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The hammock in Airini and Manaaki's wharepuni swung energetically with a protesting creak. From it, a low carrying moan came that matched the cries of passion at the bathhouse. Within the rocking furniture, Manaaki's broad back rose as Airini's leg flung itself upward to hook around her husband. Her limb covered by a sea green discoloration just like the yellower hue splashed up and down her mate's arms. The sweat dripping from her human skin crossed the scales of her leg, leaving a violet streak within the greens and yellows. Her scales' color-shifting activated by the moisture to reveal her arousal. One of many changes, like the growth of their bodies between shoulder and hip and length of limbs.

Rolling, the couple traded positions. Airini appearing with her head flung back and eyes squeezed shut in ecstasy as she moved against her lover. Her chest heaved with panting breath while her husband's hand reached up to caress her breast. A whimper slipped from her mouth when the small green webbing between two fingers of Manaaki's hand brushed over her erect nipple. Airini leaned into his caress, rocking her hips and bouncing the hammock. With a snap and a yelp of surprise, the overburdened swing gave way from the mass of the human-alien mates. The broken fabric dumping the amorous pair to the floor with squeals of laughter.

"Gods, Manaaki. I haven't felt like this for twenty years," Airini said breathlessly once they'd finished. Laying tangled with her mate in the bedding scattered across the floor with a sheen of sweat glistening across the bronze portions of her skin. Snuggled against him, she'd thrown one arm across her husband's broad chest to feel his racing heart slow in the bliss of their afterglow.

Her hand bounced on his chest as he laughed. "Twenty? I haven't felt that way in thirty. You were amazing, Airini. I..." the rest of what he was going to say was cut off by a roar that seemed to shatter the Earth itself.

"Oh my," Airini said with a blush and a quiet giggle. "I hope Ophelia didn't get..." and then she, too, was cut off. This time by a higher whistling howl from the direction of the first roar. A wave of electric pleasure swept over the two as they felt the slate-eyed dragoness' release. Manaaki had sensed nothing like it as his toes curled and his body jumped with a groan in his mouth. The pleasure was so intense, nearly unbearable, that he didn't even recognize the gasping cries he heard as his. Airini took his hand with one of hers while biting down on the other to stifle her sensual shriek. It was a very familiar eruption for the woman, but not one the man had ever known. The feeling of something impossible clenching as nerves across his body fired in waves that crashed towards his core. They lay panting in the aftermath.

"Was that... was that what it feels like for a woman? My word, Airini!" His free hand came to rest on his chest where he could feel the flutter of his heart. His gaze turned to her flushed expression. "Every time?"

With a wide, knowing grin, her hands traced his chin as her mouth met his. The couple found themselves in each other's arms once more as they rolled across their room. Their laughter turning into moans that joined a chorus of others across the community.

****

Manaaki and Airini raised a bowl in toast to Ophelia and We'sol'Tu'qut'Shel. The pair of lovers lying on their sides with their flanks swelling in synchronicity and noses touching. Rather indecorously smug grins parting their jaws. Thanking them, and Ophelia in particular, for being to blame for some of the best lovemaking they'd ever had in their lives.

It was a strange pairing, to be sure. With her crest just touching the belly of the elder, and her length a mere tenth of his. Ophelia was only just large enough to engage him in what So'waa'Ma'wae had euphemistically called the joining. Without being injured, at least. Manaaki tried not to think of the mismatch in size between the two, including their organs, nor the mechanics of it. But the damp scales along his shoulders still flashed pink, making Airini shove him with a shy giggle when her thoughts followed his. For a being that they were told was older than the pyramids, age and stature had not seemed to equate infirmity or inability to couple. Neither had Ophelia shown any shyness in loudly declaring her intentions to mate with the ancient colossus. Being the pursuer of the tryst, instead of pursued.

"For the no one that felt O'phe'Li'a's offer of a mating ritual, and Revered One's eager reception, it should be see-through that the growing chemical levels in your blood are affecting all on four-way street. So... very much thing for you to know that seesaw make you eager to make happy, happy eggs. And that O'phe'Li'a and other Matriarch K'an'N'a, hiding sneaky sneaky away on hill half turn right from peak of island, echo back with hers own."

"Our... hormones?" a Kiwi man Manaaki had forgotten the name of asked hesitantly. Judging by the unsettled conversations, not too many knew exactly what the exuberant alien meant that morning. She might have gotten rooted herself. He hoped it wasn't with a human. But, looking around the pavilion, plenty of reminders were clear that there were no humans here any longer.

"Yep!" Soma brightly confirmed. "Sixteen hor-mones making engines go into hyperdrive. Some will be egg heavy by end of turning. You be mothers, and then see miracle of life on island with Children of Egg to protect. In steadier tides, other young Dreamers protect eggs, but no Earth diggers here to help siblings just yet. Nope, nope. You be sure when So'waa burrowed tunnels with sharp digging claws, she have no problem ripping skin from predators. If hu-mans stupid enough to come when eggs are so vulnerable, they find So'waa'Ma'wae ready to do same to them. Pull flesh from bones!"

"That's pretty fucking sick, Miss Pipe Cleaner," Patti said, using the latest term of endearment that she discovered irked the alien minder. The woman burped and rubbed at her green tinged lips with one webbed hand. The four black claws capping her fingers looking entirely capable of doing what Soma suggested.

