CHAPTER 1
The sky above Cait flashed the familiar oil-on-water sheen of a Wave as she ambled home. Due to her upward gaze, general relaxation, and the considerable buzz she had going, Cait didn't see the gravel truck jump the curb. She didn't notice it careening towards her, not until it was far too late to make any difference. The headlights blinded her in the instant before the grill filled her vision and then…. chaos. Not the black nothing of unconsciousness or death, but instead the utter bedlam of being fully aware while a car wreck happened with her at the epicenter.
She'd managed to get a hand up before the truck impacted, and as it hit her hand went straight through the grill. She felt the heat of the engine around her forearm in the split second between the impact and the truck reaching her torso. Then, a cacophony of screaming metal, hissing steam and breaking glass surrounded her. One second she was walking home, the next being hit by a gravel truck, and now…. now she was…. in it?
Her vision was obscured by a mess of metal, wires, and plastic, the remnants of the vehicle's innards. She could move her head, but couldn't see anything besides mechanical carnage.
Why can I see anything? Cait thought. I should be fucking pulp!
Experimentally, she moved the rest of her limbs. She found her torso was wrapped up pretty much entirely in the engine block, and she could feel fluids dripping or spraying onto her arms and down her legs.
Shouldn't this hurt?
The feeling of metal wrapped tight around her, and, oddly, she could tell that some of the liquid should be hot enough to eat through her skin to the bone. Instead, it didn't really feel any different than a shower turned up a little too hot to be comfortable. She could breathe just fine, suggesting her ribcage wasn't behind her spine, as physics should have demanded it be. Wiggling her legs, she found that not only were they not shattered, her calves were actually still out in the air. It felt like she was tilted slightly backward and off the ground. The overall effect was as if the truck's engine compartment had wrapped her in an overenthusiastic hug, instead of sending her broken body flying off to the horizon.
Cait sighed
Welp. Bullshit it is.
"Help!" Cait shouted at the top of her lungs. "HELLLLLLLPPP!"
The accident had happened on a main road, and while it was later on in the evening in the suburbs, there was no way it would have gone unnoticed. Hell, she knew the fire department and ARMOR station would've been in sight if her vision hadn't been completely blocked by car guts.
As if summoned, she heard the wailing of sirens join her cries for assistance. Below that though, she noticed another sound. A gushy, sickly noise like thick liquid seeping through a drain came from above her head, and a thudding slap announced something dropping to what was left of the truck's hood above her.
Okay. What the fuck? Cait stopped screaming, and focused on the new noise above her head, straining to make it out over the sirens. It slowly sopped along, and she could make out more than one source of susurrating vibrations on the hood before it stopped right over her. With a sound like a tortured soul, the vehicle around her shuddered and shook as chunks of the metal between whatever was making the sound and Cait's head were torn away.
Heartbeat pounding, she renewed her abandoned struggle to escape, no longer willing to wait for the emergency crews, bizarre invulnerability or no. Her body shook and her muscles swelled with adrenaline as she strained like she was on the porcelain throne after a week long pizza party. Then, impossibly, she felt her right arm begin to shift in its casing of car parts. Just then, the final piece of ruined truck between her and something was torn away, and Cait screamed again.
"WHAT THE FUCK!?"
The thing tearing through the truck was fully unidentifiable, straight out of a creature feature set in Lovecraft. A central mass sent out muscular tendrils at random intervals, and those not currently occupied in digging towards Cait waved wildly in the air. A horrifying toothy maw, lined with jagged fangs and dripping drool, gaped wide just off center of the beast. That terrifying fanged abyss shook as the monster let out a shrieking hiss in response to Cait's scream.
The combination of the shock of the tentacle beasts appearance and the removal of more truck allowed Cait to finally wrench her right arm free of the wreckage and get it in front of her face, in what was certain to be a vain attempt to ward this thing off.
The beast hissed again, and its unoccupied tendrils waved even more animatedly as those it had been using to excavate reached down around her. Cait frantically slapped away what she could, but the thing had at least ten arms, probably more, and she couldn't do much more than keep them away from her face. Gaper's shrieking became more animated as she slapped at it, and Cait looked up at its…. face? in defiance.
"You think I'm just going out like some hentai bitch motherfuck-" she yelled as its tentacles overcame her meager defense, but cut herself off short.
She'd noticed something about the beast that was somehow even weirder than its actual eldritch appearance. Placed squarely on the top of its center mass, partly fused with Gaper's flesh, was a hat. To be specific, a red and white mesh-backed trucker cap, that proudly announced, in big black block letters, the wearer was a devout BREAST MAN.
Given Cait's anime-centric worries at the moment, that probably shouldn't have been comforting, especially as she felt BREAST MAN's tentacles slithering down past her shoulders to her trapped torso. But her restraint was justified when, instead of stuffing her tighter than the turkey in a turducken, it began to pull more pieces of the truck away from her.
