Jack Chalker - Horrors of the Dancing Gods

Joe went over to Alvi as the little creature vanished back underground, stood in back of her, and began massaging Alvi's neck and shoulders as she sat, trying to get her fully back to normal.

Alvi breathed an excited and heavenly sigh. "Oh, don't stop! That feels so very good!"

Eventually it was time to stop, though. "Where are the rest of your things?" Joe asked her. "I'm sure you had a lot more than what I saw."

"We did, but we had to leave it in a hurry. We had two pack mules, but when it was clear we were being followed, we had no choice but to leave them and hurry on."

"You had no horses?"

"We should have, but a wagon or surrey would have been too large and hard to manage on these kinds of roads, and I can't really handle much of a regular mount, I'm afraid."

They reached the pool of fresh water. "Well, you're going to have to take off what you have in any case," Joe noted. "For one thing, you'd sink with all that on. For another, it's not practical out here. Third, they're pretty filthy and we're a long way from a laundry."

"I–I'm sorry. I'm just not used to this! I mean — my whole life has been one of concealment! Now, suddenly, I'm here, with nobody I have known, and I'm — well, it is difficult. I never knew how much the monster I was until we were on this trip. There have been times — it could not be helped — when others have… seen. And I have endured their looks, their pity, their revulsion, and whatever. You are so perfect. You cannot know what it is to be like this! You can never know how I envy you!"

Joe was taken aback. Perfect? Envy me? If only she knew!

But the fact was, putting aside the couple of extra inches of perfectly proportioned height and dimensions, Joe was physically about as perfect as one could be — for a wood nymph. It was just that, well, Joe had been neither born nor raised a wood nymph, or a member of the faerie race, or even female and culturally was even more cut off from this existence. Somehow she'd been feeling so damned sorry for herself that it had never once occurred to her that to any stranger she really was perfection of her race and for this world, anyway, normal and acceptable.

And of course there were far worse things to be than a wood nymph, particularly in this world. Somehow, though, the idea that one who considered herself such would actually feel envy for Joe was unreal, unheard of, and hard to deal with.

'Well, I might as well see it," Joe told her. "I promise I won't turn away or treat you any differently. I wasn't born like this. I was born so different that this form and existence are to me so unhappy that I've been wandering the world trying to discover how to change it, to go back. I'm hardly the one to be turned off by the way anybody looks."

"But it is just a disguise and a pleasant one to look upon, at that," Alvi noted. "You don't have to hide half your body from the world, always fearful that someone will see, will start yelling and pointing out your shame."

By that point Joe's imagination had already conjured up more horrible things than were likely to be hidden under that baggy dress of Alvi's. Still, she could understand the problem and sympathize. "Anyone who sees me sees only a simpleton, an oversexed, ignorant, dumb little faerie girl with only one reason to be looked at and one thing on her tiny little mind," Joe noted. "At least, with your dresses and cloaks, you could be treated more as a person."

"It was not the same," Alvi responded. "Not only was the fear too great, but the limits were much too restrictive and even dangerous. It wasn't equality from my point of view. It was play equality, that's all."

Play equality… Hey, chief! You ain't no Injun, are you? We don't serve no Injuns in this here place… Who'd ya kill to get a job drivin' that truck, Geronimo? Yours? Get dutta here! Aita no Injun afford a truck like that… How many times, after all those fights and the hospital time that almost caused him to lose his truck, had Joe tried to "pass," to deny his own self-evident heritage? That was why he'd resettled in the East once he could. In the East "Indians" were exotic, fascinating creatures, like people from Mars; the Easterners had other targets.

"You don't have to playact with me," Joe said gently, and helped Alvi remove the rather elaborately fastened clothing.

The real problem with halflings was that they made up survivable combinations of creatures with no reason at all for being other than that the mixture, for some reason, worked. Mostly things that would be okay on the proper creature just didn't turn out right or weren't in the right proportions or places on the body or things like that. They were deformed — mutations, sort of — and nobody ever felt comfortable around that sort of unfortunate. Still, in a land where Joe had battled zombie armies, monster carnivorous rabbits, real fire-breathing dragons, and even nastier types and one that had countless thousands of faerie races, demons, and monsters all its own that were "normal," how bad could it be?

The answer was not so much bad as very, very bizarre.

Alvi didn't have to go far to lose all illusions of humanity. In fact, she looked decidedly less human and more alien than Joe had ever been as a creature of this land. And it was easy to see why she'd not been terribly put off by being handcuffed. In fact, had that fellow managed to take her prisoner, he might have been in for a very nasty shock.

The head of course was normal: the face of a pretty girl with a nice short hairstyle, thin brows, big brown eyes, the usual, set atop a fairly long neck, nice shoulders, and a pair of medium-sized and fairly firm breasts. Then the fun began.

Just below this was a second set of shoulders, mounted under the first but tapered in just a bit from the top, from which extended two additional arms ending in hands as well and between which were two slightly smaller but otherwise perfect medium-sized and fairly firm breasts.

Just below this was yet a third set of shoulders, again mounted under the first and in just a bit from the second set, with a third set of arms, hands, even breasts, in a threesome that cascaded down in such a way that each succeeding set was perhaps ten percent or so smaller than the set on top and, interestingly, was proportioned so that all three pairs of hands ended at the exact same point on the body. This, however, left room for only a small flat stomach area with no visible navel, and then the whole thing tapered into the hips so narrowly that it all appeared to be on a giant ball joint. The only girl with top measurements thirty-six-thirty-three — thirty and a waist of maybe twenty-two, Joe thought. But the hips really blew it.

Those hips were very wide, supporting two thickly thighed and very nonhuman legs that might have more properly been on a bipedal lizard or perhaps a small dinosaur. That is, the legs were attached to the hips slightly splayed rather than straight down, which was why the hip area looked so wide in the first place, and it was this that had given her clothed figure the appearance of being fat. Extending out from the tailbone and crotch area rearward was a thick, tapered tail in keeping with the lower body but rather stiff-looking for all that and relatively short. In fact, it appeared to be somewhat rigid, although her movement showed that the tail could be brought in against the legs, forming a sort of third appendage between and in the back that wasn't quite long enough to reach the ankles, let alone the ground. This tail was designed as a counterweight, for balance, not support, and to some extent its operation was automatic.

As startling was the patterning of the whole lower area starting just below the small third breast pair. It was as if a gang of mad tattoo artists had beset her, producing a riot of attractive but totally abstract designs and colors over her whole lower body. The skin was quite smooth and had a texture similar to that of her human part; the colors were not dull, either, but bright and vibrant, the design about as complex as could be imagined. Only the underside of the tail, revealed through the opening between the legs, was left au naturel, a somewhat segmented-looking off-white.