"Any critter gone so mad to terminate Dreamers still in their eggs, unable to flash claws and defend, are beyond pity or need to regurgitate on toes for their forever sleep. Something you know, funny walking half-pickle," Soma snapped back. Patti burst into laughter at her name, lifting the bulb of Soma's nearest whisker to give it a kiss. She rubbed the filament tenderly until its owner's bristling fins relaxed. Soma made a thrumming noise as her sensor shivered and flashed at the changeling woman's caress.

"That's not right. You're manipulating us to be pregnant?" A woman whose face had begun to extend outwards into a blunt muzzle. "You can't force..."

"We force nothing. How many day-night cycle pass that we not saying nothing forced! You welcome to go spend equal time devolving to human if desire. But, seems to So'Waa'Ma'Wae you happy putting tab A in slot B despite change in shape they both be. So'waa'Ma'Wae very familiar with human sex videos, and know Dreamers look nothing like."

Pattie sputtered and then sprayed a mouthful of her drink past the hand she'd slapped to her mouth as she burst into laughter at Soma's last comment. She was far from the only one collapsing in mirth against their neighbors at the absurdity of the discussion.

"Fact remains that many of you be with egg by end of transformation. Some already are, according to folded chemical chains in waste samples reviewed by Respected Elder." Soma looked around at all the different howled reactions and left Pattie's side to circle around the wharenui to where she could command the most attention.

"It is past present time we have much talk about shape of life." Soma said, sitting up and adopting what she called her educational pose. Which to Manaaki seemed to mean bracing herself to free up her hands to wave a laser pointer and an electronic notepad around. A projection screen lowered from the rafters after her tail tapped one of the remote controls lying around. Images appeared, as if by magic, showing an egg, a two-legged creature that looked vaguely dinosaur-ish, and a Dreamer much like Soma. Arrows appeared going from the egg to the dinosaur, to the Dreamer, and then from the Dreamer back to the egg.

"Dreamers, us and you now, have three-stage lifecycle." She used her laser pointer to circle the egg, enlarging the image until it filled the whole screen. A fiducial appeared next to it and below, showing the mottled dark green and yellow, tapered, ruggedly textured egg was nearly two meters tall. Several women gasped in terror, and Airini bore down on Manaaki's hand with crushing force.

"I swear to Hineteiwaiwa," she hissed in his ear. "If I ever have to give birth to that, I will break every bone in both your hands." Manaaki, wisely he felt, said nothing.

"As panicky inhalations tell, many realize Dreamer lay egg, and egg lay baby. Normal baby number between six to eight. Lady Dreamer go into...." Soma hesitated and then made a rumbling gurgle, something in her own language, before continuing. "Egg-laying mode every hundred of your years or so. Must lay eggs, whether or not little baby inside. Yes, most inconvenient not to have ready mate when time comes. Much pushing and bad words for no promise of offspring. So, better to make usefulness of eggs. Better for species for facts I soon tell. Fortuitous news for women fearing pushing out of eggs! Eggs scale to body, bigger body, bigger egg, better for baby inside. Get head start on growth, make them safe! Older Lady Dreamers always have healthiest safest babies. Young Dreamers, small eggs, small baby, maybe not live long before meat-eating vines strangle? Depends on next stage of Dreamer lifecycle."

The image shifted to the curious dinosaur. Its body had a noticeable elongation to the distance between hips and shoulders. The creature stood with two dangerous looking three-toed feet spread in an athletic crouch. Four fingered and powerful looking oversized hands appeared to be raised and balanced by the long, finned tail held stretched behind its hips. The creature's bright gaze came from a head held up watchfully on a thick but flexible neck. A wedge was the overall shape of the skull, drawing a gradual taper from crown to nose tip. Another inset image appeared with the creature's mouth open, revealing twin rows of teeth and a wide tongue extending out to a sharp point in the end. A sight that caused a brief stir at the number of fangs ringing the dark green flesh of the mouth and tongue.

Some brief videos of the creature in motion played. One showed it running with its head held low in line with its spine and powerful legs kicking up water as it raced along a hard gray surface. In an astonishingly agile motion, the creature rolled to one flank to slide across a platform and land on its feet on the other side and continue running. When it leapt through a hoop, feet first and claws bared, and scampered frenetically up a wall, Manaaki realized he was watching it run an obstacle course. Each of its footfalls was a heavy stomp and clack when the claws contacted the ground. Its muscles were a lithe blur beneath the scales of its body. Power in every motion

Another video showed a different dinosaur carrying one of the eggs Manaaki had just seen towards a hole that dirt flew out of in a torrent. A head popped up, and a quick burst of the gurgling language Soma had used passed between the two. Then the one with the egg in its harness gingerly transferred it into the digger's reaching claws. It and the dinosaur disappeared below ground.

The third clip was a pair of the dinosaurs in a jungle setting, this time wearing fully encompassing space suits, just like in the movies. Thick, waving, plant-like tentacles had ensnared one and were drawing it towards an unsettling mouth drooling a viscous sap. The dinosaur still on the ground was aiming a device shaped like a disc thrower at the base of the vines and jerking with each twitch of its claws. Jagged holes opened across the carnivorous plant. But not quickly enough for the space-suit clad raptor who snarled in frustration and threw the weapon uselessly at its enemy. The ensnared dinosaur made a forlorn squall as its partner activated vibrating, blue-tinged blades on its hands and feet. With a crouch and a sharp cry, the savior leapt at the monstrosity to rip and tear savagely until the tentacle carrying their companion fell. A flying machine appeared in view, dragonfly-like wings buzzing with another dinosaur in its cockpit. Fussily manipulating the controls as the aircraft danced around the remaining whipping tentacles. A narrow thermal distortion zipped from the craft to the plant with a crack of thunder, and the top half of the attacking creature exploded into purple ichor. An unearthly bellow came from its gaping mouth. The blast, presumably intended to save them, instead sent the two hapless dinosaurs cartwheeling into the air. Their arms, legs, and tails flailing helplessly.

