Moonstone - Chapter 12
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For the first time since his first encounter with the Moonstone, Duncan took the time to plan his next experience with the full Moon.  The scales that he had worn for the past month were testament to the effects of not planning, so they had given him motive.  Not that they'd been all bad - Duncan had quite liked the way he looked, it was just that he had to cover the scales up when going anywhere that he might be seen.  Being forced to wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts in the summer had been annoying.

Having a ventral slit instead of normal tackle had been an... interesting experience.  Duncan liked the sleekness of the result, and wanted to find some compromise between lizard bits and human bits.  He recalled that Dolphins had an interesting arrangement - their penis was usually concealed, but came out when they were amorous.  This sounded like it had potential, so he did further research on the topic when the kids and his wife weren't around to look over his shoulder.

The most interesting thing about Dolphin reproductive arrangements, Duncan discovered, was that there was quite a bit of disagreement about the details.  Some sources claimed that their penis was prehensile, others that it was merely somewhat flexible.  The former sounded like more fun, and Duncan figured that since he was going to be mentally 'designing' it anyway, why not?

And so, on the night of the full Moon, Duncan set out with the Moonstone box as usual.  He took care to charge it first, letting it bask in the rays of the full Moon.  Only once he was sure it was well-charged did he close the box's slats and turn his face to the Moon.  He smiled up at it, still somewhat amused by the 'joke' it had played on him last month.  The Moon seemed to be quite pleased that he'd kept the scales all month.  Well, it was happy to see him, anyway.  Judging the Moon's motives seemed a bit presumptuous.

Duncan set to work changing the projected image of himself in the trance.  First up - the scales had to go.  Sensing the Moon's disappointment, he kept a few - the ones that made up the white moon-shaped mark on his chest.  Then he set to work visualizing his new tackle.  Each change he made seemed to please the Moon, so he kept puttering at it for a while before he was satisfied.

When Duncan opened his eyes upon the real world, he was tempted to rip open his shirt to confirm his lack of scales.  However, the scaly Moon-mark on his chest stayed his hand.  He hadn't realized that even such a small incongruity would trigger the magic censorship principle, but it was a small price to pay.

Once inside and through the kitchen, Duncan was safe from outside eyes and stripped his shirt off.  Sidney looked him curiously, then grinned.  "Full moon tonight, is it?  I'm glad you finally got rid of the scales."

Duncan carried on into the bedroom to strip all the way and check out his handiwork.  Before long, a curious Sidney drifted in behind him.  "So you're finally back to normal?"

Duncan turned around.  "Not quite."

Sidney nodded as she saw the scales on his chest.  "Figures you'd keep a few... but I didn't expect you to keep the ventral slit.  That's no fun."

"I liked the look, but yeah, it wasn't really any fun.  This is different - I borrowed from a different species instead."

Sidney looked a bit skeptical.  "Do tell."

"One word - retractable."

Sidney laughed.  "Show me, then."

Duncan stepped up against his wife and kissed her firmly, then started to cup and fondle her breasts.  Sidney responded in kind, slowly at first but she quickly got into the mood.  A couple minutes later when Duncan broke away, she pouted.  "Aww, you've got me all pointy."

Duncan laughed.  "That was kind of the point.  I needed to get aroused, too."  He gestured to his waist, and Sidney looked down.  Duncan's penis was showing... and waving at her?

Sidney laughed.  "It moves?"

"Yeah, dolphins are reputed to have prehensile penises.  Seemed like a fun idea."

Sidney stared down at it, and frowned.  "It looks like a tentacle.  That's... a little creepy.  I can see how it might be fun, but it's still creepy.  And what you're doing with your arms is even more creepy.  What happened?"

Duncan shrugged, his arm-tentacles wriggling bonelessly with the gesture.  "I don't know.  You said it looked like a tentacle, I thought 'cool, tentacles'... and it just sort of... happened.

Sidney glared at the Moonstone box on the bed.  "I can guess why.  That stupid rock of yours - I thought I told you to keep it downstairs!  What's it doing up here again?"

"I had to charge it, didn't I?"

Sidney scooped it up, thrust it into Duncan's tentacles, and tossed his shirt at him as well.  "Take it downstairs again and fix yourself up."

