The headquarters of the League of Super Heroes reside beneath the streets of Apex City. Having a skyscraper with neon LSH on top of it would be too much of a target. And they might get a lot of junk mail.
Certain heroes, however, lived in nice fancy apartments aboveground. Nice and remote from headquarters, a place to get away and tinker on one's suit. Or so Almagest insisted.
The husky carefully twisted the precision Philips head screwdriver in between his claws, exposed by the open fingertips of his gloves. The hero was dressed in the thermal undersuit he wore to protect his body from the inner workings of his powersuit as said device lay dormant on the workbench. He had magnification goggles strapped around his head, eyes focused intently on his work. However, his pointed ears were unable hide their swiveling to catch the dramatic sighing from his partner.
Said badger was pacing between the floor to ceiling retro-tinted windows and the minibar Almagest insisted was necessary for his workshop. Her slender frame was hugged tightly by a purple leotard, lined with white trim. Her hands and feet were in white gloves and boots, conforming to her tight enough that her quite short fur still visibly laid down at the hems of each. This was because all the pieces of her costume were designed to adapt to her body. Lastly, she had an equally purple domino mask which was sculpted to line up with the twin stripes along the top of her head.
Pausing at the little sink, she glanced over her shoulder at the fiddling canine. The badgeress pivoted on her heel casually and started her pace back towards him again. "Did you really need me here while you did this?"
Pulling the tool away, Almagest stood upright. "We're going on patrol tonight, Meles. Right after I finish these adjustments."
Meles Morphis looked from the husky to the window, which showed bright afternoon sunlight across Apex City. She sighed deeply again, and leaned back on her heels, her toes lifting from the tight carpet flooring. As she reached the topple point of her stance her small, striped tuft of a tail suddenly surged in size, the fur lightening up to a uniform grey. As easily as if she had planted her rump on a high stool she was tripoding on a thick, muscular kangaroo tail. The powerful limb deflected slightly with her weight, but held steady, just a slight roll in her pelt showing where the tip bent back towards itself to make a third 'foot' for balance. "Well, if you're so insistent on it, you go..." She trailed off as she glanced back to her partner.
The husky had stopped working entirely, using one gloved hand to adjust the magnification on his goggles. But Almagest wasn't looking at his work. Simple triangulation told the badger that her partner was staring at her tail.
Meles squinted, and then slowly smiled. She had caught him staring at the various forms she had turned her tail into, but had merely thought it awe of her skills as a polymorph. Now it was clear. Without his suit's mask on, there was no hiding the blush that had flared to life beneath his white facial fur.
The badgeress' smile advanced into a smirk as she idly waved a hand in front of her tail. "I thought you were working on your suit?"
The inventor yipped in surprise, accidentally tossing the tiny screwdriver up into the air in the process. He tore his gaze away to fumble before catching it in his gloved palm. Almagest then cleared his throat and crouched down so that his eye level was on the suit on the workbench, rather than him bending over it like before. He prodded with the tip of the precision tool, clearly pretending to be doing something but rather deflecting the comment and acting as though he hadn't even heard it.
Meles kicked her boots off the floor of the workshop and balanced fully on her marsupial appendage, the dense corded muscles inside visibly adjusting to her full weight. Assured that the husky was still stealing glances, the polymorph pushed off the ground with nothing but a gentle bend and extension of her tail, sending her upper body in a shallow arc. As her tail left the ground, the tip's fur gained more density. The badger's body carried through the trajectory she put herself on, but in her wake, her formerly rigid, thick tail was giving way to an elegant, fluffy length. The fact that the tip hardly left the ground the whole time was a testament to the length she was adding to her rear appendage in the process.
Planting her boots on the floor, she casually started to walk towards the bench. "You know, I've caught you looking at the things I can do with my tail before, but I don't think I've ever given you an up-close experience with it." Behind her swaying hips the faint brown fluff followed the path it was attached to at one end. The long limb's fur visibly laid down in response to air resistance as it moved, now seeming to float as if it were some impossibly hairy eel in the sea.
Almagest swallowed, turning his eyes back at the suit. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Oh, come on..." She leaned forward over his suit, getting herself inches away from his face. "Whenever I grow my tail into some other kind, you watch." The badger lightly curved her spine in her position, but the motion continued down the length of her mink tail. Were it a rat tail, it would have cracked like a bullwhip at the way the tip flicked out. Not a moment after, that tip lead the soft appendage's motion, seeking out the husky from the other side of the workbench.