The last video showed a swarm of the creatures dressed in muted yellow suits and harnesses. All working together to erect a squat structure with a sphere placed on top using a hovering crane and an encompassing scaffold. Loud calls erupted from the mass of beings just before flames burst from the sphere and a brilliant, flaring light shot into the sky. The creatures reacted with chaos, running into each other, away from the inferno, and towards it. All the while making a gurgling explosion of sound even louder than the unfolding catastrophe in the background.

"As you see, juvenile Diggers are bit of mixed satchel. Very much harbingers of chaos, but also key to Dreamer civilization. They hatch and raise other Diggers, build, explore, and learn very much to get ready for growing up and Dreaming in deepest waters. I was Digger for many orbits of Earth. Not able to make babies, nope! Not stop from trying, So'waa'Ma'wae have pleasure of telling! Diggers are the movers and shakers of Dreamer civilization. Some go to re-birth waters, not all, and become Dreamers. Very sad, but adventurous Diggers not always live to be egg making adults. Is price of angry claw flashing and find what work or not. I very good to feel itch to swim and have So'waa meet Ma'wae. Sponsored by egg makers, they proud to have space captain offspring that lived!"

The image onscreen switched to the being that stood before them, Soma herself.

"If feel waters call, Diggers sleep and dream dreams as body changes from land to underwater. Gills, fins, webs, whole package! Bonus is now able to make eggs and much longer life! Go from living maybe five hundred orbits, to five thousand! Much wisdom to be had from those chosen. As space captain across much space and many strange worlds, So'waa happy to have survived and feel call of water when fin pops up to say surprise." She waggled the towering fin ostentatiously and knocked a few other's drinks over.

"Lucky for you all, Earth's ocean need many, many Dreamers and Diggers, taking much time. So you all skip right to maturity of egg making. Crazy mating patterns is because human and Dreamer hormones going much unpredictable. You can skip being with fertile eggs by having no sex, of certainty. Not see many takers." She pointedly surveyed the women and men, who blushed and looked away.

Which, Manaaki wryly noted, stopped the objections beyond three women who quit on the spot with the information that they needed to be mothers. Besides becoming aliens, it seemed a step too far for them. They did not want to listen to Soma explain adult Dreamers didn't have much more to do with their eggs and babies than laying them. The women forcibly reminded Soma, as humans, that's not how they raised children, and that's not how women choose to be mothers. Soma cited examples of orphanages and not judging aliens from another galaxy by one subset of humanity, creating an impasse with the women. Both being unreasonable, in Manaaki and Airini's shared opinion. Neither the Dreamer nor humanity's culture applied in a hybridization between the two.

The Giant elder seemed to feel the same way when he called Soma away with a sharp sounding word in their language. Manaaki and Airini found themselves pushed away from getting personal clarity about their future. The scientist volunteers, far more concerned with the minutia of alien life, were swarming Patience and Truth. The only other aliens willing to answer questions at the moment. They left the others with more personal concerns not getting answers of their own.

Airini clung to Manaaki, her hand on her belly. She wanted to know. She had to know. Did becoming a Dreamer mean she would care so little for her own children? Who would they be when this was all over? Manaaki tried to be understanding, but his concerns stretched further beyond the parental. What about the culture they were here to fight for?

*****

With a concussive blast, Airini sneezed into Manaaki's face. He roared with laughter as he felt over one of the small tendrils growing from just behind a nostril of her broadening nose.

"The amazing whiskered woman," he jested, earning him a long-suffering sigh that turned into a low thrum coming from deep in her lengthening throat. Brought out when he stroked his thumb across the bulb on the end of the drooping growth. Airini tilted her head into the feeling of his caress, her eyes half-lidded.

"Manaaki..." she purred. "If you keep that up, I'm going to take you right here." He kissed her for an answer, her widening mouth working against the roughened texture of his stiffening lips. Her tongue slipped free and past the gates of his teeth, tickling the roof of his mouth as he moaned. She reached up to the side of his head, and he felt himself grow hard when her fingers traced the yellow-glowing ray stretching past the edge of his scalloped ear.

Her proposal didn't sound so bad. They wouldn't be the only ones. From where they sat within the heated spring, he could see a woman burying her face into her partner's neck with her legs wrapped around his waist as he pinned her to the wall of the showers. Another pair of men were joined at the lips on the other side of the spring, caressing the small fins growing on their napes. More sounds of ecstasy came from within the bathhouse.

"I'm not quite ready for that kind of show and tell, yet..." she said, breaking off with a hiss of pain when she accidentally caught her longer tongue between her teeth. Manaaki rubbed her back soothingly as she waited for the pain to die off. As a distraction, she held up her hand, drawing Manaaki's attention.

"Does it still hurt?" he held her changing hand in his. While he had thick, dark gray claws just like hers where nails once were, her middle two fingers had now seamlessly joined up to the second knuckle. A four fingered hand, just as he would have soon enough.

She shook her head. "It feels more like a colony of ants are dancing under my skin. I would like for it to be over, so that I can move my fingers... my finger again." She let her hand fall into the mineral water, easing the sensation. She closed her eyes, Manaaki saw her nostrils close, and she submerged briefly to wet the drying skin and scale of her head. When she slicked her dark hair back, a tress came away with her hand. She looked at it with an unreadable expression and turned to see Manaaki's worried gaze.

