure craziness." He eyed the rings as they turned off and Sheyla moved on to the next pair. The small door on the wall opened with another ding and he took the cups from inside, arranging them on the table out of the way of the fragile devices under construction. "And even still, I'm only barely convinced to call it slightly diluted craziness."

"I prefer craziness over getting decommissioned. Just last week I tried reaching out to Jersa and Ulthor again. Still the same message about them 'recovering'. Probably strung up in confinement just existing in their latter days as a failed experiment." She took a big chug of her coffee without looking up.

"You don't know how they're doing, for all we know they're too busy relaxing on the sexiest resort planet in the galaxy to answer calls from former classmates!" Drash forced a smile, more for his own peace of mind than his friend who was already peering at the next device as she finished off the one in her fingers.

"Care to find out?"

"I, er... definitely not." They gulped in unison, one with worry, the other her drink as she emptied her cup.

"Don't worry, I'm gonna make sure we don't have to. We'll sort it out ourselves and show them there's a better solution than brutishly neutralizing the threat."

Drash nodded and slumped down in his bench. "Well, if anyone's gonna manage, it's the girl who's got it all: the skills, the smarts, the looks and the barely controllable need to breed interstellar colonies into existence."

It actually made her look up into his eyes for a moment. "And a guy to handle all of her!" With a click, she finished off the next portal connector, reached into her bag and spilled out another few handfuls. Drash watched in silence for a spell, before furrowing his brow. "...why do we need so many of them though?"

"Oh, uh," with a sudden snap, a small flurry of sparks sprayed onto the table. She looked at the two pieces in her hands with pouted lips, then tossed them into the reclaimer. "See, cause they're fragile! I wanna use the best pairs so there's less of a chance of it failing on us."

"Failing?" He thought about it for a moment, but quickly tried to block out the vivid images it conjured. "I don't wanna be torn apart with an entire galaxy quadrant between the pieces of me!"

Sheyla let out a snorting laugh. "That's not how that works, hon! Just because the connector fails doesn't mean your atoms are getting spread across the known universe." Drash visibly relaxed. "The connection just contracts and you end up on the exit side in one piece."

He tensed up again. "So if you suddenly disappear I'll have to go tell the captain we need to turn around and pick you up a couple lightyears in the other direction?"

"Better than the other way round, right? I'm sure you could blow a hole in the ship's hull from inside. Probably even if we had inner shielding." Somehow that actually sounded sexy, but he wasn't keen on actually testing it out. "Just keep some emergency ration patches on you and it'll be fine."

Drash shuddered a little and stuck out his thought as he remembered *that* taste from his training. "Irk. I don't know if I don't prefer getting sucked out into space instead."

He reached for his cup to wash away the horrid flavor his mind had conjured, but his digits met with Sheyla's already wrapped around the handle. "I said we were having two, get your own!" She smirked and took a triumphant sip.

-----
"Still rouses memories of passing out on a stump and waking up on the butcher's bed, but it sure is pretty." Drash shielded his eyes from the light of the twin stars shimmering through the dense canopy, craning his neck to look up the gigantic, gnarled trunks reaching for the sky like towers. The flora so bright and colorful that it was almost hard to look at it, flowers, vines and leaves reflecting the warm, orange glow back at him, speckling his view like he was looking through a kaleidoscope. The verdant paradise was alive with a constant hum of its tiny, insectoid creatures digging themselves along barks and earth, the whole place almost feeling like it was breathing the sweet, humid air. "Aw, come on," Sheyla retorted, striding ahead with the same unbroken pace she had since they started their trek from the rocky peak serving as their landing pad, "her job is putting people together, including you!" He shook his head, looked back to the makeshift path in front and returned to the dragoness' side with a few hurried bounces. "Phew, yeah, you're right. I bet she could reassemble us from a pile of dry carbon and a jug of water if given the time, with how many daily reports of us she must have in her collection by now, eh?"

He almost stumbled with how abruptly she stopped walking. With hands stemmed into her hips, she peered around. "Er, this looks like a good place! Not too steep anymore, enough room and still things to hold onto." Drash followed her gaze, raising his eyebrows. "I don't see anything different from how it was five minutes ago, but I'll trust the bioengineer's evaluation! Besides, I can't wait to finally get out of my dress, feels like things just aren't quite seated properly in there." He started pulling down the zipper on the front of his suit right away, but a quick grasp on his wrist stopped the motion just over his chest. "Wait! Er, in the bioengineer's opinion, you should use the proper release mechanism instead." They pulled it back up together and he moved his fingers to the small box on his shoulder. "And here I thought you liked watching it unfold!" He puckered his lips accusingly. "Well, yeah, I, hmm..." Sheyla rung with herself for a moment, but her priorities won out against what had to be a blazing hot reveal. "I *do* like it, but I don't want to drag you back to the shuttle and get you reprimanded for an arm dislocation by dick." He scoffed. "Pff, it's not gonna be *that*-"

With a touch of the recessed button, his clothing snapped off like a stretched rubber band being let go, flying away behind him and wrapping itself around a branch creaking in protest. The gray dragon would have been thrown back too if he weren't firmly anchored, so explosive was the decompression of masses several times his height and weight - each. Four thuds onto the soft forest floor, each one reverberating with enough force to send a whirl of leaves twirling down from the canopy above. All together amplifying the sensations from a grunt over a shaky moan and a scared whimper to a high shriek cut off in his throat. Two black pillars towering over him. The ridges deep enough to rest his arms on like shelves, the spines longer than his torso, the knots easily bigger than an escape pod. His eyes traveled up along the veins audibly pulsing before him, along the shafts shining in the jaden ambience and up to the tips flaring, their doubled-up rims jagged as if bearing teeth of flesh. He felt light-headed, his knees giving in, the sight, realization and sensation of him rivaling the surrounding ancient tree trunks in girth.

"S-She-" was about all he got out before the noise of the plummeting cocks drowned out his squeaky voice entirely. He fell forward, his snout hitting the cleft between his twin shafts gracelessly. His feet lost their solid ground as his comparatively tiny body was simply pulled along by its crotch. The heavy, ear-piercing crack of splintering wood echoed out as one of his members slammed into a tree dead-on. Roots popped out of the earth, the mighty plant tilted, slowly at first, but quickly accelerating, before being pushed out of the way altogether. It descended to the side, getting caught up in other branches, either snapping them off or pulling the entire trunk along with it, causing a domino effect of echoing collapse. His own fall finally reached the bottom, with such heft and velocity that the unfortunately-placed, bed-sized boulder under his left tip was smashed on landing, a cloud of dust billowing up and a flurry of pebbles shooting out in every direction. His spine arched, his tail bent up in kind, limbs contracting with all they had as he let out a voiceless scream of his senses awash in a deluge of synaptic overload. A shot of precum dug the underside of his shafts a little deeper into the soil, heads flaring even wider as they unleashed a lake's worth of heavy, off-white liquid each. The echoes of more falling lumber rung through his head as a curtain of stars covered his vision. He curled up, panting, trying to regain his capability of coherent thought.

As the dust settled, the first thing that came to his mind was also what he blurted out: "Sheyla!" He looked around in the clearing he had created, but of course couldn't see the ground over the throbbing shafts splayed out in front and the roiling quad-nuts towering behind him. He could feel every pebble and stick beneath his most sensitive parts, but as a slight relief, there was no movement from anything there. Then again, he *had* just reduced solid rock to a cloud of dust, so he didn't begin to relax until he felt the familiar digits touch the underside of his left cock tip. With a shaky voice that hardly managed to pierce through the constant barrage of noise from his own body, he called out to her. "Sheyla, I... I'm sorry, I can't even move and... nrgh!" He could hardly form a sentence from the jumbled mess of sensations, stress and need. "C-call the ship, they gotta come and fix-"

Then he felt his entire, shuttle-sized form being shoved backwards into a fray of snapping trunks and whirling leaves. His upper body whipped around, his arms unable to brace in time before the back of his head hit the wall of his balls with a thump, the air being pressed out of his lungs. He keeled over, vision reduced to a tight tunnel, the only thing he could see in the center was stars. He gasped, trying to heave himself back into an upright position, but the sudden barrage of sensations hitting him sent him spinning out of control. Eyes rolled up, mouth wide agape with a breathless roar, arms and legs outstretched, braced and pushing his body into the scales of his sack. The heat washed over him like a breaking ocean wave. The synaptic explosions of not one, but two pillars of meat as wide around as he was tall plunging into the wet, smooth depths were more than he could process. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and head tilted sideways, conscious thought all but blocked out by primal need. What brainpower he had left in the deluge of dopamine and oxytocin was barely enough to keep his hips bucking violently, as if his small form could actually move the metric ton of draconic overendowment by such feeble motions.

The steam in the air dulled the stark light from above a little, enough for his furrowed brow to relax. The fine layer of droplets made the ebon surface all the shinier, glittering back at him in so many colors that the edges of his mouth twitched up in delight. The dark straights disappeared between light pink lips under a curtain of the thick waterfalls pouring down from them. Each pulse returned returned by a contraction in kind, releasing another multi-hundred gallon gush of liquid almost burying the black beneath the waves. It wasn't nearly as bright as the alabaster hills before him. Six smooth spheres rising and spreading out to the edges of his vision, flawless scales framing the most beautiful sight of all. There she was, laying on her bed of clouds. Her head turned, looking back at him with those deep green eyes. He'd never seen her so happy, lids fluttering, body outright shivering with delight. Drash laughed out loud.

He sputtered as the blast of hot, sticky juices knocked his consciousness back into gear. He coughed as he was bounced around, shoved backwards by another few feet. The lips of two vaginas pushed against his knots with such force that they slid him further along what could no longer be described as ground, given that it had already turned into a lake of both the effusions pouring over him and the untold volumes of milk from her six mountainous breasts. What little he could see of the surrounding area from his position occluded by nuts, cocks and cunts had been turned into a bed of countless rivers rushing between the ancient forest grounds, reshaping the landscape wherever they flowed. And while his twin members were mostly plugging up two sources of them, buried deep in her depths with only errant squirts squeezing out, the third one was proving to be a problem. Nethers towering far over his head, thick and plump with unbridled excitement. So huge that it could fill out his entire vision from side to side even when upright like this, having to crane his neck to even see the edge above.

