Patterson: A Heart as Warm as His Padding

Story by FeralDerelicte on SoFurry

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#28 of Kioga

(as per my last journal, it's a bit short of 60 pages, as I've split the story into two complete sections. This one is a lovely little 35-page short story)

Patterson, the young, hung, married diaper-otter has a life full of fun and games. Fun with his two spouses, games with his stepchildren.

At the office after filming a commercial, however, Patterson finds that fun and games carry their own risks.

(as per the tags on the side, yes: things get pooey. If that's not to your taste, that's okay: I don't like the taste, either.)

Features homosexual and bisexual encounters between consenting adults who occasionally use their urethras and rectums for both purposes ... within minutes of each other.


Patterson lay, quite literally, in the lap of luxury. Reclining on an Emperor-sized bed, its waterproof and odorproof mattress provided by American Apogee, premier diaper manufacturers that had finally put the United States back on top as an industrial nation (leave the steel and coal to China), the otter with the emperor-sized endowment saw the glans-crowned erection of his cobra husband Clark press up against the front of his cozy diaper, bending the swollen, moist padding inward.

The golden-scaled reptile, odd for his exo-abdominal testes in a smooth yellow sac and his singular, pink-colored penis, teased his young husband's nipples while down between both their shins. Their mutual rabbit wife Susan alternated between suckling on Clark's balls and shaft and nuzzling Patterson's impressively large diaper, which had been thoroughly used by all three of their bladders.

"Shoot, ahh," sighed Patterson, feeling laxatives working through him as the hefty tube of flesh between his thighs came to life in his padding, "this is fantastic, but how's this gonna work with my dingle trapped in protective underwear?"

The rabbit grinned, stroking Clark's penis before pressing it against Patterson's diaper and giving it a long, firm lick. The otter hissed with pleasure, watching his wife lavish over both of them. Her breasts hung from her chest, big and swollen and squishy like his own diaper, leaking milk like the otter was leaking precum. She'd not touched it, but between her thighs drooled that pretty pussy that Patterson and Clark had put pups and snakelets into a few weeks back, an amazing sperm race that awakened both males' inner instincts.

What a creampie night that was: after Clark and Patterson had simultaneously pulled out of her cum-drunk cunt, the males masturbated each other into a frenzy, paws drooling with each other's spunk, then took Susan's other two holes, her ass and mouth, and pumped those full until she was burping, farting, and pissing cum. A pacifier and diaper kind of helped, but the sight was so sexy that in the morning, the males tore two holes in it and fucked her until piss and a cream-colored log fell out of her and into the ruined strap of her protection.

The DNA test came back that Patterson had won. A father, how fucking amazing that was! And Clark, of course, complained that Pat's ten-inch monster had gone right up into her uterus; had probably flooded her all the way to the ovaries. That she'd be putting pre-fertilized eggs into her womb until she'd need fifty life-support machines hooked up to ensure that her enormous litter came out okay. Clark was a writer for their company's advertising and brand-new sitcom department (called shitcoms); he wasn't realistic.

Susan put Clark's balls into her mouth, humming deeply as her nose rubbed up against his prick, pushing that prick against Patterson's own, through the diaper. Patterson grunted, grinding himself against Clark's stomach as his huge pillow of protective undies swelled even further, stretching so much that it crinkled.

Patterson gasped as he farted right against Clark's stomach, but the cobra merely grinned and slipped his forked tongue into his lover's ear. "Aren't you a talkative one?"

"I haven't said anything," the otter gulped, feeling his guts and his prick throb with content.

"Sometimes it's hard to know which end of you is speaking," purred Susan, moving on to Clark's shaft, the plump rounded tip, and suckling on it while nuzzling Patterson's tent. "It all sounds the same."

"Oh, play on!" groaned Patterson, wincing as his diaper stretched less than the throbbing rod beneath, the tapes straining. "You're saying that crap falls out of my mouth?"

Clark chuckled and started massaging the otter's stomach, his little earholes twitching as his young husband's guts gurgled. "You do talk like a Democrat," hissed the snake.

"Oh, I'll give you free shit," growled the otter, biting his lip as his tailhole pulsed.

Susan chuckled, stroking her snake husband's wet cock until his fangs came out and Clark gasped. The head swelled to the size of a ping pong ball and squirted a jet of clear fluid across her face, landing on her closed eyelid. "No politics at the dinner table, boys. Don't be interrupting my buffet of beautiful male musk."

Clark held onto Patterson tight as Susan went down on him again, the slick, wet walls of her mouth engulfing his whole length. Her buck teeth coyly scraped across the top of the shaft, lending a keen little pain to an otherwise fully pleasurable embrace. The pleasure of his husband seemed to transfer from Clark to Patterson, and as the otter felt his back door bending outward with an embarrassingly large load, his diaper bent uncomfortably forward with a colossal cock demanding for release.

It didn't help that while his wife was sucking on Clark, her forehead was rubbing right against Patterson's giant piss-bag. "Look, I'm gonna last forever," said Pat, his heart throbbing at the same rapidity of his winking anus, gas escaping from him in muffled blurts. His farts got deeper and deeper in tone, and even through the baby powder and pee, he could smell, nearly taste, the visceral stink of his digestion. "Cause while this feels amazing, there's a solid two, three inches of cock-absorber between those sweet, slutty lips and my cunt-slayer."

Susan giggled, licking her fingers with a combination of Clark's precum and her saliva, then slipped it into the snake's naked hole. The cobra groaned with pleasure, humping at Pat's diaper and thin air, jostling the otter's stomach and making him groan. Pat blushed as he felt the head of a turd spread his hole a full two inches, already filling his nose full of stink: not to mention his husband and wife, who loved him almost as much as they loved making their little egoist embarrass himself on his hyped-up bodily functions. His cock was huge, his dumps were huge, and he could still fuck both of them to orgasm while his tighty-whities were sagging down with enough content to make a turd football.

"If there was ever a pornographic pro-wrestling league," Susan sighed, pistoning her fingers in and out of Clark's asshole, her other paw stroking him until his thighs were spread wide and he was moaning like a gay bottom, "I'm sure you'd be a star, Pitty-Pat. You talk such a big game."

"And I play a big game, too!" protested the otter, sweating as his turd teased in out of him, his brain begging him to dump into his diaper. Susan gave him a patronizing nod as she nuzzled the front of his diaper, her lips wet and her nose causing crinkles as she moved against the otter's prodigious padded protrusion.

It didn't help that his husband was arrested into hypnotizing throes of pleasure, undulating beneath him and groaning as the rabbit used the private parts of his pelvis like a playtoy. Soon she was going down on Clark again, tantalizing slurps and slick saliva squelches coming from his hips. Her head rubbed against Patterson's diaper, causing his cock to throb in its wet, swollen prison. His guts gurgled again, and the otter hissed as his rectum clenched again, the brown line steaming and ready to leave the station. Its engine slid out of the tunnel with the light of his diaper shining on its cab.

Still, Patterson concentrating on humping against Susan's face as she sucked off Clark. When he looked down, the obscene white tent of his diaper blended perfectly with her beautiful white fur, and the beautiful lascivious sight of her gulping down Clark's cock while she pistoned her fingers in and out of his asshole brought even more vicarious passion to his chest and his loins.

He, by contrast, wasn't enshrined by a wet, warm mouth but by a diaper all three of them had used as a urinal. With Susan pissing down the front and Clark down the back, the otter's watertight fur served as an excellent channel to ferry all that waste to a more receptive material. These American Apogee diapers seemed to have more capacity than a pony keg, not that Pat knew much about drinking. All his brothers had gone to college and got sloppy and stupid on the stuff. Rumors abounded that his second eldest, Patrick, had even taken a keg enema and had to go to the hospital.

Rather than pumping his stomach, he had an enormously embarrassing incident with a bedpan. Most of the beer had made it into the echoing metal container; three large logs, however, stinking of beer and bar food, did not.

Susan's fingers then ran dirty as she dug deep into Clark, light brown mud smeared on her slender white fingers and plunging all three of them deeper into intimacy. The snake blushed--Patterson could tell by the change of his moans, as soon as Clark felt the slime slicken his ring and smelled his own stool. Susan let out a coy, pleasured purr as she sucked her snake husband's cock, right above his stink, and nuzzling her other husband in his big, swollen baby pants.

"Shit, I'm not gonna, God damn it..." Patterson hissed, feeling his climax mount in his cock, the organ flaring and buzzing, but when it tried to surge to its full length the diaper painfully restrained it. "My cock is too big," he groaned. Sweat accumulated on his brow, rolling off his dense fur. His guts bubbled and grumbled, the load within his colon tickling his rectum to the point that he was fighting his automatic processes with desperate manual clenches.

A loud, muffled fart rang out against Clark's stomach and was punctuated by a semi-solid blurt. Liquid squirted into the seat of Pat's diaper, and the otter groaned as his anus felt its own slickness. The sight of Clark's filth smudging Susan's fingers didn't help: now there was poop-empathy, and the cobra's cock was so pretty, pulsing and wet as the rabbit's lips went up and down.

"Darling," Clark gasped, "What are you digging for?"

Susan wiped her fingers all over the underside of his tail and shoved back in, making him yelp. "Both of my boys," she said, grunting as a brown rope fell from between her own legs, starting to coil up. "Let it all go."

"And your digestive system is top-notch," said Clark, grunting as he spurted pre into the bunny's mouth and her fingers came out of him caked in mud. "That's why you need an enormous diaper to handle all those beautiful endowments."

"That's not how it works," groaned Pat, vainly humping his diaper, chasing an impossible orgasm, then gasped as he felt and heard a wet and squelching mudslide underneath him.

Clark hissed, then cried out as his legs spread and from between his cheeks pushed out a fat, stinking log right onto the underside of his tail, then another one almost eight inches long, thicker and longer than he was. Seeing his husband's open defecation was too much, and Pat soon followed, his battle against his bowels lost. The otter let out a low groan that bottomed out in a growl as his guts clenched and his ring opened to his pure soaked padding, mess piling out of him and filling out his diaper. Weight and warmth spread his padded rear end, right against the cobra's broad chest.

It wasn't a series of logs as Clark had made, a third one stretching the cobra's alluring anus as it slid out of him, but rather a continuous cable of scat, a load that kept piling and piling until the back of his diaper was as stretched as the front. The rear leg guards swelled out and pushed against the back of the otter's thighs, and Clark clenched it, leaning up against it, his impossibly agile snake vertebra allowing him to bend double and kiss it as Patterson filled it.

"That's it, my dirty boys," purred Susan as both of them moaned, helplessly crapping themselves, "Make your little messies for mommy."

