"Harder, harder!" she cried, as the lizard woman licked one of her fur-covered breasts, ran her left hand across the other, and scritched the nipples beneath her belly fur. Below her, the lizard man strained, thick three-inch hemipenii squeezed into a space meant for a single longer, thinner appendage.

"Cut!" cried the mouse, from her camera-control perch, and hopped down. She whacked her horsewhip in her hands, and the strong lights in the basement set shone off her black PVC girdle. "Liz, be more innocent, more pure. You don't want it harder, you're scared and titillated, and you want them to be easier on you." She paced around the scene on her stiletto heels, the clicking and whirring of her mechanical legs mixing with the sounds of their labored breathing.

Elizabeth's eyes started watering. "I'm trying! I'm trying!" She couldn't think of anything else to say, and deep inside, she struggled to find someone to blame. "It's not..." she said, then, "I'm trying!"

"Do you need more foreplay?" asked the lizard man, withdrawing himself and kneeling next to her.

She sat up, and covered herself with the hastily discarded dress. "I just need some QUIET!" she yelled, squeezed her eyes shut hard, and put her fingers in her ears.

The lizard woman started to say something, then closed her mouth and simply put her warm, scaled hand on Elizabeth's foot, as if to say, "I'm here."

The rabbit's angry tears turned to sobbing, and with the awkward silence growing by the second, she couldn't stand it any longer. Swiftly, she jumped from the group, turned around, and bolted up the stairs, cotton tail held rigidly between her legs to protect her vulnerability. A moment later, they heard the door to her room slam, hard.

The lizard man stood to go after her, but he felt a hand on his shoulder.

"Blue," said the lizard woman, "Let me."

He sought the confirmation of her eyes, and the tears in her unwavering gaze told him that she was the best comforter at this time. "All right."

"And Caryn?" called out the mouse, "Tell her I'm sorry."

The lizard woman nodded, and climbed the stairs. Blue turned to the mouse and said, "Well, that could have gone better."

Elizabeth crumpled onto the bed, tears soaking the fur on her face. A moment later, she screamed in frustration and strangled the pillow, her sobs coming in bursts between her snarls.

The worst part was, she knew deep down she only had herself to blame, and that made the pain worse. Screaming "Yes, yes, fill me!" was not something that her character, a meek lapiform schoolteacher on a colony planet populated by the lizard people of Altair 7, would do.

She didn't know why she argued. She didn't like to argue, but her spouses' calm demeanors seemed mocking. Leaving the room was probably not the best thing she could have done, but she didn't want them to see her cry.

She pounded the pillow with fists, then threw it up in the air and kicked it against the wall with a mighty blow from her powerful feet. Her tears burned, and she screamed, "Shut up!" as she clenched her fists and waved them at the mirror.

The little voice inside her head didn't comply, and kept mocking her in that bullying tone. "Beth the bunny hopped away, ran to run another day."

The virus had turned her into that horrible old schoolyard nickname. She had compensated for her weaknesses by roleplaying a tiger, even before her transformation, and insisting people call her Elizabeth, but now she couldn't ignore what everything in her life was telling her.

She was weak.

After college, she had supplemented the income of her website with a standard 9-to-5 job. She had never been able to defend her actions, or her choices. She stayed at jobs until her weaknesses caused her to be fired. Neglecting the love of her lover, she sought men instead. Her boyfriends had been the controlling types every time, and only when she was pushed into the tightest corner did she ever push back. Only by running their small ebook store on the Web while Shelley worked was she able to stay away from the misery of the corporate ladders.

Her memories faded into the reflection of tear-stained fur as a knock at the door broke her reverie. Standing back, she said, "Come in."

The door opened, and a perfectly alien mixture of human and plant-eating dinosaur walked into the room. "I'm sorry," Caryn said, looking into her eyes.

"Stop apologizing when it's my fault!" shouted Elizabeth, then took a step back as her wife looked away, her own tears falling into the carpet. "Wait," she said quietly, "I'm sorry. I didn't want to mess this up. Maybe we should just go with Nat for this one."

Caryn smiled. "The Mouse House has threatened our distributor with lawsuits. Our mousemorph looks too much like a character from one of their cartoons. We need you."

Elizabeth turned away, and put a finger against her buckteeth nervously. "You all need me, so I should just do what you say?" She ran her finger across the even chewing surfaces. "I can't help it, I love sex, and we were going for genuine reactions. I can't fake what I feel."