As far as Drash's breeding instincts were concerned, this was the best view he'd ever had. His cocks throbbing violently, each unleashing a hefty volley of precum that at the peak rivaled the flow of milk for a moment. The contraction of her walls around his shafts synchronized both with each other and the third one right before him, unleashing another deluge of liquid all over him. He gasped before it crashed down, pinning his limbs down and the pressure on his chest causing him to exhale the air he'd really wanted to have for making it through the flow. He braced as best he could, powering through the onslaught that seemed to last forever, until finally his head broke back out of it and he heaved in as much of the hot, heady air as he could. Sputtering and coughing, he wiped his face, only for his eyes to focus on the pink masses being even more imposing than before. He felt his balls pushing against an incline behind him, keeping him in place as his knots slipped between the engorged lips entirely with a heavy, reverberating shlorp. His already monstrous girlfriend was only growing bigger before his very eyes, a single one of her holes eclipsing 20 feet with ease already. She, in turn, simply shifted her hips into place, sighing as she felt her already massive form expand. She relaxed her limbs and let out a moan, shivering as she finally felt herself being filled up to some degree.

"S-Sheyla!!" Fittingly, his shrieking voice was drowned out entirely by the idle splashing of sexual fluids. There was no way she could hear him over the groaning of swelling breasts, stretching of expanding flesh and the muffled crashes of the landscape around them coming apart when he couldn't even hear *himself* over the deafening cacophony. And what would she do about it anyway? He couldn't even stop his own hips from thrusting uncontrollably, his massive members pulsing with ever increased vigor, only making the already terrifying situation worse. He was shaking as he stared at the outright bestial display of raw sexual force, commanding, wishing, begging for his body to stop. Not that Sheyla was actually *trying* to do anything about their situation. Her body surging with each motion, the masses of meat sliding along her inner walls tossing her into even deeper, multiply orgasmic bliss that made her body writhe in gleeful agony and eyes flutter at the edge of consciousness. Another flood came down unto him, lasting even longer as the last. He clenched his eyes shut and crossed his arms over his chest, but even then he was gasping for air as he finally made it through. His vision blurry as he opened his eyes again. His thrusts became more erratic and violent, his spine arching back further and further as the sensations rushed through him. His mind already clouded by pheromones and abject pleasure overcome by what felt like a lightning storm, his entire body spasming and convulsing, slipping from his control. His panic was all but silent as his last attempts at restraining himself finally failed.

He screamed at the top of his lungs as the third shaft burst from his sheath and plunged into the orifice waiting so desperately for it. Another pair of balls dropped with such force that it shook the entire area like an earthquake, his size surging in kind, rising him up higher into the air and pushing back against his mountainous girlfriend with a mass beginning to reach her size. Finally, he could see her again, at least for a moment. Lost in the pleasure, her squeals of glee inaudible, but her joy all too apparent even through the fog between them. Then the added sensitivity of fifty percent more cockflesh set in and his climax hit him like a crash landing cargo ship.

The deafening blast of a triple cumshot barely even reached his senses as his body seized up and his mind was washed away in raw, searing bliss. The backblast alone splattered the surrounding, already ruined forestscape with individual droplets large enough to wash away entire trees on their own. Her expanding gut rose up over the horizon of her breasts, spreading them sideways as it bulged and bloated with entire lakes worth of seed. The ground below let out a strained groan before the immense weight sank down on it, abruptly relocating Drash to be pressed against her. His hands splayed out on the twitching, contracting pink flesh, his hips thrusting away as if it made any difference at this point. His second shot only much larger than the first, putting even the rivers of her juices to shame. By the third, his muscles had gone limp. By the eighth he'd lost count of how many shots he was in. His sense of time awash in the deluge, feeling himself drift away into forever.

Floating in relaxing, mind-numbing, thoughtless bliss.

Drash stretched out his arms and legs, letting himself sink back into his mattress as he peered over at Sheyla. "Mhh, you look like you ran a marathon."

"Ha-ha. Do I look like much a runner in this state?" She gave him a bop on the snout that pulled him out of his pleasure coma and waking up his conscious thoughts. She looked like a mountain of white scales, a single breast alone easily 30 feet wide, all ten of them combined making for an imposing view. Behind that was the towering set of muffs, plump and heavy, still audibly dripping from their romp. While he couldn't see much of them from here, they must have either been sufficiently numerous or large to take his six shafts, which now involuntarily throbbed at the sight, their already chubbed-up state hardening a little further, the spines on the rims of their heads and along the tops of the shafts rising up. Although, oddly, he could neither see nor feel her belly that he could have sworn should be at a cloud-scraping scale at this point. "You look like a breeder though," she smirked, "how about another round? We still got a couple of-"

"That's not funny!" Drash blurted out. The look of disappointment and dejection on her face made him feel a little bad though. "I mean, we can't keep going like this! Look at us, we're... we're *monsters*! How are we gonna get back to the shuttle, or find our gear, or even *move* at all?! We, we..."

"We got everything under control." She reached down into her cleavage and pulled out the two sets of bright-colored suits. "It's a bit of a hassle and *apparently* it makes you look like you just came from doing track and field, but if you don't spend your time napping you can get around just fine!"

Drash inhaled to rebut. He didn't actually manage to formulate anything though, his mind seemingly blanking out as he looked at the leviathan of a dragoness in front of him. So he closed his mouth again, shuddering and shaking his head to try and keep it straight. It took significant willpower for him to keep his nerves calm, too strong was the feeling of his own body slipping from his control, seemingly just a few steps away from acting like the mutant beast that his body made him out to be. Instead, he simply took the slightly muddled red suit being held out to him and slipped it over his head. Other than the perpetual, idle groaning of their cargo-bay-filling endowments, they put on what they could of their uniforms in silence. Letting the seams conjoin to wrap around arms, legs, tails, necks and waists, while of course leaving open the gaping windows where the gigantic masses spilled out from.

Sheyla let out a sigh as she reached for the device on her shoulder. Drash hesitated for a moment. "This conjures uncomfortable memories from training, huh?" He tried forcing a smile, but only got a confused expression in return. "Hm? Oh, yeah, right. But we're not made from polymer and silicon, I'm sure we'll come out right-side-up." She took one last look at the monumental masses around them, several more seconds of quiet than what would have been comfortable, until she finally put her finger on the button. "Well, see you on the ground."

The low, meaty snap rung through the air flowing in from her sudden absence. Drash shivered as her warmth was replaced by the stark coldness rushing in, his limbs twitching and hips bucking slightly as hundreds of pounds of his mass shifted against itself, shuffling into a re-grounded position. He tried to peer down where Sheyla should have ended up, but his neck couldn't crane nearly far enough for him to be able to see past even the base of a single one of his shafts. He too went to operate the little box on his shoulder, but her call to "Hold on a moment!" stopped him there.

With a worried expression, he waited to hear what was going on. His brow only furrowed as nothing further came. "Sh-Sheyla, is everything alright?" Then he felt something brush against his leftmost member before finally getting a response. "Yeah, all good now, go ahead!" He thought about it for a moment, but then pushed his waiting digit down.

It was a strange feeling as the strands of fabric reached out and stuck themselves together across the entire breadth of his mass in mere seconds. Their bonds quickly forming a skin-tight sleeve around every ridge and fold, the bright red slightly muffled by the black surface shimmering through its surface. His stomach turned a little as the compression engaged, his throne seemingly shrinking away underneath him, sending him on a rapid descent toward the cratered ground, feeling his shafts squeeze against each other and his nuts compacted from their sprawling state. He wasn't ready for his backrest of ballsack to leaving him hanging, so the journey ended with him thumping onto his back like a beetle.

Sheyla's face peered down at him from above. His eyes mustered her from top to bottom. Other than a slight bit more voluptuousness in the affected places, she looked totally normal. "So... is everything okay? What was the delay about?" She smirked a little. "Oh, I just wanted to take a look at you first. Really an impressive view from below. Towering ridges, waist-thick veins and..." He stemmed his hands into the ground and jumped to his feet, making her take a step away from the furor. "Sheyla, this is serious! We're turning into some kind of mutant monstrosity, we don't even know how many body parts we got and these suits can't even hide the bulge anymore. Command is gonna throw us into whatever hole the others like us ended up and I'm really starting to think they're right in doing so! You're acting like we're on some kind of pleasure vacation as opposed to a-"

As he followed where his finger was pointing, the words got stuck in his throat. Where before there was a lush, green jungle, there was now a chaotic wasteland. Thick rivers of white snaking through a maze of splintered trunks into entire lakes of sexual fluids. Where before the sun shone through thick canopies, it now cast its stark light across a plane that they'd quite literally exploded over. He could see all the way to the next range of mountains, but they too were still speckled by splotches of seed here and there, flowing down toward the valley in between. He took a few steps toward them to try and survey what it looked like at the bottom, but a grab and a pull yanked him the other way.

"Er, the shuttle's that way." Sheyla's expression was hard to read, but the cheeky smile had been washed from her face. "You're right, we should get going now so we can deal with this problem without command getting involved. And you should take your dose, it's about time." Drash nodded, took the long, rectangular container out of her hand and popped one of the round, blue tablets into his mouth.

Their trek back to the shuttle was lost to quiet contemplation. It wasn't until he slumped into his seat that he broke the silence with the most pressing question. "So... what now?" His friend's face furrowed as she turned around with two cups of coffee in hand. "Same plan, different schedule." She took a sip while handing him the other mug, then pulled the bag stuffed with electronics out of the storage compartment. "I got a enough of these functional. We'll place them here, try them out for a bit and-"

"And we'll be sent back to pick up the forgotten equipment before they even open the bay doors." Drash took a gulp of his coffee, trying to wash that weird, dusty-sweet taste his medicine had left from his tongue. "Those things will show up even on a standard scan like fireworks going of!"

"Drat." Sheyla bit her lip. "I didn't think of that. Can't we like... bury them?"

