It's Always Time Act 02 Ch. 01

"Eh," said Tomoe, shrugging. "He doesn't look like the vanilla type."

SB clucked impatiently and rolled onto her belly, facing Dee. The color of her crystal-polished skin cycled down to a rich, ruby red. She clasped her hands behind her back, wide leathery bands snaking around her arms to bind them tight together. She scooted up on her knees, rump rising in the air, two ruby pseudopodia morphing into bloated, knurled, thrumming dildos that stuffed themselves up her cunt and down her ass. "Ch-cherry?" she managed to sob before a ball gag popped itself into her mouth.

Outside, something clattered like a garbage can overturning. Dee looked out in alarm but a purring croon from Tomoe drew back his attention. "Ooh," she said, eyes locked on SB's reddening, violated derriere. "I don't know about him, but I could go for the cherry-treatment right about now."

SB swallowed the ball gag and blew Tomoe a petulant raspberry. Then she chuckled and leapt up, filling out into a toothsome Amazon, round ass pressed up against the glass counter, proud tits mashed together with her elbows. "Chocolate?" she asked in honeyed, fiery voice, drawing out the first syllable as she leaned in toward Dee, leering.

From behind the counter, Tomoe looked down and wolf-whistled. "That's my bet," she said. "Bet you five dollar he's a chocolateer, SB. But don't answer yet, Dee!"

SB bounced up to sit on the countertop and quivered back into her original, chisel-perfect form with one glaring exception. "Strawberry?" she asked in her own voice, "or…"—with a crick of her neck and a jut of her jaw, her dick billowed out, a tumescent fire hose—"…Strawberry-Banana?"

Dee sighed, took the crumpled, soggy, empty Jell-O box out of his jacket pocket, and placed it on the countertop next to the tin of SRU thickener.

SB took one look and toppled over backward into a display of vitamin supplements, her massive manhood weighty and elastic enough to stick tight to the countertop as she fell. Tomoe backpedaled away from the box, swearing a blue streak in Japanese. The pull of the SB's fall eventually caught up with her enormous dick and sack and they squeaked over the countertop glass, flipping up and then slapping down behind the counter with a loud thwap! and a muffled oof! from SB. "Lime?" Tomoe cried, nearly twisting an ankle on a Vitamin C bottle SB had sent spinning her way. "Lime?! Doaho! What did I say? What. Did. I. Say!"

SB peeped up from behind the counter. "You went lime?" she whispered, eyes wide in wonder. "You went lime…first time?"

Dee flushed. "It was an accident."

"No way, José," Tomoe said. She jerked a thumb back toward the SRU supply closet. "Once you take something from there, nothing is accidental. That's one of the rules."

"So there are rules?" asked Dee, while SB murmured, "Wow, a real lime-guy."

"Hundreds and hundreds," Tomoe said, "and I hardly know half of them. Lost the franchise manual a day after I assumed the place, although I bet that was just a rule in action, too." She glared at the gaping SB and gave her an annoyed kick, "Pick your jaw up off the damn floor, SB."

SB pouted but pulled herself together.

"Anyway," said Tomoe, turning back to Dee, "I'm glad you got away. She'll lose cohesion quickly without that first infusion of sperm."

Dee shuffled his feet.

"What?" Tomoe said while SB breathed, "Uh-oh."

"She got that four days ago," Dee said.

"Four days," Tomoe said. "Four days? You've been with lime for four days?" She drew close to SB who gave her a loving, reassuring squeeze. "Never mind about me," Tomoe said, shaking her head, "Who the Hell are you?"

"I'm not answering any more questions until you answer some of mine," said Dee. He tapped a finger on the top of the thickener tin. "What is nanomek? Is … SB … made out of it too? SB, if you're made out of Jell-O, how come you're so, well, cut? And how does it all work?"

"You want the long answers or the short ones?" asked Tomoe.

"Short will do."

"Okay. Nanomek is a magical powder, some 'techno-alchemical' handwavium stuff or something. I don't really know, I'm not science fiction fan. It's a basic component of a lot of the SRU gimmicks and gimcracks. When used as a thickener for sweet liquid, it makes meliae." Seeing Dee's confused expression, Tomoe repeated, "Meliae. Honey nymphs. Goo girls. Just look it up on the Internet later, will you?"

"Why goo girls?" Dee said.

"Nanomek is entirely female," Tomoe answered. SB cleared her throat, and Tomoe looked up at her, smiling, "even if the meliae it makes aren't."

"So that's why it needs sperm," said Dee. "That makes sense, I guess." Then, after a beat: "No, that actually doesn't make any sense at all."