"Maybe we could change it around a bit," mused Caryn toward her wife's back, "Maybe the teacher isn't so totally submissive."

"No," said Elizabeth, "The character is perfect. Maybe Blue should just play me in those scenes."

She felt her wife's hand on her shoulder, felt the scales against her fur, felt the fingerclaws run down her back, barely touching the skin beneath her fur. "He could have done the whole thing by himself, Sweets," said Caryn, "But he wants you to enjoy it. We all do."

Elizabeth turned around and stared into Caryn's eyes. "He wants, you want, everyone wants," she snapped, "I don't know what I want, and I need time to figure it out."

Caryn backed off. "Okay, if you want time to think, we'll let you."

Tears came to Elizabeth's eyes. "No! I want..."

She stopped. Underneath her mind, thoughts bubbled without words. I want you to oppose me, her heart wanted to say, so I can fight you like the tiger I am inside. The burst of hostile emotions made another feeling bubble up. No, the thought replied, it's not you I want to fight, my love, my heart. I want to get the fighting done, I want to fight the misery of this perfect life and be happy.

"I..." she said quietly, then looked down. "I'll try again. I'll get this movie right even if I have to be silent and submissive for a week."

Caryn smiled. "That's the spirit," she said, "I'll get them ready for another take." She walked out of the bedroom, and her tail followed.

Elizabeth watched the green tip of her wife's tail wiggle as she padded away, then looked at the dresser mirror, and stared into her own eyes. The wisdom of dragons, she thought of her wife's reptilian gaze.

"Caryn loves Natalie more, because she helped her when I couldn't," she muttered at her mirror self. "Maybe she loves her more, because Nat can't be more human, and Caryn can only be three-fourths human after that lab accident, but I can still be completely human if I want."

"Is this perfect dream of four wives and a shapeshifter going to end..." her whispering voice trailed off, as she looked down at the ring on her dresser.

"...before our first anniversary?"

Somehow, she thought, someday I'll find true joy and happiness. I may find it here, or it might be somewhere else.

With that thought, she stared into the mirror, into her own green eyes again, searching for something to hold onto, some perfect unknown. A moment later, she sighed, wiped her eyes, and padded out, following her wife down to the basement.

Later that day, Natalie sighed as BlueNight entered the computer room.

"What's wrong?" asked the lizardmorph, casually wandering up and placing a warm hand on his mousewife's shoulder.

She moved the pointer, clicked, and grimaced. "I can't make heads or tails of Beth's performance. In every take, she was either too passionate for the character, or she just sat there while you and Caryn made her come. We need something in between."

BlueNight watched the monitor for a moment, then said, "Any of these takes would be perfect for the average adult film."

Natalie turned around in the chair. "That's just it. We don't make the average adult film. We make the creme de la creme, the absolute best in SCABS porn." She tucked a stray blond strand back behind one of her large, round, mouse ears.

"So you're worried about Elizabeth's performance?"

"No," she responded, turning to face the computer and clicking on another clip. "I'm worried about Elizabeth."

BlueNight nodded. "Her aggressiveness is a cover for the battle between who she is and who she thinks she's supposed to be. She's trapped in a conflict between her bisexual counterculture life-partner slash old-fashioned harem wife role, and her position on life's journey. Until she realizes that she doesn't have to be who she has been made by others, she can't see how she's hurting herself by choosing to let us choose."

Natalie grinned, and said, "You've been rehearsing that paragraph, haven't you?"

He blinked. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Natalie turned the entire chair around, and put her hands on her husband's shoulders. "You noticed it too, and you were trying to figure out a socially acceptable way to talk about it. You've got that nifty pattern sense, you can read people the way I read a computer screen, but you're still the same old Luke, the one that can't be personal or personable without acting." Her smile showed off her cute little snout, the dimples at the corners of her cheeks, and her pearly white buckteeth. "Before I changed, sometimes I didn't know whether to act like my male body or the girl I knew I was inside. I used to rehearse my words the same way."

He drank deeply of her blue eyes with his own. "You're right, my honey mouse," he said, smiling, and leaned his forehead against hers. "The question is, how can we help Beth without manipulating her or seeming like captors keeping her in the same role?"

