"Is that... eight effs?" I asked.

  "Sure is!" Ti8fany said. "Pleasure to taste you."

  "Oh... uhm... okay." I hope that was just a hitch in the translations, and she wasn't really tasting me.

  She let go of my arm.

  Working with Terra, they pushed us toward the shore. My arm continued to tingle where she'd touched me. I wasn't sure if it was because I was falling in love at first sight, or if there was venom in her tentacles. By time we hit the shore I realized my arm was fine, if it was venom, I had stopped tingling.

  T-neigh leapt ashore and threw herself down on the beach. "Thank our Lordship's wisdom!"

  Nyany staggered after her and flopped down in the not quite sandy beach. I hopped off our flotation ass and with my legs still in the sea, turned back to Ti8fany, and Terraphiny.

  "Anything you want me to bring you from your flooded pod?" the boobily... I mean bubbly, Octomaid said. (The translation device had settled it for me, they're octomaids!)

  In response I said, "Uhhh...." Like the eloquent orator I am. Good lord, was there any part of her that didn't jiggle and wriggle about? I was hypnotized by all the... joyous jigglin'. Couldn't figure out what words were supposed to come out,

  "I'll come with you, dearie," Terraphiny saved me. "It looks like he needs a minute to talk to his Kitty-wife, and current mistresses before he gets another. I vote Aye, if it's democracy."

  My two aquatic Friends? We'll call them friends. They dipped below the water and went to recover more supplies, and I slowly turned to my scowling, soaking wet, very angry catwife.

  She shook off, and poofed up before she started petting her fluff down.

  "Never a planet with more than fifty percent oceans again," I offered.

  "Twenty."

  "Deal. What's your homeworld's ocean coverage like anyhow?"

  "More than half."

  I opened my mouth to say something back, surely it was going to be the pinnacle of wit and class, but the sound of a massive wet fart started.

  I had my mouth open!

  Well, it sounded like a massive wet fart. We all turned to look at Tiphanie, from whence it came. She looked embarrassed. "It's not supposed to make that sound when I deflate, I swear! There's gotta be something stuck on the outside of the valve making that noise."

  It continued to brrap pap pap brrrowwp pap pap pap fgfhfhgfghgh away. Just... every fart noise you ever heard. My old fart machine from boyhood ain't got nothing on Tiph's deflating ass.

  I closed my mouth. The taste of the air coming out was... fortunately not quite ass flavored, but had a sort of metallic tinge to it, like sucking weird metallic factory air straight from the robot-ass factory.

  Nyany and I both started laughing. What else could we do? Not like we could talk over the continuous and incredibly varied, wet-fart noises.

  I don't know exactly how long it lasted, longer than any human fart ever has... I hope. If not, woe be to the poor human who farted for a full five minutes. Worse still to be one around them. Good lord.

  When the majority of the farting was done, Ti8fany, and Terra had returned with sealed emergency supply packs and several tentacles full of building materials.

  I looked at Nyany. Her eyes softened, and I realized we didn't need to discuss anything, she was taking command. Or maybe she'd been in command since the moment I met her, and I only really understood that properly just now.

  "It's fine, we'll figure out an aquarium room with the new ship." Nyany said.

  "I mean, if she wants to come with us, then who am I to stop her... but why aren't you stopping her?"

  "I find all the jiggling bit hypnotic too, and you were cute staring at her."

  "I can hear you, you know? And understand..." Ti8fany said, dropping a load of supplies before she clocked what we'd said. "Wait, are you saying you're willing to abduct me from this planet? Permanently? By the Deep One, YES! Please take me with you, I'll do whatever you want: probe me, do weird sex stuff, you can even eat a bit of one of my legs, I don't even care. It'll grow back. I am SOOOOO ready to leave this whaleshit planet."

  "Wow! Enthusiastic to leave the planet... I know the feeling." I hoped this wasn't just one more mistake. "Gonna pass on the eating part. I'll... have to discuss the other things with the rest of the crew."

  Nyany laughed and started squeezing water from her thick red mane. "She'll fit right in."