The rabbit capitalized on this double-ecstacy by plunging in on Clark's cock, throbbing in time with his releasing bowels, her chin scraping against a firm, fourth turd squelching out of him. This sent the snake over the edge, and Clark plunged deep against the seat of Patterson's diaper, smooshing his filth back against him. The otter groaned as he felt the snake's snout push against his shitting ring, then humped back and forth, against Clark's face, against his padded prison, scraping for that orgasm as his guts churned out pounds of filth, the diaper crinkling as it stretched.

Susan gulped down Clark's cum, the rabbit's cheeks bulging around a leaking smile. Her cunt pulsed in delight, laying out sticky syrup trails between her thighs, her anus winking as it pinched off another loaf to fall on the floor below her. With a quick claw, she slit the front of the otter's diaper and the beast was released.

The otter's near-footlong monster sprang from its confines, a lance piercing through his piss shield and into the cool air. Susan detached from Clark's spurting loins and tried to affix herself to Patterson's dangling post, her lips dripping in seed, but it only took the cool air and a few strokes for the otter to fire off.

Swaddled in filth, one side of the otter pinched off as the other unloaded, a great back-pressure sending a thick, heavy rope of cum splashing against the bunny's snout, and then another over her face like a can of paint, then another against her neck, her breasts. What had been stored in his bladder seemed to be redoubled with an impossible volume, all the anticipation and all the desire having been transformed into liquid sex, his cock pumping at such a rate that for a moment, Patterson swore he was peeing semen.

It tapered off once the bunny was glazed from her chest on up, and Patterson himself wobbled on top of Clark, stunned at the absolute disaster area of their bedroom. "What the fucking fuck," he groaned, staring at piles of feces, the loaded diaper around his hips, the beautiful degeneracy of all this sexual insanity.

Susan chuckled and cleaned her eyes, wiping teaspoons of liquid onto the floor.

"Great success, boys. You make a lady feel so lucky, having two adorable spunky, very spunky, strapping lads to indulge and be indulged by. Now," she said, standing up and stopping herself from wet-shaking like a pet dog, "I'll be the dutiful housewife and clean all this crap up. You both are so very welcome."

"I could go for a shower," said Clark, tapping Pat on the back to get him to dismount.

"Yeah, me too," said Pat, wobbling as he tried to counterbalance his soiled garment. "Then some cake, if we got any."

"I need to be going to bed," said the cobra, rolling the turds off his tail and then standing. "Big writer's meeting tomorrow. They're proposing a Kioga movie, but Mr. K is protesting the CGI required to regress him for the flashback scenes, and simultaneously protesting youthful stand-ins because 'they're not the right kind of bitchy. Looking for vulnerable, not entitled.'"

"Youths today," said the college graduate with a sigh. His elders both chuckled at him. "So yeah, I guess I'll see you guys in the morning? I might just read a book, then go to bed. Or--"

There was a distant, muffled bang, then the chirp and hiss of little snakes and rabbits flooding the atrium of their house.

"Or it's your turn with the kids!" laughed Clark, stealing a few wet-wipes to clean under his tail.

"Yeah, that's cool," said the otter, still waddling about in a diaper with his dick hanging out a hole in the front. "Let me just, yeah, not traumatize them. Say, you think I could stealthily wear--"

"No," said Susan, having already bundled up the bedsheets and piled their leavings in a bucket, then dumping those in the toilet.

"Mr. or Mrs. Kensington?" called a teenager's voice. "Or Mr. Kensington, you all here?"

Clark moved to an intercom on the wall, a cheap but efficient set-up that their computer nerd spouse had slapped together. "Hey there, Callie, just give us a few moments," he said into it.

A small boy's voice called out, "Why are they all in dad's workshop?"

"No, that's special time!" said a girl.

"All right, but the clock's still running while you, ahem, clean up," said Callie.

All three of them went red, the reptile especially. Susan pushed on, ripping the diaper from Patterson's waist, balling it up, and tossing it out the back door, in a secondary, locked trash can behind the house.

"So no stealth diaper?" asked Patterson.

"Absolutely not," said Clark, opening the rear window and putting in a box fan to get the outhouse stink out. "This is where we have to draw clear dividing lines. We need retaining walls."

"Like a diaper, right?" said Pat.

"The opposite, actually," said Susan. "Diapers keep things in, whereas around the kids, we keep things out, away from them, while their minds are still developing."

"You wouldn't put a diaper on while it's still hot molten plastic at the factory," added Clark. "Besides, I bought the new Clowns and Castles. You love those shooter-RPG games; I read the new one hired a few novel writers instead of Twatter bloggers."

"Ah, pity. I was hoping everyone would be lesbians and cuckholds like in Blunderlands 4," snarked Pat. "But thanks, that's amazing, even if the game was published by BlizzEAgle. Pride, accomplishment, no Hong Kong," he counted on his webbed fingers. "God forbid they mandate web-cams for 'behavior checks.' How'd you know my PC account?"

"Oh, no," said Clark, tossing a pair of briefs, shorts, and a t-shirt on Pat's side of the bed. "For the PlatStadiums we have in the living room."

"Christ," grumbled the otter, wrapping his clothes up as they moved to their newly renovated shower, "Consoles. Using twiddly little joysticks to move my character the same way a drunk stilt-walker tries to move through a SEAL obstacle cour--"

"Patterson?" Susan asked with a warning tone, tapping her ring finger against her thumb.

"Yeah, yeah. Agreement to mutual support. The noble, giving bond between lovers and, of course, the life they build together. Raising young minds in hopes they might not be as crazy as me, or forbid, Mr. Perry. The skinny one. We need retainers. Boundaries, for those who don't have them already."

"And the home you build within them," said Clark, tapping Pat's rump on the way to the shower.

"Love you guys."

"Love you, too, Pittypat. We'll take our little boy out later."

"Who, me? I mean, why don't we draw straws? You or dad--fuck--Clark could be the baby."

"Could you handle both of us?" asked Susan.

Pat's dick sprang from its sheath, and slapped his thigh as he leapt forward. "Fuck, why not! That'll be a big stroller, though. A heavy one."

"We'll steal the motor from a mobility scooter."

"Do you know anything about engineering?" Pat asked, turning the water down from the cobra's favorite: coffee-hot.

Susan slipped past them, ever so pretty with not the littlest bit of brown between her cheeks. Her top cheeks, however, were covered in husbandry sauce. "Well, ever since Clark got into the girly habit of magazine-writing, I figured a woman's place was in the garage."

"Where're you from, Sue?"

"Mississippi."

~~~

The shower was gently professional, as if the three of them had just come in from a football game. Their naughty bits were all hanging out, but they were just another piece of skin to wash up.

"You ever think all-gender bathrooms are gonna work?" asked Pat. The water, shampoo, and muck washed quickly out of the otter's fur, even faster than Clark with his scales.

"I don't think public bathrooms are going to work soon, what with everyone fucking everyone else," the cobra returned, applying a cream to assure he wasn't walking around with a butt armored with razor blades. "Used to be a time you could shower with your children, with--"

"Boundaries, right," said Pat, "You think this was started with F-C? Or when Walmart started stocking diapers in the underwear section?"

"Considering the commercials I write?" said Clark, "Where you can hear about the new work-life improvement aide right after your morning news?"

"'Pass-Thru,'" quoted Susan, handing Pat a towel as the otter hopped out and started throwing on normal clothes, "'Gets you going so you can get going. Keeps you going all day so you can, too.'"

"Really, Xian's incontinence spray?"

"Don't need to worry about bathroom breaks when your body's doing it by itself."

"Then a diaper change with your meal break," added Clark.

"Considering American Apogee's newest patent, Desert Storm, it might last your entire shift."

Susan and Clark dried themselves off, then started brushing their teeth, which couldn't be more different: Susan had that beautiful slat of buck teeth in the center of her gums, whereas Clark had four fangs the size of severe tire damage spikes.

"I just don't know," Pat said, "This Land of Opportunity is turning into the Land of Opportunism. Just like people blowing up on burgers, getting really big. Smoking vapes until they explode, playing games until the devs turn them into pay-to-play grindfests, watching porn that gets weirder, incestier, shittier, younger. More and more and more of everything, quicker and quicker: every drug harder, faster, stronger, until gay shock treatment just sounds like a fun night out. We're gorging ourselves until every simple delight just turns into slop we shovel in. And while it all ends up as big, stinking turds, it doesn't have to start as shit going in ... hell, that spray turns diaper-play into a cynical workaround, and a potion for automatic pleasure, turning our bowels and bladder as numb as our brains."

"Funny how the closer we get to Heaven, the more like Hell it seems," said the snake.

"All counterfeit," countered Pat, "Not a stairway to Heaven, but an escalator to paradise bought with Monopoly money. All that glitters is fool's gold. And the closer we get to this paradise, the more we realize it's the other fucking way. The paradise we built isn't a place of respite and celebration, not a sanctuary to ourselves, but a factory to recreate the chemicals we ourselves produce. All the effort we put in; like a Frankenstein monster that never comes to life. More blood, more sweat, more tears, and it just becomes a congealed biohazard pile. It's fake ... we can never enjoy it. All counterfeit. We never put any love into it; why would it love us back?"

Clark yawned, and Pat suppressed a squeak of horror as the cobra's jaw unhinged, creating a wet, pink cavity the size of the otter's head. "Well, son--"

"Dear."

The cobra chuckled. "I suppose that depends on what kind of diaper you're wearing. You're so young. And therefore, you're ready to climb that staircase that your wife and I are already on. How about you enjoy what we have, because it is good, and you go out there and enjoy some video games. Because they're good."

"Console games," The otter grumped, wrapping his penis under him as he pulled his briefs on, waiting for it to retract. "I'll make sure your children are good, too."

"Our children."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm blessed. Bless this mess, am I right?"

Susan snuck up behind him and clenched his rump with both paws. "With your mess, we're always blessed."

The otter blushed, biting his lip as the bunny's claws bit into his butt. "Save the dad jokes for dad. I mean our dear husband Clark."

His wife kissed him on the cheek, then patted his lower cheeks. "Get going now, Pittypat."

~~~

Pat came out and all five of them were on their phones, babysitter included. As soon as the otter appeared, the babysitter thumbed at her screen, then flipped over to the KidsKare app. She was chewing gum, an attractive young tiger whose looks were spoiled by a petulant impatience. Pat wondered how he'd already inherited his spouses' boomer mindset, but she looked like a baby in the middle of soiling its diaper. A crinkled complexion uncomprehending its conflict.

"That's thirty-five minutes of overtime," she said, chewing with an open mouth.

Pat's eyes widened. "God, we were in there that long?" he said to himself, then cleared his throat. "Overtime? You clear this with the parents, Callie?"

"You are the parent," she said with a withering condescension, like a special-needs caregiver with the greedy dreams of a Hollywood baroness. How could life be so unfair to force her to deal with this retard? She should be licking caviar off the cock of a horse billionaire!

"Right, right," he said, then folded his arms. She couldn't have been six years his younger, yet they were generations apart. "Why is this overtime? Are the Kensington kids a full-time job?"