The canine gasped as he was blindsided, abruptly inundated with soft, voluminous fluff. Flailing his hands against the length of presently mink that twisted and slid against his throat, each fine strand of fur filling as much room as it possibly could in his opinion. Almagest grunted and stood up, tugging the fluffy appendage down to his shoulders with both hands, tools long forgotten on the workbench. "I d-did not ask for a b-boa, Meles!"
"That's not a boa." The badgeress smirked, giving her best fake Australian accent. As she spoke, standing upright once again, the tail gained weight, thicker underneath the fluff once more. In a ripple, the seemingly uncontrollable fluff laid down, leaving a different kind of keratin behind: scales. As abruptly as it had started, the change completed, with an elegant, smooth boa constrictor's tail looped around the side of the workbench and around to drape luxuriously around her partner's shoulders and arms like he was a tree. "This is a boa..." She lowered her voice playfully.
Almagest whined, his blush in full force, all the way up into his ears. The poor pup wasn't giving up any retort, his grasping hands feeling over the gently yielding flesh of the serpentine tail, the heavy, soft feeling of relaxed muscles.
Meles grinned broadly now. "You do love tails..." Once again, things began to change, the color patterns on the tail varying and shifting towards a dirty green. At the same time, more loops of tail began to wind and ease around the husky's torso. With that added length came added girth. It fought with itself for room on the male's shoulders, crowding up against his cheeks as the weighty tail slid along to make room for more of itself. "Long, powerful tails..." The badger crooned, watching her partner squirm under the weight. With a thought she released the support she was giving the appendage in being suspended above the ground.
Another high-pitched yip left the dog as the full weight of an anaconda tail came down on his shoulders and torso. His knees buckled and he flopped down on his rump behind the workstation. In his predicament, he only just kept getting more entangled, as the playful tip of the polymorph's tail eased its way to the neck of his undersuit.
The badgeress once again leaned over the workbench and power suit to watch him squirm, her grin shining with more than just her glossy teeth. She knew all of her partner's physical strength lied in the mess of mechanisms on the surface beneath her chest. Planting her hands on the edge of the bench's top, she sent another order down the yards of green scaly muscle. The thick loops and wraps tensed up, going from so soft and yielding to firm, only subcutaneous fat between the scaled surface and the rock-hard muscles underneath.
Almagest whined again, unable to move anything but his legs, but he wasn't trying to get away. The husky's eyes had rolled back in his head a bit. His muzzle had gone wobbly, lip line turning back and forth with the scrunch of facial muscles. It was the look of a dog doing his best to not smile, when he very much would have liked to.
Meles sighed, as the tip of her tail scooped between a thick part of its own length and his cheek, rubbing back and forth. "You don't have to hide it. You're adorable like this." She giggled, as changes began again.
The husky felt the smoothness of scale on fur get a bit rougher each time the tail tip went forward. The end of the serpentine mass also began to change shape, flattening out as the scales changed in quality; reminiscent of fine grit sandpaper, but only in one direction. The green was turning grey, the change travelling its way back up the length through the many loops. Almagest whined bashfully as the changes brought a tug with them, and he was sliding along the floor towards where the polymorph's tail looped around the workbench.
The current tail didn't have the length or strength of an anaconda, but the badger had a different purpose in this choice. The unbalanced fluke at the tip of her tail curled and cradled the back of the canine's head, giving a light squeeze across the base of his far ear. As the changes continued, the shorter length worked to easily drag the prone hero around. The poor dog also ended up being rolled over as all but one loop of tail had to be sacrificed for accuracy, his body held up against her hip by thresher shark tail. Meles slowly stroked back and forth with its tip.
One way it was fine, but when it reversed direction Almagest winced at the roughness tugging on his fur and grinding against his skin where his coat was sparse, especially the edge of his pointed ears.
"Tired of scales, puppy?" Meles crooned playfully. "Would you rather fluff again?"
The hero whined and weakly nodded. "Yeah... soft fluff is really good..." He murmured, eyes not focused on anything.
"Well, I suppose I can accommodate you..." The badger ground her scales against his cheek the wrong way again. "If you go out on patrol alone tonight."
Almagest nodded weakly, whining needily and turning his head so that he moved his fur in the correct direction for the thresher scales.
