(M and F to Various)
May, or ‘Maytamorph’ depending if you asked her, was one of the lesser heroes in the Pantheon. Really, she was mostly there just to help deal with sanitation and occasional hair trims. What other use could there be for someone with the power to change someone’s hairstyle?
This was exactly why it came as such a surprise to everyone when she showed up having arrested Hypno-Sis. Still, the other heroes were polite folk, and not the kind of to question a fellow superhuman over their feats. They smiled and waved to her amicably, not suspecting a thing as she made her way to the center of the Pantheon’s lobby.
“Um, everyone, I have an announcement to make!” May cleared her throat. “The truth is, I’ve been lying to myself this entire time. But maybe that’s just because I’m a big dumb idiot compared to Hypno-Sis.”
The last sentence raised a few eyebrows, especially when Hypno-Sis rolled her eyes and whispered something into May’s ear.
“Oh. I mean. My powers, they’re actually much stronger than I’d thought. The only limitations are my own, in that I can only change people in ways I myself would want to change. So, haircuts. Hairstyles. Makeovers.”
“And you unlocked something that helped you defeat the dastardly Hypno-Sis?” Major Captain called out to her, ever-charismatic.
“No,” May blinked as Hypno-Sis whispered something in her ear. “I mean, yes. It’s complicated. You see, I just needed a change of perspective. And what Master needed was enough time to override the security systems.”
There was a little concerned murmuring at that, followed by a few screams of panic from the normal folk who’d sadly chosen today as their first day to visit The Pantheon. It was a natural response to the windows and doors suddenly slamming shut, reinforced with an ultradense compound nigh-impervious to damage.
An unnatural response was to scratch at their armpits, to slump to all fours, to start hooting like imbeciles. For a moment, some of the heroes wondered if this was an elaborate trap set up by Hypno-Sis—it was—and if these people were in on it somehow—they weren’t.
The first to figure out what was happening was The Shapestress, but by then it was much too late. She yelped in surprise, having reached out to help a fallen tourist. Her powers brushed against his body, and she realized something was distinctly wrong.
Too bad for her, she was the first hero that had to be dealt with. May reached out a hand towards her and flexed just a trace of her power. Almost everyone used to marvel at how easily she could change the little things about them, how it cost her almost no effort to style them as they pleased. The Shapestress had always had her doubts, but held her tongue for respect of a young woman’s career.
Now she found herself literally holding her tongue, her cheeks bulging as she let out a miserable croak. “HGGGRRRBRRRT.” It wasn’t anything close to language, just the first sound of her new life. Her skin grew slick along her belly, bumpy and warty along her back. Webbing slicked its way between her fingers. When she fell, it sounded more like someone dropping a wet glove.
“See, Master taught me something wonderful. Something amazing. How incredible would it be if I could want to change myself into a mindless, powerless animal?” May looked at her hands, shivering and letting out a small moan of delight. “And how great would it be if I could share that with everyone else?”
With that, all the monkey-minded people in attendance devolved to the point that they were mindless, hooting chimps. There was no time to save any, no way to reason with the changes or even slow them. It was like watching a single wave crash against a day’s worth of sand castles, and erode them in an instant.
Psionette was the quickest to realize what was happening. She reasoned that her precognitive abilities might give her a look into if things were as bad as they seemed, and if she needed to fight a woman she’d thought of as nothing more than a barber. “By my third eye, I open a view to the future, and-”
Corn. Hunger. Empty. Pregnant. Eggs. So many eggs.
Her brain may have been a supercomputer in its own right. She may have had the ability to process years of her future in an instant, under any other circumstances. But now, faced with a lifetime of living in a coop, that clever brain of hers shattered completely.
“Awk. Bugh. Buckwack.” Her elbows bent, hands tucked under her armpits. She stooped over, eyes glazed. Her outfit had always been a little tight, so it ripped as she began to peck at the floor, exposing her pert butt to her respected peers.