"Oh, please, what's a few feet of dirt gonna do to block even a single-frequency wave."

"Well, I don't know, only scanners I know how to deal with fit in my hand and they have trouble getting through thick clothes! What do you suggest we do?"

"I don't know eith..." he hesitated for a moment as the gears in his head locked into place and began spinning. "Actually, maybe I do. Can those portal things handle a vacuum and take a bit of a beating?"

Sheyla puckered her lips and thought about it for a moment. "I mean, sure? The connectors are supposed to survive a pounding, and as long as you don't *activate* them in outer space there's no problem."

Drash jumped up from his seat and stepped over to the console, paging through the shuttle inventory. "There's a whole lot of planets in this system. We'll attach them to probes and drop them on our way back. They'll be in space during the routine post-expedition scan, so no way they'll be caught. And we'll know if they landed safely once the probe starts sending data."

"That... sounds like it could work! Good thing I brought a bunch of these then, we just need one pair of them to land somewhere habitable." The dragoness leaned back in relief as she watched Drash grab a bag of surveying tools and strut to the shuttle door. "Where are you going though?"

"We're still here for work, not shore leave! I mean, I know they just sent us out here so we could get over what happened, but I don't want to give them a reason to look any closer at what we left here."

"Oh, right. The scan won't find *that*, right?"

"Nah, it's just a quick EBLS: electronics, bionics, life signs."

She sputtered a little and spilled a few drops of coffee onto the table. "Life signs?"

"Yeah, just in case a crewmember is left behind." Drash shouldered the bag and opened up the hatch. "They're not looking for like... genetic material, if that's what you're thinking."

"...right, yeah. That was it." Her voice sounded a little unsure, but she nodded slowly in agreement. "Well, I'll try to finish the rest of these up then while you're out. Uh, don't go back the way we came, okay? I... don't want to come pull you out of some milk lake or something."

"I'm going nowhere near that direction, there's no way they'll be getting *that* data!"

"...thanks Drash."

He sighed. "Hold that until we see this crazy plan working."

"Oh, I mean for letting me have both coffees again!" Her smile calmed the doubt and dread in him a little.

-----
The feline's eyes narrowed as they inspected the weird object laying in the grass. Two plate-sized, metallic rings attached to each other, slightly bent and scratched at the edges. Which tracked, really, falling from the sky would do that to the toughest grinder. Long fingers gave it a poke before, after receiving no reaction, all digits laid themselves on the thing. It was cold to the touch and light to lift. The yellow of their retinas and the white of their grinning teeth reflected off of its surface. Such a fascinating thing to call one's own, ahah!

With a quick gesture, they let it slide into their coat pocket. Surely no one would suspect anything. Just a toy, an experiment to work on, yes! You wouldn't think it came from outside though, for certain. No, how would it, none venture there and risk discovery, of course! Of course.

They looked up into the blue skies, the suns shining like a pair of eyes, unblinking. Another deep breath, so invigorating after the long, persistent nights down home. Dreadful how they were all blinded by ignorance, deafened by those ancient tales of the ghosts long past. Up above there was only beauty, no evil to see oh so far and wide!

With a sigh, they turned around, whiskers sinking in sorrow as they stared at the dark maw of the abyss back home. They hesitated for a moment, but it was the time to return. Lest someone would notice the shine of sunslight seeped into the gray-striped fur of a surfacewalker delinquent. Chech, spit was all they had for the cold grasp of safety by the bowels under earth.

Taking greatest care not to damage their find, the cat slid back down the narrow chute. Down, down, down they went, a steplong at a time. Always a dread how fowl the air became so quickly. The first time, they'd turned around again. But that was a way to almost get caught, barely hiding the chlorophyll stains under their claws. But the envigorance was worth the risk all times over, ahah, the heart beat higher ever since they saw their first true day.

Another scratch on the concrete wall next to the unseen exit to freedom. The lines counting excursions almost looking like the trunks of a small forest now. Nothing compared to the real thing. They grabbed their mask hidden behind the pile of rusted rebar, hanging it around their neck loosely. Just going home from a long day of digging, grinder, don't hold me up from a meal and my bed.

Disdain was all they had left for the sight of mighty spires and spiralling walkways stretching from ground to the dreaded ceilings. Instead of skies just the jagged rock, light not from suns but only the perpetual gray tint of the lightstones set into the walls made from hewn stone. Dark and cold it all was, claustrophobic despite the tall towers and canyons between buildings. An underground city sprawled out across caverns so marvelous upon first sight, but uncomfortable once one got used to, dreadful once one got sick of it.

Still grasping their find, they stepped onto the station platform devoid of anyone else waiting here. The next residential transport only took a few breathlengths to arrive as usual, a slight worry welling up as the raised brows looked back at the lonely passenger climbing in. The rest have all gone home, digger, what are you still doing out? They didn't say it, but they looked it nonetheless.

Luckily, the journey was uneventful. The train too full at this time to really bother with something merely unusual. The station free of any bonegrinder bored enough to stop someone who looked to be headed straight for home finally, stumbling, tired steps toward their housing and into the elevator. Chech, the only directions to go were down and deeper down anyway. A forced smile to the neighbors. Yes yes, much work to do, depths to dig deeper!

As the door closed behind them, the pretense of a tired demeanor was wiped away. Pulling it out of their pocket again, they smiled. Open the cabinet, pull out the box, unlock it to look at the grand artifacts taken from above. A pebble, a twig, a leaf, a flower. Secret treasures to lift a buried spirit. The strange device almost went to join them - but the hand moving it held up halfway. It retracted, eyes peering over it again, before placing it right in the middle of the table instead. No, it would stay out! None would suspect this was a surface trinket by its appearance. An open reminder of the sunslight and the fresh air, even in the darkest nights in the deepest underground. An object worthy of further, intricate inspection! It would surely bring the joy from outside all the way down here, ahah.

-----
Just hours ago, there'd been a river here, snaking its way through the valley amidst the mountains covered in lush vegetation. But after standing seemingly unmoved for centuries, their arrival had abruptly transformed the landscape into something unrecognizable. Now it was the hills that were dripping in liquid, flowing down toward the pit almost overflowing with what looked akin to alabaster stone. The rushing and buzzing noise from the days of old now replaced by the idle shifting, rumbling, scratching from innumerable sources. For miles and miles around they piled, a single one the size of an escape pod and then some.

The shuffling amplified in volume steadily, the entire area beginning to waver from commotion. Then, a crack. A singular claw pushing through the surface, splitting the calcified shell into pieces. Pulling the chunk inwards, a lid opening to the light outside. A blank, gray eye staring at the world with only thoughtless hunger. Roused by the sight, the creature renewed its efforts. Sinew straining and teeth grinding against each other, it stemmed itself against the flimsy cage of its egg, ripping it apart like it mustered no resistance at all.

With a twin-voiced roar of thundering and shrieking, it reared up from its prison. Its deep, black scales shimmering in the light as its body rose to its full height, easily twice the size of its progenitors. Its muscular form creaking as it towered higher, bestial arms and legs flexing as its broad wings spread out by a span wider than the rest of its body. Wholly black aside from the white horns, teeth and frills jutting from its head, thin tongue slithering out of its mouth and nostrils flaring up. Arching its back to make room for the immense assets on its body. Six engorged breasts, each one the size of its own head, hanging down heavily and squeezing themselves around its arms. Thighs spread far by the pair of shafts pulsing violently, spines covering their entire lengths down to the veined knot pumping rhythmically, off-white liquid idly pouring from their tips by the gallon that their roiling sack fueled effortlessly. In the cleft of its nuts rushed another river of liquid from the engorged lips of its other sex, a thick and engorged muffin bulging all the way into the tail, a warm haze rising from its excited flesh.

Narrowing its pupil-less eyes, the draconic beast swung up into the air already filled with a million roars of its siblings, quickly joined by more. Their wings carried them across the hills to find a nest of their own, the choice becoming scarcer as the entire valley was taken over by the dark beasts coming to a hard landing as their guts swelled out with their own, already gestating spawn. Immobilized by the rapidly developing brood inside them, taking hardly longer than a few minutes to go from hatching to laying. Legions of the roaring monsters putting out hundreds upon hundreds of eggs each, the once green, then white, then black hills once again turned white by the tides of shelled vessels.

Only for the dark mass to return as they hatched mere moments later. Like ink spilling out from a neverending well, they overtook the verdant world at an ever-accelerating pace. Each new batch beginning their progeny like the ones before them still continued to do, adding onto the rapid, unbounded multiplication with an even higher rate of fertility. In each new generation a single individual already eclipsed the potency of the entire previous generation combined, bearing entire populations worth of bestial dragons on their own, only to be far eclipsed by their offspring once more. Each one spawned with an ever shorter period to begin laying their already forming clutches.

In the span of only ten minutes, the entire continent had been overtaken by the brood. The mountains of eggs began pouring into the oceans, rising waves crashing over the lands as they filled the shimmering, blue pit like it was but a nest for their taking. The ones hatching under the seas emerging the shells equipped with gills and webbed limbs, their makeup mutated to befit their new environment by virtue of the genetic targeting imbued so recklessly into their originators. The black blotch on the surface of the once green planet spread ever more rapidly, taking less time to cover the entire globe than in took them to conquer its first landmass.

Then the chaotic seas of mindless, multiplying beasts began to rise higher. What was a mere few quintillion of them engulfing the world whole gave way to novendecillions spilling into the void of space, the feeble rock at the center all but lost and crumbling under the relentless onslaught of procreation. The former moons orbiting it sinking beneath the tides of shining scales, protective horn plates and powerful, thick muscle that the mutating monstrosities gained to befit them to an environment made out of their own kind. The wavering, black void doubled and redoubled its size by the second, swallowing neighboring planets and encroaching toward the sun, where the heat-resistant, dark cinder dragons plunged deep into it to and turned it into just another nesting place.

As the star system disappeared from their scans and was replaced by static, the outpost at the edge of own space sent an urgent inquiry to the closest vessel. The readings were erratic, going from the regular trickle of a totally mundane sector to utter chaos with no trace of even a single planet in the span of barely half an hour, coupled with utterly nonsensical life sign readings that were so far off the charts that they eclipsed the total population of the known universe. But the immediate reply lead to misguided calm and a lengthy diagnostic run that left them unable to realize what was coming.