Not a moment after he had signaled his agreement, the flat tip fluffed up to life in a surge of black and white fur. Unlike the badger's natural tail, however, this black with white stripes was long and luxurious. Curling further around the husky with every regained inch, the plush, blunt tip sought its way in a path around the male's throat. Draping off the back of his shoulder, the tail grew heavier, like the fur coat it was emulating further with each bit of hero hidden under black and white fluff. As she finished enveloping Almagest in the mephit appendage, Meles sighed, turning away from the enthralled hero. She could feel him nuzzling into the heavy fuzz, and smoothly slid the tip of her tail across his face in return.
Meles glanced back over her shoulders, hands on her hips. "So, are you really gonna patrol without me?" The polymorph crooned, casually starting to walk towards the door. With every step the soft mass of striped tail slid and brushed its way out of the curls on the seated husky. Inch by inch by foot by yard luxuriously dragged across and around the enthralled male, his face half-buried in the living leash as it unwound from his form.
"Uh-huh..." Almagest murmured, nuzzling into the tail's topside as the tip came back around to his face one last time, the final part still in contact with his body.
The moment it no longer had contact, the skunk tail reeled right back in to the badger's rear like it were a spring winch, fluidly becoming her natural tail again as she crossed the threshold out of the workshop. "You'd better get back to work on your suit, then." She giggled and closed the door behind her.
Almagest shook his head, trying to clear the fluff that was clouding his thoughts away. "Wait."
But his partner had already left.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~
"Repeat that again." Dispatch spoke into the coms built into the husky's helmet.
Almagest reached the last curve of the subterranean tunnel connecting his penthouse workshop to the hidden League network, before he stopped himself and started up one of the shafts to the surface. "I'm patrolling alone tonight, Dispatch."
The hatch slid open as the power-suit accelerated upwards, allowing the inventor-hero to emerge into the twilight air.
"Did something happen with Meles?" The voice on the other end asked gravely.
"A bet." Almagest replied with a quiet huff. "One I lost. Nothing to worry about."
Dispatch was quiet for a moment, before the voice returned, clearly trying to hold back amusement. "Well, do call in for backup if you need it."
The husky frowned. "Understood." He muttered, before disconnecting. He had nearly reached a good scanning height to start patrolling from by this point, holding himself in an aerodynamic posture. It had been some time since Almagest had abandoned traditional propulsion methods. Miniturizable options in that field had trended towards hot jets of gasses and/or plasma launching from his limbs, and that wasn't a safe way to handle civilians, or non-powered criminals, honestly.
Thankfully, with research help from Newton, he was able to get his grav-drive functional. In the time since his first tests, he had refined the system. Unlike the pangolin hero, he couldn't control or produce gravity waves, but his drive instead rode the planet's own gravitational field, warping it somewhat to propel and support himself.
Almagest activated his sensor array, picking up police scanners, short-range radio chatter, as well as audio directly from his surroundings, heat signatures that may indicate danger and sources of high ionization. All of these were filtered through algorithmic processes to remove all but the outstanding, off-putting some of his mental load onto his software.
He turned in midair and then began to fly, his position changing the sphere of detection his array could collect from, a pretty standard patrolling technique of his. He crossed out of the financial sector's skyscrapers into a smaller set of office buildings, decreasing altitude as he entered the shadow of one of the towering structures he'd left behind. He was about to fly down in front of one of these offices when he was suddenly halted, pressure wrapping around his midsection. The pressure array, transmitted to his under-suit via haptic feedback, read like a coiling tail.
"Meles!" The husky shouted in annoyance with the external speakers of his suit on, sure she'd set up some kind of ambush just to tease him further.
"Oh, she's nowhere near here, tin soldier." A resonant, husky voice replied from outside of his range of vision.
Almagest twisted in the loop, turning to lay eyes and scanners on his assailant. He swallowed, a blush returning to his cheeks.
She was an iguana, based on the crest of fleshy spikes that draped over one eye like a fringe. Similar to his partner, the reptile wore a leotard on her torso, leaving her thighs exposed. However, she topped this with a cropped pleather jacket loosely draping around her ribs, both seeming cut specifically to accentuate the curve of her hips and the strength in her legs. From her position he couldn't see footwear, the low wall at the edge of the office building's rooftop blocking his sight.
Most striking however, was the limb that had caught the armored husky. It was thicker than either of her thighs, approaching the width of her hips as its muscular mass extended from where it curled around her leg to extend the four meters out from the building's edifice to where his trajectory had been curving and an extra meter back from the edge wall. And even then, it still had enough length to quite squarely hold onto Almagest. Along the powerful limb's spine, there was more of her crest, draped off to one side from the movement that had caught him up.