Tomoe continued, "As to your second question: yes, SB is a meliae. And as to why she's 'cut,' as you so delicately put it: I cut her collagen-based gelatin powder with the polysaccharide pectin when I made her." She nestled further into SB's protective embrace. "So that means she's my meliae, Dieter, and don't you damn-well forget it."

"I'm a one-woman man-woman," SB told her, "you know that, lovey."

Dee said, "So then how do you get … well, you know …"

"We used to steal from sperm banks," said SB. "But that was too complicated, random, and not a very nice thing to do in the first place."

Tomoe smirked, running a finger up and down SB's breastbone. "So now, every once in a while, we go to a club and make some guy really, really, lucky."

SB stepped back, rolled her trim, broad shoulders, and stood proud, fists pressed to outthrust hips. "Any very, very surprised."

The couple collapsed together in a fit of cackling laughter. Dee found himself grinning like an idiot.

After a minute, SB brushed tears away from Tomoe's eyes with her thumbs. "You okay, lovey?"

"I am now," Tomoe said, bussing SB's lips. "This just isn't the way it's supposed to work. When they go lime, they're not supposed to come back at all. Something is going on here."

"He's a real lime guy," SB told her with a shrug. "We always suspected there had to be some out there, somewhere."

Dee felt like he was intruding on something that should have been very private, but the questions were burning too brightly in him, and he had to interrupt. "I'm sorry," he said, giving them a moment to drift apart, "But what's the deal with lime?"

"Let's start with how the nanomek works, how the meliae is born." Dee felt a flash of panic at hearing the word 'born,' although he did not know why, but Tomoe must have read something in his eyes and added, "I mean made, or summoned, if you prefer."

"Sure," said Dee, relaxing.

"The goo girl takes on characteristics associated with the flavor you make her with, often with unexpected results," Tomoe explained.

"Huh?" said Dee.

"The nanomek metamorph assembles by a process of allopoeis informed by a collaborative-learning neural net filter trained in the recognition of poetic justice and irony," SB girl translated. The coppery one-piece fanned out from her shoulders to cover her Olympic diver's physique again.

"Oh," said Dee, one of nature's nerds. "Duh. You should have said. So what's so bad about lime?

Lime meliae are tarts or something?"

One of the women in the store harrumphed indignantly.

"What's Latin for 'slime,' Dee?" Tomoe asked.

Dee thought for a moment. "Uh. 'Oblimo?'"

Tomoe and SB shared an awkward, embarrassed glance. "No," Tomoe said slowly, "that's the verb."

"Latin has a verb meaning 'to slime?'"

"Forget about 'oblimo,'" Tomoe said, waggling her hands. "The Latin word for slime is 'limus.'"

"'Limus,'" Dee repeated.

"Yep."

"'Limus' as in 'lima?'" Dee said.

"Yep."

"And 'lima' as in lime," Dee said. He got it now. "And lime as in lye. And lye as in 'will burn your face off.'"

"Lye's also used to make pickles," Tomoe said. "Your dick pickled yet, Dee?"

"I'll say," said Dee.

"The nanomek won't make the same associations with the flavor as you do," SB explained. "It won't behave as you expect. It never does. Rules are rules."

Dee thought about it. Why had he wanted the thickener in the first place? Oh, right, to keep Jell-O thick when it warmed up. Instead, the nanomek gave him a girlfriend that melted faster the hotter she got.

"When you went lime," Tomoe said, "you jumped ahead few dozen chapters of the story, like trying to graduate from kindergarten with a PhD in fucking."

Dee felt foolish for asking so many questions, but that was why he came here in the first place, so he said, "There's a story?"

"There's always a story," Tomoe said, rolling her eyes. "Once you buy something from SRU, you're subject to the rules. And the rules demand a story. They won't just let us skip straight to the fucking." She grabbed SB's hips and mashed herself against SB's package. SB purred and tugged playfully at Tomoe's hair. "Believe me, we've tried. Instead it's always talk, talk, talk, romance, romance, heroes, villains, yadda yadda. The gods have hard-ons for melodrama, seems like.

"Anyway," Tomoe continued, "you deserve to know how your story was supposed to go. It's a fairytale. Lonely guy buys magic powder for mysterious stranger. She promises it will bring him riches and delights the likes of which he had never experienced—"

"You didn't tell me anything like that. You didn't really tell me a damn thing, if you care to recall."