Natalie sighed, and ran her hands down his back, feeling the smoothly textured, scaled hide. "How about we get our minds off it for a while? I found a photo on the Web of an inanimorph whose skin is made completely of denim cloth. Think you can do anything with that?"

"For me or for you?" he asked with a grin, placing his hands on his wife's leg stumps.

She smiled.

A wave rushed up to the beach, then lapped back.

Mindless repetition, just like my life, thought Elizabeth, and sighed. The gentle breeze brushed against her ears, and ruffled her hair. The myriad red strands blew over her fur-covered shoulders, and she absentmindedly brushed them back.

She had been walking for a while, between the wet sand and the gentle slope that marked the boundary of the private beach. Her husband had brought her and his other wives on a business deal, and the unseen party of the second part let them spend a day on his little strip of land.

Another wave ran up the shore, then faded back.

In her heart, feelings wrestled with each other, pushing toward love, pulling against emptiness, twisting around in circles of lonely pain.

As she watched the ocean, a tiny cloud covered the sun, and then slid away. He only wants me, she thought, shivering in the momentary cold, they only want me for my submissiveness. My weakness is hurting my relationships, and I don't know what to do about it.

"Elizabeth!" someone called out, and she turned around. With her large ears, it was amazing at what distance she could hear clearly, but the voice had been half-drowned by a wave coming in, and she didn't know who had called her. She squinted, and just made out a petite figure on the edge of the private beach, far behind her. The figure ran to catch up, and Elizabeth smiled. It was Shelley.

Shelley the kind, Shelley the loving. Memories flooded back. They had met in college, started their own ebook nook, and paid off their student debts. They had also fallen in love. Each shared her desires, her dreams, her fantasies. They both wanted to be animals, Elizabeth a tiger, and Shelley a ferret. When Elizabeth caught the Flu, it was Shelley who visited every day in the hospital. When Elizabeth changed into a very high-degree rabbit-morph, it was Shelley who calmed her down and brought her back from lapine panic. They shared their love with their spouses, but theirs was timeless.

Elizabeth shifted a bit more to rabbit, tugging her one-piece up to adjust. Her beautiful red hair pulled back into her head, and white fur grew over her face. On her belly, little rabbit-nipples appeared, as her bust size shrank. She adjusted her stance as her thighs and shins shrank, and her hips grew along with her feet. With an odd tightness, her big toes shrank to clawed nubs without muscle and pulled far back, her other toes taking her weight as she stood on the balls of her feet.

By the time she was done transforming, Shelley had narrowed the gap, and run up alongside. With her green Irish eyes, Elizabeth looked at her friend and lover wearing a bikini top and a pair of cut-off jeans.

She had a smooth, creamy, streamlined body and curvy legs. Her breasts weren't large, just shapely and symmetrical. As with most people of African-American descent, the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet were a bit lighter, almost giving the effect of shaded fur on top. She smiled at Elizabeth, and said, "So?"

"So what?"

"So have you started figuring out why you're out here, all alone, when you could be farther up the beach with us?" Shelley's face kept smiling, but her eyes were serious.

Elizabeth dropped her gaze, and sighed. As they walked, she thought about it, and then said, "I don't know. I've been weak for so long, I don't know how to be weak in the right way for this film."

"The film? Listen to me, you don't have to be weak for this film. You have to act weak, and that means you have to be strong, first."

Elizabeth looked up in shock, to be met by Shelley's eyes. They were somehow full of understanding. "You..." she started to say, and Shelley placed her hand on her arm.

"Back at the beginning of this century," Shelley said, "Black people were an underclass. We had ghettos and crime and drugs, and we kept calling for freedom, even though we had it by law. The Flu victims started taking our cultural position in the underclass, and we were pushed into the middle class. At that time, we didn't realize that there were a lot of black folk out of the gutter and in the white-collar workforce."

Shelley stopped, and picked up a stone. She walked down the the shore, and rinsed it in the ocean. "You see," she called out, as she walked back, "We had become so used to being on the bottom, we couldn't handle both being full citizens by law and being regarded as normal, average people by the majority of Americans. It's like we couldn't stay victims any longer without hurting ourselves."

Elizabeth waited for the rest of the story, but Shelley had finished speaking. "So," she said after a moment, to fill the silence, "You think I've gotten so used to being weak, that I can't be strong?"

