Solar Dragons Need Love, Too! CHAPTER 1-2

This is a snippet of my next novel, and I've been working very hard on it. I hope you guys enjoy this preview, exclusive for my Patreon readers!

1: Welcome to Meteoropolis

Light returned to me slowly at first. It was like peeling away the blackened lens of a grimy kaleidoscope, revealing the dazzle of color little by little. The most prevalent color was a sort of burnished pink. When the veil of darkness was gone, however, and I could see clearly, I found myself tightly situated inside a strange, claustrophobic pod. I struggled to move, but I appeared to be buckled down to a sweat-dank cushion. All I could make out was fogged up rose-colored glass an inch away from my nose.

Before my eyes adjusted to take in anything on the other side of that glass, my ears granted me awareness of a faint but persistent hum. It was the droning sound of idling machinery, and with it came a persistent vibration that rattled me from inside the containment pod I found myself in. The pod itself reminded me of a cheap science fiction movie so much that I found myself half-frenzied over just where the hell I’d woken up.

“Hello?” I called out, my voice cracking and dry like I hadn’t spoken in days. That made no sense—I’d just been teaching a grammar class on verbal phrases to a bunch of middle school kids only a few seconds before. My throat felt dry, parched—like I swallowed a desert. I allowed myself a few minutes for my mouth to become lubricated with saliva, gulping down some of it to prime my vocal cords. I shouted this time. “Hellooo!?”

My cry was rewarded with the sight of a strange man. The man possessed a wiry figure and pointed ears that extended well past the top of the bald dome he called a head. He had caterpillar-like eyebrows and matted, leathery skin that hinted at too many days spent under an oppressive sun. Aside from that, though, his chiseled features and impressively prominent nose made him uncommonly handsome, if a bit uncanny to look at.

“Oh, you’re ready!” he said, his voice a few registers lower than I’d expected. His expressive eyebrows threatened to break free from the frame of his age-worn face. “Welcome, welcome little human!”

“Little human?” I muttered to myself—though now that I thought about it, his ears and intense white eyes did seem to hint at something other than humanity.

Did I wake up in a B movie? I wondered with a dumbfounded look plastered on my face.

But the reality of the situation barely had time to soak in by the time the man had taken a step back and clicked a button on a remote control. The epiphany of what was going on would have to come later.

The rose-colored glass window in front of me lifted up like the doors of a Porsche, and the straps and buckles binding me down undid themselves as if by magic. I looked down at my wrists and saw long silicon-like tubes connected to them. I was certain there was one in my back and my neck, too.

“Come on out, little fella!” the man said, coaxing me like I was an animal. I  flashed him a cockeyed look as he gestured with a ‘come hither’ motion.

My eyes instinctively darted around the room, and with that, my adrenaline surged—especially when I realized I was naked. Oh boy, there was no way I was in Kansas anymore. Glowing signs with a language I’d never seen before hovered in the air above chrome-plated terminals in the futuristic room. There must have been a dozen pods similar to mine, half of them occupied with peoples of various colors and physical features. None of them seemed human by any stretch of the imagination. Some of them looked downright monstrous.

This is a weird-ass dream, I thought.

From a floating tray beside another capsule, the strange-looking man handed me a change of clothes. I accepted them politely, not knowing what else to do. “Put these on,” he instructed, and I did. Happily.

At least my dong isn’t swinging in the breeze anymore.

The clothes were gray, stretchy pants and a tank top that showed off my biceps. Those biceps definitely were a bit more impressive than I remembered, but I wasn’t about to complain. Still—it left me wondering.

The man waited impatiently as I put on the clothes, pants first. I was unfazed as he didn’t really stare at me. Furthermore, I was so done with the absurdity of this dream or hallucination that I’d decided not to fret anything.

“What the hell is this place?” I grunted, wiping my eyes as I finished pulling the shirt over my head. Crusty rheum deposits in the corner of my lids scraped away onto my hands. I flicked them on the floor, surprised at the thickness of the stuff.

How long have I been here? was my silent followup question.

“Welcome to Meteoropolis,” the strange man with the kung fu master eyebrows said. He bowed, sweeping dramatically with his left arm, and I found myself fighting the urge to bow in return.

Mama raised a gentleman, after all.

“Meteoropolis?” I repeated groggily. “How the heck did I get here? What even is Meteoropolis?”

I felt the cords in my wrists and back come loose with a slurpy sucking sound all on their own. Instinctively, I reached for the spot on my neck that bore one of the lines a moment before. I felt a small bump there that gave way to an obvious hole, or crater, in my skin. It still felt a bit raw, stinging like a fresh spider bite.

“Time will take care of that, don’t you worry,” the man said. “Quickly, come here!”

His deep, sonorous voice had a quality to it that I felt I could trust and respect. I certainly wasn’t about to go edgelord and murder this weird old elf-looking dude without hearing some answers, dream or not, so I followed him over to a terminal. When I got there, an adjacent floating screen now displayed a bird’s eye view of a rather unusual looking city. I squinted as I took it in. “Meteoropolis,” I repeated again. Then it hit me. “Wait, does that mean—”

“We’re on a meteor, yes,” the man said. He reached out his hand. I took it cautiously, but he smirked and adjusted my grip so that we were clasping onto one another’s wrists. “This is how we do handshakes here,” he said. “Not everyone has hands, but most people have an appendage of some sort—it’s the most functionally inclusive way.”

I didn’t know how to react to that, so I just let out a bewildered groan and fixed my eyes back on the screen as he kept talking.

“My name is Dr. Artigius Luna. I run the reincarnation laboratories here—you’re the first human I’ve seen come through one of the Rebirth Capsules in over three hundred years!”

There was a lot to unpack in that sentence. “I think I need to sit down.”

Now—I’m no fool. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Dungeons & Dragons—always a bard, by the way. Not because I like all the memes about bards sleeping with everything in sight, but because I’m a musician myself. I used to bring my guitar to sessions, I even had a song written for most of my spells. But I also liked to play bards for another reason—they were a support class, and ever since I was a kid, supporting friends is what I was all about.

But that’s besides the point. I’ve read a hell of a lot of fantasy books and played a boatload of fantasy games, even some weird stuff. I’m pretty versed in the various fantasy creatures out there, and this dude looked like some sort of elf, not an alien. And yet, I was in a city situated on top of a meteor? None of this made any sense.