"Shut up," Tomoe said, "I'm on a roll. 'But,' the mysterious stranger says, 'there is one thing you must never do: you must never mix the magic powder with lime.' So the lonely guy goes off and has all sorts of wild adventurers with honey nymphs, trying different flavors and concoctions that never seem to work as he intended, and much zaniness ensues. And then the story ends in one of two ways." Tomoe held up her thumb. "First, the Disney lovey-dovey ending. Our lonely guy learns about the true meaning of love, goes on some grand quest to truly earn the love of his beloved honey nymph, and in the process she turns out to be a warrior princess under an enchantment or something equally trite, his true love for her sets her free, and they live happily ever after and all that kind of dumb crap, at least until the straight-to-video sequel is released." Tomoe's forefinger joined her thumb. "Two, the Grimm's Tales cautionary ending, which seems to be getting more and more common these days: lonely guy fucks his way through dozens of honey nymphs, getting more depraved, bored, and even lonelier with each dalliance, until he finally decides that the mysterious stranger was full of shit and lime must really be where it's at, so he makes a lime honey nymph and he…" She rubbed her extended thumb and forefinger together, making a soft sandpapery sound, and mimed flicking away something tiny and distasteful. "Well, he sublimes."

Dee had a brief flash back ["…keep you cumming and cumming…"] and admitted, "It almost happened to me. A couple of times, in fact."

SB moved close, hands splayed on the countertop, her almond-shaped, diamond eyes narrowing as they hunted for something deep within Dee. "But it didn't. No man comes back from lime. No man denies sublimation. God damn it, Dee, Lime could probably devour me in a matter of minutes. Who are you? What did you do to Lime?"

Two more flashbacks ["…The fridge. You. Before that? Dunno…" "…It's time? It's time? Is it time?…"] brought Dee to the verge of tears. He tore his gaze away from SB and watched the autumnal gold sunset through the storefront window for a long, quiet moment. "Her name was never 'Lime,'" he whispered. "She is Galatea." He turned back to face SB wearing a smile so inscrutable Tomoe wanted to photograph it for future study and practice it in front of a mirror. "She's back at my apartment," Dee said, and touched his palm to the tips of SB's fingers. "I can introduce you if you'd like."

Little drops of sport-drink florescent red sweat pricked across SB's brow, and she started to stutter. "S-s-s—"

Dee arched his eyebrow in an unconscious but perfect imitation of Galatea herself. "Solid?" he said, and lifted his hand. It dripped like it had been dipped in red grapefruit juice.

SB took a few jerky steps backward, eyes glazing an opaque, milky pink. The fingers where Dee had touched her ran together into a formless flipper. The plum-sized tip of the bulge in her one-piece crept up past her bellybutton and a candy red, gooey stain spread over her stomach. Tomoe reached out to her but hesitated.

"Your precum is maraschino cherry syrup?" Dee said but shook his head. "I'm sorry, that was going too far. I haven't been myself lately."

Tomoe glared at him. "Maybe you just didn't know who you really were before now. Dee, you need to learn how to control it."

Dee matched her glare. "Control…what?" Dee growled in a deep, bass register.

Tomoe wilted, knees buckling, palms flat against her inner thighs. "Please, Dee," she said, gnawing the flesh of her bottom lip. "Call it back. Dial it down. Do whatever you want—" Dee snarled wordlessly and Tomoe's eyes fluttered up as her head lolled down "—ah, God, do anything you want, just please, stop playing games," Tomoe begged.

"Games?" Dee said, gripping the countertop. "What games?" A tracery of cracks raced away from his clutching fingers, weaving an irregular spider web in the counter's glass. I've said that before, he thought, haven't I? No, it wasn't me…One of his earliest memories of Galatea hit him hard. He blinked. "Tomoe? SB?" But the two women just gawked in fear. Fear of me, he realized. He slumped over the countertop. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wouldn't. I would never…" And this time he let himself cry for a while.

Someone stepped close. "SB," Tomoe said, "you were right." Her petite but strong fingers ruffled Dee's hair. "He is a real lime-guy."

SB strutted up, and gave Dee's shoulder a friendly punch. Dee stood and she greeted him with a wide, knowing grin, "Go on home, hero," she said and struck out her right hand. "Galatea is waiting."

He nodded, straightened out his coat, and shook her hand. "Man," SB marveled, "what a grip." She threw her other arm around his shoulder and slapped him hard on the back, taking the opportunity to bury her face in his neck and drink in his scent. Dee felt a very unfamiliar pressure against his groin. His absent conscience was dead silent about it and his raw sex drive did not care what was touching his dick as long as it got him off. Dee himself chose to postpone his final opinion for a later date. "Dee," SB sighed as she broke the oddly-mixed embrace, "if one day Tomoe and I invited you to go…clubbing…"

"I'd be sorely tempted," Dee interrupted, grinning, but SB just laughed.

"I was going to say, 'do you think Galatea would kill us,'" she said, peeking over his shoulder into the shadowy aisle behind him.

"I don't think so. Not for just asking, anyway," he smirked.