Soon, with nary more than a jiggle of a boob by a tentacle that could totally have been an accident, Cait was free, and stood next to the destroyed truck. With a sickening slap, BREAST MAN fell to the ground and flowed over next to her, his main mass contorting so that his maw was facing the truck. For the life of her, Cait couldn't see any features on him but tentacles and mouth, but at this point, she had to assume the area with the toothy maw performed all the main functions of a face.
"So, uh…. Bad luck with the Bullshit wave huh?" Cait turned to BREAST MAN, and gestured at the shattered windshield of the truck, where the driver would have been sitting.
He turned to her, and hissed out a sound like…. Well honestly exactly the sound you would expect from something that looked like him. His tentacles waved wildly, and one hit his hat, which he tried to pull off and throw on the ground. This revealed that the hat was well and truly fused to him, the mesh flowing into his mottled purple flesh rather than having any kind of distinct border.
"I wouldn't take off the hat buddy," Cait chuckled, flexing the jacked arms she'd worked so hard for. "It's the only thing that kept you from the firing squa-"
"JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT!?" Cait was cut off for the second time in as many minutes, and looked over to see a, understandably, agitated ARMOR officer. He was fully decked out his namesake gear, and pointing an overcomplicated sci-fi ass gun at BREAST MAN. Clearly not thinking clearly, Cait raised her arms and stepped in between the officer and the creature, as the latter continued to hiss and wiggle, only more so.
"Wai-"
Third time. Couldn't a girl finish a sentence without being shot in the mouth? Because that's what happened. The jumpy officer's gun went off, and Cait took a Nano-Coat Plazload round right to the back of her throat. It promptly exploded, delivering its patented load of superheated expanding plasma directly down her windpipe.
Cait coughed, her breath coming out in colorful waves of the steel-melting vapor as she expelled it out if her lungs like it was no more than a particularly aggressive rip on your friend's bootleg vape. Eyes watering and mind reeling, she looked up to see the trigger happy ARMOR officer on the ground under another, larger, ARMOR officer.
"Dammit Collins!" the officer on top berated the man below him. "It took you less than a day after graduation to shoot a civilian! We're goddamn ARMOR officers, not the old-world police! You'll be lucky if you don't hang for-"
"Cough, hoooooo, uh, actually, I'm fine, officer." It was Cait's turn to interrupt. The larger officer cut off his rant, and Cait now could hear the other officer softly sobbing under him, along with BREAST MAN's increasingly agitated hissing and gurgling. The larger officer gaped at Cait, his bushy moustache framing his open mouth under the opaque visor of his helmet. He untangled himself from the smaller man and got up, planting a boot on the other officer's, Collins, Cait assumed, chest. He looked at Cait, the truck, and with a shudder, BREAST MAN, taking the scene in.
"Well… didn't know we had any civilian Altereds capable of taking a gravel truck to the face in town." He frowned, and Collins groaned between sobs as he pressed his boot down hard on his chest. "Much less one capable of tanking a fuckING ANTI KAIJU ROUND, COLLINS!"
His voice rose with each syllable of that last part, and he punctuated it with a stomp, eliciting a groan from Collins.
"Ma'am, I apologize on his behalf and assure you he will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I'm Officer Davis, supposed to be training this idiot, but now I guess I'm his arresting officer." Officer Davis was visibly saddened by that, but steeled himself, and turned his attention towards BREAST MAN. "I'm using context clues here, but it looks like your friend there is the driver of this vehicle?"
Cait looked at BREAST MAN, and for the first time she saw his mouth close, forming a jagged line of teeth that managed to impart a frown of concentration as he stilled his tentacles. With some effort, he managed to raise only one, balling up the end before poking the tip out of the top of it in a remarkably good impression of a thumbs up. Officer Davis sighed.
"What a shitshow." He shook his head, pulled his comm to his face and muttered something Cait didn't pick up. "Alright. Ma'am, Sir, I've got AEGIS on the way. Since you're both Altered, this is their wheelhouse." He looked down with no small amount of pity at BREAST MAN. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry for what's happened to you, Sir. Suppose that's just the Way of the Waves sometimes. I'll let the EMTs check you out now."
Cait had been vaguely aware of more flashing lights and people around, but her cone of attention had been pretty laser focused, first on the plasma in her throat, then the ARMOR officers responsible. Now, a team of EMTs approached, a man and a woman carrying a stretcher between them as well as the dawning realization it probably wouldn't be needed.
She's cute….
The thought wormed its way into Cait's head before she shook it away. It was true, the EMT was a petite, athletic looking blonde with the look of perfunctory competence that always seemed to follow her profession. Cait normally would absolutely have gone for that, but overactive libido or no, she couldn't go lookin' for love at the scene of an accident she was actively involved in.
"Hello!" The woman smiled at Cait but quickly looked away after meeting her eyes, found BREAST MAN, and hurriedly looked back the other way. Cait noticed her partner was looking basically anywhere but at her or her betentacled friend as well, although as Cait looked between them she saw him quickly glance away from her a few times.
Not wanting to look at BREAST MAN, when he hadn't pulled you from the innards of a truck engine at least, I can understand. But last time I checked I was *everyone's* type.
