A CAUTIONARY TALE

It all started the other night, when I was woken from my slumber by what appeared to be a tiny hand punching me in the face repeatedly. I switched on the nearby light, and saw to my surprise a very small fairy sitting on my chest, offering me a dirty look. What was also surprising was the fairy's physique. Her breasts and thighs were enormous, but her waist was barely a centimetre across.

"Ah," I said blearily. "You would be my Hentai Godmother."

"Correct."

There wasn't much more I could say. "Nice wand."

"Don't you try and sweet-talk me, you bastard," she shouted, giving my nose a vicious poke. "You know what this is about."

I sighed. "I have a feeling it's about the small collection of hentai I recently deleted from my hard drives."

My nose felt another small fist. "How could you! After all we've done for you! You just toss us in the recycle bin without a second thought!"

I tried to sit up, but she was surprisingly heavy. "Look, it's nothing personal, it's just my girlfriend is coming to stay and I'd never live it down if she ever found -"

"You could have just encrypted them!" she squawked. "Or put them in some folder she'd never look in! But no, you deleted them all!"

"I didn't want to! I even wrote a special article a few weeks back as a tribute..."

"Feh!"

"Feh?"

"Have you no morals?"

"No," I said simply, slapping her onto the floor. "Goodnight."

She fluttered over to my side as I made to turn the light off again. "The gods of porn are most displeased with your actions," she whispered. "I have orders to place a curse on you. You will be cursed from now on to live life like a Hentai game!"

"Is that a threat or a bribe?"

She waved her magic wand over my form, and spoke a few occult syllables. "You will rue the day you ever crossed us."

"Oh, I'm rueing, I'm rueing. Can I go back to sleep now?"

She vanished at that point, so I took that as a 'yes'.

The next morning, the sun was shining and it was another beautiful day of English spring. The birds were singing to greet the new day. My Hentai Godmother's warning was already being dismissed as a curious dream as I pulled my bedclothes aside and reached for my jacket.

Which was when I noticed my arm. It had changed during the night, now wearing a deep tan found only on the skin of people on holiday advertisements. On my upper arm, where yesterday there had been a bicep like a sock full of jelly, was toned and hardened muscle. I felt my torso, and found similar development there. Furthermore all my body hair had mysteriously disappeared, and the spots on my chest I had been worrying about had gone the same way.

It was all very disturbing, but on the whole I felt that this was one curse I could do with.

So I was quite heartened when I took my dressing gown and made my way to the bathroom. I had decided to have a shower. I never have showers in the morning, but today I felt a curious compulsion to do so. The shower passed without event, until I was emerging from it and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I had to slap both hands around my mouth to prevent myself from crying out.

My lower body had become partially transparent!

From my shoulders down my body started to fade away, the level of transparency amplifying as it neared my groin, then lessening further down until my feet were fully visible. That which made me a man - which had also seemed to have gained something during the night - was naught but a white outline.

I stared at all this for several minutes, counting the fish on the shower curtain I could see right through my stomach. I managed to calm down after some deep breaths, then grabbed a towel and began drying off. I was determined not to let that accursed godmother get to me.

"Well," I said to the stranger in the mirror. "If this is as bad as this curse gets then I for one can live with it."

Little did I know that the worst was still to come.

Shortly after breakfast I wondered what I would do today. "Well, I suppose I have three options," I thought aloud. "I can either (1) go out into town to see what else the curse has done, (2) watch some TV, or (3) go back to bed."

I considered number 3. "But I'd only be wasting time," I said to myself. "I go into town shall."

I hesitated as the words came out of my mouth. "I go into town shall," I said again. I gave myself a sharp thump to the side of the head. "I shall go into town." Satisfied, I put on my trenchcoat and left the house.

There didn't seem to be many people around, but I didn't read much into that. I passed the house of a neighbour of mine, Mrs. Stevens, and there was an unfamiliar woman in the front garden. Again, I didn't think much of it until she greeted me as if she'd known me her whole life. Physically she was extremely attractive, with measurements that seemed to parallel those of the Hentai Godmother. Her eyes were huge and blue, and an ungainly amount of purple hair ran from her head down her back.

"Good morning, Yatzo!" she exclaimed.

I gave her a curious look. "YahtZEE," I corrected. "Where's Mrs. Stevens?"

She frowned. "I don't know Mrs. Stevens. I am Reiko."

This was becoming weirder from the minute. This woman pertained to have a Japanese name, but she didn't look Japanese at all. "I have to go," I said firmly, and made to leave.

"Would you like come inside and see the jigsaw puzzle I finished yesterday?"

"No thank you -"

"But my husband is away -"

"No!" I almost shouted, and took off at a jog.

The streets were almost deserted. What little population remained seemed to comprise entirely of women with oddly-coloured hair, unlikely measurements and Japanese names, all looking at me as if I was running around naked. Everyone who wasn't one of these women was invariably a good-looking man with absolutely no personality who all seemed about as surprised as I was.

As I neared the town centre a pressing desire to empty my bladder began making itself known, so I snuck into the gentleman's toilets, making sure I wasn't being followed. But as I stepped up to the gutter I found a woman lying in there with a hopeful expression on her face, wearing nothing but thong panties.