"Time spent beyond the agreed limit," she said, then blew a bubble and snapped it.

At least she had good business savvy. A deal's a deal upon closing time. Don't be bargaining for work already done.

"Yeah, that's fine."

"Sign here."

"I have to sign for my kids?!"

The four children looked up from their screens with blank, lukewarm stares. He understood they didn't love him yet ... if ever ... and they didn't have to. They were well-behaved kids going to decent private schools: Clark and Susan had been generous people for thirteen years, parents for twelve. But now their kids were all playing goddamn mobile empire-builder games with microtransaction buttons as large as their thumbs.

He'd review his spouses' accounts.

"So hey, you guys wanna play Clowns and Castles?" he asked as he took Callie's phone and signed her charges. He jumped when he saw the figure--maybe they should start shopping around. Find neighbors or immigrants. The KidsKare app was fantastic in uniting teens looking for prospective work, an Uber for babysitters, but considering the "enthusiasm" of all their workers, it didn't seem that KK was paying them terribly well.

Convenience charge, Pat reflected as he handed back Callie's phone, twitching as the atrium's light caught all of her finger's oily prints on it, making it look more like a tin of vaseline. KidsKare just like those mobile games. The end product was kinda crappy, the workhorses behind the product were paid crappy, but the middleman--that fucking middle man who "delivered a service" like a pimp--made out paw-over-fist because the user, the sucker, didn't want to lift more than a finger to get it.

The competition of the market wasn't based on the quality of the product, but the quickness of the convenience: the winner was the one who could quickest separate the user from effort. A fool and his agency were soon parted.

So the customer got a crappy product, the worker got a crappy paycheck, and the pimp that united them snuck off with everything. Pat looked to the braided band on his finger, if just to find himself a moral focal point, an anchor. The band was pure white for Susan, gold for Clark.

If F-C started a diaper delivery service, or worse a changing service, some sniveling wretch would make out like a fox in a chicken coop. Green flashed in his eyes. Perhaps it could be him. No, no. He couldn't destroy the faith built up within Ferris-Chalmpers, no matter how lucrative a delivery service he could make. If he paid his workers well, above the rate of all those other delivery services, perhaps he'd get the best drivers. The best caretakers.He could be a proper capitalist if he didn't get greedy. Weird thing to say. Then his kids could take over his division, and inherit a beautiful machine of both revenue and customer faith.

Pat glowed with confidence and charity, but was shocked by a cold realization: how much did they know about what their parents did? It'd be embarrassing, especially to all their friends, even if they did inherit a diaper empire. Then again, diapers were becoming more normal, a simple indulgence like a good whiskey. Places sold them, and people were wearing them.

Were they wearing them for comfort or convenience, Pat thought with a shock. Were they just another luxury that softened the brain, dazing it, and then when that daze was over, leaving nothing but a pile of crap to deal with? No, Pat thought, diapers were more moral than that: there was a direct cause-and-effect with them, a contract signed when the tapes were placed. They would enjoy it and they would handle the consequences. Diapers were beautiful, because they were planted in honesty.

America was getting weird.

"Kids, no phones inside the house after eight," said Pat as Callie left. "Whither, Thither, Thence, Fortnight, let's go play a real game. Those phones aren't going to clap at your graduation or visit you in the nursing home."

Thither, the youngest male rabbit, cast him the same withering glance that the babysitter had. "You don't know that. Automation's coming."

"Oh yes," said Pat, helping them with their coats, "People are really going to want a world of vending machines."

A shiver ran through him. Remembering his time at the casino Fart, with the slot machines and even the robot blackjack dealers, and then at Wight Dungeon, the burger joint, the otter recalled a lot more screens than he did employees. Happily, however, was the fact that everyone seemed quietly miserable without live contact. Maybe automation, when fully implemented, would be regarded with the same disdain as yearly checkups and paying utility bills. Or having to wear diapers when having a severe stomach flu. Conveniences were great for ugly necessities, yes, but not for little pleasures. Computers didn't understand little pleasures, like cuddling with one's partners around a fire all padded up. Or crinkling around a computer game that had crunchy combat and snarky writing.

Pat jolted, feverishly spinning his ring around his finger. If one was able to automate game programming, then one of entertainment's biggest industries was fucked. If they found the common denominator to basic pleasure, then every game was just a spreadsheet of loot-and-action quotas. People would pay for this sudden convenience, and then too late would they realize it was just a foil-thin façade: that the games were programmed to manipulate them.

It was the facsimile of pleasure, of fulfillment: a facsimile of life.

It was hard being an optimist in this digital age, but Pat was young and stubborn enough to hate everything he didn't like.

"Dad never gave that rule," quipped Thence, the older female rabbit. "Is this a power-play?"

"This one did. It's after eight."

"Ask the real ... I mean the other dad," pursued Whither, a young female cobra.

Patterson bore the blow, appreciative that the little snake was trying to be polite over her natural bias. "We'll make a bet," said Pat, "I'll give you all cash cards for your little mobile games if either one of your lifegivers don't back me up."

"How much?" she asked.

Pat scanned her. If they'd been spoiled, he was in a world of hurt. If he overestimated, however, now he was the spoiler. On the other hand, if he undershot, then he was just some poor dumb 'boyfriend' that the parents picked up because they didn't love each other anymore. Patterson was an invader. Pat chewed it over, analyzing the quality of their clothes, their phones, the conditions of each, and just how bored they seemed with the world, with banalities.

Their clothes were good, but not fashion-brand. That was good, because they were ages 8 through 12. Their phones were nice, but not the retro-chic Apple Oofphone with its chunky brick screen. Neither were the phones particularly large. Two of them had hairline cracks, meaning Clark and Susan hadn't immediately replaced them.

"Twenty."

The children gasped.

Jackpot.

"Don't be mean, he's trying," said Fortnight. The eldest, a male cobra, was also the meekest: perhaps it was because he had a rabbit's fur frill around his hood, and the kids at school teased him for what would turn out to be stunningly handsome as an adult.

It occurred to Pat that, of the Kensington children, the rabbits were the more assertive ones, bordering on jerk territory. Strange juxtaposition, but then again cobras did have two dispositions: sleep, and strike.

"Authority through bribery?" challenged Thence, putting her fists on her hips.

"You're being petty," begged Whither. It was the first time a cobra looked cute, though she looked funny in a blue cornflower dress. Frilly lace and scales didn't click.

"No, hold on," said Thither, narrowing his eyes. "He's smart. He's got our attention." It was the first time a rabbit looked malicious. This kid would grow up to be a great lawyer, like Lasmo.

"So how 'bout a real game?" Pat asked triumphantly.

The kids grumbled and handed him their phones. All of them except for Fortnight's were desperately low of charge and caked with fingerprints. It took all his effort not to clean them right here, right now. He did, however, run to the living room station to charge them all.

The game booted up on a veritable battlestation of a setup, three TVs and three consoles with oddly dusty controllers. Each of them took one. The screen was split on the two side stations, with Pat taking the main TV all to himself.

"Why do you get the main TV?" Asked Thither.

"You know what? Fortie here was the most mature and pleasant. He gets the main TV."

"Thank you, sir," the fur-lined cobra said.

Pat briefly regretted it. Fortnight was mild-mannered, but if such mildness was constantly encouraged, he'd turn into a fur-lined doormat.

The kids were all marginally familiar with the operation of the PlatStadium, though none of them could fully grip the controllers. Puberty was still a year or four away.

Whither, of all people, was the fastest, the little girl snake getting into the menus, creating her character, and then starting the tutorial.

"You can teach us how to play," said Thence, the female rabbit skipping through everything.

"Hopefully I read everything right," said her sister with a smirk.

"There's a story?" complained Thither. "Hero wins because the villain was too stupid. What's the point of this, again?"

"There's loot," Pat said with a roll of his eyes.

"Ah, no prob," said the male rabbit, leaning into the screen. "Shoulda led with that."

Lawyer for sure.

They started the game and all the players were in place: Whither jogging through the tutorial, her snake brother Fortnight trying to keep up, while the two rabbits Thither and Thence were caught up in arguing over the first gun and railstaff.

"Guys," said Pat, "they'll give you more as the game progresses."

"It starts at the start," countered Thither, grabbing the railstaff.

"I wanted the gun, but I wanted a choice!" said Thence, pouting as Thither ran ahead and skipped all the dialogue. "Chevalier is dead!"

"Chivalry," quietly said Fortnight.

"Did I ask you?" hissed Thence. She leaned toward Fortie, but she didn't raise her arm. Pat would have to watch her.

Fortnight's hood retracted, but he stayed put. "Now you know the word."

"And I look like a dunce!"

"You boldly made a mistake," said Pat, "and now you can do better."

"Boldly shit the bed," cackled Whither, who had already led her brother to the game's first mini-boss. Thence whined and set down the controller, hiding her face.

"No I didn't, it was the flu!" she whined.

Whither and Fortnight both got killed when the dragon-tank centaur killed the first with his breath and the second with his cannon.

"Guys, work together.C.C. tracks its players and demands great results, which comes through teamwork," he said, his ears going warm when he was suddenly talking corporate.

"Teamwork with a good head," countered Whither. "And not shitty panties."

"Dad!" complained Thence.

Pat looked toward the bedroom door, which was shut, then looked down at Thence. The rabbit was staring right at him, and this made him smile. He nodded at the young girl.

"Whither, we can all enjoy a good joke, but don't catch your sister in a moment of vulnerability. We can make fun of her in a couple of levels. I'm sure she's stocking up against you as we speak."

"Yeah, don't sandbag the jury with evidence not admitted in court," said Thither.

Pat's eyes bugged at the ten-year-old rabbit. Clark and Susan had him watching the right shows.

"But she did shit the bed."

"Thither, is that relevant to this case?" said the adult otter, raising his voice.

"No," Thither sulked.

They tried the dragontaur again, with the rabbits running circles around the cumbersome boss and the snakes hiding in cover, putting out tactical strikes. Railstaffs, guns, quantum bows, sap rifles, and tech punches rang out from the three TVs, and soon the beast was felled.

The game's main theme rang out, a cacophonous sortie of orchestral, choral, synthwave, and heavy metal that caught each of the four children in its different genres. Contrary to their dispositions, the rabbits enjoyed the orchestra and choral parts, while the snakes took pleasure in the electronic and harsher parts. It was cute to see them all dance in their seats, and then Whither reached for her controller. Pat caught her paw and the snake reflexively opened her maw at him.

"Are your brothers and sisters done?"

"Let's kick some ass!"

"Thither, Thence, Fortnight?" Pat asked.

The kids scrambled for their controllers and their gaming night began. The kids worked partly in cooperation, with Whither giving the smart advice and Thither trying his moments of glory. Thence tried to be her own leader, a rival to her sister, but ended up just riding Fortnight, which worked out reasonably well because he was analytical to the point of paralysis. Patterson inevitably gained levels ahead of all the munchkins, acting as the glue when Thither overreached herself or Thence hammered Fortnight to the point of distraction.