The elf-looking scientist nodded encouragingly and snapped his fingers. Some of the tubes running along the floor slithered upward into an arcing position suitable for one’s posterior. Not knowing what else to do, I sank onto it, detaching mentally from the absurdity of my new reality. I just tried to accept it little by little for its own premise. “So I’m in some kind of alien city on a space rock, hurtling through the galaxy,” I said, doing my best impression of a person who was unbothered by something utterly insane. “Got it.”

“Alien is a word we don’t like to use. There are xenos in Meteoropolis—those entities of a more extraterrestrial genetic makeup that bear few to no similarities with humans and elves, but most people here come from Sylvan, Infernal, or Atlantean worlds.”

My mind raced to try to interpret the meaning of these terms. “Infernal… as in—”

“As in Hell, yes. There are demonkin in the Infernal District, woodland folk such as elves and monsterfolk in the Sylvan District, and the Atlantean District is home to a hodgepodge of people, from gorgons to giants to—”

I held up my hand to beg for silence, hoping to cling to my sanity for a few minutes longer. “Doc, what are the odds I’m dreaming right now?”

He cocked his head at me and looked at his own hands somewhat sadly. “I certainly hope they aren’t very good,” he muttered. “I don’t want to be a figment of your imagination.”

Next, the good doctor grabbed a gun-like device off of a chrome-colored tray table floating in the air beside him. Good, I thought, Frickin’ shoot me. This is ridiculous.

That being said, though, I was honestly intrigued. “Doc,” I grunted, my throat still a bit dry, “would you mind giving me a bit more context about what’s going on?”

“Of course,” he nodded, fiddling with the buttons on the gun-thingy. “You’ve been given a new life. Your soul has been reclaimed from where it was floating, lost in space. Now you’re here, in our city. It’s… it’s not a bad place to be, but it has seen better days, if I’m forced to be honest.”

I scrutinized his quickly sinking expression. “Better days? What do you mean?” I asked anxiously, shifting in my seat

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Crime is up. People are apathetic, eaten alive by consumerism. Entitled, greedy, wicked. But not much different from your world.”

I shrugged. It sounded similar enough.

“This world needs a change. It needs—” he paused to think of the word, “—Well, it frankly needs a hero, someone to show what it means to go out of one’s way for someone else.”

Also from the same tray as the device, he handed me a silver container, not unlike a flask.

“Drink this.”  Apparently, the gun-like device he pointed at my forehead was a scanner of some kind, because  a violet light shot out of it and started reading back a list of facts about me as I took large sips of cold water.

> Welcome, Brock Clayton. Subject is male, twenty-nine Earth-years of age. Blood type O Negative. Genome mapped. Numerous aptitudes.

> Notable character traits: fixated on justice, quick to trust and care for others, generally selfless.

> Notable strengths: musically gifted, compassionate, good with children, diplomatic, habitually maintains fitness.

> Notable flaws: overly selfless, addictive personality.

> Natural instinct: to aid and protect others.

> Species: Originally full-blooded human.

> Splice Partner: Solar Dragon.

My jaw dropped with each detail about me the voice rattled off, but so did the pointy-eared scientist’s. He looked even more bewildered by that revelation than I was. “Ohhh, that’s interesting,” Dr. Luna muttered after a too-long bout of silence. “I’m an astral elf, but I had a Splice Partner as well—lunar ghoul, though, nothing so fancy as a Solar Dragon!”

This was definitely a dream or something. Whatever just happened was too over-the-top, I was sure of it. “Sure, doc,” I said, secretively pinching my asscheek as hard as I could to wake myself up. It didn’t work. It was, however, successful in creating a bruise, I’d later discover.

The computer voice continued.

> Solar Dragons are prone to fury, but generally good. For this reason, this pairing was rated as Ideal. The AI hypothesizes that the confidence and fearlessness of the Solar Dragon will provide an advantageous balance to the moral compass and the tendency of Clayton to be exploited by stronger personalities.

Stronger personalities? I thought. Well, screw you too.

Dr. Luna cleared his throat and looked me in the eye. “Meteoropolis has an affectionate sobriquet among those in the know: the Space Wizard’s Playground. Occasionally throughout the universe, the souls of individuals get displaced. Those souls contain many secrets about said individuals, including genetic material.”

I squinted at him as though the words he was speaking were in another language—language was another topic to broach at some point.

“Umm…” I just stared at him blankly.

“Try to keep up,” he chuckled as he read my muddled expression.

He was shuffling through a nearby drawer for something, and the first thing my mind did as I saw that was wonder, what now?

“Anyway—we have probes throughout the galaxy that swim around in the void of space searching for these lost souls so that we can restore them and give them a life here—we have our agenda of course, but it’s purely benevolent. Almost everyone on Meteoropolis is either reborn in a Capsule or born to parents who were themselves reborn in this way. We’ve grown quite rapidly over the last century. Most people here, including myself, had a past life—or two.”

“Or two?” I repeated with a cocked brow.

He nodded, excited by me pegging that important bit of emphasis. “Yes,” he said, clapping his hands together excitedly. “Yes, indeed. See—sometimes particularly distant souls get diminished by time and the distance they’ve traveled. After clinging to space debris for millions of  years—”

“Hold up,” I said, raising a hand. “Millions of years?”

“Oh yes, I always reveal that part too soon. I’m afraid intelligent life on your planet is mainly dominated by sentient insectoids at this point. There are other humans throughout the universe—quadrillions throughout the multiverse but… from your Earth? Just you at the moment, as far as I’m aware.”

“This is a weird dream,” I mumbled to myself, studying the alien script on the signs around the Capsule room. I’d never known a dream to be so vividly detailed and oddly coherent, but it was all too much to be anything but a midnight hallucination inspired by spoiled milk or expired meat.

He nodded grimly. “Yes, think of it as a dream for now. It’ll help with the gradual transition to acceptance.”

“So, my soul—was it fractured?” I decided to play along. If this was real, I should know everything I could. Assuming it wasn’t though, I might as well have a bit of fun.

Dr. Luna nodded. “Indeed it is,” he said. “So it appears that you’ve been fused with one of the rarest celestial beings in the cosmos.”

“A Solar Dragon?” I grunted, almost laughing at the silliness of it.