"Now scram, sport," Tomoe said, "but don't forget your nanomek." She held out the tin of SRU Thickening Agent.

"Galatea doesn't need any more," Dee said, "and I don't want any more meliae, just her. Can't you put it back wherever it came from?"

"No way, José," Tomoe said, shaking her head. "I'm sorry, Dee, but you brought it forth. You paid five dollar. It's yours, and whatever happens with it is your responsibility, your karma. I wish I could rewrite the rules, but I lost the stupid policy-and-procedure manual. Keep it close, keep if safe – and for God's sake keep it dry. One schmuck poured his down the drain and the next thing he knew his city was crawling with tentacled, sperm-stealing, sewage she-demons. That's how Atlantis sank, don't you know."

"No, I didn't know." He took the tin of thickener from Tomoe, carrying it as gingerly as he would a live grenade. "And I really didn't need to know, either. And please, don't let anyone else know. I do not want to see fan art of that on the Internet."

The bell clattered as he opened the front door. He paused. "Tomoe?"

Tomoe was counting out the money in the cash register. "Yeah?" she said, and turned to SB who was flipping through the Sudoku puzzle book and muttering in befuddled anger. "You had done them all wrong, so stop bitching," Tomoe told her.

"There were three questions I forgot to ask," Dee said.

"Go on," Tomoe said, working on a tall stack of bills. "One five dollar," she muttered, "two five dollar, three five dollar…"

"Why did you fire the other guy?"

"I didn't like him," said Tomoe, "and besides, I didn't fire him. I just said, 'Whatever you do, don't take anything from the supply closet.' Never fails."

"Oh," Dee said. "Tomoe?"

"Yes, yes, two more questions, I know, I'm listening. Galatea must have to sit on your face to shut you up."

Dee turned the tin over in his hands. "What would happen if you ate some nanomek?"

"Me?" Tomoe said, about halfway through the stack of five dollar bills. "Probably nothing. Unless I guzzled semen at the same time, then I might turn into a cum-powered hose-beast monstrosity or something. Remember, it never works as expected."

The silence stretched. Tomoe and SB looked up at him. "Dee?" Tomoe asked.

The nanomek powder scrapped and scratched the inside of the tin. Dee tried to steady his hands. "What if…what if I ate some nanomek?" Dee asked.

"Don't," said Tomoe, jumping out her seat and scattering the pile of bills, "don't even think about it. You can eat Galatea out as much as you like, but don't swallow any raw, non-patterned nanomek. That's even crazier than making a lime meliae."

"That would be giving nanomek its own source of sperm," explained SB. "Take me, for instance. I can cum. I can cum gallons. I'm a one man-woman bukkake extravaganza."

"She really, really is," breathed Tomoe. She reached out and twined a cotton-candy dreadlock around a lazy forefinger, her eyes roving up and down SB's crystalline angles and jellified curves.

SB flushed russet under Tomoe's hungry gaze. "Any-anyway," she stammered, as Tomoe slid her other hand down the front of SB's one-piece, "I c-cum seminal fluid, not semen. Letting nanomek—ah!—have its way with your balls would be—oh, yeah—no-don't-stop! Just, just keep doing that. Oh, wow."

Dee shuffled uncomfortably. "You, uh, could've just told me to get lost. I would've taken the hint."

Tomoe disappeared below the countertop. SB started, "I—" but gave a little yelp and threw her arms wide to clutch at the counter, the fat puzzle book flapping to the floor. "I-thought-I-told-you-that-when-we-first-met," she squeaked as fast as she could before a small, delicate hand with an iron grip reached up and hauled her down by the ponytail behind the counter.

Dee listened to the couple murmur and gasp for a moment before whispering, "Good night, guys." He shut the door as slowly as he could to keep that horrible bell from clattering.

A few seconds later, Tomoe, topless but with her blouse gathered up to cover her chest, jogged out from behind the counter. "T, you devil-bitch, get back here!" SB cried from behind counter.

"Fuck you I want to watch him walk," Tomoe said.

"Huh? Oh, yeah, me too!" SB ran to join her.

"Christ, SB, cover up, he might notice a three foot erection bouncing in the window."

"Oh, shit, sorry. Um. Do you have a tarp or something?"

"Never mind, SB, just let me look. God, what an ass."

"He's got a cute butt, though, T."

"Oh, hardy-har-fucking-har-har."

"Seriously, T. What's going on? What is she doing to him?"

"Her? Nothing. Him? Everything. Rules."

"I've known you for three thousand years, T, if you include the future and all those temporal continuum anomalies, and I don't even know what the fuck you just said."

The odd couple watched in silence as Dee started up his car and pulled away.

"He had company, you know," said SB. "An entire entourage, seemed like."