They made amazing progress, save for the times that Whither and Thence wanted to read the story, while Thither scouted ahead and Fortnight was buried in the weapon and armor menus.

Clowns and Castles was fantastic, a several-year development cycle funded by a AAA developer who, in the chaotic politics of the game development scene, took a middle-of-the-road approach of selling their base game at half-price, but furnishing several more copies at full price with an Ally's Starter Pack--a sort of "discount-pass" for the inevitable microtransactions, as well as a character pack and weapon pack. Clark had bought the Ally version three times over, and the boys grumbled as the girls burned all the free stuff in weapon boosts for Thence and pretty armor for Whither.

"Just like a lady," said Thither.

"I dunno," said Fortnight, a little sweaty and scratching himself. "Girls want cool stuff and pretty stuff. Not a bad idea. The armor looks cool!"

"Whether it does or not, they're trying for dependence. We never fully own the game," said Thither.

"What did I do?" asked Whither.

"I didn't say your name."

Patterson grinned the whole time, loving their banter as hours went into the night. Gradually the children grew sleepy, but then awoke again when they creamed through encounters and spent an effortless thirty minutes on an insane, technical boss. They died less and less, but even their deaths just brought more insistence.

Eventually, when fighting a Titan-Battleship from its inside and outside, Thither and Fortnight pulling stealth while the girls rained hellfire from cybernetic unicorns, they noticed a severe drop-off in quality.

"Pull the lever, Fortie!" said Thither.

"Drop the Titan's chest, I gotta get at its reactor!" said Whither.

Nothing.

Fortnight had frozen in place, controller in his hands, his eyes staring at the screen. Patterson leaned in as everything exploded on-screen and the kids grumbled. He waved his paw in front of the young cobra's eyes.

"Snakes don't have eyelids," assisted Whither. "Except other-dad."

The otter blinked. "Oh."

Pat nudged Fortnight and he stirred to life, promptly twitching and catapulting his controller. Thence was already in motion, knowing her brother. She caught it.

"I think it's bedtime, buckaroos," Pat said.

The kids complained, but after a few faulty stumbles they were caught. "Yeah, yeah," they grumbled, and helped each other to bed like a bunch of drunks after last call.

Fortnight hesitated by the door.

Patterson stood, groaning like Clark and Susan but not having the joint problems as an excuse. "Come on, buddy, let's go count some mice."

"Can I wear a diaper?" asked the twelve-year-old.

The otter jolted as if electrocuted. Did he know about his parents, did he look up the wrong website? "Uh. Are you having ... problems in bed? Sheets ending up wet, or smelly, or ..."

"Sticky."

Patterson's heart clenched and he took a long breath.

"And do you know why that is?" asked the otter.

The cobra hugged himself, staring down withblinkless eyes. "No."

The otter trembled, feeling a fluid would come out one end of himself or a solid, the other. He and his bowels were moved.

"It's perfectly natural," said Pat, slowly. He tried to put his paw on Fortnight's shoulder, but the snake slunk away, halfway curled into a ball. "You heard of snake acne?"

"Yeah, Jeffers has it all over his face." "It's similar. Your body's booting up some ... sub-class abilities and we all know the body can be a dirty thing. We can call it crotch acne--"

"What?!"

Patterson was an idiot, but seppuku would only traumatize the kid further. "Bear with me. We'll go into the long description further, you, me, your mother, and your father--"

"All of them?!"

Patterson sighed. "For now, let's just say that, just like acne, sometimes funny liquids will come from 'down there' and it's a pain in the butt and is completely natural, but hey all of life is like that but, just like Clowns and Castles, with hard work you get stronger and everything is fun again."

The cobra seemed to perk up.

"So why do you want to wear a diaper?"

"I don't want to shit the bed. With ... the new shit that I shit now."

Pat could see the cobra curling up on himself again. He took a slow breath.

"Your mother, your father, and I have some pull-ups ... because we thought it might happen."

"And you didn't tell me?!"

"We were saving it for when it happened. If it happened," he said, lying through his teeth. "And it's just like normal underwear, just has a little more cushioning in case something happens. If it doesn't, just put it away."

"Do I have to do this every night?"

Patterson shrugged. "Or you can wear your normal stuff and risk it. It's not that hard to do laundry."

"I'll ... I'll take the ..." the boy attempted, then hid his face in shame. He didn't have eyelids to close his eyes, the poor kid.

"Safety precaution?" Pat asked.

"Yeah!" the snake hissed, though his attempt to keep his voice quiet only focused it, making it slice through the air. The otter and snake froze, the mammal's ear and the snake's head poised for any stray sound.

Snakes were strange in the way they heard: they didn't have holes in the side of their head, but sensed vibrations with inner ears buried underneath skin and muscle. This, combined with the fact their eyes didn't move in their sockets, made it impossible to tell whether a snake was listening if its head wasn't turned right toward at a person. It was more the vibrations of the objects themselves, especially through walls and the ground, that helped them hear.

Funny enough, it meant that Whither, Fortnight, and Clark usually wore thin-soled shoes, and were partially deaf when walking on carpet. Their hoods helped catch the air vibrations of sound, but if it was a noisy environment, they either heard everyone's conversation or none of it.

But in a quiet house of hardwood and tile floors, that was another matter.

In a house of snakes and rabbits, everyone heard everything, and they were puzzled that, on late nights, Patterson's alarm woke everyone up except for Pat.

Fortnight talked so quietly that Pat had to read his lips, and then translate the movements to mammalian. The cobra didn't have any incisors to make distinct alveolar sounds, so "diaper" came out as "thiafer," as his lips did more of the work.

What Pat translated was, "Did they hear us?"

Pat mouthed back, "You tell me."

Fortnight put his head against the wall, his bunny-fur ridge softening the sound. "No movement."

They shrugged, so Pat got to work, stalking on stocking feet. He headed to the nearest stash upstairs, away from the young male's knowing. He skipped past a swath of baby-printed and ultra-capacity adult diapers, pacifiers, giant bottles, laxatives, rectal plugs,onesies, and more until he found the most boring pair of store-bought slip-ons and came back down. They'd bought them last week, and definitely not for their children.

He handed the thing over, his fur tingling from part-revulsion, part-empathy. If he had to wipe the kid's ass, he would, though he'd be gagging the whole way through it. This sort of bedtime accident was far and away from the decadent madness that he got up to with his spouses.

Boundaries.

"Can I throw it away in the morning?" Fortnight said as he took it, trying to open it as he would a bandage.

"Sure. Bury it, for all I care. We can talk more later, okay?"

Fortnight slinked back. "I want to forget all about it."

"You're not gonna totally forget it, but you'll realize this is just another step in living life. You 'forget' your accidents same way you forget your deaths in Clowns and Castles."

The snake nodded, and the smallest smile crossed his face as he clutched the white square. Pat inclined his head. "Say, why haven't we known your sheets have been ... you know. Messy?"

"It's not that hard to do laundry."

"Why didn't you tell anyone?"

The cobra gave him an exasperated, impatient glance, similar to the one Whither had.

"Point taken," said Patterson. "Bedtime?"

"Yeah, bedtime," said the snake. He turned to go down the hall, then lunged at Patterson.

This is it, thought the otter. This is where his fangs plunge into my shoulder, injecting venom that makes my body shudder and froth and I die. He no witnesses so he may keep his horrible secret of pubescent enthusiasm to himself. I can only regret that I've not time to run, for then my iniquity will indeed bite me in the ass. Foam and blood will erupt from my mouth, soiling his clothes, and one would think this evidence alone will be enough to convict him.

But then again, it's not that hard to do laundry.

Fortnight hugged him.

Puzzled at the warm, affirming emotion of protective affection, Pat froze for a few seconds, then hugged back. The snake was cold to the touch, a perfect sixty-eight degrees, "which is plenty warm while keeping an eye on the thermostat! We could only burn our foreclosure notices for so long."

Clark was a true dad.

"I'm so embarrassed," said Fortnight.

Pat shook his head and stroked the cobra's rabbit fur frill. "Trust me, buddy, you'll do a whole lot worse if you got any sort of ambition. People get strong when they bust their faces on the ground. True dignity is accepting the fact that failure is part of the process, and smiling despite your bloody lip. Anyone denying they're anything but perfect and pure is afraid of admitting they're a person, just like everyone else."

"So everyone's dirty?"

"Everyone makes mistakes," Pat corrected. "And it's only the goblins of the world that will define you by them. They have nothing better to do than to knock people down to their awful level. Funny enough, some of these goblins have high-ranking positions, but the rank itself is based on the same style of put-down. They're stacked up on a figurative pile of skulls, bastards to the core. Some people are pure evil, and most of it comes from pettiness. They don't know how to speak from the heart, build from the brain. They're afraid of themselves and, because they hate themselves, have a great suspicion of all people. But they're not people themselves, because they suppress their very soul. They're goblins. Stay pure, Fortnight."

Most of this went over the short boy's head, but as soon as Pat ordered him to be pure, the cobra nodded emphatically.

"Was I named after that awful game?" asked the snake.

"Back in my day," said Pat, which immediately made him feel old. It would only be fifty years and he'd be in diapers out of necessity. He might as well get the walker now, and an oxygen tank, too, because he'd smoked a cigarette once in college. "We had Minecraft."

"What?"

Kids these days. Pat was twenty-two, but already feeling sixty-five. He was a trans-boomer.

"Nothing. It was a game about building log cabins ... from an era when we lived in log cabins."

"So what do I do about..." the snake said, the garment rustling in his paw.

"Wisdom is in the recovery. You'll get through this and you'll be just as awesome as the people you trust."

"Like you?"

Pat felt a tear come to his eye but withheld it. He could bawl into his pillow later. The otter hugged him tight, squeezing until scales nipped into his fur, then sent him off to bed.

Wired from this immaculate revelation, with no work in the morning, Pat got himself a snack, a drink, and snuck another diaper from upstairs. Every crackle and rip of tape seemed to cut through the house's walls, but nobody stirred as he wrapped the thick plastic around his groin and then slipped on a pair of baggy shorts. As soon as the garment nestled against his undercarriage, a warm smile crept across his face, and as the otter made his way down the stairs, his bladder released, his penis pouring urine into his padding with a low hiss. The front filled out a couple of inches, and the heat from his musky pee radiated up against his sac and his pucker.

The otter swallowed, creeping the last few steps to the ground floor and checking both ways. If any of the kids caught him like this, that would be inexcusable. If Fortnight caught him, at least he could stammer out an excuse that sometimes he has problems, too.

Either way, it'd open a can of worms that would end in deep marriage problems. He chastised himself for being so greedy after being so charitable.

"Goddamnit, this is how Kioga and Lugo fell apart. One stress too many."