There was no shame in it for her. There was nothing except existence. The brain that she would have couldn’t permit anything other than simple, empty-headed life. She didn’t even recognize the meaning of the cry from the man across the room, as he ran towards her.
The Human Porch was her husband, a particularly dashing man with a gift for carpentry. He’d thought it romantic that Psionette had never tried to gaze into their future together. Perhaps if she had, she’d have been able to stop him from turning into a fat female beaver.
He stumbled and shrank as he fell, shrinking from his clothing, tumbling out of the flannel. Fur covered his body from head to toe, hiding the sight of his fattening gut. His new tail slapped against the ground. The world was getting confusing to him, he wanted to go home. His teeth stretched well past his lower lip, and he chittered anxiously.
He… No, she. She needed a home to go to though. She didn’t remember where her old one was. Her fingers and toes trembled their way into paws, and she darted over towards a rather nice table, gnawing on its leg to try to break off a piece big enough to bring to her new dam.
“Well, then. Shall we begin?” May purred. She wrapped an arm around Hypno-Sis’s waist, looking to the woman for approval.
“Release your control over the woman at once!” Major Captain thundered. He held up his Ring of American Spirit, ready to conjure an All-American Joint Strike Force Next-Generation Stealth Fighter (available at a smaller scale from local retailers).
The ring cracked and burst as his hands bulged into paws, sharp claws adorning his fingers and shaggy brown fur covering the backs of his hands. As the fur races up his bulging arms, he realized his fate. “This isn’t what the Second Amendment was abHHRRG!”
The change had moved from his grizzly arms to his chest, spreading quickly up his neck. Before he could finish his thought, his words had devolved to a throaty ursine growl, one that only grew louder at the discomfort of feeling his face stretch out into a jowled muzzle.
“A shame, really. Nobody else will be able to see the irony of having him change to the symbol of another nation,” May crooned.
“Major! NooOOOOOUGHH!” Steppe Ford held a hand out towards her bear of a husband, only to groan as her face bulged into a bovine snout. Then she started to gag, coughing out a thick slimy substance that slowly started to envelop her.
Wherever the ooze met her skin, she changed. Her hands were the first to fall victim to this new curse, clenching into hooves. Then it wrapped around her belly, tugging her ample breasts down between her legs as a dangling udder. Her hips flared, her shoulders snapped. And all the while, she shrank smaller and smaller.
“M-mom?” Lieutenant Captain held a hand out to the thrashing ball of goo as though there was anything she could do. Unfortunately for her, there was. The instant she recognized that her mother was turning into some kind of calf, she dreaded what might be surrounding ‘America’s Perfect Woman.’
It was amniotic fluid.
The calf thrashed about in its fluid confines for a moment. Then she shot towards her daughter’s groin. Mercifully, if it could be called a mercy, Lieutenant Captain’s hips flared at that exact moment, perfectly maternal. Her costume ripped, and the calf shoved inside her, stretching her womb.
“Mom, no! I can! MOOOUGH! I! Uh! GHHMMOOOO!” The girl clutched at her massively pregnant belly, feeling the cow kick inside her. She fell to her now-furry knees, then onto her side. Whimpers and moans dropped in pitch. She scuffed at the ground. A long, slimy tongue burst from her mouth, doing little other than spreading her thick saliva about the tiled floor.
Hypno-Sis’s brow furrowed. The transformations themselves made sense, but there was an almost fae cruelty to the changes, as though May was reveling in them. Perhaps she should-
“Don’t move.”
Hypno-Sis’s heart thundered in her chest, barely relaxing as she realized May hadn’t been talking to her.
The fastest woman in the world, Quark, slipped on a bit of her own slime as she turned into a slug. Unfortunately, at this point she’d already activated her ability to move at supersonic speeds. The localized sonicboom was loud enough that nobody noticed the faint wet splat as the slug pasted itself against a wall.
