Turek Ray Gun 14 (Patreon)

As you might have guessed, I've been pretty stumped on this story. I didn't know where it should go, and that's why—despite repeated requests—I haven't worked on it since November.

This month, I got requests from @Piedunk, @Edolon, and @ArcadeDragon to continue (though they didn't know how either) and then suddenly, a stupid idea hit me.

Said stupid idea follows...

Turek Ray Gun 1
Turek Ray Gun 2
Turek Ray Gun 3
Turek Ray Gun 4
Turek Ray Gun 5
Turek Ray Gun 6
Turek Ray Gun 7
Turek Ray Gun 8
Turek Ray Gun 9
Turek Shrink Ray 10
Turek Ray Gun 11
Turek Ray Gun 12
Turek Ray Gun 13

———

Mai thought she was going to absolutely lose her shit.

She was expecting to come home from a hard day at work to a guy in her bed. That was the agreement, after all. But she wasn’t expecting to come home to two guys in her bed—passed out and sticky, atop soaking wet covers.

“What in the name of She Who Was Consumed is going on here?” shrieked the little mysa.

Karkachan sat bolt-upright, blinking and wiping the sleep from his face with an urgency she’d never seen from him before. “Uh… Uh… I can explain!”

“You can explain?” she screamed, her face moving close to his. The other male—Sanuel, presumably, the buck whose bedroom window looked directly into hers—was awake now too, and he cowered behind the miniature lio, trying to go unnoticed. “You can explain why you were fucking another guy in my bed?”

Karkachan leapt to his paws, and he waved his palms in front of her face. “Yes!” he said, but then looking less certain, he backed off a step. Mai didn’t hesitate and she was right back in his face. The lio changed his mind, “No. I mean, yes!”

“Well?” asked Mai, but with her voice still pitched to a shout. “What is it? Do you have an explanation or not?”

Karkachan looked so frazzled, like a turek had slurped him up and spit him back out. “I… I… I invited Sanuel over,” he explained with a stutter. “I hired him. We all did. He came over and fixed the sink in the bathroom. I paid him three cents, and Gras paid him three cents, and Berti paid him three cents, and you owe him three cents… and so it barely cost any of us anything, but Sanuel got twelve cents out of the deal—which is a ton for him—so everyone wins!”

“Everyone wins? Everyone wins?” she repeated. Why was her eyelid twitching so hard? It never did that before. Mai felt so stressed right now! “My mattress looks like it was dragged out of a krakun’s cunt … and everyone wins?”

Karkachan swallowed hard, his eyes jumping quickly between Mai and the soiled covers. “Uh…” he said quieter than before. “I … uh … personally … promised Sanuel more than just the three cents—I didn’t obligate anyone else!—but I … uh … intended to pay him back in his own apartment, and things just kinda got carried away … and I can clean … up … all … this … mess…”

The lio’s words tapered to silence, but Mai felt like a bomb was about to go off inside her skull. She pointed at the ceiling. “You and I need to work this shit out—”

Karkachan was staring at her with wide eyes. “Uh… Are you okay, Mai?”

“No, I’m very much not okay!” she screamed. “I have bent over backwards to help you out—”

“Uh…” he gasped again, seeming more panicked. “We have to leave.”

“You’re not going anywhere, unless you’ve decided to get completely out of my fur!”

The lio grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a shake, lifting slightly and forcing Mai to stand upright. “We have to leave!” he repeated. “Now!”

Mai started to reply, but no words came out. Her heart was beating at a million lightyears a second, and the blood was pounding in her oversized ears. She glared at her friend, at her former boss, at her former lover… Was he her former lover? She wasn’t certain, but she glared down at him just the same.

Down? Glared down at him?

Oh no! Was Karkachan shrinking again? He was already mysa-sized—or close enough, perhaps only a centimeter taller than her—but now he was looking smaller, shorter than her.

Sanuel stood slowly from the bed and slinked behind the tiny lio. She hadn’t seen him up close before, but now that she did, he seemed a little undersized too.

In fact, …everything did.

“Am I… Am I…” she whispered, “...growing?”

Karkachan grabbed her wrist tight. “We have to get out of here. Now!”