"No," Shelley said, smiling, "I think you've seen yourself as the martyr or the victim for so long, that you've forgotten how to be anything else. Just forget what life has made you, and consider who you want to be. Take your freedom, and do something with it. Make the choice to use your free will, choose to choose. Take your dreams, and make them your destiny."

Elizabeth blinked, and her heart skipped a beat. Deep within her, something clicked.

She stared at the sky and thought about her dreams. She wanted to be a tiger, but she was a rabbit. She wanted to take control, but she was a woman. She wanted to be strong, but she was a victim. And none of her objections seemed to matter anymore. Her jaw dropped, and she felt her cheeks become wet without her permission.

Shelley stopped too, and looked into her deep brown eyes. Elizabeth realized how she must look, fur-puffed cheeks pouting, lips barely open, whiskers quivering as her eyes watered. Elizabeth was crying. Her breath was coming in short gasps, and her eyes were filling with tears. Within her, emotions were spilling over, and her mind was quiet as she realized in her heart that her life could be more than it had been, but only if she could grasp it and hang on.

Then she started sobbing. Shelley embraced her as tears streamed down her face. She finally realized, finally understood just how much she had been ready to change.

The change in her heart continued. Her heart's new light shone on her relationship with her other wives and their recent snubs. She realized she wasn't a victim of Caryn and Natalie and their special bond; Caryn was just coping with the trauma of losing her mind to a beast within herself, and having lots of sex with the master of her inner cougar was her way of taking control of her own path through life.

And then she saw the entire world in her mind's eye, a sea of humanity all hurting others because the pain of their own lives was too much to bear. A world of victims.

It all fit. It was all so perfect, and so sad.

Then her tears weren't for herself, they were meant for the world. In that moment, her pain dropped away, and her heart was filled with something more.

She looked up at Shelley, and smiled through her tears. "I love you so much."

Shelley smiled, tears running down her own face. "I love you too."

They held each other for a time.

Finally, after minutes of quiet crying, Elizabeth let go, and took a deep breath. "So, is there any fun up the beach?"

Shelley grinned. "Of course. Caryn is sunning as a high-degree lizard, and her boobs are completely gone in that form. When I left, Nat was dancing in the sand, wearing those new blue jeans that fit her stumps like a glove."

Elizabeth tried to picture it in her mind. "We have a strange family, don't we?"

Shelley laughed. "We do." Then she remembered something, and reached into her pocket.

Elizabeth gasped as Shelley placed the rock in her hands. It was red stone, flecked with black stripes. It almost looked like a tiger's hide. "It's beautiful," she said, "Thank you."

Shelley held her hand. "You're welcome. Now, let's go see if Nat is still dancing."

Elizabeth smiled, and walked with her. "And Shelley? You can call me Beth."

Epilogue

Hannah Rabbit sat on a hill overlooking the town. It was so peaceful up here, but her heart was full of turmoil.

A tear rolled down her cheek, and scenes flashed through her memory. Little Robert's mother Katherine had come to her one night in the schoolhouse, and they had made love in her attic room. It had been so different, the horizontal vent, the reptilian nipple-analogues, and that long, thick tail.

Only a day later, Little Robert's father Richard had come to her in the evening, and they had made passionate love on this very hill. He had been gentle, but his thick hemipenes had left her insides aching.

They had each given her a sense of belonging, but she couldn't understand. Over the next weeks, she played a dangerous game of love-and-lie, and finally the lies had run into each other and collapsed. She had put in for a transfer, to run away and leave these horrid memories behind her. The monthly supply vessel would take her back to Lapin 5 tomorrow.

A rustle in the bushes broke her concentration, and she stood up, startled, ready to run. It was, after all, an untamed colony planet.

And there they were, Katherine and Richard, each nude, each smiling.

"Hannah," said Richard, "You've misunderstood the group dynamics of our society."

Katherine stepped forward, her tail swishing back and forth. "Let us show you why you should not be afraid to hurt us, by telling us the truth."

She paced forward, and ran a finger down Hannah's blue cotton schoolteacher's blouse; Hannah shivered, and looked at Richard. He walked around behind her, and started giving her a backrub.

It felt so good that Hannah closed her eyes and lowered her ears without thinking. Katherine held her hands as Richard slowly unzipped her blouse, unlaced her bodice, and ran his fingerclaws through her backfur.