-----
Message sent.

$ rr

Repopulation report.

Male. 23e39% active. Distress. Error reading size: out of bounds. Error during error handing: too many errors. Suppressants not administered. Female. 283Error during error handling: too many errors.

e189% active. Healthy. Relaxed sizError reading size: out of bounout of bounds. 38,293,293Error reading size: out of bounds. 993. Right breasOvulation detected. Ovulation detected. Ovulation detected. Ovulation deOvulation detected.s not administered.

Warning: unknown expressants detected.

Warning: no repopulation plan givenError reading size: out of bounds.

ERROR: male suppressant active levels out of bounds.

Warning: duplicate male size reading. (49 identical warnings suppressed.)

Warning: duplicate male production reading. (58 identical warnings suppressed)

ERROR: female suppressant active levels out of bounds.

Warning: duplicate female size reading. (83 identical warnings suppressed)

PANIC: UNRECOVERABLE SUBJECT SUPERVISION FAILURE. TERMINATE.

Repopulation report will be published. Press any key to continue.

[9832] killed.

$

-----
"You don't *look* okay, Drash." As he opened his eyes again, the scowling snout was now looming overhead, a grim expression staring back at him. He swallowed. "Y-you sure can look intimidating if you want to, Gris."

His smirk was wiped away by a low growl that made the glasses and cutlery on the table rattle, the ambient chatter of the cafeteria quieting down as the large, red dragon drew the attention of numerous curious gawkers. "Come on, I'm worried about ya! You haven't been so down since when your better half's return shuttle got delayed for half a day, and you're actin' three times worse now."

Drash sighed. He almost blurted out that it was, by his math, about four hundred times worse than that for each pair of balls, but instead he just sat up with a quiet groan. His brain felt like mush, the thoughts swimming around in it unable to connect and hold onto each other in the sea of overburdoning sensations. He couldn't even sort where each of the constant barrage of needy jolts and welling surges was coming from, it was like every synapse was constantly screaming at the absolute edge of its ability, their background noise so loud he couldn't even hear himself think. Which he was almost thankful for, after all it prevented him from obsessing just what he'd gotten himself into. Wondering just how far his assets had grown and multiplied, now that he couldn't even process their feelings consciously. Questioning if that suit would hold, already slightly bulging despite the immense compression levels it was rated for, packing him so tight he had to force himself not to keel over in response. All he could do is push through another minute of it, hoping that it would be the one where he'd finally get the call that the portals were ready. Or his clothes finally giving in and putting an end to the agony that way, he wasn't sure he cared anymore either way.

The deep voice picked up again: "...is it that? Something wrong between her and you? I mean, y'all seem so good together, but-"

"No!" Drash opened his eyes and gripped the table, almost flinging his still full plate onto the floor. "I mean, no, seriously, it's fine. Great, really."

"Yeah, it's a friggin' blast." The kobold leaned back in his chair, shaking his head slightly and rubbing his still sore knuckles. "Maybe another cabin emergency, eh? Well, not my job this time, I-"

"Kardow, please let's not bring that up now." The gray dragon rolled his eyes in pain and exhaustion. "We were made that way, I really don't need you gossiping about how we deal with it."

The blue bold grumbled to himself, but nodded. "Alright, apologies. But last I checked you still had to pull your weight. We can't keep covering for you just not showing up."

A large claw slid the plate back into place. "And you need to eat, too."

Drash looked at the concerned faces of his two friends looking him straight into the eyes. He smiled a little. "Yeah, thanks guys. You're right." He forced himself to sit up straight as their tense postures relaxed in response. He grabbed his fork - and with a low grunt, he hunched over like he was hit straight in the gut, the instrument clattering onto the floor. His vision was blurry, head spinning like something just whacked him right into the skull. The tightness really was unbearable now. Whatever surge of growth or multiplication - or both - had just enraptured him, it had been a big one.

"Alright, you're going to the doc." Looking up, he saw the palm reaching for him, easily bulky enough to carry him to sickbay if it wanted to. He jumped up, chair falling over behind him as he stumbled onto his feet, still hunching over like something was pulling him down. But his panic-stricken stupor found a sudden solution as he felt a vibration on his arm and heard the familiar "ding," something he never thought could sound so relieving until now. He pulled the little box from his shoulder and pointed the screen at Griswald, who had already risen to his full, towering height, the entire room fallen silent and focused on the confrontation. "Heh, sorry, see, er, Sheyla needs me now!"

Without awaiting a response, he rushed out of the cafeteria at a full sprint, not even looking back at the collective bafflement at the scene he'd caused. Not something he could lose a thought on at this point anyway, as he made his way through the halls mostly empty around this time. The lonely lift ride felt like it took an eternity, halfway through he was already cowering in the corner, clutching his groin in desperation.

When he finally came crashing through the door of their quarters, Sheyla was sitting there on the bed, fingers digging into the mattress. "What took you so long! I was-" She peered down at her communication unit and then back up at her friend gasping for air, in a pile on the floor, crawling toward the bed. "...never mind, apologies. Strain's gotten me emotional."

"Really?!" He heaved, holding out one hand for help in his ascent onto the mattress. "It's been, nghr, killing me." With their paired effort, he was lifted up and rolled onto his back, where he simply laid with his eyes closed and panting heavily.

"Well, we're all set it seems. I think." Sheyla squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to concentrate on what she was seeing, trying to assess the status of the superspace connector array they had dispatched on their way back from their morning mission, trying to ascertain if one of them really landed in a hospitable place, but being unable to hold the information together long enough to actually do so. "Er, just gotta push the button, probably. You ready?"

"I'd be ready," he huffed, "if it were the self-destruct too."

She hesitated for a moment. "N-no, don't worry."

Click.

-----
The noise startled the digger, their claws retracting from the lever next to the door and eyes narrowing. They spun around, putting their back against the wall, peering around the room erratically. Quickened breath drawing in the stale air, heart beating up to their neck. Had someone found out? Were they coming to take the treasures and correct the delinquent now? The woes and worries whirled through their head until their gaze fell onto the two rings on the table. A gasp. A blink. A smile.

The feline slunk away from the cold stone and toward the trinket instead. After the click, it was now whirring, beginning to glow a pretty, light blue. Oh, like a little patch of sky, right here in the middle of their living space! Their expression a wide grin now as they stared at the brightening shine, making spots on their vision like the first time they stared at the suns for too long! They couldn't help but wibble in excitement, bushy tail swishing faster than ever.

Then the glow suddenly faded. No, it was covered! By the stuff emerging from the rings, stretching them wider. Their mouth fell open and remained agape. One side dark as the night, the other rose-colored like the flower when it was still fresh and unmarred by the noxious underground. Two fingers reached out, quivering as they closed in, feeling the warmth engulf them. Their tips made contact, just to have a little feel.

They would have screamed if the impact hadn't blown the breath out of their chest. Coughing, claws scratching at the floor where little chunks and pebbles of the wall they'd been thrown against were making their mess. Shaking and with blurred vision, they looked up, then just barely recoiled out of the way of a long, black spine almost knocking them right back down. A scared whimper accompanying the first inhalation they mustered, cowering in fear.

The fleshy things pouring out of the rings now separated into different corners of the room were already reaching from floor to ceiling, with clearly far more of them still left to go. One of them like the head of a gigantic serpent, pulsing and covered with spikes that prevented it from retracting back even if it wanted to, drooling from its vertical maw that was large enough to swallow two grinders whole. The other a pair of lips even larger, wet and dripping, tensing up with excitement as they went to engulf the other with unmistakable greed. The entire room unbearably hot, a heady steam billowing up from the beasts that had made it their lair, so humid that breathing it in made it burn down the throat like a puff of tankroot, and almost made the head spin like one, too. With a wistful gaze, they looked over to where their treasure box once was. Now buried under the veritable mountain of heaving masses. Certainly crushed, much like the table, the cabinet, the sink and all other furniture and fixture they once owned.

Another surge making the spine brush along their chest and almost tear the loosely hanging digger mask from their neck ripped them out of their stupor. Within just a moment, the plan was set. They were in for the grinders, no question about it. There was no choice but to flee, to the surface, forevermore this time. The cat jumped up, dodging another swipe that a pulse of the dark thing threw at him as it began to be engulfed by the other, clearly only accelerating the rate at which they both emerged. The lever pulled, the door sliding open and quick feet traveling toward the balcony. What's the matter digger? Saving oneself. No time for the elevator now. The landing target was found quickly and the jump made. They hadn't done a dare like this since a young one's times, but what was another brazen act among the bunch.

There was a crash behind as the walls of their living quarters gave in to the masses expanding into it. Screams that were abruptly cut short as the flesh tore its way through the entire story in seconds. The hewn stone standing not a chance against the relentless surges of ever more heft pushing itself through the portals being stretched wider and wider, still only the first pair of shaft and vulva emerging, each one the size of a whole freighter on their own. Spines ripped through ceilings, solid floors suddenly turning into sinkholes where furniture and inhabitants came tumbling down among the rubble. The rivers of juices flowing down the cracks, washing away even the most solid fixtures, turning the elevators into but waterfalls that ground all motion within them to a halt.

The delinquent landed on all fours, feathering their fall and rolling for a few steplengths in the dirt until coming to rest on their back. Along with numerous others, they looked up at the whole residential building shaking. Dust and steam rising up from the windows and gaping holes in its facade until they were blocked off by the growing beasts inside. A sudden jolt sent the upper floors crumbling, revealing the second shaft that had forced its way through the tight hole, only to plunge into the next orifice readily waiting for it, an excited throb cracking the remaining parts of the tower into pieces.