"Revealing to our children that I might be pregnant with eggs did not go very well."

"Are you okay with possibly being..."

"If I wasn't, I wouldn't have been so eager to have you inside me," she said with a playful smirk returning to her face. "Still, I worry that if what we're doing is right. The cost for us both. Manaaki, how could we abandon our children like they do? Is that what our future will be? Divorced from the past that we wanted to keep alive?"

He told her of his own misgivings. But also his convictions. They shared myths of their people, trading stories they could also tell the others to give all this context.

"It is for us to keep the line unbroken then," Airini said, at ease. With the burden unevenly on her side, it was all that Manaaki hoped for. Her hand found its way to her belly once more, resting there while his hand covered it. "Soma said herself, her culture is not for our world. We will find our own way."

"Have you felt anything out of the ordinary?"

Airini scoffed. "Besides all my other organs moving around, you mean? Silly man, even after four babies. We've only been here five weeks, even as a human I wouldn't have known. Soma told us I can expect to carry for two years. Can you imagine that, swinging your trouser snake around? Making me carry our children for two years?"

"No, I can't," Manaaki said with a roguish grin. "Creating life feels good though, doesn't it?"

She laughed and stood up, beads of water streaming off the tightening slope of her rejuvenated, green-tinged breasts. Bending over, she cupped his cheeks and tenderly kissed him again with her distending mouth. "I've changed my mind. Toku ngakau."

"E aroha ana ahau ki a koe me toku ngakau katoa" Manaaki told her, reasserting his love for her.

With an extended hand, she drew him up and pressed her body against his. "Touch me, Aroha." Just like her, Manaaki found he no longer cared who saw their love.

*****

The physical and mental changes were far from being limited to the two Maori. Some being more rapidly afflicted than others. For others, grappling with real and imaginary behavioral changes was the more pressing issue.

As they had been told, the changes manifested much earlier at the healed sites of human injury or disease. A woman who had been suffering from heart disease had lost her breasts when her swelling chest consumed them. On some who had poor eyesight, the eyes mutating into slit pupils that had no fixed coloration were their first alterations. Leaving them blind, briefly yet alarmingly all the same. The change radiating outward from there. Pradana, a man from Java, had already lost his nose when it flattened into a pair of slits. The beautiful but emotionally fragile woman from Perth, Cathy, sobbed inconsolably where she thought the aliens couldn't hear her. She now had a short but distinct snout extending her skull and would eat nothing solid. Even struggling with liquids as her lips no longer quite covered the teeth in her painfully sensitive mouth. After seeing her difficulties, others had protested to the aliens that they were torturing her, and them, with unnecessary deformities.

In an act of desperation that helped with some of her most severe emotional swings, the poor woman tried and failed to hide the broadening and lengthening of her head behind a wrapping tied around the lower half of her face. Cloth she'd cut from one of the shapeless blouses they all wore now. Not even the loosest of human clothes capable of being worn by any former human. Her mouth had numbed, and her lips had extended to cover the teeth after the protest brought to the aliens. Wily, while acknowledging the concern over the pain was legitimate, had been acerbic with her remarks regarding the superficiality of a species worried about the aesthetics of being mid-way through a transformation between two beings that had evolved in entirely different galaxies.

Manaaki had hedged that she might have had a point, and only gotten a scathing glare for his efforts from Airini while she tried to comfort Cathy after he had failed. He tried not to let his doubts for the Australian show, expressing them privately to his wife instead. It was his opinion that the only one who could bring the woman out of her depression was her husband. If only then by taking her away when she was unwilling to separate from him. He was the last thing tethering her to reality, even if he didn't realize how badly she'd fallen. From what Manaaki understood, her family was still missing from the events of what was now being called Zero Day in the Australian news.

But Cathy's husband, Jonathan, had found a purpose that he reveled in, even if it meant dragging his vulnerable wife along with him. Manaaki used the vast library available to them on their computer devices to find a relevant story that his memory failed to provide. In vain.

Cathy was not the only one suffering under the stress of what was being asked of the humans. More than anyone else being affected spiritually, no one quite knew what to make of the change that'd overcome the American Titania weeks ago. No longer wearing clothes of any sort, that morning she was eating whole pizza pies and drinking liters of amber beer. Her crashing diet didn't show, at least in a human way. Instead, she bid well on her way to overtopping everyone but Manaaki and the soft-spoken Chloe from Samoa in size.

She sat with her back to the M?ori man, giving him a show of the disappearing derriere that had fused into a single pointed mass. Bent upon the cushion she awkwardly sat on. Manaaki frowned at the young men who sat at her table and devoured the sight of her slim chest as hungrily as she did slices of pizza. He was far more fixated on the twitching movement of the new protuberance of her spine.

A tail. The first of anyone on the island.

It had been her lower abdomen that had shown the most change when she first appeared naked. Fine scales covering her from belly button to thigh and a pair of low flexible fins concealing her intimates, but her very human chest remaining exposed.

"Men," Airini had exclaimed in exasperation. "Always chasing after one thing. But the moment a woman shows what is only natural and beautiful, you become jabbering drooling prudes. Can you even tell me what anatomy alarms you so? Say it out loud with me Manaaki, so that everyone can hear you. Vagina. Breasts." Furiously blushing in what remained of his skin, he took the ribbing that he deserved.