Hannah made a little squeak of surprise when he found her weak spot, just above her tail.

They undressed her together, and as she stood there only in her bloomers, she smiled. She finally understood.

They took turns being on top of her. Katherine went first, interweaving their legs and her tail, and putting her hands on Hannah's furry bottom, so that Hannah had full-pelvis stimulation as they touched vertical and horizontal lips. Richard knelt above her, and deep-scritched her headfur and kneaded her long ears as Hannah stared into the blue sky and rubbed her breasts.

She moaned and shook, and screamed, as her entire body felt a rush of warmth.

Exhausted though she was, she knew there was more. She panted as Katherine untangled her legs and tail, and stood up. Richard knelt down, and ran his two erect hemipenii down her leg. She shivered.

He pulled one of her legs over his shoulder, and knelt over the other. Hannah's eyes widened in fear, as she knew exactly what he was planning. She felt his tail moving up her leg, felt each hemipene pause at the entrance, and then plunge inside her, one in her front, and one up her bottom. She felt his underside all across the space between her orifices, and rocked forward reflexively.

Then Katherine got into the fun, kneeling on Hannah's face and holding onto her breasts. Hannah was surprised, but reached up and held Katherine's tail steady as she licked around the outside, and then the inside.

It seemed like an eternity before she came again, and again Katherine matched her timing, movement for movement, so it seemed for an instant that she was covered in lizards. The thought of so much love made Hannah throw her head back in ecstasy, placing her fuzzy chin against Katherine's vent and rocking.

They rested for a few minutes, but she knew it wasn't over. As the moments ticked by, she thought of her life. "Being a teacher on the frontier isn't so bad after all," she muttered, and the lizard couple looked at each other and laughed.

"You want bad," Katherine said, "We'll be downright naughty." With that, she pounced on Hannah, and held her down as she tickled her stomach. Hannah curled up, gasping for air, but Richard joined in by tickling the soles of her long, long feet.

"Aaah!" she shrieked, as they switched to areas she exposed when she curled, and stretched out to defend those areas. They grabbed her wrists and ankles, and held her down as they found places to touch her with their tails. It was so far from anything Hannah had ever imagined, but she felt so much better than when she was hiding the truth, that she nearly came just thinking about their honesty and love.

And then Richard ran his hands up her shins and thighs, to rest on her hips. "You just lay there, and let us do the work," he said, and using one hand to guide them, twisted one of his hemipenes on top of the other and slid them inside her. She was stretched, but not badly, and she swooned.

Katherine knelt over her from the side, placed one hand on the rabbit-nipples beneath her stomach fur, and cupped one breast with the other. She leaned farther over, using her tail as a counterbalance, and put her reptilian lips on Hannah's other breast nipple. Licking, her tongue had a texture not unlike a cat's, but thinner and longer.

Hannah stared at the sky, her own innocence growing inside her, as she realized that only by acknowledging the pain she had caused others, and accepting their forgiveness, could she end the guilt and start the love. Innocence wasn't a thing that, once lost, was gone forever, she realized, it was the child in her that knew she would be happy in the end, no matter what. It was something to be cultivated, not mourned, to be grown anew when it was cut down by life, bigger and better than before.

And her smile turned into a gasp as the lizard couple synchronized their motions. She breathed hard as they pushed and pulled and licked and touched her in all the right places. She stretched, arching her back and extending her long, long legs and feet and toes as far as they would go. She reached one hand up, far above her, and scrunched her ears together in the other.

Her orgasm lasted a full three minutes.

"... aaaand cut."

Natalie pushed a button on the camera, and Shelley did the same. They looked at each other, and smiled. "I think that's a wrap," said Natalie.

Shelley lowered the camera platform, and walked over to the group. "Hey there, Bunny Beth, you've got it back, in spades."

Beth tried to sit up, strained for a moment, then lay back down. "I've had it in spades, and now I can't do anything with it."

They laughed, and Beth said, "You know, it's the oddest thing. I couldn't accept myself, because I thought I was weak. Now I realize I was keeping myself weak, perfecting the roles of Innocent, Victim, and Martyr. Funny how it turns out I only needed one out of three."

She smiled wistfully, and tears of joy started dripping down her cheeks. They all gathered around her, and hugged her, and hugged each other.

Website Copyright 2004,2005 Michael Bard.  Please send any comments or questions to him at mwbard@transform.com