The two had yet to mention the divorce, or having gone through one. Neither one of them had asked help in moving. Though Lugo could lift a couch on his own, Pat and he were not on good terms--such will happen when you swallow a friend's wedding ring after sucking him off, taking his load in your face while you make a different kind of load--fat, smelly, and heavy--in the back of your swim trunks.

That was so hot, Pat reminisced as he crept and crinkled down the hallway, his tail twitching to make a new one right now.

And Kioga, well. Pat had yet to ask him if the cheetah blamed him for the death of their marriage. Lugo, of course, had been the initiator, but Pat never asked him if he was sure of it. If it would be cool, if it was totally acceptable.

Kioga would probably have to ask someone for help in moving, right? The moment he tried to pick up one end of a couch or lift a gaming chair, that compression of his abdomen would have him shitting his diaper right there, right then. And considering that cheetah had the metabolism of an Olympic swimmer and the body of a recovering prisoner-of-war, he ate big and made even bigger craps (getrekd, thermodynamics).

No movers he hired would tolerate a walking sack of shit (the diaper, not the male wearing it) following them around as they did their work. The one ABDL company that did, "Two Men and a Baby," didn't go into Leakguard because of those weird gangbangers that'd developed a soiling fetish. They'd be out on their front lawns, all the guys and one girl, drinking and smoking and making out while they took dumps in their underwear or sometimes, the lawn itself.

That commercial was going worldwide, too, even the civilized countries: Pat and Lugo (no contact between them) were presenters in different conference rooms. With the aid of an enormous dinner the day before and a gentle spritz of PassThru and of HardPress'd, the two were to get erections in front of a host of their colleagues, and in the midst of that they were to shit themselves, too.

Given Pat and Lugo's endowments, plus the medical trickery, there were going to be enormous lumps in both directions. Lugo was the poor, banal office drone that had just worn his boring briefs to work. Then, as the commercial went, in the middle of his biggest presentation, nature called on line 1, 2, and 3.

The wolf, not so much an excellent actor but suffering under real biological edicts, gets more uncomfortable during his presentation as first his pants get a wet spot right at the tip. Then, as his colleagues ask more and more questions, not real business talk but Hollywood business talk, the wolf's bladder releases and he pisses his pants, hot fluid soaking through his underwear and coating the crotch, turning it dark and shiny, then pouring down the insides of his thighs and showering down onto the floor, making a big puddle. He turns toward the board, his colleagues seeming not to notice, and tries to go on as if everything's normal, even as his shoes splish and splash and the pantlegs are trickling droplets from the cuffs.

Then the boss comes in, Evanstrom playing the stern bastard he is in real life, and this is just when the beautiful, shapely female Kyrie is asking a piercing question about last year's losses. Her shirt is open to the point that her breasts are brimming from her bra, areolas almost visible, and for an instant the wolf smiles and a lump forms in his pants. The room goes silent, and the tiger Evan sniffs the air. His ears are slowly turning, hearing a strange spraying sound, like water hitting canvas.

"Don't tell me you didn't read the report!" accuses the tiger, and while the wolf stammers for an answer, his tail raises and the commercial goes into slow motion. There's the echoing, thumping sound of a heartbeat, and amid the stress the front of the wolf's pants rise, and then keep rising, Lugo's thick canine cock stretching the front of his pissy trousers until the flap opens to show the stressed zipper teeth. The heartbeat increases, and then there's the downturn of a gurgle as he pees again, urine dribbling through the fly.

"Well, sir, of course I went over it, but this is a new year!"

"And how are you going to prevent the mistakes of last year? Where's that in this presentation? Did I miss it, or did you forget?"

"No, I didn't forget!" says the wolf, nervously thumbing through his notes, the thumping increasing in sound and frequency. "I just--"

"You're just making a mess of excuses!" shouts the tiger, and as his voice booms through the air, that gurgle turns to a splutter as a wet fart rips through the conference room. The wolf freezes as the fart bottoms out into a hiss, then a squishy crackling as the back of his pants stretch out and then sag down. Everyone in the conference room cringes and looks at each other, and the fennec sits up in her chair, pressing her breasts back into her shirt and buttoning it at up. She won't make eye contact, whereas everyone else is whispering and leaning forward as the seat of the wolf's pants distend and form lumps. A dark brown stain spreads as crackles and farts continue. The center seam stretches, and with a grunt from the wolf they rip open in the back, showing an ugly, malformed pouch of what used to be white cotton underwear.

Everyone gasps and Kyrie's chin presses down into her neck.

"Wait, I can explain!" says the wolf as he turns around, grunting again as his underwear stretches. He brushes up against the projector screen, smearing a giant sticky skidmark across his figures. He gasps and the front of his pants pop open, an enormous, soaked, and yellow tent emerges from the front, and with a moan and a howl it pulses and erupts, showering the inside of his underwear in sticky liquid that oozes out of the front. A few streams hit so hard that jets jump out the front, hitting the table.

"Well, you really made a mess of this!" says the tiger, and as a punchline, the waistband of the wolf's weak, cheap briefs breaks and a nasty brown mound splats behind his legs.

"American Apogee," says the commercial. "For when the shit you need to do isn't the shit you want to do."

There's a similar version with Patterson, but the otter is clean and cool throughout all of it. The beautiful fennec's breasts seem to pour out of her shirt as he presents, sliding out to the point that her nipples are barely contained.

Patterson's speech breaks up as there's a faint trickling sound, and the lump in the front of his pants seems to swell and round out. Nobody seems to notice but the fennec, whose breaths make her chest heave and her legs cross. Studious viewers can catch a puffy, crinkly strip of white over her crotch when she moves her knees.

The otter's presentation continues, his smile seeming to grow, and then his speech is interrupted again by a gurgle and a grumble. His tail lifts but his speech goes on, his voice a little strained amid accents of a soft, muffled crackling. The seat of his pants swells into a smooth, uniform lump, making his rump almost look muscular, and the tiger boss nods approvingly.

"Well, sir," says Pat amidst a grunt, then a relieved smile. "I think the strategy almost worked last year, but later in these slides you'll see the critical execution blunders. Here, actually, you'll see where the letter of the law betrays the spirit of the law."

Everyone claps, but a few coworkers near Patterson are wrinkling their noses. They first look at the otter, but he's so confident and handsome that it can't possibly be him. Then their blame is forgotten as Evanstrom says, "My goodness gracious. What is an employee of your dependable poise, tranquility, and assurance, not to mention your confident, dry wit, doing in a conference room when you belong in a board room!"

Then the American Apogee slogan goes, "For when the shit you need to do, is the shit you want to do."