"Wait, who are-" The snared hero started, interrupted by a squeeze around his chest and waist that caused the joints of his suit to strain audibly.
"Shush, golden boy." She ordered, tilting her head so that both eyes became visible. "Isn't it a bit late for you to be out~?"
At that moment, the timed lights of the city came on, signaling that the sun had set on the far side of the skyscraper casting shadow upon the rooftop she stood upon.
Almagest clenched his jaws, fighting the urge to keep held in her powerful... tail.... He twisted, ordering the gravity drive to produce rotational momentum from the field around him in addition to increasing his perceived weight.
The villainous iguana perked as he managed to unroll one coil before she could react, dropping a meter in her grip. The massive limb flexed in a ripple from its base to the loops around the armored hero, snaring him like a yo-yo tangled on its own string. Her powerful fifth appendage refused to bend back on itself, instead using another squeeze to halt his rotation.
The husky grunted, then reversed his relationship with gravity, trying to fling himself skyward.
Rolling her hips, the lizard moved with the new momentum, unfurling her tip slightly as she swung him up and around. Before the canned canid could react, she sent him crashing onto the roof, buried in an accordioning mass of fleshy tail. The weight only increased as she turned and strutted towards him, allowing more slack to pile onto him. "Now now, don't be a naughty puppy... I haven't even gotten to know you..."
Beneath the fleshy tonnage, Almagest sighed. No avoiding property damage tonight, it seemed. In the surface of his suit a series of high power cutting lasers whirred up, aimed at the roof beneath him. By the time she had begun to quip upon his pinned form, the heat was becoming apparent. Then, the surface beneath him gave way. He dropped through the hole he'd cut, and hit the floor in the service corridor below running. He was especially glad she'd released the loop from his waist in order to pile as much weight as possible onto his suit. He blushed a bit thinking about that, but kept moving, trying to get as much distance within the building as possible for the moment, to give himself time to think. He made it to a large room with the pullies for the office building's elevators built into the floor in rows on either side. Another path led directly ahead of him. He stared towards it when the lights went out.
An alert on his hud told him that the grid of the entire building had been interrupted. Due to his position, there were no external windows, no vents to the roof, nothing to bring light to him. He held still and did his best to keep calm. He began scanning for heat signatures in the average range of larger anthros, overlaying that data onto a quick scan framework of the room around him in his hud. He swallowed, the metallic walls making it hard to pinpoint the origin sound of noises coming from the halls. They continued to get louder, closer, but still his heat scan showed nothing.
He twisted around, starting to second guess himself, his heartbeat audible in his own ears.
"Cute." The iguana's voice was impossibly close. Less than a meter from his ears. Equal distance. Telemetry told the husky... above.
Almagest's heart sank. He'd set his scan for a mammalian heat range. The moment he recalibrated for a reptile... She was everywhere.
Her face was directly above him, smirking lightly in his heat-vision, arms crossed to keep her jacket from flopping about. Her feet were bare, planted on the metallic ceiling, seeming to be supporting her weight, impossibly. But really, it was her thighs resisting against her own tail.
The massive limb was really what was surrounding him. Its girth was pressed to every wall, supple muscle spread out to support itself by applying pressure outward, the base section pressing the villainess's body up to the ceiling for her reveal. The thinner, more dexterous parts of her tail were on the floor, weaving between each pulley to form a pattern around the husky's feet.
She let him take in just how entirely surrounded he was, before shifting her hips. With a sound of scales sliding against enameled steel panels, the massive limb undulated in a wave from its base, along each wall...
Almagest guessed what order was being sent down her sinuous spine and countered as fast as he could. Lenses upon his suit's surface glowed with the emitters behind them, forming a ring of flat, hard-light panels surrounding him just before the distributed ending loops of her tail came crashing in. With those in place glowing brightly, he no longer needed to rely solely on his sensors, glancing around quickly.
With the generators of his shield starting to audibly strain from the pressure her tail was now putting on them, he spotted a gap. The hallway opposite the one he'd come in from. The coils on the wall turned away from that spot on either side. Activating his grav drive, he rotated his shield to horizontal and shot himself towards the opening in her entrapment.
"Ah ah ah~" She crooned. Suddenly the girthy loops stopped pressing up against the walls, instead closing in. Both switchbacks of her caudal length were coming in on him. It hadn't been a gap at all, but a pincer lying in wait.
Almagest yelped as he realized this, just a moment before the scaly flesh grasped him between the two blunt surfaces. The soft undersides conformed to him, banded scales curving to keep every bit of him immobile. Even with the strength of his suit, he had no space to get up any momentum, not enough torque to resist.