He nodded again, this time frantically, with eyes that seemed to glow. “You mustn’t tell anyone—tell them you’re pure human, or I’m afraid you will garner too much interest.”

“What does it mean, then?” I asked. “I mean, being part Solar Dragon.”

Dr. Luna shrugged his frail-looking shoulders. He looked me in the eyes and said, “We’ll find out together—with time. But please, don’t do any experimentation on your own if you can avoid it. And don’t tell—” He looked at a bit of text written on the screen, narrowing his eyes to read it carefully. “—Don’t tell Ms. Pinky Peach.”

I winced at the odd-sounding name. “Sorry, what?”

“Thanks to a tax relief program, Capsule Puppies—Sorry, that’s what people like to call new arrivals,” he clarified, clearing his throat again. “Anyway, new people to Meteoropolis are usually set up in someone else’s home and made their dependent for their first few months. It can go as long as a year, though.”

I furrowed my brow, understanding slowly. “So… Pinky Peach is my host.”

He nodded, turning back to his terminal. Dr. Luna typed up a bunch of information in a language I couldn’t understand. “You’ll get acclimated to the text here shortly,” he encouraged me. “You must feel quite overwhelmed now.”

“Well, you’re speaking solid English,” I said, finally standing back up. The tubes on which I’d been sitting had started to irritate my toned backside. “Am I to assume that won’t be true for everyone?”

“I’m not speaking English,” he laughed, looking over his shoulder at me as he continued to poke away at the vast keyboard. “You have the same language chip installed in your brain as everyone else. It isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close. It’ll even trick your brain into learning how to operate in our writing system without even realizing it. Within a few hours you’ll start to be able to read written text. Just takes time for your head to correlate it all.”

That was quite a revelation. I didn’t react to it much except to allow my jaw to drop silently as he continued to work. A few seconds later a retinal scanner shot out of the wall and bathed the doctor’s eyes in a purple light like the one that scanned me a few moments prior.

> Subject is clear for integration. Good work, doctor.

He looked at me with a mischievous look on his leathery face. “I programmed her to praise me.”

I snorted a little laugh despite myself.

“Alright then,” he said, cracking his knuckles. His fingers were oddly long and sinuous. “Any questions before we wrap things up?”

My hand landed on the spot between my belly button and groin. “I feel like I should want to pee,” I said. “Why don’t I need to pee?”

“Oh,” he laughed. “There was a tube attached to your, ahem, nether region until about ten minutes before you awoke. We have discovered through trial and error that that cord should be disconnected first.”

I could understand why. Waking up in a claustrophobic nightmare was already jarring enough. Waking up with a weird tube fixed to your genitals would have been even more disconcerting. “Good call,” I said.

In the moment of awkward silence that followed, my hands traced the outline of muscles in my chest inside the gray shirt I’d been issued while Dr. Luna poured over some documents. When he looked up to me, I had a comment ready.

“I seem to be in better shape than I remember, doc,” I noted, flexing my muscles. “Not that I was in bad shape, mind you.” My fingers traced my abdomen, finding a six-pack there that definitely wasn’t so pronounced last I’d checked.

“What do you remember?” he asked me.

I scrambled to think. A waterfall of memories hit me at once, but I couldn’t collate them all without careful thought. It was all stream of consciousness. I remembered how to play Stairway to Heaven on my guitar. I remembered every word to every Gravity Kills and Nine Inch Nails song. I remembered my sister, Melody, who disappeared shortly after her twentieth birthday, and how it ruined my mom. I remembered the alcoholism mom battled, and how I worked forty hours a week on top of my schooling to support her and tried desperately to get her off of her addiction.

I—I remembered too much. The smell of my first girlfriend’s hair. The look on my father’s face when he told me I was useless, never able to take care of anyone. The realization that he had been right when, despite my best efforts, my mother took her own life. The need to take care of others, to prove him wrong, to honor my mother and my sister by helping and protecting anyone else. The need for it. The burning need.

And—there was more. The last thing I remember? I thought.

“I remember I was in my classroom. I was teaching a lesson, and—there was some kind of announcement over the PA system.”

He nodded. “What was the announcement?”

I frowned as I tried to recall it. “I can’t remember,” I admitted with a long sigh. “Damn.”

“It’s alright,” he offered, “it may return—but either way, it’s unlikely to be relevant and, based on my experience, it’s probable to be at least mildly traumatic. So if I were you, I wouldn’t bother to recall it if you can avoid it.”

Traumatic? Well, that just made me want to remember even more. What the hell happened, then? Why was I here? What made my—how did he phrase it—my soul detach?

After that, the gentle doctor performed a bunch more tests and filled me in on a bit more about the city I found myself in. Apparently xenos, elves, dwarves, orcs, satyrs, centaurs, and more were all real. What’s more, they all more-or-less happily and peacefully coexisted on this little rock I now had to learn to think of as home. I still wasn’t convinced this was anything but a particularly lucid dream, but I decided to take everything at its premise, just in case.

“It’s time for you to go now,” he said. I looked at him in surprise and alarm, not really feeling totally prepared for the world outside this lab just yet. “Oh, relax, we’ll meet regularly for follow-ups, and Pinky Peach will aid with your integration.”

“When is our follow-up?” I asked. “And how will I get here?”

“I’ll send a cab for you. We can meet in two days’ time, as soon as you are up. I’ll contact you again soon.”

I nodded. “Just what am I supposed to do here?” I asked. “I mean, in… Meteoropolis?”

He shrugged. “That’s entirely up to you. This city is full of interesting people and endless wonders for a Capsule Puppy from a world without magic to explore. Get a job, make friends, get laid, fall in love, start up a new hobby. It’s all fair game.”

“Still, I—”

He held up both of his hands to stop me from protesting further. “Please,” he said. “You’re going to have a lot more questions after you get settled in. Whatever Pinky Peach doesn’t answer for you, I’ll be happy to help with, though I’ll be more interested in helping you connect to your Splice Partner.”

“Roger that,” I said, stretching, tugging at the waistband of the simple gray unisex shorts to loosen them up a bit. “Now, tell me about the city itself, then, doc.”

“Well, I think it’s better if you see it with your own eyes.”