As a final note, for countries allowing pornography, they're back in the conference room with Kyrie sitting on the floor, leaning against Pat's leg. Her skirt clearly shows her own diaper, round and faintly yellow in the front. Her breasts are out of her shirt, full and supple, and draped over one shoulder is the otter's proud, massive penis.

~~~

Pat went to the bathroom just so he could sit down. He still had his soiled diaper from the photo shoot; the otter just wanted a chair where his seat could sag out from under him. The scat already clung to him like a second buttocks, marking his shame with a hefty weight and aroma that made his toes tingle and his balls clench mere inches from the advancing mud. While he was reading the post, Kioga had crashed into the bathroom and attempted to use the urinal, but as soon as the cheetah lay eyes on that device of relief he flooded the front of his pants in a storm of profanity and urine.

Still, giving it the "old college try," even though he was halfway to thirty, Kioga unzipped his sodden trousers, fished his pissing worm out of his wetted briefs, and let the last pint trickle into the bowl.

"Trying to quit diapers, buddy?" asked the bathroom stall next to him. The cheetah's guts rumbled but he concentrated on the feeling of pissing in the open. He had acclimated himself for so long in peeing at-will (or without) into his undergarments that it felt alien to have his penis out in the open, deliberately eliminating liquid into a specific receptacle that wasn't his partner's mouth.

The cheetah looked sideways and saw a pair of ankles without a pile of trousers around them, the cuffs of the pants straight over some dress socks and shiny leather shoes. "Well, the same way an alcoholic needs to cut down on his booze, sure. Who is that? Don't you need to drop trou to take a shit? If you're just shitting in your pants, why go to the bathroom at all?"

The cheetah held his cock in one paw, and his other wandered over the wet spot on his pants, then the warm, wet panels of the briefs surrounding the base of his penis. There was a muffled fart which made the cheetah twinge, then grunt as his bowels rumbled and his dick hardened. Without looking, he didn't know if he was done peeing. The only muscles he knew were the ones that spewed kitty batter. At least he wasn't cumming his pants.

"Don't tell me you're struggling with substances, friend."

"Jesus Christ," Kioga groaned, "you have a bad year and everyone thinks you're a rope away from a corpse chandelier. I'm not your friend, guy, who is it?"

"No one special," answered the stall, which struggled with a soft sigh as a fresh turd slid out into his diaper audibly crinkling. Pat licked his lips as his padding stretched in the front, cock growing.

"Ah, Jesus, Pat, you nearly pissed me off, and I'm doing enough pissing. Drives me crazy when good samaritans waltz into my business like bored middle-class women 'helping' 'oppressed cultures,'" he said, releasing his dick to do scare quotes and as a result, pissing all over the floor. "God dammit," he said, the splatters echoing as he re-aimed at the urinal. "With this body, I swear I'm all bladder and bowels. I fill diapers as if I'm hooked to a keg and a garbage disposal. Fuck's sake. I'm not in the best mood; really," said Kioga, shaking his dick off and stuffing it back in. His penis released again, spraying into his briefs until a clear stream emerged from the bulge, and as he struggled to free his pissing hose, the cat let out a chain of cruelties so vile, that Pat could have sworn he was a rope away from making a different sort of corpse chandelier, one that involved ghost costumes and wooden mathematical symbols in conflagration.

"You got a tough fight, brother," said Pat, crinkling his nose as his diaper stink escaped. "Trying to fix your condition without medical assistance?"

"The medical assistance is what got me here in the first place," grumbled the cheetah, waving his paw over his own nose. "Christ, did you cut a hole in your diaper?"

"American Apogee's just like American car companies and console manufacturers," said Pat, scared to push again, his bowels twitching. "They have their years when their shareholders are watching, then they have their years of cutting corners to scrape more of a profit. Looks like this batch is their mediocre model."

"You might as well just shit your pants. Better for the environment. God forbid they start making paper diapers to save the turtles."

Pat's bowels took eminent domain and the otter moaned, opening his pants as his rectum pushed a long, thick log into a diaper becoming too big for his clothes. "You were saying about your medical condition?"

"Ah, yeah," said Kioga, slipping off his shoes and emptying them into the urinal. "Back when I was a kitten, I got punched in the gut so hard something burst. The doctors fixed it, but had me on painkillers so good and for so long that everything went numb. Honestly? If I take enough antacid, I could swallow a hotdog whole and get it back to you at 98.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Just rinse it off."

"It's a cool party trick; why don't you try it with hankies or a live animal?"

"I'm enough of a fucking circus," Kioga grumbled.

"So is that's what got you in a bad mood?"

"Saw the ex with Joe. They're happy, which is fine. Didn't mind that part."

Pat bit his lip as his ring pinched off, then stumbled to his feet, removing his own shoes so he could pull his pants off and walk around bottomless with his giant white sack of crap. Kioga stood in front of the urinal with his dick in his paw, concentrating on how his bladder felt. Full? Empty? Waiting for nice cushiony padding? He really was a diaperholic.

"The part I did mind," he continued, feeling his tail twitch as Patterson's load teased his nose, the crinkling of his movements echoing through the bathroom like shattered wine glasses, "Was that they looked at me like I was the fallen angel. Like I was some washed-up druggie they used to love in high school, like I was the one that ruined the marriage. Like--oh no--"

With a grunt and a groan, Kioga felt his bowels clench and his ring slide against a solid tube of matter, his gut forcing a hard log into his briefs that tented them backward before it broke and sat warm against his buttocks.

"Fucking hell, this ain't stopping," he hissed, then braced himself against the urinal, cock spraying another few tablespoons into the bowl, his pants falling to his ankles as a second rope, less firm than the first, poured out of him like soft serve, coiling and filling the back of his tighty-whities until they were as round and plush like a fully soaked diaper. "How in Christ's name am I this cursed?"

Patterson put his phone away, thinking of what to comment on what a few users were already calling the Clown Cataclysm, and walked out to a cheetah that had his forehead against the wall, his pants around his ankles, and a big brown pouch making out the back of his briefs.

He put his paw on Kioga's shoulder, blushing as he felt his disproportionately large endowment fill the front of his diaper. Part of him wanted to wrap his arms around Kioga's trunk, push his diaper against the cheetah's lumpy butt, and shower kisses on his cheeks. Then, perhaps, slip down the back of Kioga's briefs, lick the male's muzzle, and tease that shitter that'd already shat all inside his cute, cottony ... No. Stop it.

He was married: he'd only be fucking Kioga to make him feel better. He couldn't break that promise of safety and fidelity he'd made to Clark and Susan ... who were really gonna get it tonight. If he found Clark over lunch, then the cobra might find himself over the lunch table with a pair of makeshift assless khakis.

Freedom or safety ... Patterson thought. Value in, value out; could he make love with as two different couples? Was love created, or was it a finite resource? Life and time were finite ... He'd have to do the math: "Yes, my spouses, I did fuck Kioga in the bathroom. I eased my giant cock into his slick, shitty asshole and fucked him until cum coated the inside of his rectum and drooled down his thighs, then we showered and hid in a napping pod, where we cuddled in undies, which Kioga only peed once. We were two males resonating off each other, our fur tingling as we looked into each other's eyes, pressed our noses together, and even nudged our bulges against each other's. We talked about our dreams and we fucked a few more times. Kioga cums almost as much as he pees. But he and I are two sides of the same coin. I'm chasing perfection, while he's battling all his imperfections. Maybe there's a generation gap between us, but what I feel with Kioga is different than what I feel with..."

"Pat, you're staring into space. Even though I have a pile of feces in my pants, in plain sight for you or anyone else that walks into this restroom, this is the first time I feel uncomfortable."

"Shut up, I'm thinking," said Pat. His paw moved down to Kioga's tail, then cupped the warm, squishy, stinking brown pile hanging off the cheetah's rump.

The cheetah glared at him. "Somehow this feels as intimate as you cupping my balls."

"Then give me your consent or refuse it, asshole."

A light flickered in Kioga's gaze, and he looked down at the king-size protrusion in Patterson's king-size diaper. Honestly, the entire amalgamation looked like a regular bulge, in a regular brief, expanded under a lens. At that moment, Kioga understood the battle within Pat, and one welled within the cheetah: should he stop his friend, or catch a new boyfriend?

"I mean, if you need to warm your paw ..." said the cheetah.

The otter bit his lip as his heavy cock jetted splats of precum into his diaper. Pat's endowment was getting to be more of a curse, but then again, that was the nature of power. More of it meant higher stakes: huge successes and terrible failures. He was thinking of sex all the time. Hell: his first had been an extramarital affair with a sex-hungry wolf. Lugo had fucked his shitty asshole until the otter was squirting semen-diarrhea. Pat was part Kioga and part Lugo: he didn't know how much he liked it, or feared it.

He'd signed a contract with Susan and Clark: a promise of complete dedication for life. They would renegotiate the contract only if it was beneficial to all parties. Kioga around kids? The diaper would be discovered eventually, but medical incontinence was a valid excuse. All good there. Kioga could also be a wonderful person when shown love. He was just starved of it, which made him erratic.

So that was a giant maybe.

Then the general concept of polyamory. Could Pat love a person who might still fuck other people, such as that handsome gryphon, or that dragon back at the casino? Those, too, were wonderful people. Could Pat open the door to them, too?

The otter was massaging and squeezing Kioga's soiled lump like a stress ball, moving the squishy clay of his scat through his fingers, through the fabric. The cheetah was half grin, half fear: he didn't know whether to laugh or stand in shocked anticipation.

Patterson growled and squeezed extra hard, which made Kioga jolt as shit slid into the strap behind his balls. His cock twitched at the domineering, thoughtful male. For his part, Pat ran fuzzy math equations through his head. The strict selection of his spouses--none of whom would fuck anyone else--versus a freer selection of "fuck the people you respect."

Freedom or security, God fucking damn it ...

Kioga kissed him on the lips and Pat jumped.

"Whoa! I don't know, I don't know," Patterson exclaimed, stumbling. His cock throbbed and his bowels clenched, the heavy diaper exaggerating every movement.

The cheetah stepped out of his pants and draped them over the stall wall, turning to face the otter with a serene smile. "Pat, don't do it," he said with a beautiful, noble lift of his chin, "You're the type of person that wants the very best. Wants to obsess over a single point: craft a piece of existence beyond any other. In order to craft it, you must dedicate yourself to it."

"But I want you as a boyfriend!" Pat said, then gasped and slapped his paws over his muzzle. The one coated in Kioga's mess stung his nostrils, flooding his brain. The otter coughed, but he kept it there as punishment, choking on Kioga's fumes.

The cheetah stood lightly on his footpaws, elegant as an adonis in a dream. Patterson practically forgot the load of warm feces in the back of Kioga's undergarments, nor the dark yellow spot that dominated the male pouch in the front. Even his penis, hanging free, looked as part of a piece of art. "Let's go to the ultimate logical end: can you really dedicate yourself fully, heart and soul, to three individuals? This isn't a business where people come and go on different projects, as relevant to their usefulness."

"How's four too much, but three is perfect?" challenged Pat.

The cheetah chuckled, then from his pants he dug out a cigarette and lighter. He tucked his penis back into his briefs, then lit it, taking a drag in the office building. "I don't even think it's three, Pattycake. You married a couple. A unit. Clark and Susan, Susan and Clark: the two are inseparable."

Pat's jaw dropped. "Oh my God."

"Yep," said Kioga, casually eyeing the smoke detector. A digital readout made an LED frowny face, but it didn't beep. "Adding one more's just going to tip the scale."

"Then we can make a unit, and our unit can marry their unit!"

Kioga shrugged. "Why would we need another unit when we're a couple?"

"But you just said Susan and Clark is 1! Then we'd be 1! And 1 + 1 is 2!"

The cheetah grinned, chuckling softly. "You see how your brain is already doing cartwheels?"

"Yes!" shouted Pat.

"Your subconscious, like that smoke detector, is smelling something funny. And it's not just the shit in our drawers. To pinch it off: I hope Clark and Susan remain so possibly tight that neither of them minds if the other one gets that giant cock salami you call a heart. Also the giant cock salami. It's gotta be them or me."

The otter's heart twisted, turning cold and weak as the rejection rang immediate in his mind. "No, it can't ..." he stammered.