Unlike most of the other onlookers, they didn't stick around to watch the beasts come down. Hitting the ground with enough force to make them stumble, the noises of tons of erogenous skin sliding against each other amplifying, drowning out the breaking of the rock beneath them and the screams of those who were still able to do so, scattering as fast as they could. As the dust lifted and the remaining rubble thrown out had landed, the sight had only gotten more dire. Eight shafts having made their way out of the portal now, just a single one of them as long as the building was high. The doubled-up knots at their base pulsing rhythmically, countless spikes covering the entire length flaring up with every contraction, the veins on the surface broad enough for a whole digger to disappear under them whole. All but one of them had already plunged into the eagerly waiting holes dripping and ready for them, easily large enough to take two of the leviathan-like members at once, tightly contracting around them with the force of a gigantic pair of vice grips, eliciting only ever stronger throbs from them. By now, the other side of the portals had stopped glowing, the white masses behind the openings ready to pour into the world that was waiting behind with bated breath.

With just barely a moment to spare, the cat leaped into the train as the doors shut behind them. Like the cold machine it was, it simply started rolling gradually as it always did, uncaring of the chaos that was happening just a few hundred steplengths behind it, the tracks it had just come from ripped from their anchors as a gush of viscous liquid blew across the trestle and simply washed the structures away. The fearful passengers looking out the carriage windows went over with intent to ask the newcomer what was happening, but their inclination was interrupted by the deafening crash that cracked the glass and shook the whole cart through, sending the ones inside stumbling and falling.

Sixteen spheres suddenly manifested in the battered residential district. A set of ten churning, heavy nuts tearing through the narrow streets and ripping through the home quarter walls on either side of them without relent, breaking solid stone like it was only flimsy fabric daring to stand in their way. Their groaning and rumbling echoing out with such immense volume that it alone blew out every window in the vicinity, the shockwaves of noise so strong that even the fleeing ones managing to not be rolled over by the multiple-ton balls were flung away like pebbles from a drill. On the other side, a sextuplet of white-scaled breasts busted out across the outskirts, crashing through several of the habitat towers standing there and turning them into nothing but rubble instantly, grinding the remnants thereof to dust as they hit the outer cave wall with such vigor that the supporting struts lining it bent and the solid stone gained several, worrying cracks.

Then, with an abrupt surge, the entire mountain of pulsing flesh, shining skin and glistening scales doubled in size. The entire district of dozens of towers reaching from floor to ceiling was reduced to nothing but a crater, the room they'd once taken up just a brood cave for the towering behemoths overtaking it. With unbridled force, a deluge of precum and female juices shot forth across the neighboring areas, lakes worth of liquid ripping buildings from their foundations and turning the carefully crafted cave structures into mere channels to hold their volume. The sudden displacement of air caused a pressure wave to radiate out from the epicenter like an explosion. It tore apart anything within its wake, solid stone pillars felled, bridges torn down and the train tracks yanked out of their foundation like staples being removed.

At the leisurely rate that their automated carriage was moving, it couldn't hope to escape the same fate. With its passengers clinging onto whatever they could, it was thrown from its rails with a shrieking crash, twirling through the air in a nauseating moment of weightlessness, before slamming into the walls of a half-constructed storage hall. The collapse sent dust and debris flying through the small, metal box, but compared to an uncushioned fall, it probably was one of the better options available. As it hit the ground proper, its structural integrity failed wholly, ejecting anyone left inside it across the building lot. For the second time in what felt like just a few breathlengths, the delinquent rolled through the dirt. And once again, they jumped back up. The escape would continue on foot. Not too many steps from here laid the exit.

They didn't take a look at the chaos unfolding behind them. With the portals now having spun up to full capacity, Sheyla's and Drash's assets were barraging into the underground city at an absolutely relentless rate. At every blink of an eye, the number of breasts, balls, cocks and vaginas seemed to double up in number. A nest of swelling sexual organs starved from their purpose for far longer than they should have been already having filled up a significant chunk of the cave and only continuing their takeover.

New shafts emerging from the ring lost somewhere under all that mass, rising up only for most of them to descend right back down between the lips eagerly taking them in, closing around however many members found their way in and quickly driving their owner to repeated, unhinged orgasms that made her body convulse and her mouth stand agape in a voiceless scream, thrashing in gleeful agony at the insurmountable pleasures ravaging her entire being. Drash meanwhile couldn't even move anymore. The incessant, ever-increasing contractions around his members driving him straight towards the peak. Knots filling up, the veins upon his shafts bulging out, spikes hardening like diamonds. The roar from the pile of hundreds of district-sized nuts filled the entire cave, making dust rain from the ceiling and ringing through the ears of its doomed inhabitants helplessly cowering before the growing monstrosities. Two hundred urethras bulging out at the same time, pumping oceans worth of seed through them with more force than the strongest rivers ever recorded. With his tips flaring wide, the spines at the rims of the numerous cock heads spreading out as far as they could, he finally got his release.

A fact not lost on anyone, as the two dozen shafts that didn't manage to find their way into his girlfriend erupted with such force that the blasts of cum blew straight through the stone. Ropes of thick, white liquid blasting in several directions at once, drilling themselves through walls and ceiling, all the way out to the surface in a single shot, the bright light from outside like a burning flare shining in through the cracks, broken into innumerable colors by the frothy spray filling the air. It was a sight only enjoyed for a short while by most however, as the ropes of seed, the backpressure spewing out from Sheyla's nethers and her own effusions easily rivaling those of Drash combined into a deluge that ravaged what was left of the city. White waves towering cave-high rose over millions of wide eyes before breaking over them, millions of tons coming down and not only washing away, but outright crushing whatever flimsy structures stood in their path. The dragoness' bloating gut rising from the rapids and digging its own room into the cavern floor, pushing away the bedrock and grinding it into sand. The noises of it straining further and further as it filled and gestated, its weight and volume redoubling by the moment as it quickly became the most immense force in the bulk of heaving masses.

The grinders didn't even try to stop the former digger as they rushed past them, the bulky, armored guards just standing there limply, watching the end of their underground home unfold right before their eyes in the span of a few rapid heartbeats. With familiar motions, the cat jumped over the rebar, the straps of the mask around their neck catching onto the edge and snapping off. They came to a stumbling landing, but continued without slowing down. They almost slammed into the wall with the countless scratches, clinging onto the hole to freedom as they were slung and spun around by their own grip, forced to take in what they'd left behind one last time.

The sight seared itself into their mind. Shimmering scales all the way to the crumbling ceiling. Waves crashing across mountainous masses of flesh excitedly sliding and grinding against ever more of it. The blasts of white liquid drilling holes deeper than even the digger had ever seen. Burgeoning sack and surging breasts breaking away at what once was the furthest extents of the cavern, breaking through the rock and replacing the metal pillars supporting the structural integrity with their own bulk instead. From the corner of their eye, they saw the lips of a vulva not stuffed with any shafts widening and an off-white, oblong rock emerging. Then another dozen. And then more, turning into a veritable flood of eggs being laid from all available orifices. The former grand home now but a nest for the unseen creatures behind the portals.

Up. They clawed their way forward through the narrow tunnel like never before. Even with their lids shut, they couldn't help but replay what they'd just seen over and over again before their mind's eye. All from a shiny trinket they took. Oh, they all would have laid their blame on this foolish act... if there were any of them left. But no, better it happen down in the dread than up at the surface that they now finally emerged into. Almost catapulting themselves outside, they still didn't stop running, thoughts racing as they brushed past trees and stumbled through bushes. Panting, exhausted, panicked they pushed on and on and on - until finally, a root caught their boot and sent them careening into the grass. Third round through the dirt, but this time they stayed down. Laying at the crest of a hill, gasping the fresh air, peering up at the suns, two of them setting. They couldn't run anymore, nor could they manage to think straight. But despite all the mayhem, being out here made them muster a smile.

A new life in the light. Away from the subterranean mire now taken back by those strange monsters who were truly meant to dwell there. Not a place for a creature made to walk the grassy planes and climb the gnarled trees. These digits weren't a digger's claws, these lungs weren't meant to be drawing in that stale, dusty murk. Pushed into their day dreams come true, the vague plans and ideas rushed through their head. Like in the forbidden stories of old where the people spent their perpetual days under the open skies. They would need to fashion something to shield their vision, build a shelter, find water... but that could wait. For now they just laid there, stamina spent and strength sapped from their escape. Their thoughts fading into the bright, cloudless blue as they closed their eyes to rest. Determined to go to sleep as a digger and wake up as a walker.

They didn't get far in that endeavor as the quakes pulled them out of their relaxation. The feline sat up with a gasp, looking over the forest where a flurry of leaves had been shaken loose by the sudden quake. As if the very earth beneath them was angry, it let out a low, reverberating growl that echoed across the plains and made their fur stand on end. Rapid, repeated, rhythmic pulses amplifying in intensity, making them recoil instinctively, despite having no clear direction from where the perceived threat originated.

Then, abruptly, the ground split apart violently in the distance. Trees were uprooted and house-sized boulders lobbed through the air like playing balls tossed around. The edges of the new canyon rising up and forming new mountains in mere seconds. A pressure wave radiated outwards, depressing the grass and picking up a flurry of dust until finally reaching them and almost blowing their ears out from the deafening crash. They were thrown onto their back, vision turning into a tunnel as they gasped for oxygen. The sky parted by a streak of white liquid that seemed to reach for the suns themselves, arching high above and casting its shadow over the land. The delinquent stumbled to their feet, looking around in panic as the rope was joined by two, eight, twelve more of its kind. Droplets breaking off from the streams and raining down like the sky itself was falling. They took a few steps into one direction, doubled back into the other, panting, staggering as they couldn't discern which place was safe from the doom-bringing rain.

The ability to make that decision was taken from them by the ground bucking so hard that they were launched into the air. Instinctively righting themselves in the first phase of flight, they watched the ravines rip open the rock, cracks traveling all the way from the horizon to the hill they had just stood on, now opening up like jaws from which a pink mass of flesh emerged to soften their landing in an unappreciated way. Slamming down and sliding along the slick surface contracting heavily, black spines jutting up to the left and right of them, piercing through solid stone like a spike through cloth. Coughing as their chest burned from the humid, heady haze clouding both their vision and their thoughts, life flashing before their eyes as the grip of hysteria squeezed them for every drop of frenzy they had left.