He gestured for me to follow him, and I made small talk with Dr. Luna, him asking a little more about my life before arriving here. “English teacher,” I told him, to which he offered no further comment for the moment. I couldn’t help but think that, whatever I was going to end up doing for a living here, it probably wouldn’t make great use of my master’s degree and state-certified teaching license.

After exiting several neon-lit tunnels, we made our way through a front door that looked far less high-tech than I was expecting given everything else I’d seen up until this point. It was a clunking wooden door on rusty hinges, complete with a primitive-looking keyhole. It made me anxious to see what the hell was on the other side of this door—and I wasn’t disappointed.

I walked out into a domed city where a semi-opaque casing surrounded a bustling metropolis. Outside of the dome casing, which seemed to be lit a dark blue to simulate a certain time of day, I could just barely make out stars swirling in the sky. When I looked further, I also noticed comets or other minor celestial bodies that appeared to shatter against the protective surface of the dome.

A helix-shaped tower with a spiraling walkway leading to the top was positioned directly across a wide street from the building I emerged from. Trees were everywhere—some of them as big as sequoias or even larger still, others far humbler by comparison. Some of the buildings, now that I looked more carefully, seemed to be carved out of those gargantuan trees, with branches emerging from underneath and between window panes.

The street itself was crowded, filled with all manner of vehicles from medieval carts and carriages all the way up to futuristic chrome-covered hover cars. The smell of exhaust was notably absent. Instead, there was a subtle floral odor pervading the air, wiggling its way into my nostrils wherever he stepped.

“What’s that smell?” I asked, my eyes still trying and failing to comprehend what they beheld.

“That’s mana-burn,” Dr. Luna noted, not making eye contact with me. He raised his hand in the air, jiggling it in a motion that I recognized as the apparently intergalactic method of hailing a cab.

Within moments a red hover car pulled up to the curb, its door opening up instantaneously as it stopped. A horned man with goat-like features below the waist was sitting in the driver’s seat. The driver had a joystick on either side of his thighs rather than a steering wheel in front. “Where y'all headed?” he asked. His voice was grating, low, and raspy, like a sixty-year-old man who just spent the last fifty years of his life chain-smoking unfiltered cigs. Facially, though, he didn’t seem a day over forty.

Dr. Luna shuttled me into the backseat on the passenger’s side. “Here’s my number,” he said, and he pulled something out of his own pocket. “And here’s your own cellular phone. You’ll have to set it up yourself, but Ms. Pinky Peach will probably be able to help if you need it.”

I blinked. “You have cellphones here?”

He grinned at that. “We’ve adopted quite a mishmash of tech and culture from across time and space. Much of it is modeled after your own world, as 2000s Earth represented a golden age of urban culture. Well, at least according to many xenologists. You’ll probably find that daily life in this city closely resembles quite a lot from your own world.”

“That seems like an insane coincidence,” I noted. In my head, the probability that this was a dream shot back up.

“It is,” he agreed, “except that Earth is a centerpoint in the fabric of reality, and it reached its cultural apex around the time that you were alive. It is indeed rather striking that you come from that time period and place—but that time period and place is one of the few fixtures in the multiverse.”

The guy in the driver’s seat looked back at me and repeated his question, this time sounding a bit irritated. “Where y’all headed, I says?”

I looked at Dr. Luna, ‘cuz damned if I knew.

“Not far—Sylph Street, Third Lane, number 287. Give him time to hit the buzzer before you drive off.”

Dr. Luna kindly prepaid the cab fee, including a tip for the driver. Noted, I thought. They even tip people here. That isn’t even common back on Earth outside of my home in America, and yet they do it here? Interesting.

Dr. Luna waved goodbye to me, I looked back at him with a silent whimper in my throat. What the hell was even going on? As I watched the insane architecture and diversity of Meteoropolis pass me by as we drove through the city, I muttered a silent wish that everything would somehow work out.

Pinky Peach’s Interlude

“Ahhh freaking heal me, please!” Pinky Peach squealed into her headset as her fingertips punched the keys. “Why would you let me solo mid against Zintara when she’s kitted to counter my Q?!”

“Sorry Pink,” another feminine voice called back at her. “I’m with Rexorz on top—they’ve got our spire on the defensive.”

“Sweet mother of—do you think I have no freaking map awareness? I’m just saying, deal with it and—” Pinky Peach’s voice went quiet for a moment as her fingers started hammering the keyboard. “No, no NO!”

“You are dead!” announced the announcer’s voice in the game.

“No shit, you dumb—”

“It’s okay,” her friend’s voice reassured her. “We still have the lead. Buy some gear back at base and head back into the fray as soon as you respawn.”

Pinky Peach stomped her hooves on the floor beneath her computer desk, holding her palm over her microphone to muffle the sounds of her outburst. She shouted obscenities into her room.

“Pinky, we can hear you. Don’t stress so much, we’ve got this.”

She knew they were right. The team they were playing against was at the bottom of the silver tier. Pinky’s team, The Dream Girls, was on the verge of crossing over into gold tier soon. Even if they did lose this match on a fluke, it would only be a setback. Pinky would come out on top—she had to.

With one hand, the beautiful unicorn girl purchased upgrades for her champion, while the other grabbed a washcloth and scrubbed a smudge off of her desk left by the condensation of her energy drink. One thing led to another, and soon she was wiping down her whole desk—until she heard the AI announcer utter those crucial words.

“You have been revived. Good luck, Champion.”

“Alright, chat,” Pinky said, her lips curled in a snarl that wouldn’t have been pretty on any other face. “Let’s teach these freaking scrubs a lesson.”

***

Eventually victory came, but it was hard won, clutched from the jaws of a near defeat.

Pinky let out a sigh and stretched before chugging half a can of energy drink. “What the hell happened in there, chat?” she said. “Did anyone see? How did their Monga get so many freaking kills? His KDA ratio was off the charts.”

Pinky squinted to see the chat as messages flew by with different interpretations of what went wrong. She set it into slow mode.

> Their jungler got so overleveled.

> Your team had no crowd control champions.

Pinky shrugged. “True,” she said. “At this rate I’ll need to take the girls back to bots for some basics. There ain’t no way we’re making it to diamond tier, much less the championship match, at this rate.”

> You’re not ready this season.

Pinky grimaced at that message and the several others that sounded off afterward in agreement. “Maybe not,” she sighed. “Maybe you’re right.”