Then, the muscles beneath the scaly surface hardened as the pressure on his body increased.
The husky's hud sent up a warning about the joints of the suit. The mechanical pressure was advancing beyond what he'd anticipated he needed to support. Almagest tried to create more hard-light panels, but the emitters had no space between themselves and the encroaching mass to focus.
The iguana's voice came from unsettlingly closeby, not muffled at all by the mass of flesh surrounding the hero's helmet. "I could crush a car with a poor, trapped puppy at the wheel..." She intoned coolly, ramping up the pressure.
Almagest had hoped it wouldn't come to this, but he started to charge up his cutting lasers as a last-ditch effort... when the joints of his suit failed and the hud went dark. He winced, preparing for the pain of being squashed like an egg once its shell had yielded.
But it never came.
"...And save that poor dear inside." She finished, practically purring as she rotated her grip upon him so he was laying on one length of her tail, the other raising away from his prone body. The tip of her tail probed at the parting of the joint in his chest-plate, starting to sneak inward.
With the suit shut down, he couldn't move. Its weight alone was cumbersome, but with the joints undone he could do himself some real harm. He trembled as he felt the prodding against his chest through his undersuit. His eyes widened, feeling the probing tip start to slide back and forth along his torso, a bit more of its length sneaking into his suit alongside him with each repetition. He couldn't help but think of an oyster knife.
Once enough of the limb's length had snuck in, she began to loop it directly around his ribs, dragging more and more of its crested girth through the part. In the process, not only did its width part the gap in the armor, but the coiling was starting to split open the torso altogether.
The lights came back on, flickering to life with a florescent hum. Almagest could see through his helmet's visor that the villainess was standing tall over his prone position: draped over one broad roll of tail while its end continued to slither and wrap around his body.
The suit let out a weak groan, before the back-joints came apart as well, allowing the chest piece down to the groin of the power armor to open plenty wide enough to extract the husky without giving up an inch of that coiling.
Almagest couldn't form words, just stammering vowel sounds as his helmet came free from the rest of his suit to stay on his head, for the time being. However, his arms and legs were still caught mis-aligned with the joints of the armor's limbs, immobilized and straining his own biological joints.
The tip of the iguana's tail rose from the coil around the husky's torso, arcing down like a snake examining its prey. Fluidly, it lowered towards the visor of the dog's helmet, lingering.
Heart beating faster, the hero realized that she might just steal his anonymity next. He quivered and squirmed, receiving only a snug squeeze of looped tail for his trouble.
Smirking, the reptilian villain simply tapped the visor with the tip of her powerful limb. "I'll just let you keep that mystique, boy..." She rolled her hips out to one side and back. A moment later, the dog was yanked fully free of his armor, leaving that helmet in place. In the same motion, the coiled end came around to press him against the broadest portion of her tail.
Almagest oofed as the wind was knocked out of his lungs, before his mind caught up... When she'd first ensnared him her tail got no wider than her hips, but now... He felt his cheeks heating up within his helmet. Somehow from his collar-bone to his shins were pressed to the broad soft underside of the muscular limb. Directly across.
Before the hero could wrap his mind around this change, or even think to use his recently freed limbs, the tail bent over on itself, squeezing. In a fluid slide, the coils drew away, leaving more and more of the husky held only by the roll of flesh formed by such a thick limb bending sharply.
He panted softly, somewhere between thanking his luck that he wore a thermal body-suit under his power armor and cursing the same, because he couldn't feel those scales directly... He swallowed and shook his head a bit. No time to think like that. He had to figure out how to get out of this situation!
As if reading his thoughts, the iguana purred. "You know, that suit you're wearing is making my scales itch... I'll just have to peel that off too so you can get to know my tail better..."
"You could at least buy him a drink, first." A familiar voice struck the room.
The husky and the iguana both turned their heads towards the source.
Meles Morphis had her arm wound back, preparing for a punch. In a split second, her fist expanded to be larger than her head, followed by her arm exploding out into defined, powerful musculature. Her torso was next, gaining a powerful core and broad chest, before her opposite leg surged in size. Then that full power-train came down in a wallop.
The villainess only had time to finish the twist of her body with a roll of her hips, sending the order down her spine to raise a coil of her tail in a block before impact. Even with the flexible limb deflecting to absorb impact, her bare feet slid across the smooth metal floor until her ankles butted against the lip around one of the pully bays.