The engorged lips they'd landed on began to stretch, lifting them higher and higher. Trying to hold on, but finding no purchase as every wrinkle gave way to taut skin, they slipped into a rapid descent, almost like a free fall. Barely avoiding the jagged edges of broken ground and tower-high spires of pulsing spines, they landed at the edge of an ebon vein throbbing with enough strength that it could have crushed them easily. From the corner of their eye, they saw the pale shell emerge from where they had stood a moment ago. An egg the size of a train station, slick and shining as it left the dragoness' depths. It shook and quivered with activity within it, the rumbling of what seemed like a hundred, twin-voiced growls reverberating in their ringing ears. They tried to pull themselves to their feet, but gave up halfway as they began to process what they were seeing.

Their precious surface landscape had been deformed into something utterly unrecognizable. Cracks lining the chunks of once solid ground like scars, islands floating in an ocean of countless slithering shafts, mountainous breasts, roaring balls and thick muffs. Liquids dripping, flowing and blasting out in every which direction, filling the steamy air, itself thicker than anything the caves had ever presented at their worst. Where they weren't stuffed with throbbing members, the vast holes were pumping out their brood at a nightmarish pace, the remaining bits of land quickly crushed under the sheer weight of thousands upon thousands of eggs.

Once again, the ground shook. At the horizon, there shone the ominous orange glow a digger never hoped to see. From the depths of rock, rising higher and higher into the heavens now clouded in their musk, like ravenous leviathans and gaping abysses, grinding the planet down as they made their nest. The gigantic gut reshaping the world's innards, displacing crust and magma, set to rival the globe's scale in short order. The cracking of shells resounding as sharp snaps into the feline's core, panting in desperation, unmoving and paralyzed in their inability to even make an attempt of escape as the walls of flesh and scales rose higher than the deepest depths they'd ever dug. Dark silhouettes of winged creatures whisking through the narrowing slip of sky, so many hatching simultaneously that they blotted out the sunslight that had already struggled to pierce through the thickening haze.

With each surge of size, the canyon contracted, the monstrous pit deepening. With their mouth agape, the delinquent reached toward the sliver, only to retract it as it was filled out by the grayness of a blank, glowing eye peering down at them. It narrowed along with the wrinkle it stared through, before another pulse closed the slit for good. And so they returned to the darkness. Blacker, hotter, more oppressing than the last. Lost in the nethers of unseen beasts, their enormity grinding and sliding against each other, uncaring of what or who was caught between them. The noises of a crumbling world quickly giving way to the pulsing, growing, stretching, sliding, swelling chaos of cataclysmic procreation. Buried beneath billions of tons of flesh, the crunch too quiet to be heard.

-----
The throbbing thumps pushed through the veil of Drash's hazy mind. Opening his eyes a little and closing his mouth that had hung agape for a while, he sighed and cleared his throat that was still hoarse from his screams of pleasure, limbs heavy from the orgasmic convulsions that finally brought him his oh so necessary release. He peered over at Sheyla, smiling as she looked even more positively tuckered out than he felt, the joy and ecstasy still lining her face. He dismissed his thought of rousing her, instead opting to stretch out and enjoy the residual sensations. The fervor still raging, but his body having adjusted to it as quickly as one would expect a repopulator to do. Rather than brutally intense climactic rage, it had become a constant current of endorphins, the giddy joy and warm bliss engulfing him whole.

Thump, thump, thump. This time it was louder, angrier. He furrowed his brow.

"Alright, forget it. Step aside, I'm bustin' this door down right now!" Griswald shoved the kobold away with a single claw, sending him stumbling out of the way. The sight of his colleague bending down into a combative posture set off something primal in Kardow, his body set on flight from the beast. He raised his voice shakily: "Wait! We can just call security and have them-"

"I said out of the way," the dragon growled, "no more excuses this time, I'm gonna-" With a pleasant jingle, the entrance to the quarters slid open. The sight cut off the conversation and left the would-be vandals in a stupor.

Drash stretched with a grunt and let his arms slump to his sides, looking at them with a mixture of bemusement and sleepiness. The once crumpled figure now looked absolutely fine, not even a wrinkle on his red suit or a matting on his gray scales. "Could you please not do that to our private quarters? I'd rather not have to deal with *that* kind of embarrassing encounter."

"Yeah, just ask to watch instead!" The giggle from the back of the room gave way to a yawn as Sheyla rose to their feet, walked over and wrapped his arm around her friend's shoulder. "So, um, what's this about? Two vigilantes on the wrong track?"

"We, er..." the cinder dragon slumped, his face looking even more red than usual, falling into silence.

"Well, all-hands alert drill is on in two hours and, uh," Kardow tried to respond.

"And so you wanted some breaking and entering action to get psyched up?"

"We were worried sick," Gris blurted out, "neither of us could even get through lunch after what happened!"

Sheyla gave an exaggerated look of reproach to Drash, who raised his hands pacifyingly. "Guys, I told you, I'm fine! Just... scheduling conflict, alright? Our private business."

"Pff, well, pretty close to becoming a group activity!" She scoffed.

The kobold scratched his chin, looking around. "S-sorry about that. Guess we overreacted."

"...yeah, apologies, really." Griswald rumbled quietly.

Drash shrugged and shook his head. "Never mind it, I'll try to be clearer next time!"

"Alright, so now that that's settled, we got more pressing matters to tend to!" Sheyla clapped her hands and stepped out from their quarters. "You two joining us to make up for a missed lunch?"

-----
$ rr

Repopulation report.

rr
n
asfadsfsdfWarning: bignum: out of memory
^C
^C^CSegmentation fault (core dumped)
$

-----
As well as Drash's mind could conjure the amber beaches of some off-shore resort where he'd been cuddling with Sheyla for an entire afternoon, its ability to replay the all-hands alert from the hours-long drill was clearly far more advanced. He opened his eyes to his vision filled by the white scales of her neck. Well, at least that part of his dreams had been real. Unfortunately for him, so was the siren.

His snout rose up and slumped back into the pillow as his friend almost leaped up, only for her legs to not be quite ready to do so, sending her stumbling. With the sleep rushing out of and adrenaline into him, he grabbed her by the waist, rolling off the bed and onto his feet. They exchanged a quick glance of mutual disorientation, but with nothing much to say they rushed toward the door.

Given the location of their quarters, it was only a short sprint down the hall to reach the externals division, bursting through the doors and going through the motions that had just been drilled into them. Drash's "you're relieved" saw the junior officer visibly relaxing as their replacement arrived so quickly. With it barely becoming vacant, he let himself fall into his seat, fastening the belts around his waist and shoulders before pulling himself closer to the scanning array's screens. His digits landing on the familiar controls recessed into the arm rests, reporting in with his left hand as he flicked through the standard diagnostics with the other, eyes darting back and forth to check for everything being operational. Sheyla, with no night watch to replace, strapped into the mobile sling in front of her consoles, sliding along them to boot up every system in the bunch. While a bioengineer wasn't an essential role in most emergency situations, Drash couldn't imagine what it would be like to be alone in the fray. But without anyone manning communications yet, she took over relaying the situation.

"That outpost station we passed last week has sent out a major distress signal and stopped replying right after. Something about an anomaly in their sector rapidly expanding across several adjacent star systems."

"What kind of anomaly?" Drash looked over to her as more of the crew came rushing in, having made their way from the regular residential quarters. His fingers shakily waiting to dial in the scanners accordingly. Sheyla bit her lip and flicked around on the somewhat unfamiliar screens. "Er, I'm not sure, I... I don't think they managed to identify anything about it! Someone from our ship sent them a message yesterday and then, uh..."

"We got their records streaming in!" Her furrowed brow relaxed as the regular communications officer took over for her. Drash nodded and switched his input sources over to the recorded feed of sensor data. "Copy, records streaming in, sighting now."

The acknowledgement was interrupted by the authoritative voice barking over the speakers. "All hands on high alert!" The order coming from the captain themselves made it feel like an even higher level of urgency than it already had. "We've received multiple major distress calls and are turning around on the double. Brace for maximum velocity and be ready..." they hesitated for a short, but all too noticeable moment, "...be ready for anything." The entire ship shook as the engines turned up to full power. The entire division held onto whatever they could, trying to hold their heads steady as the visuals from the station's final moments came in. Drash fingertips tapped on a set of buttons to focus his instruments and then looked at the screen where the static began to clear.

He'd seen the planet on display before. In fact, he'd already seen scans of it just this week. There hadn't been anything interesting on it though, just your usual planet between a trio of stars. Lots of sunshine, vegetation and bugs, but nothing out of the ordinary. For several seconds he watched it remaining virtually still, only a few clouds spinning over its surface. But then, a blip at the edge of a canyon. He focused in on the location, zooming as close as the resolution of the recording would let him. Some sort of cave at the edge of the rock face, trees and-

"Life sign!" He blurted out, relaying the data over to the rest of the crew, their views switching over to his. With some surprise, Sheyla took her eyes off of him and slid over to the leftmost part of her station, poring over the information and distilling what she could in a few words. "Isolated individual. Fully biotic, with garments, something industrial probably. Body shows signs of subterranean living environment. Structure is... feline?"

"Confirm, we got an *underground cat* here?" A voice from medical came over the intercom.

Sheyla rechecked her findings and nodded. "Confirmed. Why didn't we get any info on that last time?!"

"Must have been hiding well." Drash looked over the geological composition to try and validate his suppositions. "Hard to tell with this kind of rock but if you ask me..."

He paused as he watched the sudden flurry of information come spewing at him like from a firehose. As the creature made its way out of the cave, sprinted through the forest and up the hills, the underground behind them seemed to reshape. As if tons of rock were just crumbling away, the data from what was - or rather, had been - there flowed in. Constructed buildings and reinforced tunnels stretching on for many kilometers. Railway infrastructure and machinery stationed at the edges. Some kind of underground civilization no doubt, once clearly housing a sizeable population, but experiencing its demise through... something. Something organic, but there were no individuals discernible, yet there were clearly a multitude of them. Something rapidly expanding, filling out the volume of the caves and then some, reducing the structures to dust and rubble. It didn't match the feline's biosigns, instead it was more common, familiar even - something draconic.