Whether Titania's insatiable libido to the increasingly frequent emotional outbursts from the Children of Egg, no one knew. Not that it had stopped many from taking advantage of her willingness. So many men, and women, had spoken of the wild experience of rooting someone with a tail and the elongated orifices embedded beneath, that even her sotted country mate Pattie had grown concerned.

The aliens hadn't found cause for alarm at the woman's hollow-eyed looks and the whispers of her unhinged behavior, however. Which she demonstrated at that moment when she dropped her pizza to grab a young man with sail-like ears walking behind her, slamming him on the table using inhuman strength and pinning him in place with her mouth on his. Only being backed off after Truth and Patience had admonished her. She snarled and threw herself at the much larger pair, but Pattie caught Titania's arm and used the formerly petite woman's greater mass against her. Caught in the older, but smaller, woman's bear hug, Titania thrashed with her stubby tail flailing until Pattie had calmed her.

Manaaki didn't blame the others sitting beside her for scooting away after Titania's outburst. She glowered at her companion before tearing into her never-ending meal with renewed vigor. Seemingly oblivious to what was going on. But the M?ori man still saw her attentive eyes beneath the shaggy bangs falling over them drill into So'waa'Ma'wae when she resumed her class.

"A reminder," she said, with her whiskers pointing out Titania, Cathy, and two men from the Ecuadorean group. "That not all Dreamers and Children of the Egg are open to hearing your mind quakes. Many having mind quakes of their own."

A wailing cry that could not have been made by a human throat came from outside, accompanied by a horde of flapping wings that emphasized her point. The hybrid-humans winced and rubbed their heads as a feeling of despair came with crushing force. Manaaki felt tears slip from his eyes and numbly wiped them away with his shaking, scale covered hand.

"But you are still free to ring-ring-telephone anyone you might well choose. So'waa'Ma'wae also makes post-it that Extinguished Doctorate of Pyrokinesis Ai'ish'Id'a from Ya-pan is willing to take on new convalescents for help."

A tall Japanese man, with his hand raised as he waved it for attention and a fin growing from his spine that badly stretched his tunic, interrupted. Bringing his hands together in contrition and bowing to So'waa'Ma'wae as he spoke.

"I beg you to reconsider the accuracy of your words. I am a Doctor of Psychology, and I don't have patients. I have people struggling to adjust to strange circumstances that wish to talk." His spinal fin twitched and then stood straight up, shearing right through his blouse to leave the green skin of his back exposed. "Oh! Pardon me." He bowed again, struggling to get his arms to hold his clothes on and revealing more of his buttocks than he'd probably ever care to hear about. "I am experiencing a strange circumstance."

"Yes...that. So'waa'Ma'wae meant that. Without falsehood, human language much confusing for us. Dreamers have seventeen thousand three hundred seven and forty light sounds for water. But humans cannot even agree on one word for this thing." Her whisker grabbed a doughnut that a woman next to her was about to eat. "Which exist in only one state and with one intention. What is problem with human words? Need one for local pod, and one for all others. Is courtesy! Bah!" So'waa'Ma'wae flicked the pastry back at the bereaved woman, who was silenced when it slammed into her open mouth.

"Second reminder! Yes, there is very much Dreamer space techno at this place, okay? But fact that you scratch at devices with knives and take pictures of shells with cameras without understanding show you not ready for techno, also okay? So, leave alone, unless you prefer water touched by filth or hunting for own food like skurls under claw. Very nasty and time eating, yes? Also, very good odds of you turning to green dust if you in bad odds find some way to crack shell of space techno. So, no green dust! On this we can arrive at agreement."

"Third reminder!" she said, raising her voice over the shouted demands to explain more about what kind of technology was in use there. The questions coming from at least three that Manaaki knew were barely concealed spies for their own nations. The kind of parochialism that got them into the mess requiring them to become aliens. "As you can hear very well, unfriendliness at water's end continues!" A distant boom followed by a louder explosion illustrated her point well as the humans dove under tables in alarm. A chorus of musical chirping blared outside and then paws thudded by as the Children sprinted into the tree line. There were two heavy thumps that rattled the wood bowls. By the time Manaaki's attention swung around, We'sol'Tu'qut'Shel and Ophelia were on their feet and headed the same way the others had hurried.

In the direction they were all going came machine gun fire and then a torrent of roaring. Manaaki saw a head and then flapping wings rise above the trees after racing to the edge of the pavilion to look.

"So, no returning to sand space until time yet to be measured has past, okay yes? Human pods still busy finding out who has rights to come murder us all, so we let them be stupid on the force of their own tail swish with no help from us. Yes, very good. Questions before we start today's lesson on interchromatic speech?" Soma said, not overtly concerned by what was happening on the island. Nor were the Golden-Eyed Ones who unblinkingly continued their duties and observations.

"Are we safe here?" an Asian man Manaaki wasn't familiar with shouted while fussily wringing his hands. The dazed panic in his eyes turned to the unseen source of the cacophony. New sounding gunfire intermingled with the first. Two more Children lifted into the air with shrieking roars.

"Safe?" Soma mused, chewing on the word like she wasn't sure of its taste. "You have drawn irritation of two off-world species at antics on world claimed by you and being altered in maybe magic, maybe science process. Six different great pods of your people are deathing each other offshore for chance to death you. Safe is word left behind in black abyss. You will not go to forever sleep if So'waa'Ma'wae, We'sol'Tu'qut'Shel, and Children of Egg have anything to say on such topic."