Wincing as the tension partially caused the tail to squeeze tighter over himself like a tortilla press, Almagest managed to call out. "Meles?" His voice sounded hoarse from his lack of breath.
The badgeress hefted the blocking mass of tail over her head to press to the ceiling, her power-house build having balanced into a blend of gorilla and her own anatomy. "This girl bothering you, hon?" Meles quipped to her prone partner.
Huffing in frustration, the iguana shifted her mass, the double-back trapping the husky nearing a full fold. "All the cute boys are already taken."
Hearing the husky wheeze from the increased pressure, Meles darted her eyes around the yardage of muscular tail to find which way the loop she was gripping was facing. Then she twisted her torso and yanked down hard with both arms, her back swelling with extra musculature.
Despite the powerful pull, the curves between that point and the husky insulated much of the power from pulling the press apart. All the way to the iguana's hip it merely caused her weight to be shifted to one leg. "My turn." She grinned, rolling her hips back the other way.
The ton-plus muscle-metamorph was yanked off her feet by the resulting movement. Meles spotted the length ahead of her having twisted into a helix, preparing to snap down on her. Thinking fast, she banished her musculature, returning to her slender natural state. In the blink of an eye, her fur lengthened. Not just lengthened, but thickened. Sharpened. She curled in midair into a mass of porcupine quills.
With a startled gasp, the villainess lunged, forcibly moving her immense girth out of the way of the launched spike-ball.
Meles rolled on the metallic floor, her spines fading as she got to her feet in a crouch. She shot her arms out towards the trapped form of her partner, the limbs extending in the same movement. Gaining suckers along their ventral sides from her paws to her elbows, she flexed her new tentacles, twisting them around the exposed ankles of the husky. Her legs thickened as she put power into standing up fully away from her grip, retracting her arms at the same time to yank powerfully on the dog.
Almagest's helmet popped off as he was dragged through the smooth press of banded scales and out the other side into the badger's arms. Knowing he was facing away from the iguana for the moment, he thought quickly. "Reboot into defense mode." He ordered aloud, before coughing.
The broken suit, laying in the middle of the room, whirred to life. It flipped itself over, open chest cavity down, before the hard light emitters all came to life. A wall of panels formed, the breadth of the room, totally separating the pair of heroes from the villainess.
Snarling, the iguana pushed her coils against the luminous barrier, trying to press the panels apart. "No fair letting him have his toys again..."
Once sure Almagest could stand on his own, Meles walked over to the prone suit. "You're one to talk about fair." She reached down to grasp the collar of the suit, before her whole body began to swell again. This time, however, she grew proportionately all over, becoming a very tall version of herself. At this size she easily scooped up the metal armor, before using her other arm to scoop up its wearer.
Almagest blushed a bit at being manhandled this way, but didn't press the issue. "She's still a threat."
"Tactical retreat is a victory when capturing a cape is her plan." Meles responded, before carefully walking out the available door, angling the suit to keep the barrier up behind them as long as she could. "Flight system still working on this thing?" She asked, looking down at the husky.
The inventor held up one hand, flexing it slightly. Through a nonverbal relay of commands he had for his suit, he should be able to...
The empty helmet came spinning through the hard light barrier, immune to its effects, and straight into his open hand. "Looks like part of it... Let's see the rest." He put the helmet on, looking over the HUD inside. "Yes, but not while the barriers are operating."
"Well, make it fast, fly-boy." Meles shrank down to her normal size, adjusting herself so that the husky stood between her and the broken suit. Her tail extended, losing its fur as the pink flesh gained segments in the skin. Shortly, a girthy opossum tail was looped around the badgeress, the suit, and the husky in between, binding them together. "There, buckled in. Think it can take us all the way home?"
Almagest stammered for a moment, pinned in place into his suit by a long tail for the second time today. "Y-yes. If we leave now."
"Then go." The badger looked over the suits shoulder, seeing the barriers starting to get pulled apart by writhing, scaled coils.
Exhaling deeply, Almagest deactivated the barrier and spun around so that the armored suit was facing the nearest window. Then the grav-drive activated. They were pulled up to terminal velocity horizontally just in time to avoid a loop of iguana tail lunging for them, crossing the open space to the window and shattering it.
Once out of the building, the suit began to fly in a bit more controlled path.
Meles grasped onto the suit's shoulders with her arms, tail squeezing tighter. "Guh... I really was tempting fate, teasing you about tails, wasn't I?"
Almagest huffed and focused on getting them back to base safely.