A quake radiated out across the area under focus. Cracks spread across the ground, pulling it apart. Dust billowed into the air, before a streak of white blew out from underneath the rock. A rope of viscous liquid traveling onward for several kilometers, grazing the clouds and splitting up into multiple drops after reaching the peak of its arc. They rained down on mountain ranges far further inland, crashing into mighty peaks and felling them, forming new crater lakes that dug themselves into the ground from the violent impacts. Just one rope of many that spewed up from numerous holes that seemed to gain more area than the few islands of land between them.

From the crumbling earth, the source of the chaos came into view. Mountainous heads whose rims were adorned with multiple rows of flaring barbs piercing through the solid stone. Veined pillars of black flesh easily several dozen kilometers long rising over the surface and plummeting back down onto it, grinding the forests into sawdust and the hills into sand, racing toward the gaping orifices ready and waiting to accept them. The pink rims all too intimately recognizable. Glistening wet, reflecting in the light of the three suns, hot, steaming, twitching with excitement. The clitorises at the base thick and swollen, juices pouring out as the lips were parted and swallowed the multiple members, which in comparison didn't look nearly as intimidating as the abysses they plunged themselves into. Hills bursting open with dozens of pairs of alabaster breasts emerging from them, perked-up nipples splitting mountains in half as the stacked-up racks spilled into the seas on the side of the continent. A bulging wall of rising up on the other, the testicles within the sack rapidly and violently bifurcating, swelling to ever more overbearing sizes as their weight seemed to make the entire landmass tilt toward them. The feline disappeared from view, lost in a deepening, organic ravine. Their life signs impossible to detect through the much stronger signatures of the sheer masses around it.

Drash's ears rung as he sat paralyzed, his hands clinging to the armrests of his seat. His heart felt like it was beating out of his chest, the dread sinking into him as his mind tried to deny understanding what he was seeing. The voices around him seeming muffled and distant, but he couldn't shut them out no matter how much he didn't want to hear what they had to say. A total of over five hundred reproductive organs. Taken together, the size of an entire continent, with more possibly underground. Multiplying at an alarming, accelerating rate. But clearly only two individuals; breeding. Until the number of life signs abruptly shot up dramatically.

Her unbound fertility was outright terrifying, something that only became truly clear with the scans being able to give a glimpse of the inside as well. Flooded with oceans worth of seed, the repopulator had amassed a staggering amount of uteri, hitting the quadruple digits mark and redoubling that in just the blink of an eye. Eclipsing the scale of even her external endowments numerous times, surging larger, thicker, more overactive with every moment. Just how many ovaries were held within each one was virtually impossible to discern just by the sheer rate at which they stacked up with each passing moment, compounding so fast that it seemed like they were trying to put every last one of the vigintillions of sperm cells to use. Gestating into their final, hard-shelled state so fast that it was like watching their development in fast-forward. Ready to be laid mere minutes from their conception.

Several of the unoccupied vaginas facing the surface stretched wide as the huge, off-white masses pushed through them and were released into the chaos outside. A veritable barrage of eggs pouring out, huge boulders rolling across what remained of mountain ranges and stretches of land, their weight digging into the bedrock and crushing the few patches of vegetation remaining into the dirt. The life signs becoming stronger, the activity beneath the shell amplifying, their development so rapid it was impossible to properly track given the resolution of the recorded data. Cracking the barrier to the outside with ease, the brood came pouring out like ink spilling, thousands of them at a time from a seemingly bottomless well of their newly bred kind.

A single one of them could easily take Griswald in a wrestling match just given their size, even disregarding the immense muscles packed onto the four limbs the feral beasts strode on. Despite their wings spanning several times the height of their body, they had to work hard to swing themselves into the air with them. Four shafts with a matching sack almost as big as they were and several rows of breasts hardly having enough room for each other weighed them down as they tried their best to make some headway as their gut began to expand, swelling to a size where flight became impossible in under a minute and settling them down to produce their own progeny wherever they landed. The smooth spines on their back tightening as the lips of their twin sexes parted to let loose their multitude, yet seemingly unable to keep up with their own fertility as their guts continued to swell faster than the mountains of eggs. Their deep, black scales reflecting the light, speckled surface of the shells. Letting out bestial roars, their heads adorned with an entire row of sharp horns and snout covered in barbs. Long, sharp teeth and empty eyes betrayed their bestial nature, terrifying to behold such a monstrous creature. Far worse than that though was the undeniable, dread-instilling similarity of their features to Drash's own.

The entire planet seemed to heave a sigh. The ravines upon its surface pulled wider, earthquakes rippling across the crumbling rock. The atmosphere lit up in the amber glow of lava spewing to the surface, virtually being squeezed out from the reshaping globe's innards. From the fiery depths rose ever more of their endowments, new pairs bursting into existence and already present ones surging up in size. Tectonic plates broke apart between their immensity, folded over like paper and ground to dust as the untold tons of flesh slid to their eagerly waiting destination. The violent contractions of their apocalyptic coupling shook the ravaged world over and over again, splitting the solid landmasses into ever smaller chunks floating in oceans of molten red, skin, juices, scales and eggs. It continued to expand further, the distances between the tiny islands increasing ever further. Burning splashes and waves spewing up and extinguished in the unmatched volumes of liquid gushing over it, eclipsing the volume of what the oceans used to be. Then, from below the dust and chaos, a white mass emerged, expanding far faster than the others. The bits of land turning into mere pebbles atop the alabaster sphere.

The gigantic gut would have become a planetary fixture on its own, if not for its expansion into even larger spheres. Even the gargantuan tangle of monstrous endowments atop of it seemed somewhat outmatched in their unhinged growth, falling behind in their relentless struggle for size, only keeping their volume a force to match by virtue of their extra-exponential multiplication. The natural satellites that once orbited their globe now reduced to mere particles of dust entered into a spiralling descent toward the scaled sphere heading toward them, their impacts only minor blips atop the pristine, taut surface. Its mass becoming a gravitational force to be reckoned with, noticeably altering the orbits in the tri-star system it was invading. A few scraps of system information flashed up. Diagnostics complete, no issues found.

There was a short cut in the raw sensor data as the station rebooted its main core. Drash's face stared back at him, reflecting from the array of screens showing temporary blackness as they awaited reestablishment of the connection. Two dozen eyes, blinking in stupor. The entire room eerily quiet, only the rattling of the ship's hull and the roaring of the engines providing for background noise. He looked over to Sheyla, who was focused on the organics information scrolling off. Face flushing brightly, biting her quivering lips, she raked through the information, pulling the numbers into projective graphs. She tried to say something to report, but only managed a whisper before her entire body contracted. She let out a gasp, clenching her teeth, the edges of her mouth rising up to almost a kind of grin before she straightened herself out, inhaled and steadied herself on her console. Her eyes were almost glowing as she stared at the graph lines becoming almost vertical and the digits spilling beyond the screen real estate allotted for them. Drash felt dizzy, nauseated, petrified in his chair. The sight of his friend was only sending his head spinning faster. Maybe, maybe she had a plan, he told himself. Another one, after this one was failing so spectacularly.

The screens sprung back to life after the roughly thirty seconds cut off. The sensor data had spiked so high that at the current granularity, it was just at a constant peak on all values. Yet the visual remained dark, the view of the former planet not returning. Then something shifted. The empty whiteness of a blank eye opened, almost filling the screen. Then a second one right above it. They blinked in unison.

As if he'd suddenly been unfrozen, Drash's fingers came back into action, pulling back the focus hard. Flaring spines, shining scales, bulging sinew, cracking shells, stretching limbs. It was like swimming through an ocean made of beasts. As if the entire void of space had been overtaken by the brood, a detonation in population in such a short time that it seemed outright ludicrous to consider. A squeal. He looked over at Sheyla, who had clasped her hands in front of her mouth, her graphs having spiked completely out of measureability. Then, a buzz that drew his attention back to his own equipment. He'd reached the coarsest level of granularity the sensors were capable of. Horrifyingly, the output remained unchanged. Then it cut out. External sensors offline.

He was greeted by a useless view of some storage bay, the next available internal system being picked up. A few boxes and barrels stacked along the metal walls, some uniformed personnel who had been carting equipment around, now holding onto the nearest railing as the station had begun shaking. Structural integrity of the outer hull tanking quickly, the ceiling bulging inwards as the force from outside increased. The distress call blared over the speakers. Panicked, the shrill voice yelled something about an anomaly overtaking their space, calling for all available aid. A sudden crash abruptly silencing it mid-sentence. Sets of black tendrils bursting through the floor and tearing it open with the entire might of their muscular structure, making way for the two-headed draconic beast rising up, grasping its swelling gut, panting and heaving as the forces of fertility overtook its body and the flood of eggs was unleashed with a roar, the masses crashing down unto whatever stood in its way and turning the entire room into nothing but a nest for its clutch.

After what couldn't even have been a single second, the eggs burst open, an array of tentacles preceding the even further mutated creatures emerging from them. Three pairs of eyes opening and then closing once more, bodies covered whole in barbs that contracted tightly eight powerful limbs clutching their belly as it surged up in size. An entire bouquet of cocks leaking entire tubs full of seed onto the ground, their breasts fighting for space as they didn't so much begin laying their own brood as it came rushing out of them at double the rate of that of their progenitor per each of their dripping orifices, of which they now sported at least eight by the short time they were visible. Voiceless screams from four heads gave rise to their throats bulging, jaws unhinging and yet even more clutches of eggs bursting from their maws, the sheer overflow of unbounded fertility wracking their bodies into nothing but factories of reproduction. Their own offspring hatched almost the instant that they were laid. The life signs abruptly jumping to a harrowing seven digit number in what was left of the small room alone before the feed went offline.

Drash sat still. His mouth was dry. His eyes were burning, having been left unblinking for far too long. So much adrenaline flooding through his veins that his every muscle was in a perpetual state of agonized tension. His vision a tunnel that was narrowing to a mere pinpoint in the center. The screams, roars and slick noises of eggs being pumped out at a rate too far beyond all bounds. He was overwhelmed. Saw stars. The tension in his body suddenly lost as his head slumped forwards, chin against his chest, only held up by the seatbelts affixing him.