"With all their t?matarau, why don't the Spirits of the Void do more to protect us, if we're so key?" Airini wondered to Manaaki who could only shrug, telling his wife instead that an army of dragons might be their protective shield. He could certainly imagine that Blake had enough p?kahukahu to equal hundreds of soldiers by himself. Manaaki had seen the formidability of the tar?kona when a battalion of marines had come ashore on an attack. After the violent attempts to disarm those who'd refused to retreat or surrender, he couldn't quite look at the man who had been a friend of his daughter's the same. Thirty-seven, out of a force of two hundred, had survived by laying down their weapons. Two of them had remained out of disgust with the orders that had brought them there and were already growing greenish scales of their own.

"Haven't we arranged protection for you?" Wily said, rather smugly, pointing with her tail at a pile of the tar?kona sleeping and licking their wounds. "Isn't enough blood soaking into the rocky beaches to convince you of the force we've offered to guard this place?"

"Those are people, beings, with their own lives. Not guard dogs!" Airini bared her itching teeth and curled her fingers into menacing hooks at the Void Spirit. Manaaki felt the vague urge to do the same. Understanding of Soma's many remarks about flashing her claws came to mind.

"Why do you keep teaching us about Dreamers, and not what the future has for us? What do you expect of us?" The Southern American, Jackson Delgado, asked. Pattie calmed Soma's bristling first response by caressing the fin caught between her webbed hands. Tiny shivers traveled upward along the taniwha's spine from the contact as the man continued to press. "What is the purpose of this island? Today marks five weeks since we volunteered. We've been told we'd get answers, and they have come, but not the ones we've sought."

Soma's rain dampened scales turned a neon orange and her hand clenched, crushing the electronic tablet she held. Manaaki knew by now there had been an outline she'd written for herself to follow on the device. A reminder that this alien once commanded a crew and a spaceship. Despite her rather short temper marring the ideas Hollywood had placed into his head about what aliens should act like, she liked things going to a schedule.

Her whiskers stood straight back from her nose, past the crest of her head. Tensed, with her jaws cracked enough to show the points of her twin rows of teeth.

"With precision, how can So'waa'Ma'wae help assuage you this pleasantly moist sun-rise?"

Hearing her frustration made her feel... relatable. It removed a load from Manaaki's shoulders to know that what he was becoming could be less opaque than the other aliens, emotionally, to a human.

That emotional distance was the most obvious in the Children of the Egg. As more time went by, not even Blake seemed who he was when he'd granted the gift of a ride upon his back. How did all that brain, all that communal sharing they'd been told about change someone from the human they were? Manaaki shuddered to think. Instead, he plead alongside Airini to their gods for understanding that they were on the right path. The shift in their mentality, whatever it was, had not gone unnoticed by the Children themselves. On more than one night, Manaaki and Airini had lain in their wharepuni and wept as the tar?kona's wailing cries echoed in the concealing darkness. Amplified by the two former women whom Truth had identified as being special leaders among the Children, the pressure of loss and confusion squeezed the minds of the M?ori couple. It made them feel small and impotent in the face of such great unseen power.

Scared of what that power could do. What it was doing. The sound of artillery and machine guns on the open waters surrounding the island was a violence they could understand, but feeling their identities get crushed under the force of the invisible instilled a paralyzing instinct that could not be managed.

The scientists wanted to know more about the importance of what they were doing to an ecologically sensitive island.

So'waa'Ma'wae had been lying flat with her arms extended beneath a table, but now shuffled into a sitting position and flicked her tail hard enough to lift one end of an expansive table. One whisker brought a bowl up for her to slurp at. Drinking again at only eight in the morning, Manaaki thought despairingly. Was she just an alcoholic, or did these drinks serve a biological function?

"All your questions are part of same wave," she started. "Original plan was to spend seventy per-cent of time discussing what currents you could follow and what each flow path might contain and lead to. Now, too few Dreamers forced change in chitchat. Describing biology more important. Much breeding needed, and you must understand Dreamer body, not sense out like in dead plan.

"More breeding, more hatches, more chaos of diggers. Numbers needed for half-raw experiment run by Dreamers with Void Children and Children of Egg support. Need you to know all for many happy eggs and healthy lives. This island and others like serve as nurseries for eggs and hatched diggers. In normal tides, these sites be guarded by diggers flashing claws and making chaos of ideas. But here we start from itch, and Children of Egg be guardians and helpers while you grow second selves."

"You hear us say that tunnels, waters, and diggers needed for progression. That is occurrence here. Already word being passed by ex-visitors and key lego Matriarchs informing maybe volunteer Diggers and Dreamers. Many Diggers anticipated, exuded from not happy places of world. Human diggers, made to knit t-shirts and stretchy wrist cloth that say love New York place, even though that falsity of never know New York place. We see what chaos they do flashing digging claws after performing So'Waa'Ma'wae's volunteer dance. We must utter, much puking of indigestible food for human behavior and treatment of self. What wrong with brain chemistry to manage like this? Is little wonder local star cluster ignore your species and wall you off. Lucky, or unlucky, you, Golden-Eyed Ones see horizon far beyond sight."

Manaaki thought he counted forty hands shooting into the air to ask questions, but So'waa'Ma'wae raised her tail fin, twisted it sideways, and lowered it in a suppressing motion.

"Hold questions until time has elapsed. This is going to scramble your eggs and might require sleep for digestion."

****

"There have been... problems here with the spirits."

"Tell us," Airini asked their oldest son after the M?ori couple's grueling day of learning. Made worse by the irritation of the fins growing from their spines that'd made their first appearance.

"The national government has declared that anyone caught communicating with the aliens, any of them, will be brought up on charges of treason. A bounty is being offered for any information that can lead to a conviction. I no longer can trust anyone outside of our hapori.