"What, you don't want to play 'hide the tentacle'?"

"No!"

Duncan sighed, and trudged off downstairs.  Of course, she hadn't said 'right away', so he did take the time to play with his new appendages a bit.  They were stronger than he'd expected, though they were better at gripping and pulling than carrying weight - there are some advantages to having bones, after all.  It took quite a bit of work to figure out how to use them to masturbate.

Duncan spent most of the next two weeks disappointingly normal.  He didn't even have his moon-mark, it had disappeared when he used his shirt to turn his tentacles back into arms.
He did take the time to research more about tentacles and their structure, which led him to read more about octopi.  Many species had chromatophores that would let them change skin colouration - that could be useful.  In theory, he would be able to look normal when he needed to, then make a pattern like leopard spots emerge when he wanted.

Still, he had to get through to the next full Moon to even try it.  The way the job search was going, that was going to be a trial.  He hadn't heard back on a single job, yet.  He at least figured his resume was good enough to get the odd phone interview, but there was nothing.  It was disenheartening.

And then one day he thought that it wouldn't hurt to google his name, like any prospective employer might... and the first link was to his DeviantArt page.  Full of favourites that revealed far more than he liked much about his quirky tastes (ie, his transformation fetish).  So the next three days were spent frantically sanitizing everything he could.  Still, the damage was done.  He had to figure his name was tainted anywhere he'd already applied to.

By the time that crisis was over, it was the new moon again.  Duncan was happy when his moon-mark came back, but the dolphin-penis thing was still a non-starter with Sidney.  He had a little private fun with it, but as soon as the Moon had waxed enough to let the Moonstone work, he changed it back to normal.

And so, back to the job hunt.  But there were only so many jobs to apply to, and so many places he could reasonably expect that a cold-call would have any chance at all.  Duncan would go through all his job-search sites first thing in the morning, and if there were none to apply for, what then?

The one thing he felt was really holding him back was lack of experience in some of the newer programming languages, so Duncan found a good textbook on C++ programming and set to work.

Trying to study with little kids running around and begging for attention didn't work terribly well.  After a few days of trying, he'd spent more time reading children's books than his textbook.  Much more time.  So he moved his computer down to the office/storage room in the basement.  For a time, that worked passably well.

The thing is, learning to program without a specific project to focus his efforts was deadly dull for Duncan.

The siren call of the Moonstone sitting on the bookshelf behind him grew louder each day, and the only thing keeping him from wasting entire afternoons messing with it was the fact that by the time the Moon was full enough to be useful, it was rising fairly late in the day.  He could feel the moment the Moon rose, and two days before the full Moon his resolve finally broke.  There was about an hour before dinner, the Moon had just risen... why not?  He'd plowed through a chapter and a half with the promise of this ahead of him.

Duncan dug out the pink L-cup bra he'd gotten from Pauline.  There were J, N and P-cup versions of this one still at her shop, and he had to wonder... what would a P-cup bra look like?  He'd have to look Pauline up again soon, while he still had excess cash.

But for now - the bra.  Duncan opened the Moonstone's box, then debated.  Which first?  Hands was fun, but he couldn't type with breast-hands.  Legs, then... they were useless while sitting at his computer, anyway.  So he went back to his desk-chair, pulled off his pants and underwear, then tugged the bra against his feet.  He only had a few moments to marvel at just how quickly his legs were changing before the bra was at his hips.

Duncan wriggled so he was sitting on top of the bra, and his bum became an over-large pair of breasts.  The only thing keeping him from sinking further was his T-shirt - its form suggested one version of his body while the bra suggested another.  The tension in the middle felt sort of ticklish, and every time he moved, the shirt rode up a little bit and he lost half an inch or so of height.   He tried doing some coding like that, but it was very distracting.

After ten minutes, Duncan gave in to temptation, and stripped the shirt off.  By the time it had cleared his head, his torso was gone, leaving him a head and arms perched atop a pair of breasts.  He tried to push himself down further into it, and managed to largely dispose of his arms before running out of leverage.