> You need to take it easy, Pinky. Make some friends. Do some more fun streams.

She cocked her eyebrow suspiciously. “I know what that’s code for.”

The chat was suddenly filled with the words “hot tub” and “pop dance” as the legion of men sounded off their wish list of Pinky Peach content.

Pinky Peach giggled slightly and shook her head. “Alright,” she said, gazing at the clock. “Well, it’s time for me to take a quick break to order dinner and use the bathroom. I’ll be back in a bit, maybe do some ASMR affirmations or something.”

The unicorn girl’s chat left her messages of farewell. Most of them weren’t going anywhere. They’d stick around until she returned, she knew, ready to watch her be pretty in front of the camera for another hour or two. Then they’d go to bed, and many of them would wake up and watch her do it all again.

But Pinky Peach didn’t care about being pretty—she wanted to be good at something. She wanted to be the best. As she left the room and headed to the bathroom, she found herself obsessing over every mistake she made in the last match.

“I can’t believe I wandered so near the bush so early in the match,” she groaned. “And that freaking Monga!”

She could do better—she had to. Failure wasn’t an option. And yet… her fans were right. She wasn’t ready. Even more than her, her team wasn’t ready for the big leagues. This was not her year. They may get as far as gold, maybe even diamond, but to break into the top thirty teams in Meteoropolis? Last year they didn’t even make the top two hundred.

She leaned against the sink and studied her reflection. She was pretty, without a doubt. No one could or would say otherwise. Pinky Peach was the kind of pretty that didn’t even need to be spoken. It was just so much a part of her that it hung over every interaction she had. She knew she was pretty. But her looks didn’t get her much except for views and subs. Pinky Peach was alone—as alone as anyone could be, with very little hope of remedying that fact in the near future for reasons both personal and magical.

Some of her friends were worried about her. They’d tried to hook her up with nice guys who claimed to be virginal and pure—a sticking point that was important to a unicorn girl in particular—but, invariably, it didn’t work out. In some cases, they turned out not to be virgins or pure of heart at all. In other cases, they left her for other women when she refused to take the next step.

She had never even been kissed.

“What am I even doing with my life?” she asked the bathroom mirror. Her gorgeous reflection seemed to mock her.

“You’re this beautiful, and what does it do for you? You’re poor, you’re alone, and you’re probably not even going to break into diamond tier this season.” That’s what the Pinky in the mirror seemed to say, her face twisted with disgust.

She closed her eyes so she didn’t have to look at herself as she stripped off her clothes and folded them on the toilet seat.

Pinky hopped in the shower and scrubbed every inch of her milk-white body until it was covered in soap suds, shampooing the naturally pink hair of her head and tail. She let out a moan of bliss as the hot water washed the soap and shampoo away, purifying her, wiping off the dust and dirt and grime and dead skin that pervaded every surface in the world, as unavoidable as her fate of dying alone and unloved.

“At least I have my showers,” she mumbled to herself. The hot water jets hid the tears from her eyes even from her.

When she left the bathroom, she dried her hair with her combination hair drier and horn buffer. When her hair was dried and warm, she brushed it delicately, getting out all the snarls and knots. Afterward she dressed herself in a freshly washed blue t-shirt and comfy, tight black shorts.

Pinky Peach picked up her cellphone and ordered a pizza. The process was more complicated for her than for other girls. When she’d waded through it, she spent a couple minutes with a hand cloth and a bottle of cleaning alcohol, spraying and rubbing down every surface until she was satisfied.

Pinky walked back into her room a little more relaxed. As she crossed in front of her camera, a dozen messages popped up to greet her, but she somehow realized she’d never felt so alone. Adored by thousands—worshiped, really—but it meant nothing because her life was missing the affection that she found she craved more and more with each passing day.

Pinky Peach sat back in her chair and kicked her hooves up on the desk, right in front of the camera. This caused a few small donations and new subscribers to come through moments later. It was a pro tip one of Pinky’s teammates had given her. “Show your feet, Peachy Keen,” she said, jabbing her in the tit with her smooth-scaled finger, “or hooves as the case may be. Some boys are super into that.”

Her friend was right about that, as she was about most things. And Pinky Peach’s finances were suffering. She blew most of her income each month on her mortgage and utilities, not to mention her insurance. That left only a handful of silver pieces for literally everything else. In a bad month, it could be even less.

I shouldn’t have bought this stupid house, she scolded herself at least once a day. If I were renting a studio apartment I could eat like a queen.

Pinky didn’t remember it, but today was a special day. Today was the day that a visitor was set to arrive on her doorstep. In need of a tax credit, she had signed up to host a new resident of Meteoropolis. There was a tiny part of her that hoped it would be a boy, and a handsome one, but most of her hoped for the opposite. A boy would be problematic for a lot of reasons, many of which she shuddered to think about.

After the donations stopped coming, Pinky set her hooves back on the ground and leaned in with her elbows on the desk. “How’s it going, chat?” she asked. “Should I do some solo unranked matches for practice or play something else?”

Chat was divided on the topic.

> Play as Bosco. I think you’d be good with his kit.

> Do the ASMR thing. I love that.

> Have you tried the game Dunlanding’s Quest?

Pinky sighed as she studied the messages, looking for a suggestion she actually found appealing. She was lucky, she knew, to be in a position to make money from home being cute on the internet, but she was unlucky for more reasons.

Pinky didn’t take her fans for granted, but at that moment, all she wanted to do was turn off the camera and microphone and lie in bed. Her hand hovered over her equipment a few times, entertaining the thought of just vanishing. Vanishing was only so easy for her.

What did she want to do? She cast a yearning look over to her army of dragon plushies. She wanted to feel their softness on her body, simulating a loving embrace. After that, she would be content to stare at the ceiling until sleep claimed her. But even that was hardly a reprieve, because in the morning she would be back on stream again, playing ranked matches for most of the day in front of hundreds of fans.

She needed a change.

2: The Stream Queen and the Potted Hottie

I lost track of how far we traveled pretty quickly, caught up in the dazzling, unusual city outside the car window. The hover cab pulled up to a curb in a neighborhood with a dirt road. The street had gnarled roots emerging in patches here and there, even a few tufts of grass and weeds. It must be a pain in the ass to get a normal wheeled carriage through here, I thought. This likely wasn’t a rich neighborhood for how poorly maintained the roads were.