  Ti8fany looked a bit horrified at Nyany squeezing the water out of hair, but maybe her facial expressions were different than mine? She was the most alien waifu yet. After a moment she decided that since no one else was horrified, whatever Nyany was up to with her fluff was probably normal and her vivacious nature returned.

  "How long do I have to pack, how much stuff can I take? Should I bring anything in particular?" Our jiggly new friend was asking good questions.

  "About as much as fits in that room down there, probably. We'll see what shape our rescue takes. Bring your personal hygiene stuff, we might not have any that suit your particular needs. And I'm not sure on the time, lets find out. Tiph?" Nyany said. "You work as a short range transmitter, right? We can call up to Dave the mammoth up there, busily unfucking our massive fuck up, and talk to Becca?"

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "I've been transmitting since I realized we were close enough to the surface to make contact. Mother says hello. She is bringing us a new ship. One that can take a much more thorough beating than your wee little hammer did."

  "Not in the love with The Hammer of Davis being called wee and little. I blew up a moon with it!"

  "YOU blew up the moon!?!" Ti8fany cried, and then started laughing hysterically. "Serves those bastards right! Ohhh I'm so ready to leave, that's fucking perfect."

  I'd try to get at what that was about later.

  "That was just an incredibly unfortunate accident," Nyany said, about a completely different that. "How the hell was I supposed to know the moon would do that. Moons don't normally explode like that when you shoot them a little. That's why I did it, I thought it'd be essentially harmless."

  "Mother says it will probably be several days before she can come collect us. Upon investigation of the exploded moon bits, it seems the moon was stuffed full of some ancient civilization's poorly utilized nuclear fuel rods. All available ships are on cleanup duty. Disney has been completely routed. We essentially own the entire capitalistic portion of the galaxy."

  "Great news!" I said. "But, out of curiosity, how much of the galaxy doesn't participate in capitalism with us? and do they do so with one another? If we just... quit, would it be star trek?"

  "Mother says..." Tiphanie took a moment, like she was buffering. "N-N-Not to worry your pretty little head about that right now. Instead, worry about the sun."

  It was beating down. "Yeah, I'm noticing a distinct lack of trees or shade."

  "My deflated ass can be used as a sun shade. We will just have to detach my skin from thigh to my knee."

  Some poles and rope recovered from our wrecked pod were brought up, and we made a sun shade out of Tiph's stretched out ass material. Like a nice beach umbrella, but with a hole in the middle, extending from a pole she insisted on carrying. I guess I'd want to keep a hold of my ass too in this situation.

  Ti8fany was fascinated by this, and mildly disgusted that Tiph was taking off the skin from her upper legs. She was much more fascinated than disgusted though, thrilled to get a look at how land being's legs worked. We explained that she was a machine, but one designed to simulate land beings, and that delighted our newest crew member.

  For a little while we just caught our breaths, and then, after a short while.

  "So you air breathers, you gotta take cover from the sun up here, huh? What other weird stuff is normal above the water?" Ti8fany was staying on the edge of the water, occasionally dunking herself entirely underwater again.

  "I have no idea what's gonna seem weird to you up here." I said. "Probably a lot. So why do you want off the planet so bad?"

  "Ohh, I'm a bit of a recluse." She giggled in a way that moved her at least three points up the crazy-o-meter, "I theorized the existence of air breathing, and space flying beings. I figured out a way to prove it, too, and started detecting what I'm pretty sure were faster than light travel signals zipping all over the galaxy... and they laughed me out of academia. But I was right. Hundreds of ships appeared in orbit over the planet just recently, didn't they?"

  "Yeah, we had a whole space battle up there. They were here for me. To attack me or defend me. I'm a very important man just now."

  T-neigh finally got up, and I'll be damned if she didn't ask the most horse-sense question, "Hey, Weird Ball of Tits, how much is the water going to rise when the tide is highest. Will there be any land left?"

  "Land!" She smiled. "There will be a little land that stays landy up at the top. This will all be very, the shallows in a while."