"I didn't say no, Pat. I'm just saying before you lies two different, distinct lifestyles, defined by the people you're attaching to, and found by the values in yourself with which they resonated."

"Would you agree to be exclusive until the end of time?"

A sad, pained smile crossed the cheetah's face. "To anyone who could promise me that, and deliver it? Of course I would."

"You're not making this easy."

"Easy is a video game tutorial. It's the foundational nuggets of gameplay that contain none of the expounded fullness the rest of the game offers. I'm endgame, baby. So what's yours?"

Pat felt tears come to his eyes, and he madly paced the restroom, crinkling and squishing and stinking and hurting and loving and wanting. "What a crossroads. And I was only in here to take a dump ... someone my age, who understands me perfectly, or two parents, with kids, who are ten years older than me and ten years younger than my own dad," said Pat, his heart fluttering.

"Who's your main, Pat?"

"And who's my alt?! Where's my alt-server?!" he protested. "Life doesn't have alt-servers."

"Fuck!" he shouted. "Do you love Susan?"

"Yes!"

"Do you love Clark!"

"Yes!"

"Then there you have it."

He froze, he cried, he stomped around.

Kioga smiled with the calm righteousness of a Saint in a stained-glass window. "The only unfair thing is the expectations you foist on yourself. You're looking at the shadows of alternative futures which will only be possible if you betray yourself. You are being unfair because you are pretending away that very horrible moment where, in order to achieve the future you have intoxicated yourself with, you will betray the ones you love. But you ignore that fundamental moment where you betray everything: where you kill your self. Because with the sacredness of that bond broken, you sell yourself to the Roman soldiers who will crucify you. Your Judas kills your Jesus: your future is lined with thorns and edges of glass, and you are drunk on the fountaining wine, forgetting it's your own blood. You ignore it. Your imagined life is unfair because you're cheating yourself of the knowledge that it will be a painful hellscape as empty as the soul you've sacrificed."

"See?! This is why I love you!" Patterson shouted, his cry bouncing off all the walls.

Kioga watched him with a wise, pained fatigue. He understood.

"This ... forget about us. Kioga, how did you do this?"

"Alone and poor with only my thoughts, I realized that money and cum are only accelerants of the life I lead."

The otter stared at him incredulously, weighed simultaneously by his heart and his scat.

"So what is the wisdom you wanted to impart upon me? You were, as I recall, the wise one."

"Oh, right," said Pat, his anus twitching as his mess stuck to his buttocks. "If ... if you have any problems, it's this: you're naked."

The cheetahs brow creased. "I ... think the only time I'm naked is when my diaper is open, in which I'm soon to wet or defecate."

"Even your bowels have no filter," pursued Pat, and before Kioga's rising muzzle could release a cackle the otter continued. "I think you're doing fantastic, but with no filter, saying and feeling and doing what you want, as an AMERICAN!"

"You are so cute. Look at me, an African Muslim culturally appropriating the West."

"You wouldn't accept labels if they were taped to you."

"Only my nametag. Only me."

"You're making me want to abandon everything for you."

"Only kiss me if you could kill them."

"Then let's continue."

"Can I change you?"

The cheetah's muzzle drew up in a precious grin. "Never. But you could impress me."

Patterson drew a long breath, wincing as his erection filled more of his diaper than his piss. "I meant can I assist you in the evolution of your life? Help you ... peel off the old skin for a new one?"

"That's the most eloquent way I've heard a request to wipe my ass. Of course," the cheetah said. He glided up to Patterson and gave him a kiss on the cheek before opening up the changing table and hopping on. His briefs squished against the textured plastic, smearing brown, and the cheetah automatically reached up and opened the side-cabinet of diapers and supplies with a quick paw.

Patterson strode up to the side and began his ministrations, his heart beating quickly as he slid the desecrated cotton briefs from the cheetah's hips to reveal his wet sheath and caked, pert buttocks. The otter had to hold all his emotions from flooding into a diaper that wasn't there. He took a few wet wipes and began swiping off poop from Kioga's rear end.

"You're completely incontinent, completely free. You're the type of person who wants to be liberated, both from your worries and that troublesome issue. Very free. I'm thinking you'd walk around F-C in just a pretty pair of briefs if you could. Wild and free."

The cheetah's bright yellow eyes looked at him. "How would you know that?"

"If you're looking for a mathematical proof, give me twelve hours," said Pat. The otter reached down and pushed the cheetah's penis back into its soaked pouch, then wiped around it and tossed the cloth. "Just call this a good guess. Because you have no filter, people know exactly how you're feeling at all times. And you yourself are really loving riding those waves of emotion. No buffer, no padding, no safety net. And you're working so hard, just to own the person that you call you. I've seen how Sakrasingh has to change you in your office because you can't peel yourself away from your work. I've seen her nursing you because you won't take lunch. And I've seen that yellow Furoti Testawoosa in the parking garage that's a year better than Wesley's. You're killing it!" the otter said, finding himself digging a little too deep as he scooped up shit from the crack of Kioga's ass.

The cheetah chirped and twitched, but when Pat looked at him, Kioga was only smirking.

"You and Lugo are so much smarter than me."

"Pat, if you continue at this rate, you'll be saying 'Ok, Boomer,' to us in no time."

"You're just using the meme to defuse the conversation," Patterson sighed, finding himself indeed cleaning Kioga's rear by utility, not by romance."

"I'm trying to carry some of the load you bear. You've never had a breakup this nice, have you?"

The otter's jaw firmed. "It's not a breakup. Not yet."

"There he is, between two worlds."

"It's not easy!" Patterson shouted, slamming his fists on the changing table. Kioga flinched, but he never stopped watching the otter.

"No. It's not."

"Let's talk about me."

"Finally."

Patterson smirked, then grabbed the stupidest diaper he could, one with "Daddy" and "UwU Cock Baby" scrawled over it.

"If you really want to humiliate me, grab one that says 'For Deposit Only' and 'Final Notice.' That takes me back to my first year at the company..."

"Okay, boomer."

Kioga cackled, his legs squirming as Patterson cleaned the final remnants of feces from his gluteal fur. It was funny to see Kioga's anus: not as a sexual conduit, not yet, but simply the little stretchy hole that made all this goddamn mess. He was a person, and people pooped.

"Regarding you. Just as you, Kioga Davis-Perry. As this fuzzy and intelligent meat construct that I'm really conflicted about. I don't know what your endgame is. People see you frustrated and they think you're making all the wrong decisions. Are you happy?"

The cheetah smirked, but his eyes lost a bit of their glint. "I'm very happy," he said.

"You don't smile at work, Key," said Pat, You always look I'm just working on the next problem. The next commercial. The next video. The next partnership, which might be with the Swedes at FartToalett if Apogee doesn't step up their game," he said, stretching out an Office Buddies diaper that, indeed, had "Final Notice," "Urgent," and "For Deposit Only" stamped all over it. On the back was the symbol of a cartoon cheetah's head. When Patterson saw this, Kioga smiled. Patterson did, too. "There's a project I did last year."

"You ever sit back and enjoy your work?" asked the otter, cringing as his own diaper started to cool, and his cock was buried in a blanket of yellow snow, his ass in permafrost dirt.

"Not normally," said the cheetah, raising his legs so Pat could slide it under. "But ... maybe with a friend."

Patterson's smile came back. "How much money is going to make you happy?"

Kioga chuckled over the rustling of tapes, then shivered as the powder hit his sac. "Either I retire at forty or I have a tower with my name on it."

"President of the United States?"

"And finally have an American-born Kenyan in office. Or I could fix my incontinence."

Pat patted Kioga's chest. "Let's get you elected."

It was abrupt and caused the otter to pause in bringing the front of the diaper over Kioga's groin. Kioga glared, which was interrupted by a twitch of his eye, and a flex of his anus as it opened and pushed a tiny, brown rope onto the open pad. "Was that a fucking joke? Think I can't be cured?"

Pat shrank, wondering for a moment if Kioga ever clipped his claws. His skin beneath his fur felt like it was thawing from frostbite, wet and painful and full of needles. He wasn't scared at being found murdered in a soiled diaper--that was the office culture at F-C (the diapers, not the murder)--but feared he couldn't play Clowns and Castles on his desktop battlestation, make a noble post online how the current 'Caust of Microtransactions was actually a really cool Aesop's Fable--an encroachment of greed once publishers saw the first glimmer of gold--or that he could see his bunny-otter kid grow up and go to college and marry a normal person, or that he could kick Xian's ass in Clowns and Castles and wipe that mystical grin off his face.

But no, sure. Murdered in the office bathroom by a cheetah who's already pooped in his new diaper. Ah well.

"It was a very good joke," said Kioga with a straight face, far worse than a scowl. "And it's put me in a better mood."

"Will you smile for me?" begged Pat. Though his bowels had been emptied for the commercials, it wasn't for lack of trying they were pulsating.

"I am smiling."

Patterson grumbled, then used a wet wipe to pick up Kioga's little turdlet and toss it in the toilet. He returned to close up the cheetah's diaper, but not before staring at his pretty powdered penis poking out of the sheath a second too long. Kioga cleared his throat.

"Could we be platonic boyfriends?" asked Pat.

"How the fuck's that supposed to work? We fuck each other and think of our husbands when we cum? That's like a robber saying he's sorry right when he shoots you."

"I wanna cum with you ..."

"For as he ejaculateth with his penis, so is he. Perverbs 23:7," said Kioga, then slipped off the table and kissed Patterson on the lips. "And there's my Judas kiss."

Patterson blushed and his fur went to spikes. The otter reached out to embrace the cheetah, but Kioga merely took the first limb reaching toward him and used Patterson's momentum to flip him onto the changing table. The otter stared at the ceiling, incredulous. He'd hardly noticed Kioga opening his diaper, coughing at the smell, and getting to work with a huge roll of paper towels until the cheetah had excavated his testes from a fecal cave-in.

"You're studying the bible and Judo now?" he asked as the cheetah cleaned him. His disproportionately huge dick had flopped up on his stomach, but Kioga just used its stretched nature to more easily wipe the contours.

"You're hung like Jeffrey Epstein; Jesus Christ."

"What?" asked Pat, biting his lip as Kioga's eyes bugged. The cheetah couldn't get his paw fully around its diameter. "You mean nonexistently? Because I could probably use this as a noose when it's soft. Not on myself, because then it'd get hard again, but ... "

"Criminally," said the cheetah, shaking his head and swearing to himself as he tossed another wipe. He gave up on using towels for scat mountain and started digging his way out by hand. "Goddamn kids and their big phones, big attitudes, big messes; entitled spoiled brats that have you changing the diapers they soiled because they're pretty ..."

"Okay, boomer."

Kioga glared at him, then wrapped two scat-caked paws around Patterson's enormous shaft. The cheetah's eyes did not break contact as he stroked the otter's cock up and down, smearing the slick, warm muck up and down the hard, throbbing flesh until the entirety of his ten-inch monster was coated. Patterson's breath drew short as precum oozed from the tip hovering near his chest. Kioga continued to glare, unblinking, as his paws caressed up and down his pulsing, muck-covered cock, and the otter could only cling to the changing table, his diaper open and stinking, his cock filthy and flaring as the cheetah took complete control of it. His balls drew up against his soiled undercarriage, and he bit his lip as his heartrate accelerated, his hips bucked, and ...

Kioga stopped to wash his hands.

"What... what ..." Patterson said, gasping, leaning up only for his scat-covered shaft to draw a huge skidmark up the front of his office shirt. "What are you doing?"

"Know your place, millennial," said the cheetah, then went right back to diaper duty.

Intoxicated with sex and frustrated lust, Patterson had to choke back feelings to punch him in the side of the head. He felt humiliated, violated ... but it wasn't for the sudden sexual touch. They'd been dancing around the subject the whole time, molesting each other with their minds. Patterson felt violated because ... Kioga had thoroughly beaten him.

He really had to find Clark, or Susan ... crawl up on their desk while they were doing paperwork and fuck them in the mouth, probably while taking a dump in his diaper. Or right there on the desk, show them who really wears the assless chaps in the family ...

"I ... I really love you," said Pat, his heart rate doing everything aside from a slow, steady rhythm.

Kioga looked at him with that same, tired smile. "You're flopping against me because you're lost. And I can't help you find the way."

"I'm also only seven years younger than you."