The sidewalks were planks of hardwood lined in neat rows with intricate patterns and fancy-looking words inlaid or burnt into them. They’d been polished with a resin that probably made them suitably sturdy and resistant to the elements. The buildings here were mostly between two and four stories tall, treehouses for the most part—some literally carved out of the trunks of massive trees.

“This place is impressive,” I grunted in between slack-jawed fits of gawking.

“We’re in the Sylvan District,” the cabbie mumbled, barely audible as he took a drag from something rolled in brown paper that was too ugly to call a cigar. “Lots of green. Lots of trees.”

I nodded. “You aren’t kidding,” I said.

A beep from the terminal under the driver’s dash saw his mood go even surlier. “Okay, bud, time to get out. Git git git,” he said, shooing me like I was a nuisance. Not the friendliest guy, but I’ve experienced worse cab drivers in my day, so I offered nothing but heartfelt thanks as I opened the door and climbed out of the car.

The sounds of cawing birds, croaking frogs, and the burbling flow of water nearby crept into my awareness all at once. It was like a city street in the middle of the forest, hewn and fashioned entirely from the forest itself—homes and places of businesses were built from logs, carved out of hollowed-out trees, or constructed out of mounds in the earth like hobbit holes from Lord of the Rings. Everything here was lined in neat rows, forming a suburban-looking block despite the eccentric woodland theme. It was both unsettlingly picturesque and aggressively charming.

“I don’t think I’ll hate it here,” I smirked, looking around. “Let’s see—287? That was the number?” I searched the block for address plates and found that, by this time, the markings on the houses were actually legible to me. They didn't exactly look like the numerals I knew from back home, but my brain seemed to read them the same.

Within a few moments I spotted the one I was looking for. For reasons I couldn’t quite express in that moment, I felt my heartbeat quickening to the point where my veins pulsed in my wrist as I gripped my new phone in my hands. I started toward the doorstep, slowly, cautiously.

Pinky Peach’s house was the only one-story house on the block, and it didn’t exactly look brand new. It was a vine and ivy-choked cabin—cozy enough, I thought, but I was a little nervous to discover what the inside was like since the exterior looked so… reclaimed by nature.

I tossed a glance behind me and realized to my distress that the cab driver did not wait for my host to receive me before driving off. I let out a nervous  sigh and walked up to the door upon which the number 287 was marked with tarnished gold-plating—the tarnish meant that it wasn’t real gold, of course.

I pressed a little button next to the door—a doorbell, I figured, but the sound was more like a trilling bluejay than the chime of a bell. I waited for a minute. Then two. Nearly three. How long was long enough to ring the doorbell a second time? Three minutes certainly seemed like long enough to me.

I pressed the button again, triggering the obnoxious sound, but before I had even released my finger from it, the door swung inward, opening wide.

“Come in!” a high-pitched, almost musical voice shouted as I saw the feminine figure it belonged to retreating into another room, slamming a second door behind her. “One sec!” she called back, this time muffled by the walls between us.

I walked inside, my eyes curiously darting  around. It was eerily like any other suburban home I’d ever been inside of—white walls, a simple glass table in the kitchen, familiar-looking kitchen appliances—certain details were different for sure. There was a machine on the table plugged into a very unfamiliar outlet. The device looked at first glance like a hairdryer, but when I bent over to look inside of it—cautious not to touch anything that wasn’t mine—I noticed that the inside reminded me of the mouth of a pencil sharpener.

“What the heck is this for?” I asked the air. I stood up straight, though, as I heard footsteps approaching the door that the girl had disappeared behind.

The door into which the girl had retreated swung back open. My breath left me all at once as out stepped the prettiest woman I’d ever seen in my entire life. Incidentally, she was also the strangest.

Going by measurements I was familiar with, she was probably about five feet and five inches tall from the top of her head to the bottoms of her hooves. Yes, you read that right—hooves. Her skin was milk-white, her figure trim and yet wildly curved past the point of perfection, and both her eyes and her hair were pink—naturally. There was no way that hair was dyed, or that those were colored contacts I decided right away.

She also had some more unusual features, even considering the rest of the exotic package. Sure, there were the hooves, but coming out of the back of a pair of black booty shorts was a pink horsetail that matched the color of the hair on her head. Most glaringly—she had a horn. A single golden horn jutted out from the center of her forehead.

“Holy crap,” I mumbled to myself, trying and failing not to gawk.

She reached out to me, extending a hand that clutched a few shining coins between two dainty little  fingers. “Here you go! Ten copper pieces!”

Her voice was so sweet I could almost taste it. Even from where she stood a healthy gap of space away from me, I could smell the strawberry aroma of her perfume assaulting my nostrils with her intoxicating appeal.

My mouth flapped, jaw hanging from the hinge. I struggled to say something, but I failed, just blurting out some unintelligible grunt. That is, until I processed that she was handing me money. “Wait a second,” I said, “why are you paying me?”

She blinked at me, her long, thick eyelashes fluttering as she processed my question like it was gibberish. Then a wave of realization seemed to wash over her as her eyes went wide and huge and she took half a step back in surprise.

“Oh, gosh!” she squeaked. “You’re not the pizza guy!”

“No, I’m not,” I laughed, scratching my head awkwardly. “But it’s nice to know pizza exists here.” My stomach growled. I’d never even had a meal in this version of my body.

If her eyes could get any wider, they did in that instant. She hopped up and down as she said, “Oh! Oh oh! You’re the—you’re the Capsule Puppy!” She sized me up, narrowing her eyes a bit and going over me from head to toe. With the self-control of a god, I did not sneak a peek as her braless breasts bounced in her tank top.

I laughed and nodded. “Capsule Puppy. I like that term,” I said, smiling at her. I reached out my hand, and she took my wrist. She offered the same handshake Dr. Luna had shown me. Even the feeling of the skin on her arm was enough to thrill me, and my heart thrummed in my chest as I tried to keep cool in front of her unshakable charm.

“I’m Pinky Peach,” she said, smiling bright with teeth even whiter than her skin. “And you’re—”

“Brock,” I said. “Yep.” I loosened my grip on her wrist, and we released our polite, if awkward, handshake. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Peach.”