Well, technically Wardog noticed—though at this point the man was now a near-brainless Golden Retriever bitch. She ambled over to the mess that was her former teammate and licked at it curiously, tail wagging all the while.
Starflare found herself unable to look away from the sight. Her breathing grew heavier. The hard light she’d been conjuring winked out. She fell from the ground onto her thick, clumsy paws. Paws? That didn’t quite sound right. She struggled to think about why it was so weird. Maybe if she sounded it out.
“Mhlugh.” The first noise from her throat was unrecognizable, thanks to her swollen tongue. It spilled from her mouth, along with a torrent of thick drool that matted the fur on her paws. She should have known better, that was why before panting she liked to shake out her jowls. Jowls?
May giggled at the signt of one of Earth’s strongest heroes finding herself battered by hew new instincts. “What’s the matter? Someone used to hard light should really enjoy being such a hard boy…”
Starflare was sexy. She had a pinched waist and generous curves. She liked how thick her furry body was barreled out and how good her fur made her… Wait, she was a… Butt she had a… The dog sneezed, unintentionally expelling childhood memories in the form of mucus. His swimming head made much more sense now at least. Sure, he couldn’t remember being a puppy, but he knew he wanted to make some…
Hypno-Sis covered her mouth with both her hands, squeaking at the ensuing sight. The mastiff seemed to be so much bigger than his counterpart, but at least she seemed to like the attention.
“I wonder…” May grinned savagely, rounding on Nii-Anderthal. The girl’s hair tended to get so wild when accessing her cavewoman strength, and May had spent hours each week untangling it even with her powers.
The poor girl’s almond eyes widened for a moment, then bulged along with the rest of her head. Scales crept across her face, mouth forced into a grimace by her swelling teeth. She fell against the ground, head now easily as large as the rest of her body, eyes now cold and golden.
The rest of her stretched out behind her massive skull, muscles in her legs bulging, delicate toes bulging into ugly clawed talons. Her slender arms shrank into near-useless nubs that could barely itch at her fat, voracious gut.
Her first roar as a T-Rex was almost deafening, and in the quiet that followed all that could be heard was the quiet squawking of the hen-brained Psionette.
“Oh, I almost forgot about you.” May waved a hand casually, and the woman’s pretty features warped into those of a hen.
The new chicken simply warbled like an idiot.
“Haha! Look at that! It’s like an evolutionary line!” May clapped for a moment, before the dinosaur evidently decided it was in the mood for nuggets. “Whoops.”
Hypno-Sis felt afraid, for the first time in years. “Uh. I thought you could only, you know, make people into things that existed.”
“Me too. But all this… I’ve learned so many things. Like, did you know it’s possible to change away the part of your brain that makes you susceptible to hypnosis?” May pointed at the side of her head, cheeks flushed. “And that makes it even easier to make sure that I’ll never ever forget the love of turning people into things.”
Hypno-Sis gulped. “You know, all that ‘Master’ stuff was really just for show. Really, you don’t need to make me into an animal.”
May rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to do that.”
Hypno-Sis sighed in relief, then fell apart. It was so sudden, so casual. She didn’t even have time to feel a spike of fear. The scraps of her body fluttered to the ground: gloves, boots, a bra, panties, a jacket, a skirt. Each of them still retained a fragment of her brain. Each of them thought that they were the only surviving component of what was once a villainess.
Thought. They could think. Their brains hadn’t gone, or their souls hadn’t, or something. Hypno-Sis didn’t know how it was possible. She could feel, too, especially when May shoved her fingers so far inside her that she thought she was going to tear/stuffed a foot deep within her and wiggled her toes/slipped her up between her legs and snapped her waistband against the girl’s hips.
May stroked at her new outfit, moaning. “Who’d have thought that all this power was just a thought away? I’d thank you, but I just can’t risk you turning me back to normal. Sorry about that.”
Most of that was true, save for the last sentence. May was excited, not sorry. She had so many more wonderful targets in this city. After, of course, she worked out how to break through the Pantheon’s lockdown…