"You're still just a baby," Kioga said, then wiped Patterson's penis down and taped ... most of it up in the diaper. Half of it still stuck out, which was nearly Kioga's whole length. The cheetah pulled the otter's skidmarked shirt over it. "But as your friend, I'll be there for you."

"You sure?" asked Pat. He carefully sat up so he didn't jam his sternum with his cock, then slid off the bench. "You got enough in your diaper. Don't add my load to it."

Kioga patted his shoulder, then pulled him into a hug. "If we change each other's diapers, then we get through life relatively unburdened ... and with the knowledge that someone's always going to be there with a fresh one if the load gets too heavy." He kissed Pat's cheek, and they held each other tight.

"Friday night, what are you doing?" said Pat. "Clowns and Castles?"

"Of course. I'm on your Alliance, aren't I?" "On PC?"

"I wouldn't get my Diaper Rifle or 'Co-Op Gangbang on the Boss,' otherwise, would I?"

Patterson laughed. "You have the weirdest mods."

"Dude, come over sometime. It makes the game something else," Kioga laughed, and Patterson heard a funny crinkle. He looked down and saw a tented plastic spire poking him in the hip. Patterson's blush reached the tips of his ears, toes, and fingers, and he felt like he was in high school again. A hair trigger from anything marginally sexual. He'd sometimes have to stuff his pants with tissue paper: not from the lack of content, but for the content he'd put into it.

Lot like Fortnight, actually.

"If ... if we jack off to the game, it doesn't count, right?"

"Long as we don't make eye contact. That's gay. Besides ... don't you have a baby on the way?"

"That just means I'd be buying diapers in two sizes."

"Heh. Let's analyze the cliff before we jump off, m'kay?" said Kioga, leaning back and holding Pat by the shoulders. The otter nodded, and the two leaned toward each other. Kioga forced himself sideways, to the otter's cheek, and he kissed it.

A wolf walked into the bathroom, and both of them froze, hiding in each other's eyes like fugitives. The wolf came up to the urinal behind them and opened his trousers, then pushed the crinkling plastic down and pulled out his dick. He started pissing, the champagne-colored liquid splashing against the back.

The otter and cheetah dug into each other for answers, quietly wondering about murder. Pat was shocked he could read Kioga's mind, and Kioga in return was shocked that Pat was on his wavelength. The bathroom led into a hallway that always had at least one set of eyes. Ferris-Chalmpers handled advertising and purchasing accounts for thousands of businesses, big and small, not to mention their own product line of commercials, diapers, bathroom aids, and soon an ABDL-centered sitcom. The building was never not busy. Pat looked over Kioga's shoulder to the changing table. It was just a recess in a wall, far too small for a wolf's body. There was a maintenance closet in the corner, but only the maintenance crew had the key. Solutions were running low as dreams were running high. Kioga leaned over Pat's shoulder, his pulse palpable and throbbing against Pat's chest ... and thigh.

It was just Jim Breezy in Sales, one of Wes's understudies. The modestly handsome forty-something male gave them a salesman smile. "Phew! Maybe I should have stayed at my desk. Didn't quite make it, eh boys? I swear they put the bathrooms in a different county."

Kioga chuckled, returning the smile. "No, no. I made it just fine. Just made a mess of it once I got here."

The wolf's smile was big until he looked backwards, then saw two males hugging wearing nothing below the belt besides their diapers. He wondered what kind of mess they'd made. His grin wobbled off his face, not quite sure what to say, so after he finished, he packed himself back up and went to wash his hands. "Well, uh, we all mess up the simple stuff. Funny our species made it to electricity and automobiles. Heck, my wife burned my toast this morning. I'll just buy charcoal briquettes and save her the trouble!" he said with an awkward laugh.

This guy really was brand new. Pat was about to speak, but Kioga patted his back and swished his way to the sink, crinkling the whole way in his exposed bottoms. Pat jolted as he remembered the huge skidmark on his shirt, and coughed awkwardly, keeping his back to Jim as he grabbed a few wet wipes. "Yep!" Kioga said. "People are such goofballs. I should probably take an extended lunch!"

"Yep, goofballs," said Jim, then walked out of the restroom faster than was natural.

Pat knowingly grinned, the two of them exiting the restroom. "I bet he hasn't used a diaper in almost forty years."

They walked proudly down the hall, crinkling and swishing, getting a few amused glances and a couple of chuckles as their crinklebutts gleamed in the fluorescent light. People like Jim awkwardly coughed and looked away. Then there were a couple of deep frowns from executives from other departments. One or two of them cursed Xian's name. A mousey intern ran up to them and had Kioga, celebrity star, autograph a folded diaper. Pat patiently grinned, knowing his time might come. Maybe he could audition for the sitcom.

Things were very good at the company and very good for the two. As they walked, their paws kept drifting towards each other like a dog's nose to a dog's ass, but one or both of them slapped the other away.

"People are sure looking at us weird," said Kioga.

"People look at you like that all the time," countered Pat.

"Do they really care about my incontinence that much?" he asked, slipping into an elevator with the otter. The two office boys in their office diapers got all the same stares they had in the hallway, except now it was more concentrated. People couldn't look directly at them, but one male and two females were unfortunate to have their eyes fall to the massive white triangles between Kioga and Patterson's bare thighs and lock onto it like a train's headlight. "I mean, Q over in tech support is getting a little 'perky' with her Addlepate prescription, and B over in actuary's masking his wife's affairs with a 'cuckhold' fetish. W, no not that W, in R&D--"

"That W wouldn't be in R&D," laughed Pat. "He'd invent a cock that sucked itself and he'd be fired for writing worse sci-fi than Star Wars 11."

Some people coughed at the obscenity, others chuckled because their kids had come back from Star Wars 11 with glazed eyes. "How can there be something worse than a Mary Sue?!" one teenager screamed when leaving the theater. "I can't even remember the movie!" sobbed another. "I have the ticket right here. What just happened? Oh God, what's my name?" "I forgot bowel control; make it stop!"

They called it the Shart Wars, as it was so bad that some people literally forgot how to shit.

"As I was saying. W over in R&D, well ... let's just say his taste in women is getting younger ... and cartoonier. Everyone has problems and it's best not to gossip about them. I just wear mine on the outside because ... well, you can't work on a car without opening it up! So I have resting cat face. So what?"

"I'm a W over in R&D," said a red-striped armadillo. The male was ten-to-twenty years older than the cheetah and had glasses with silver dollar lenses. He turned in the elevator, shell scraping the side, and folded his arms. In his paw was his phone; the case had an anime kitten flashing her panties. "Now what were you saying, Kitty Pisspants?"

A silence struck the elevator, and by way of the reflective walls and ceiling, all eyes were on Kioga. Through the silence pierced a quiet piddling, and Patterson's ears grew hot as he heard the cheetah wetting his diaper. Patterson watched the reflection in the wall in front of him; that white crotch grew round and darker in the front, and everyone saw it.

"All I'm saying is you're a pedophile, Wendaygo, and Sahasrahla won't fire you because the girls are cartoons."

A collective gasp ran throughout the carriage.

Patterson kept his fists tight and his gaze bouncing between the two. An executive in the back had his muzzle crumpled with contempt; the otter saw in the reflection that he was flipping through Monster Jobs on his phone. Pat stood still: if either Kioga or Wendaygo were going to lay into each other, he was going to stop it.

The silence was interrupted by a muffled blurt, and a wince spread across the cheetah's face as a soft crackle precluded a lump under his tail. The people in the cabin groaned and covered their noses.

The red armadillo sneered. "What makes you and me so different? Seems we both have youthful proclivities."

At that moment, the elevator opened and Kioga yanked Patterson out by the tails of his skidmarked shirt. The cheetah turned back and shouted at the door, "Because I'm the adult part of 'adult baby;' I don't want to put an adult part in a baby!" He was motioning to his crotch.

Patterson stared at Kioga, tired, as his accusation echoed through the floor. There was a screech of cowboy boots and Wesley the coyote froze in his tracks. He was on a video call with an oil investor from Ukrypolisckya, while Kyrie was following him with an IV stand holding an enema bag whose tube snuck into the back of his diaper.

"No, see, we can have a bunch of vixenistas gushing oil from their tailholes, and if your mascot has his pants off near their faces ..."

Patterson folded his arms.

Wesley kept walking, then started waddling and held his stomach. "Here, I'll demonstrate."

Then the otter turned to Kioga. "Was that fight really necessary?"

The cheetah's complexion had cooled. "Are you saying that people can't have problems?"

Patterson glared. "A lot of internet arguments explode when the side in the wrong exaggerates a legitimate complaint."

Kioga returned the look, setting his jaw. "And sometimes a little bit of social shaming keeps us all in line. In the elevator of life, we're all shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to survive to the next floor. Had I shit myself wearing those briefs from earlier, it would have been a much worse problem."

"So you see my point."

"Do you see mine?"

Patterson started to walk away, but Kioga grabbed him by the shirttails and yanked him back. Both of them blushed as they heard blurting, gushing splurts of filthy enema water whooshing into a diaper. "Now, see, a lot of volume can be accomplished with practical effects," Wesley said in the back. They looked over and saw the coyote holding his phone to a comically large, perfectly spherical diaper wrapped around his pelvis.

"Patterson," said Kioga, "Look, just stop. Just stop." His glare was forceful and confident, but he winced as another gurgle made his own pants crackle. "Ugh, damn it. Hey. Let's not get so lost in our ideals that we sacrifice people like us in the process. Hnngh, hold on..." The cheetah held his stomach as he slightly bent over and pushed. Behind his legs, his diaper swelled.

Over the course of the last two altercations, Patterson's penis had shrunk back into his diaper. Now he could feel it nestling against the front. "Keychain," he said, noting that the cheetah was now grabbing his arm, "I want to fight for a world where ideals are people like us."

"I just hate that guy."

"Let Sahasrahla deal with him."

Kioga frowned, but Patterson kept smiling at him until the cheetah relented. The otter took the paw holding his arm and clasped it, then frowned briefly as a cloud of fresh stink drifted into him.

"Keychain, you have no filter, but like we've said in the past, maybe a diaper for your mouth would help you endear yourself to people better. It'd help people from seeing the glorious mess that ambitious people make of their lives. You're super ambitious but the stress shows on your face ... and in your pants. You're very happy in your element, but simple people are a bit scared staring into the complicated abyss you weave. Are you happy?"

Kioga nodded, smiling. "I'll be happy with a change. Care to assist?"

"No problem," said Pat, putting his arm around the back of Kioga's waist and leading him to the nearest changing station. "Just no happy endings. Okay, boomer?"

"Know-it-all millennial." The cheetah groaned, walking around a set of cubicles to a frosted glass alcove that glowed baby pink and blue. "Married people are so boring."

"And sluts like you make complicated messes."

"You're so terribly cruel, Pat," said Kioga, faking injury as he climbed up on the changing table. Pat opened the side cabinet full of supplies, even spare underwear and pants. "It's like BDSM of the soul, and I fucking love it. Just ..."

Patterson paused while untaping the slender cheetah's soiled protection.

"About us ..."

The otter's ears fell, and he took a long breath. "It would be ideal. I just don't want to sacrifice Susan and Clark to do so."

Kioga profoundly grinned as Pat started wiping down his buttocks. "You're an ideal man, Pat."

~~~

Patterson thought about that while he played Clowns and Castles in the dark, after he'd made love to Susan and Clark, after he'd guided the kids on the first ten levels of an epic fantasy game. After he'd helped the eldest with his new bathroom problem.

Life was indeed ideal, even if it meant he didn't get everything he wanted. He had claimed what was important and it paid so many dividends; they were like pillars in the desert, and they stood strong against the wind and the rain. Admittedly, there were random chance breezes that felt so pleasant, but they were gone before Patterson could press down his dress like a diapered and transvestite Marilyn Monroe. Kioga, that would be a hard question. Pat had so much heart to give ... but why not spoil Clark and Susan? Why not run with the kids? He had a baby on the way; that was amazing.

The otter made himself a deal. If the kids fell down before he did. If Clark and Susan took all his heart and took all his cock until they were overflowing with love and cum. If, after all that, Pat was still standing upright, after he'd filled his kids with attention, his spouses with love, and his diaper with the rest, sure. He could afford Kioga.

But that'd make him one hell of a man.

One might say ... more than ideal.