“You can’t go out there, now!” the mysa gasped. “It’s the middle of rush! You’ll be spotted by hundreds of does!”

“Now!” he repeated, dragging her toward the door. “If you’re growing to lio-size, you’ll be squished inside your bedroom! Or worse, you’ll crush the whole apartment building!”

Without even stopping to tie the bonnet-disguise around his hair, the two ran from the apartment and down flight after flight until they had completely left the building. Karkachan didn’t stop. Even though they were out, he was still dragging her away from W block.

“Are you crazy?” she hissed. “You’ll be seen!”

“It’s not safe for you to grow here!” he hissed back.

Mai looked around. If she really was growing to lio size, she might be able to fit between the buildings without accidentally toppling one over, but it was hard to tell. The roads between the buildings weren’t all that wide, and she didn’t know how much space there was above them.

And even if she did manage to grow here without smashing anything … what then? There was only one exit from the mysa dorms, and it was a tunnel leading to the labs—a mysa-sized tunnel.

“Where are you taking me?” she cried as Karkachan dragged her through gasping crowds.

“We have to get to the lab!” he shouted.

“So, you can shrink me back down?”

“It’s the only space large enough for you to grow!”

The tiny lio and huge mysa shoved their way down the main roads, pushing does aside left and right. At first, they shouted in anger, but quickly the crowd focused on how these two didn’t belong here, and they stepped aside on their own.

Soon, they were running—through town and into the tunnel to the labs. But the tunnel was growing narrower with each passing moment, the walls closing in on Mai, forcing her to scramble on all fours, to crawl, to pull herself through until she finally—barely—extracted her growing body from the tunnel with a grunt.

She toppled from the counter top, bounced off a lab stool, and landed on the tile floor in a heap. Above her, Karkachan scrambled down the ladder that led from the counter to the floor. He rushed over beside her and gently stroked her muzzle.

“Mai? Mai?” he whispered. “Are you okay? Talk to me, Mai.”

The mysa gasped. Air wasn’t flowing freely enough. She closed her eyes and sucked in huge lungfuls of air over and over, trying to push the panic aside.

“Shh. Shh,” whispered Karkachan. “It’ll be okay.”

Eventually, what seemed like years later, Mai’s panicked breathing began to slow. She rested her fuzzy cheek against the cold tiles and slowly opened one eye. She stared at the tiny lio in front of her.

“Am… Am I…” she whispered, “lio-sized?”

Karkachan shrugged. “Uh…” he whispered back, “more or less? It’s hard to tell with you lying on the floor, but roughly, yeah.”

“Oh, no!” she groaned, closing her eye. “Please tell me this is all a bad dream.”

But when she finally opened her eyes once more, Karkachan was still tiny and stroking her muzzle in a caring fashion.

“Can you change me back?” she whispered.

But the little lio shook his head. “The gun…” he said, pointing up to the counter, “it’s gone. They must have moved it to a secure location after I disappeared. I guess it makes sense that they’d lock down the classified projects.”

“No…” she groaned.

He pulled at her face. “We have to get you out of here before any of the researchers spot you.”

“What? Why?” she asked, suddenly confused.

Now, Karkachan looked confused. “If they see you, they’ll start experimenting on you! They’re not going to ignore that a thirty centimeter mysa grew to over two meters in height.”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, of course not, dummy,” she groaned. “But that’s my job. I’m here so that they can run tests on me.”

“No, no, no!” hissed the lio. “I mean like classified stuff!”

She glared at him. The turek ray gun was already “classified stuff”.

“I mean,” he whimpered, “they’ll lock you away, and I’ll never see you again!”

Mai felt a stab of pain in her heart. Angry or not, she wasn’t eager to face a future where she’d never see her lio again—regardless of the inconvenient and now oddly reversed size differences between the two of them.

“So,” she whispered, “what do we do?”

“Yeah, what do we do?” echoed Sanuel from behind Karkachan.

The lio turned slowly and stared at the sopping-wet mysa buck. “What are you doing here?” asked Karkachan.

Sanuel’s eyes shifted back and forth between Karkachan’s and Mai’s faces. “Uh…” he whispered. “You said we had to run.”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SPDhAKNxAD1t0qJcwEvQerTDOsZG1SbtHdpSwNgDLaw/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?