She rolled her eyes, which cut some of the tension, making me smile and relax a bit. “Please, Just call me Pinky or Pinky Peach.”

“It’s an interesting name,” I noted, trying not to smirk.

“Is it?” she asked. She reached her hand back to brush some hair over her shoulder. The unicorn girl was wearing a blue tank top with a cartoon dragon on the chest. One strap was falling down over her shoulder. She still held the coins in her hand awkwardly, still keeping one hoof in the doorway to the bedroom behind her. A pink glow from her bedroom oozed out into the white living and dining room area. “It’s just a normal unicorn girl name,” she shrugged.

I pinched myself one more time just to be sure, but at this point I was pretty certain I wasn’t dreaming. I didn’t think my subconscious could make up someone like her. It was beyond me. “So—”

She cut me off, though, “Oh my freakin’ gawd!” she squeaked suddenly, hearing a beep coming from inside her room. “I’m so, sooo sorry, but I have to leave you hanging! I’m in the middle of a Flinch stream now, and I’m losing viewers every second I’m away from my computer. Here,” she said, handing me the coins, “take these and buy yourself some dinner! I’ll catch up with you in a few!”

“Oh, I—”

“I promise I’ll see you soon! Mm-kay buh-bye!”

The door slammed shut behind her, wafting out an extra potent blast of her sweet aroma. I stood there outside her door for a solid minute before I worked up the strength to move. It was the groaning of my gut that shook me out of my awestruck stupor.

I looked around the room, but without first seeking permission from her to touch her stuff, I decided that the best thing for me to do would be to take her advice and go out to find something to eat. I slipped the coins in my gray pants pockets—still wearing the boring clothes Dr. Luna gave to me.

Maybe I can buy a snack and see about a change of clothes, I thought to myself. It was as good a plan as any.

I opened the door to the house and wandered out into the odd sylvan street once more, struck by the contrast between inside and outside. The interior of the house was so warm and familiarly modern, but the neighborhood was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I hoped that this would all make sense to me eventually, but at the moment it was just… eerie.

As I walked down the block I saw a man who probably stood about six and a half feet tall with green  skin and tusks emerging from his mouth. He was staring at his own cellphone while walking a dog that looked oddly like a wolf with ram horns protruding from the sides of its head. It peed on an iron pump, which I assumed to be the equivalent of a fire hydrant in this neighborhood.

“Hey,” I said, waving, surprising myself with my own forwardness. “I’m so sorry—can I ask a question?”

The man looked surprised to see me, but after a moment of looking me up and down, he nodded. “Go for it, bud.”

“Where can I get food around here?” I asked, rubbing my belly to emphasize my hunger.

He pointed off down the street in the direction I was already walking. “Two blocks down and take a left and you’ll end up on Goblin Street. Good market there. Lots of weird stuff, too, though, so look for what other elves are eating.”

“Oh,” I chuckled, pointing at my ears. “I’m a human, not an elf.”

He leaned to the side to get a look at my ears and nodded. “No shit,” he grunted. “Not a common sight in Meteoropolis these days. Advice is still the same, though—if the elves can handle it, you probably can, too. Just don’t eat anything sold by demonkin or xenos, you know?”

“I keep hearing that term—xenos,” I said, emphasizing the last word to make it more or less a question.

The man nodded as he glanced at his dog, which was sniffing my leg a bit too eagerly. “Lots of tentacles, black or purple vascular bodies, antennas—no magic,” he said. “Space freaks, basically.”

I nodded and straightened up, feeling a bit bold. My curiosity had overcome my shyness, but still—I glanced around conspiratorially. “Do you know my host?” I pointed at the house I’d emerged from moments before. “Pinky Peach.”

His eyes took on a far off look. “Yo, man. Pinky’s your host? You for real?”

I nodded. “Yeah, why?”

He shrugged and jerked his dog’s leash as it initiated a bold gambit with the apparent objective of seducing my leg. “Nothing,” he said. “She’s so friggin’ hot, though.”

I chuckled. “Okay, good,” I grunted, letting out a sigh. “I worried it was just me.”

“Nah, man—she’s a streamer on Flinch.”

“Flinch?” I repeated. She’d mentioned the term before, but I hadn’t had time to ask.

“Yeah,” he grunted, still struggling to keep his horned pup from mounting my calf. “She’s been doing it for a couple years. She’ll break into the big leagues eventually—just a matter of time.”

“What’s holding her back?” I asked, genuinely hit with a wave of curiosity. Hell—I doubt I’d ever been as curious about anyone in my entire life. Something about that girl flipped all my switches.

“Well, for starters—only virgins can see her. It’s a unicorn thing,” he explained. I cocked my head at him and narrowed my eyes in a skeptical look. “You’re technically a virgin here,” he pointed out. “You may have banged a hundred folks back in your old life, but you’re brand new here, aren’t ya?”

I nodded. “Point taken.” That made sense.

“You need help finding the market?” the guy asked. An orc, I decided. Big dude. Green skin. Tusks. It added up.

I shrugged. “Is it hard to find?”

“Not really,” he said.

“Are you headed that way anyway?” I asked.

“Not really,” he repeated. That got a laugh out of me, and he smiled back with unexpected warmth.

“Then don’t worry about it,” I said. “Thanks for the advice. And the information.”

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” he said. “I’m Jasper. I live on this road, too.” He gestured to one of the houses I thought looked like hobbit holes halfway down the block. “Number 265.”

I smiled. “Thanks for the welcome.” I waved goodbye and started to walk away, pulling myself free from the lusty intentions of his horned hound. At the last moment though, I was compelled to turn back. “Say, Jasper?” I called out.

“Yeah,” he answered, his dog whimpering, eyeing me like a piece of sexy steak.

“What are the chances that this is a dream?” I asked.

He pulled another one of those shitty cigars out of his pocket and placed it between his lips. It was the same thing I saw the cab driver puffing on. He lit it as he answered my question with a knowing expression. “Slim to none, man,” he said. “Slim to none.”

***

The marketplace was quite a sight to behold. Each stall was positioned atop an elevated platform—in most cases it was the stump of some thick tree. The stalls lined a gravel road that was just a bit too narrow for the elbow-to-elbow foot traffic that was going through. Surveying the scene, it had to be around dinner time for everyone here, even if the dome and the meteor’s status floating through space made it hard to guess at a standard time of day. There were tons of people here.