The shrill collection of screams yanked him back into consciousness. He couldn't have been out for more than a minute, but the room had changed substantially. No more rattling and whirring of the ship's movement. The commotion of activity from the crew abruptly stopped. After the shock, they all fell silent and looked up. Stricken with disbelief and fear, aside from one expression of suppressed, but all too obvious excitement. Drash followed their eyes to the main screen encased in the far wall. It felt like he'd been tossed into an abyss.

The ship had stopped short of returning to where inner space used to be. The outer edges of where their civilization had settled. The countless systems they had explored along the way. Their originator's world at the center, a marvel to behold. But instead of looking at what felt like home after a long journey out, they stared at the writhing chaos of the cosmic monstrosities that had overtaken it all.

The gigantic, gravity-distorting sphere of the broodmother's overbearing gut at the core. Expanding with ever stronger surges whose ripples could be felt reverberating through the ship, untold forces powerful enough to crack planets closing in toward it, torn out of their orbits and drifting toward their doom. Nothing short of an eldritch goddess of fertility, her ovaries far outnumbering the total of all celestial objects ever recorded. Clutches far beyond any capability of measurement, each of the star-system-sized eggs filled to the brim with a progeny that could overpopulate entire galaxies with their first generation alone, yet every single individual capable of reproducing to thought-defying multiples of times that amount.

Like black clouds bursting forth from the feeble shells, the brood spread like a dark spark on kerosene, their multitudes virtually detonating into whatever space available. The creatures almost unrecognizable monsters, bodies more a horrid mass of horns and limbs than any natural shape. Mere vessels for a chaotic mass of sexual organs, a maze of shafts and dripping holes immediately put to use upon hatching as their bodies began pumping out their own broods. Long tentacles wrapping around their gut and pulling tight to force them out faster, their necks bulged out as their scrunched faces with their gaping maws became just another means to unleash their kind. Which too took only a sub-second of delay before they added to the overreproduction, their numbers growing far beyond the wildest ideas of exponentiality. Every moment another record violently shattered as a single beast laid more eggs than the population had individuals, only for the next moment to re-break that achievement once more.

And yet, from the vast masses of their offspring, ever more, ever larger of their own endowments rose up. Drash's members having reshaped into something far more befitting of their role as intergalactic devastators. Enormous spines jutting from their surface, massive enough to graze past planets and reduce them to nothing but dust and ash, droplets of precum dripping from their tips voluminous enough to extinguish stars like they were mere candles to be blown out. A second row of knots swelling out behind the ones at the base, rhythmically pulsing to aid in pumping the seed from numerous bulbous, internal testes lining their sides all the way to the tip, fueling the relentless barrage of cum bulging their urethras and blasting out in an unending flurry of white. Sheyla's vast vaginas had gained several more clitorises, fighting for space in her dripping holes and descending into their depths each one more engorged than the last. Heaving eagerly as they didn't only await their fill, but helped themselves to it by means of long, fleshy tendrils reaching out, wrapping around the barbed shafts and yanking them into their depths, squeezing and milking them for all they had and then some.

The disbelief gave way to pure terror at the sight of such abject horrors, a scale and devastation incomprehensible, outright impossible to fathom. His colleagues fell to the ground with distorted expressions, unable to handle the assault on their minds, knowing that all they'd known and had was lost beneath the black brood, digging their claws into their face as if it could drive out the madness overtaking them. They yelled commands and reports, trying to focus on their tasks at hand, but neither receiving workable input, nor any coherent response. They sat there, silently, shut off from the chaos and turning in on themselves, alone with their thoughts. Much like the gray dragon in his seat, lower lips trembling, eyes still wide, pupils dilated and unseeing of the escalating insanity on the screen. He couldn't feel all of himself, the enormity simply far too vast for his brain to process. What reached him was only the static of perpetual pleasure. Something he now detested having basked in thoughtlessly for several hours. Subconsciously recoiling away, but utterly unable to escape from his own self after all.

A familiar voice almost instinctively pulled him out of his stupor. His head whipped over to Sheyla, whose mouth was agape, staring at the other side of the room and desperately trying to undo the straps that held her in place. He tried to jump up, but the belts tying him down gripped on tightly, feeling them sear his muscles strained from too much tension. With clenched teeth, he looked over to the entrance to the division and gasped.

The azure scales matted by dust and oil. Amber eyes narrow with rage, the grime smeared out of her face just enough to get as clear a sight as being without the tattered glasses wound up in the face mask around her neck allowed. Head tilted, one arm limply hanging down in her coat, the other raising up, clutching a disruptor at full charge. Aimed as squarely at her target as the high-powered, maximum-spread shot would need. The doctor's yell was shrill and hoarse: "I should have let you-"

"No!" Drash screamed, once again trying to leap from his chair, cursing it as his spine popped from the attempt and the belts ground against his limbs.

"BRACE FOR IMPACT!" The voice over the intercom blared. The blue dragon's face brightened. The entire viewscreen was filled out by whiteness. A droplet of seed, careening right toward them. Her eyes widened, teeth clenched, finger tried to contract around the trigger. She didn't get the chance to fire.

A deafening crash blew through the ship as it was hit broadside, sent spinning aimlessly in the direction it had just arrived from. Sparks flew from ceiling hatches blown open, equipment was catapulted across the room and the screen scrunched up, its viewing pane shattering to pieces. Without even so much as a railing to hold onto, the doctor's body was flung into the back wall with full force, hitting it with a turgid, bone-chilling crunch. The weapon skirted across the floor as she slumped down, remaining there, motionless.

It was like he was running on autopilot. Before he knew he'd done so, Drash had unbuckled, vaulted over to the biomechnics console and was helping Sheyla out of her off-kilter harness. She was panting, still startled from the encounter, but unharmed otherwise. In good spirits even.

"All hands on this deck, report to shuttle bay two!" Griswald's voice had never sounded so assertive. "We're abandoning what's left of this chunk of the ship!"

"Drash, maybe we should-" Sheyla began, but was cut off as her friend yanked on her arm. "No time, come!" Drash's voice was hoarse coming from his dried-out throat.

They rushed out of the doors of the externals division, leaving several of their colleagues behind who were still sitting there limply, staring into nothingness or cowering with their heads buried in their hands. In the hall, they almost tripped over the waist-high figure dodging past them. "Kardow, that's the wrong direction!" Sheyla yelled after him.

"There's a stuck door in engineering and it's my job to get it fixed!" He hollered back, waving at them without turning around.

"But-"

"Let him." Drash hissed. "He's got-"

Another crash rattled the ship. Alarms blared all around them as they were flung down the hall, getting a short glimpse of the depths of space between them and the detached corridor that the kobold had just entered, before the safety engaged and the door shut automatically. They bounced off of the ceiling and slammed into the side wall, lights going out and leaving them hanging there, the artificial gravity having gone offline. They were left in darkness and silence, only hearing each others breathing. Moments later, the emergency lighting came on and along with it a distorted voice over the intercom. "-epeat, HULL BREACH in the shuttle bay! Proceed to escape pods and abandon ship, repeat, to the... escape pods..." The voice trailed off as the surrounding noise became quiet, replaced by the silence of the vacuum of space.

Like a berserker befallen by rage, Drash grabbed Sheyla and pushed himself off of the wall. He rammed his elbow into the lift panel, unlocking the doors and pulling them open as fast as he could. The shaft behind it was like a bottomless pit. Leaping down was still an eerie experience, even with the lack of gravity making it less of a fall and more of a flight along it. They pulled down under the platform and jumped into the depths, aiming for the bottom deck.

Their descent was calm and quiet. Dreadfully so, because it gave him time to think. Which really wasn't something he wanted to do right now. Or ever again. His home. His friends. Hell, his *species*. His... actual one, not whatever those horrid, deformed creatures were. He swallowed.

"Drash?"

"Y-yeah?" He was thankful for the interruption, even though he didn't feel like talking either. But Sheyla's voice was calming in its steadfastness. Or maybe just unsettling in a different way than the rest.

"I think we should just turn off the connectors and-"

"WHAT?!" He stared at her in disbelief, the turn of his head sending them into a nauseating spinning motion. "You said when they turned off we'd end up on the other side! With those, those..."

She smiled a little. "Yeah?"

There was a pause. Except she didn't resume any further elaboration. Drash looked her in the eyes, his lips trembling. Then he shook his head angrily. "That's pure craziness." Reaching the bottom of the shaft, the doors to the escape pod launch bay had already been opened, the flashing red lines along the walls guiding them along, his arm still wrapped tightly around her waist, past several empty slots where others had already left what was left of the ship.

"Well, I prefer craziness over-"

"Here's one we can take!" He let go of her and pulled open the hatch to the tiny capsule, equipped with two plain seats and not much else to speak of other than what had to be two lifetime supplies of emergency ration patches. He grabbed the railing at the top of the door and swung himself in.

"Drash?"

"Sheyla, we-"

His arm stretched toward an empty hallway, open hand waiting to be grasped by the nothingness.

He hung there, motionless. A harrowing feeling running down his spine. Something inside him fell apart.

"Sh-Sheyla?"

Silence.

An explosion ripped through the upper parts of the ship. The pressure wave slammed the hatch shut and blew him against the far wall of the pod. A searing pain surging from his temples through his entire head, his hands involuntarily snapping up to the point of impact. From blurred vision, he got a view of the outside. Half of the entire hallway were gone, just a gaping hole into space, with the other half drifting off. In the distance, there were other parts of the ship. Residential quarters. A gaping hole into the shuttle bay. A glimpse into what was left of the bridge. The remnants of the launch bay slowly spun around on its own axis, panning across the destruction.

Then the void came into view. Blacker than the depths of space. An eerie shimmer of the emergency lighting reflecting off of their scales. The darkness closing in, filling his entire vision as he stared out of the tiny porthole. And innumerable eyes looked back at him. Gray and empty, of unthinking, twisted beasts, their faces dreadfully familiar, carved from his own and that of her.

With his throat closing up, he slammed on the eject button, imploring that there was still enough of the escape pod launch bay left to act on it.