His stint as a head and breasts was short, though - soon the rest of the female body that went with the bra started to form.  A minute later, Duncan spilled from his chair, fully rebuilt along sexy lines.

Trying to type in a porn-star's body was even worse.  Every movement of Duncan's arms brushed against her breasts, and it didn't take much to arouse her in this form.  For that matter, the breasts made it really difficult to type as they rested heavily on her arms in any viable pose.  Soon enough, she gave up on the whole thing, and spent the last half-hour before dinner in the downstairs bathroom.  The only reason she managed to stay quiet was that she'd used Moonstone and the bra to turn the bottom of her face into a third breast, gagging herself quite effectively.

Duncan felt rather guilty about all this afterward, of course.  As far as he could tell, nobody noticed.  Still, he mulled over it the next day while trying to study.  Is that what he wanted to do with the Moonstone?  Use it to realize his own weird fantasies?  After mulling it for a good chunk of the day, his answer was... an it harm none, do what ye will.  The trick was keeping it from messing up his life and others.

With that resolved, once the Moon rose Duncan traded his legs for boobs again.  This time he stopped there, closing the Moonstone's box so he wouldn't accidentally change further.  He found it quite comfortable to sit that way, and spend the remaining half-hour before dinner productively.

The following day was the day of the night of the full Moon, and it wouldn't rise until after dinnertime.  Duncan felt restless.  Another day with a job prospect or a call.  This full Moon marked the halfway point of his three months termination pay.  If he didn't find something soon...  

Eventually he gave up trying to get anything useful done, and spent the afternoon playing with the kids instead.  Sidney was happy to have a bit of a break, and the kids had fun, too.  Duncan had to admit, after a while, that he was a lot happier like this as well.  It was a pity it couldn't last.  He stared down at the plush rabbit puppet on his hand.  Toys had it so much easier.

Once dinner was done, and the kids abed, Duncan found the puppet again.  He wondered what the Moonstone would think of it.  It might treat it as clothing, and shape his hand to fit it.  It might treat it as a costume... he had to try.  After all, when he embraced the Moon, he'd be able to get it off again, much like he had with Sidney's naga-costume.

Duncan took the puppet downstairs with him when he went to fetch the Moonstone.  He slipped it on his right hand, and opened the box.  He grinned as he felt his hand melt inside the puppet - it felt warm and somehow... fluffy.  But when he tried to pull the puppet off to see what his hand had become, he couldn't.  The puppet was merged with his hand.  As he tugged, he realized that he was actually feeling the touch of his left hand on the rabbit's head.

Duncan tried wiggling his fingers, but couldn't quite find them.  He looked at the puppet, and imagined it waving it's paw - it did!  He found that with a bit of concentration, he could move the rabbit's ears, too - and those didn't even have pockets for his fingers.  He wiggled the bunny's nose, then closed his eyes to see if that would help him focus on the bunny's sense of position and touch.  He was surprised to realize that he could still see - from the perspective of the puppet. Apparently its glass eyes were enough to let him see, if a bit fuzzily.

Duncan was looking forward to trying this again, perhaps closer to the new moon.  He figured that as the Moon's power waned the puppet would lose its grip on his hand.  Well, he hoped it would.

Still, it was time to go recharge the Moonstone and embrace the Moon once again.  Duncan cradled the box in his left arm, as the rabbit's plush body didn't have a lot of gripping strength.

Once the Moonstone was fully charged, Duncan turned his face to the Moon, greeting it like an old friend.  In the familiar trance, he found himself distracted by his musings from the day.  Once he was free of the puppet, he couldn't stop thinking about what it would be like to be a toy for a while...

When Duncan roused from his trance, he felt an overwhelming sense of panic.  He barely managed to scoop up the Moonstone's box before it drove him inside, hopping on long, powerful feet.  He slammed the door behind him, and let out a deep sigh of relief.  Or he tried to, anyway.  Nothing came out of his mouth.  He tried to talk, and couldn't make a peep.  Duncan looked down at his hands, and saw big pink mitteny paws instead.  He reached up, and pulled an ear down to look at it.  Yup, definitely a rabbit's ear.  It twitched out of his hand, and brushed the ceiling.

Well, thought Duncan to himself, this is what I get for not planning.