  "Great. See you all up there." T-neigh said, and got up and started trekking up the island with a load of supplies on her back. It looked like only about a quarter mile from the beach to the top.

  "I guess she's right, we should make a shelter up at the peak, where it'll stay dry." Nyany said.

  "What's that word mean?" Ti8fany said. "Dry? What's that?"

  We all had a good laugh, and Terra did her best to explain. As an amphibious reptile, she was the best suited for this task.

  Nyany, Tiph and I made our way uphill. We found the area at the top that had a sort of... soft, blue, grassy, mossy sort of plant. Probably the only naturally occurring land-dwelling organisms on the planet.

  "Time to adapt to getting stepped on little plant." I said, and walked right over the top of it. We built a little bit of a tent situation up there using some more of the poles and the emergency blankets in the crash kit. Set a few of them down for spots to sleep on the ground too, for those of us that would need to sleep. Tiphanie was the central tent pole of our little island paradise, and once we were settled in, we got busy waiting.

  There was more than a weeks worth of emergency rations. Terra and Ti8fany recovered a few printed animal legs, and also caught us some local fish to eat. A camp stove and piece of broken metal for a pan made it easy to cook.

  One of the things that Ti8fany brought from home - a few hundred meters down from the mountain peak - was a sort of... surfacing suit, that she wore to keep her wet while she walked up to our tent and hung out. It kept the bottom half of her contained in water, like a mobile suit with a kiddie pool attached. Her top half was free and able to communicate, but she could dunk herself in water when she needed to.

  A day and a half later, well ahead of schedule, Tiph alerted us that our new ship was coming down. Plans had changed and now it was imperative to get us immediately.

  Our rescue drew our attention as it sent a boom through the atmosphere coming down so fast.

  I looked up into the sky, and at first it was just a blob up in the atmosphere, an indistinguishable shape through the thin clouds. As it flew lower, and our rescue grew sooner, my stomach dropped. It looked like weapon's fire.

  "Tiph, what's going on up there? Why is there shooting."

  "Mother says, don't worry. We are coming to pick you all up. The ship can take a beating."

  "Who is attacking us though?"

  "Oh, just some space banditos, nothing to worry about."

  As if to punctuate her point, one of the attacking vessels exploded and fell from the sky. A growing column of smoke grew behind it as it fell.

  "See, one down already. One to go."

  The second pursuing ship fell, a few seconds later, shot down by our rescue ship. This one left a spiral of smoke as it spun out on its way down.

  As our rescue ship flew closer I realized I recognized the shape, all too well. One of my favorite shapes, actually.

  It had a big... Shuttle Bay up front, and huge... Living Area behind it. A couple of tubes of material connected the warp engines off to either side of the ute- I mean living area.

  "Hooooly shit! Now THAT'S a ship that can take a beating." Nyany said, laughing, she certainly recognized the shape of things.

  Terra and T-neigh both scratched their heads, confused by what they were seeing. Both had their own reasons for ignorance. Meanwhile, Ti8fany trilled in wild excitement at the whole notion of getting abducted by air breathing aliens. It was an untranslatable, and unmistakable sound of joy.

  "What exactly am I looking at here?" Terra asked me. "You seem to recognize that... shape."

  "That's a, uhh..." Eloquent, I know.

  "Basically," Nyany rescued me from my own immaturity, "that's a flying vagina, uterus, and Fallopian tubes. The ovaries are warp engines."

  It was more discreet about what it was than the Hammer of Davis had been.

  I was about to ask Tiphanie how we were supposed to get aboard, when a tractor beam from inside the Shuttle Bay engaged. It grabbed us, the top of the island, and good bit of ocean from the area too, for good measure. Hoovered us all aboard. Our rescue ship started flying back into space before it even had us all the way inside.

  We were gently plopped down in the massive hangar space, water and all. Somehow, it seemed like this particular hangar bay was meant to occasionally be a wet environment.

  The doors began to close and when we got high altitude an energy barrier sealed the opening of the Shuttle Bay to keep the air from getting too thin inside as the doors finished shutting. Before the hangar doors were even fully shut, we'd gained enough altitude and jumped to warp...