"The Children of the Egg? What's happening to them?"

"The dragons? They have fled into the mountains. Their human families that can have gone to Australia, but Wellington has seized all their property. Interior Minister Strauss has created a new police force, The Special Office of Human Affairs, and given them a mandate to operate against any enemies of the peace.

"Oh, gods." Manaaki said in disbelief.

"Father. New Zealand's economy has collapsed. Trade has stopped. The dollar is worth less than toilet paper. In Christchurch, they're using the bills to... to... burn people. Anyone commiserating with the dragons."

"They're called Children of the Egg."

"Mum, it doesn't matter anymore. It's not just them that are being blamed. We are being attacked. It's the humans, not the aliens, that are the danger..."

Blake, who had been the ignored backstop in the video chat, rumbled in his chest as he lowered his head to present one eye into the tiny camera capturing the group on the island. He felt the weight of his tiny ones against his tail as he squeezed them reassuringly.

No matter what, he would protect them. Even the twinging bullet wounds that he'd hidden from them would not stop that. The parents of his friends, his little ones, had to be safeguarded. Blake's fins lowered in his distress at the smell and mind feel of them. In time, they would be far greater than him. But, for now, he was their guardian.

"You will stop," he grumbled warningly. "You are frightening your parents."

"Blake," Airini said, laying a restraining hand on the Child's encircling tail. "We know you mean well, but we do not need our feelings protected or decisions made for us."

A whisper from Kanna and Ophelia brushed his troubled thoughts. Relax, their touch told him. Reluctantly at first, his body and focus eased, pulling back to allow the family their distressing talks. He sought through the myriad of other voices he heard for those of the two brightening lights closest to him. Seeking their wants first.

"Who is that spirit? Why is he speaking for you?"

Blake saw their desire. He knew the answer to Kanna's question about how to control their spinal fins. He felt her wings beat as Eka watched the humans surrounding the island sink another of their ships. The giant form of the Elder submerged, circling the foundering vessel, slamming his head into its side and making the ocean behind him boil with the furious beating of his tail to nudge the ship away from the reef. Raising his fin, he showed Kanna the cooling his sail brought to his blood and how to know what it told her about the air caressing it. A storm was coming. This evening, while some slept. Samuel sent his loneliness, and Blake joined the other Children with their support. That feeling swept back into him as he remembered who he was. The man without a direction that had found life.

The confusion overwhelmed, and it was only his sisters and brothers, along with the contact of his little ones, that stopped him from fleeing into the welcoming void.

"This is Blake, Pounamu's former neighbor. Blake, this is our son, Etera."

"Charmed, I am sure." Blake huffed and remembered to switch to English when the little odd ones looked at him without understanding. "Charmed, I'm sure."

"The police visited me today, twice. The second time it was with a man wearing a black uniform. He took one look at me, and spray painted a red "X" on my door."

"What does that mean?"

Baring his tongue with his eyes held wide, Etera slapped his chest in defiance. Answer enough. Blake wondered what such resolve smelled like. "The red "X" is what the new secret police used to mark suspects. Any aliens, any at all, and the first natives, our people, are targeted. I will not run from those using Zero Day as a pretext to finish what the Europeans started centuries ago.

Where their skin hadn't turned the color of the sea, the M?ori pair grew pale with alarm. Blake asked Kanna to show them reassurance, and they calmed enough to think reasonably after the instinctive need to panic.

"Where are your tu?hine? Where are our tamaw?hine?"

The fire in Etera's expression died, and he looked away. "I don't know where my sisters are. I do know that since they'd both stopped talking to you, they'd moved in together at Northwood. When they didn't answer my calls, I found a red 'X' on their broken door."

Blake screamed his little one's pain for them.

****

"Of course, the communication systems are not just for the Dreamer-humans. As you too have chosen to come, divorcing yourself further from your life, the courtesy is yours as well."

Blake rocked side to side, uncertain. His gaze turned from the large monitor and the hardened keypad attached to it for use by large, clawed creatures, back to Truth.

"Who I want to contact will not have one of these."

The Golden-eyed one blinked, knowing straight away what he wanted. Of course. "Unless you give me the name of the Children of the Egg you wish to contact to assist in finding the lost family of Airini and Manaaki, I cannot help."

"Cannot, or will not?"

"You already know the answer. What is it that your ancient fabulist, Aesop, wrote? 'Heaven helps those who help themselves.' is it not?"

Patience gave him a similar response, while also reminding that what one Golden-eyed one knew, they all knew. Wily just snarled at him for the effrontery of asking a third time.

"It will take another month for you to return to your family. So'waa'Ma'wae is adamant that to speed it up risks damaging your minds." Truth later told his little ones when they begged the chance to save their family.

"Soma told us that the project is already at risk of failing from so few willing to help. That the governments are blocking news of our existence to discourage others." Airini said. Her right eye was red and puffy while the softly glowing reptilian left orb dilated and vacant. The lifeless whiskers from her nose drooped to brush the arm of Manaaki. Who stared into space, lost, with the rays of his ear fins limp and dull against the green skin of his neck.

"As much as it hurts to hear this, whatever help you can give will be too late. You are more likely to be victims of the same kidnapping that has taken your daughters."

"We must do something..." Manaaki said wretchedly.

"You are doing something. Right here. Something too few are doing."

The large man sobbed. "We did this for our children, and two of them cast us out of their lives. Now, because of us, they might be dead."

"Our son told us it wasn't safe for us to come back. He didn't want us to come back."