Speaking of the people, good Lord! I’d never seen such an array. The diversity on display here would make the first season cast of the Power Rangers hang their heads in shame. There were loads of folks I couldn’t even label, but there were also elves, goblins, orcs, trolls, centaurs, even gnolls—hyena-like people that stood around seven feet tall. It was one of those gnolls that enticed me to check out my first stall for the evening.

“Get your roasted manticore, right over here!” she called out. She was not a pretty thing—mangy, with a bestial face. She possessed gangly but well–muscled limbs and wild eyes that made you recoil to look directly into. Still, she had a certain charisma about her that I appreciated. Her voice carried, and she put more effort into making her operation stand out than any of the others on her stump. Her cart was draped with lanterns made of leaves stitched together by twine, and she clearly didn’t hate her job as much as some of those around her.

I rewarded the gnoll woman with my curiosity, walking up to her stall. “How much for a stick of roasted manticore?” I asked, leaning in to better hear her response. That turned out to be unnecessary. She grinned at me widely and barked back, “two coppers!”

I handed her a silver, and watched as she gave me back eighteen coppers—so the exchange between silvers and coppers was 20:1. Good to know.

“Just hang tight, human,” she said. She was apparently more observant than the orc man; she pegged me for what I was right away. “Yours will be ready in just a minute.”

I stood with my back to her sign, surveying the sprawling market from the elevated stump-top position. It was breathtaking, if a tidbit messy and overcrowded. The scene reminded me of a traditional Asian market back home.

Suddenly, though, I was shaken out of my calmness by a loud and alarming sound. “Help!” a shrill feminine voice rang out. “Help! I’m being kidnapped!”

My eyes instantly pinpointed the source of the cry. A cloaked figure was running through the market street, shoving people out of his way, knocking some of them to the ground. Under his arm he looked to be clutching a potted plant close to his breast. His body was weirdly curved, his spine bent in a way that seemed downright unnatural.

“Help!” the voice cried out again, and I realized with a start that the voice I was hearing was coming from inside the pot.

There are few things that trigger my adrenaline like the sound of a distressed woman or girl. I think it’s the same for most guys, but given my past, I just couldn’t ignore it. A crime was underway, and a little girl was about to become a victim. Something burned inside me as I realized that. Without thinking further, I sprang into action, leaping into the crowd with surprising agility—surprising even to myself.

I was moderately athletic—back on Earth, I enjoyed boxing twice a week and went for a daily run. On the weekends I would sometimes go hiking with my friends. But I was never known for speed and nimbleness, so when I leapt into the fray and shimmied through the crowd with ease, I was as taken aback as anyone else.

The cloaked figure grew nearer and larger in my vision. Some people cussed me out as I nudged and elbowed through the mob, but I’d be happy to field their questions later. For the moment, I was focused on rescuing the potted plant kid.

“Help!” the voice cried out. “I said freaking help! Why is no one helping!?”

My jaw clenched tight as the man exited the crowd, sneaking into a narrow but crowdless alleyway. I followed behind, though, and I gained on him fast. For the first time, he looked back and noticed me—his face was oily and so purple that it was almost black, his eyes bulbous and red and too numerous to count. He clicked at me with gasping mandibles and leaned into his sprint, picking up even more speed. He wouldn’t let up, and neither would I.

We were about to reach a dead end. As he came upon the wall though, he didn’t slow down. He jumped and kicked off from it, ricocheting from the momentum and grabbing hold of the windowsill of an adjacent building with his free hand. I realized a moment later that it was actually a powerful tentacle. With a grunt, and one tentacle, he pulled himself onto the ledge and panted. The purple bastard glared down at me, probably certain he’d gotten away.

Something burned in my chest again, something primal and ancient, powerful beyond any feeling I’d ever known. I jumped. To my surprise, with a simple standing leap I managed to bring myself all the way up to the second story windowsill where he was positioned.

“Give me the kid,” I growled, balancing on the ledge beside him. He gaped down at my hands in horror.

“Wh—what the hell are you?!” he said. His voice was indescribably gross, like slime that talked.

I looked down at my hands, too, following his gaze—they were monstrous talons now, exuding shafts of light from between hundreds of glimmering yellow scales. Something in me kept me from reacting in surprise—instead, I remained focused on my purpose. “Give me the kid or get knocked on your ass.”

The man—a xeno, I realized—looked down, sizing up the drop. It wouldn’t be pleasant. Cautiously, slowly, the purple bastard started to move the potted plant in front of him, to hand it to me—

But at the last second he got stupid and instead reached out his tentacle, grasping some kind of futuristic pistol. A pulse of green energy blasted outward with a strange, unexpected sound, bathing me in light. I jerked my arms in front of my face to protect myself… but realized almost immediately that his weapon had no effect.

He stared at me in horror. I looked at my hands with a similar expression, now entirely draconic up to the elbow. I jerked my head back up, looking into his alien face, and we shared an awkward ‘what now’ moment. Using it to my advantage, I snatched the plant from him and kicked him off of the ledge. He fell the entire ten feet onto the rubbly road beneath us, landing hard on his back with an ugly thud.

Feeling brave, I jumped down and discovered, as I suspected, that I landed gracefully, with total ease. Stooping beside him, I pulled the hood off of his head as he groaned beneath me. Dark antennas jutted out the top of his scalp. He was bald, and his head was slick and seemed to have a layer of glistening fluid coating it.

“Who are you, and what is this?” I said, holding up the plant. I looked at it closely for the first time and my jaw dropped.

Rooted in the pot was a woman, not a girl, if her proportions were to be believed—just small, maybe the size of my forearm. She possessed ivy-green skin and was naked, except for a few leaves that obscured the sensitive bits. Her face was narrow with pouty lips and large, expressive eyes, solidly black and reflective. Her hair was made up of vines that hung down her back until they hit the soil of her planter. She was… beautiful but oh-so-tiny.

The freaky-looking alien leveraged my distraction to his advantage, pulling a glowing red knife out of his pocket. To my surprise, he didn’t try to stab me—he stabbed himself. In the freaking heart.

“Well, damn,” I grunted, watching vacantly as he bled out underneath me, definitely dead. Super dead, I thought. I looked at the plant. “Now what?”

She blinked at me, grinning naughtily. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”