Her mind catching up to reality, it dawned on her what forcibly entering the engine block of a truck, being ripped out of said engine block, and then shot would do to a modest Iowa girl's outfit. She looked down to see her tanktop was fully shredded, and hadn't even had the decency to drape in a way that hid her nipples, so her big ol' cornfed couple was on full display. Her jeans had fared better, and the tight athletic briefs she wore underneath were mostly intact, but the overall effect was one of a ravaged adventure magazine heroine that the censors hadn't gotten a hold of yet.
And officer Davis never batted an eye. A true professional.
She grinned, and caught the female EMT's eye.
"No worries!" She said cheerfully, "I'm not shy."
She gave a wink to the man as well, just for the sake of mercy. They both sputtered a bit, the normal solidity of EMTs in an emergency skewed since there didn't actually seem to be an emergency, and the pretty lady with her tits out didn't seem to be worried that her tits were out, or worried about the eldritch terror in a rude trucker hat waving its tentacles around next to her.
Quickly though, they pulled themselves together, and led the odd pair over to a waiting ambulance, introducing themselves as Heather and James. They moved to get Cait settled on the bumper of the vehicle with the shiny blanket and juice, just like in the movies, but she noticed they were avoiding doing anything with BREAST MAN. Shrugging out of the blanket, Cait walked over and picked the lil' guy up, who promptly pulled his tentacles in tight, looking for all the world like a terrible, unusable, purple, and very toothy dodgeball with a hat on.
"James right?" Cait smiled at the man as he boggled at her handling the terrorbeast. She held BREAST MAN out to him. "This is my buddy BREAST MAN, just met him tonight. He's been in an accident, I know you're probably not trained on the anatomy of…. him, but I'd appreciate it if you could give him a once over. He pulled me out of that engine block over there."
Snapping out of his stupor, the EMT took the little ball of toothy terror, and keeping it at arm's length, did manage to get him into the cab of the ambulance and began to, confusedly, examine him on the stretcher.
"Shit, sorry" Heather said, shaking her own head and looking Cait in the eye with renewed focus. They were blue. Striking, clear, icy blue. "It's our first shift during a Bulosi wave, they tell you to expect the unexpected but…" She waved first at the ruined truck, then into the ambulance cab where BREAST MAN was presenting his tentacles to James one by one for inspection. Cait noticed there were actually already two bandages on different appendages, and her estimation of James' dedication to his craft skyrocketed.
Heather motioned to wave towards Cait as well, then looked back to her, and her eyes quickly flicked downward and back up to find Cait's cheekiest grin. She blushed hard, but impressively kept her eyes locked on Cait's.
"I know you're on the job, but you can call them Bullshit waves. Everyone else does. Cause, you know…" Cait repeated the same series of motions Heather had, ending with a gesture down towards herself like she was presenting the grand prize at a game show. Heather gave her the universal look for 'Really?' but it looked like her blush might have deepened just a shade.
"Riiiight." Heather said, drawing the word out. "Anyway, I gather you're an Altered with some degree of enhanced durability, however, we should still really get you checked out. There's a whole spectrum of enhanced durability covers and nothing says your liver isn't shutting itself down from internal hemorrhage right now."
Well, that was a sobering thought. But Cait felt good. Better than ever, in fact. Who knew, though, maybe that was her body giving her a pleasant send off. She worked with plants, not people, she wouldn't know shock if it bit her on the ass. As was her custom, Cait let off some knee jerk flirting in response to pressure.
"Oh, you're just now going to start checking me o-" she started before Heather waved a finger in front of her face.
"Ah! You really think that would be the first time I'd heard that?" The cute EMT met Caits eyes, one plucked eyebrow cocked and a smirk on her face that said maybe the flirting wasn't as unappreciated as her words made out.
First time you've heard it from me… Cait let the retort stay a thought.
Heather had quickly switched gears into business mode, and was closely examining Cait's body. Her expression grew more and more confused as she examined every inch of Cait's exposed skin, which, given the state of her clothing was quite a bit, and found not so much as a scratch or bruise.
"Huh. Well, your exterior is disturbingly untouched for someone who just got hit by a truck. Lay back here, I'm going to put some pressure on a few points and you let me know if there's any pain," Heather instructed. Cait complied, settling back onto the cold floor of the ambulance. As she laid back, she noticed that James seemed to be done with BREAST MAN, who had a few more bandages but otherwise looked comfortable in a shiny blanket, the straw of a juice box pointed into his gaping maw.
"Need any help Heather?" James asked, and Cait turned her attention back to the girl. Heather was bent over Cait, her fingers hovering right over Cait's toned stomach. Cait knew that look in her eye, and allowed herself a satisfied smile. Heather shook herself out of it, told James she was fine, and resumed her examination. Cait's abs twitched at her touch, and she felt blood start to flow south, engorging the special equipment that was supposed to mean she was immune to the Bullshit Waves.
Whichever doctor in the betting pool had me getting a big fat dick by being Altered in the womb is gonna lose some money if they ever find out.