"Please carry on with what you were doing," she said breathily.

I distinctly heard the sound barrier break as I darted out of there as fast as I could. I cast a look around to find an alternative place to make my ablutions, and decided upon a bush in a nearby park. I selected one buried deep in the undergrowth away from prying eyes, and began the deed.

"Hey!" said a voice from below. Out of the bush two heads and two sets of shoulders emerged, a young man and a woman, both apparently unclothed. "What you think you're doing?" asked the man.

"Oh, let him finish, Keigo," said the woman. "I kind of like it."

I zipped myself up as fast as I could and ran off again.

"Well, it's not so bad," I muttered to myself as I ran. "So everyone's got a Japanese name and look like anime characters and all women want to be used as sex objects, and everyone speaks in badly translated English. It's not as bad as all that."

I screeched to a halt outside a TV shop, as the TVs were showing a news programme, and the headline had caught my eye.

"The President of the United States was impeached today for having sex with every single female member of White House staff. High Court judges ruled in his favour, however, because he had had sex with all of them, too. In other news, Afghanistan has won the war, as all American and British soldiers were all busy having sex with pretty girls, and they have launched a bunch of nuclear missiles at the civilised world. Defense networks regretfully cannot stop the missiles as all the personnel are too busy having sex. Sport -" the presenter on the screen was cut off when a woman in a bikini suddenly threw herself upon him, and they both fell under the desk.

The curse was amplifying. There were people copulating on the floor of every shop I looked in. There were even one or two shameless ones in the street. As I watched, frozen with horror, there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see a small green blob-like monster with countless tentacles sitting there, giving me a baleful look with its one huge eye. "Excuse me," it said, "could you direct me to St. Woodrow's School for Girls?"

I planted a boot squarely in its monster face, and ran again. This time, I didn't stop until I was far away from town, though I was tired as hell and my feet were blistered. I ran through fields and forests, not even looking behind me to see if any naked girls were chasing me playfully. Eventually I burst through a hedge to find myself in the grounds of a mental hospital.

"Of course," I muttered to myself. "It's only a curse on me, not the whole world. This is all illusion. I'm being tricked. I'll just get myself looked at here, then they'll give me pills to make it all go away, and happily I'll live of ever after."

I hesitated. "I'll live happily ever after."

Cheered up in some small way, I entered the building.

The doctor in the white coat had me sit on his examination bed, then thumbed my eyelids and checked my pupils. "You seem a little highly strung," he said. "Have you been under a lot of stress lately?"

"Doctor," I said quickly, "What's your name?"

"My name? Oh, sorry. It's Smith. Dr. Richard Smith."

An English name, I thought, and sighed with relief. "Doctor, have you noticed anything ... strange ... going on lately?"

He stroked his chin thoughtfully. He was quite an ugly man. This also heartened me. "What kind of things?"

"Well ... there being lots of highly sexed people with Japanese names around?"

"Can't say I've noticed anything like that. Excuse me, I have to fetch some texts."

As he left the room, I felt quite happy. This place seemed unaffected. Perhaps I was right, perhaps it was all in my mind. Perhaps the curse had been lifted, or had worn off, or something. Maybe -

I heard talking from the next room. Cautiously, perhaps knowing what I would see even before I saw it, I peeked through the door.

The doctor was on the phone. "Yes, here is he," he said. "Bring condoms."

He heard my gasp, slammed the phone down, and turned to face me. He did so with such rapidity that his ugly mask fell off to reveal a very handsome young man with purple hair.

"You!" I said, pointing wildly. "You're one of them!"

Instantly the door flew open and six or seven buxom young anime girls burst in, clad in shorts and tube tops. I picked up a chair and desperately tried to fend them off, but there were just too many. I was forced back into a corner.

"One of us," chanted the girls. "One of us."

"No! Noo!!" I yelled. "I'll never be like you! Get away from me!"

"Ah, but Yatzo," said the doctor, a huge smile on his face. "You are ALREADY one of us!"

He offered me a hand mirror. Slowly, with infinite despair, I looked at my reflection.

I had no facial features.

"AAAAAAaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!"

I woke up with a start, sitting bolt upright, sweat glistening on my forehead.

I looked around. My room was just as it had always been. I examined myself with my hands - my torso was skinny again, my chest hair returned, the spots left unconcerned. I squeezed my biceps, and I was never so pleased to feel those jelly-filled socks.

It had all just been a dream. A terrible, awful dream.

I couldn't get back to sleep after that, so I got dressed and headed downstairs, pausing only to check my stomach in the mirror. Completely opaque.

"Feh. Hentai godmother. The very idea."

I decided I needed some mindless violence to calm me down, so picked up one of my Friday the 13th videos to take my mind off the terrible dream.

I plonked myself down onto the sofa, and started the VCR. The picture quality wasn't too good, but I didn't care. I was just glad my ordeal was over -

The film began. Instantly I knew something was wrong. Something was terrifyingly, soul-destroyingly wrong.

"NNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooo!!!!"

Then I woke up again. The end.

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