"You said it is not my affair before, but he is right. Have you seen the news?"

Blake sought a remote and poked randomly at the controls with his tongue. Getting the exact news that he wanted suspiciously quickly.

Their prime minister appeared, reading the end of a prepared speech at a lectern. "At the recommendation of the Minister of National Security and Intelligence and the newly formed Special Office of Human Affairs, I have accepted the resignations of all ministers and governmental employees who have been identified as those of questionable loyalty to our great country, our species, and our world. For their safety, and the safety of others, they will be temporarily housed at secure facilities. Thank you all, and good day."

A M?ori newswoman appeared, looking flustered as she shifted her papers and tapped them on the desk before her.

"As you have just heard from Prime Minister Strauss, the release of creatures of national concern... Okay, this needs to stop!" She broke from her teleprompter to shout, slamming her hands down on the desk and rising. Indecorously revealing that she was wearing nothing but a pair of basketball shorts below her business suit top.

"This Nazi shite of spiriting everyone away..."

"There she is!" a voice shouted from offscreen, and the camera tilted up unattended as the studio went pakaru. "Under the authority given by the first directive of the Special Office of Human Affairs, Noa Wero, you are being detained as a matter of public safety..." The rest cut off as the image went blank. Blake turned the tv off by accidentally crushing the remote with his snout and twisted his head back to his little ones.

"You saw that all our names are on that list released by these... stormtroopers. They know we're here. If you go back, you'll put your son and daughters in more danger, and that is only if you aren't executed immediately."

Manaaki and Airini didn't have an answer, instead putting their heads together to cry. Blake, through Ophelia, burned with the parent's loss and wanted to wrap his wings around them. The feeling grew, travelling up his throat as he raised his head and bugled at the ceiling. Answering calls rose around the camp in the night, sharing their pain. Their anguish and the urge to protect equally strong and confusing to the former man. The others were presences that nudged at him, that nudged at the human-aliens in his embrace.

The M?ori couple's sobs fall quiet as they let the contact calm them. Blake's connection lit with energy as he thought of an idea. He sent it to the Matriarchs who, after passing it between them and an exploratory pulse, agreed. His little ones' crestfallen faces looked up at Blake when he showed them his excitement.

"I have a plan to search for them. It needs you, Children, a Matriarch, and your son."

It was audacious in the extreme as he explained what he proposed. Requiring more to put themselves in harm's way. But there was another possibility, to find out how many more would take the plunge if only they knew about the island. A chance at something else, something greater. Especially after seeing what dystopian nightmare New Zealand was becoming.

"My little ones. I will do all that I can for you." To do anything less would dishonor the feelings that grew stronger by the day in the former human. Thoughts of what he was becoming, what he was, set aside at the sight of his little one's fins raising along with their hope.

****

"I need to access the internet." Blake said to Soma. Not wanting to deal with the Golden-Eyed Ones now. Soma, still dripping sea water as she returned from the ocean, froze in shock with an explosion of color when Blake came bounding through the trees.

"You do?" she asked tentatively, with her whiskers raised and coiled to strike like vipers. Her body posture relaxing after the first tense moment.

"So'waa'Ma'wae will ensure Children have machine for surfing data web. We know you been much busy learning to be you. Follow and remind human-Dreamers no going to beach. Yes, okay? Hu-mans murdering each other there, time as of this time."

Blake felt himself lift from the ground when his wings unfurled to flutter in excitement while he bounced on his paws around the smaller Dreamer. At last, he had a purpose on the island beyond being shot at. He had a job, to find his little one's family.

Soma had a quick flashed conversation with the new Golden-Eyed One, Wisdom, that had taken the form of a tremendous Child of the Egg. She had appeared to train Kanna and Ophelia in what it meant to be a Matriarch. The two former women were below the immense wings of the alien at the moment, watching Blake approach. Kanna, a little shyly, put her head out to snuffle at his throat. If he were still a man, he'd have been blushing like a cherry. His scent said all he wanted instead. Linking with her mind, he sang praise for the beauty of her charcoal, argent-streaked eyes. She hummed in tune to his song, and her mind shone with her approval. A rustle of her scales provided a scent, encouraging him to continue later.

"Your devices are at the central pavilion," Wisdom told Blake, inclining her head down from a height that was dwarfed by only one other on the island. "There is one for each monitor. Place your palm on the sensor and then focus on your command as you would communicate through the link."

"Think carefully," Wisdom said to Blake's tail after he'd turned away. "About what you plan to do. It may work, but the cost to your country may be dire." Blake stopped, mulled that over, and then waved his tail in a fan-like motion to signal his acknowledgement as he pranced onward. Full of the glow of his idea and the approval of Kanna. If caution was needed, he only had to lop off the final stage of his plan.

There was a mass of human-Dreamers and Children at the pavilion. More than there had been before. Including, to Blake's horror, a score of emaciated children wearing tattered reeking clothes that stared up at Truth with rapt expressions.

"What is this?"

Soma came in with her whiskers snapping. "Humansssss..." she hissed after understanding with one look at the children goggling at her.

"These children are slaves who learned of this place from a Child of the Egg," Truth told Blake. "They have volunteered with the appropriate resolve after completing So'waa'Ma'wae's ceremony."

"We guard children from harm, Blake. Nothing is stopping them from leaving if they want, but none of them have anywhere to return,"a Child named Veronica told him with her tail curled protectively around the kids who huddled against her after becoming spooked by Soma's hissing. Blake's aromatic distress at seeing that the skin of their hands had already become green was countered by the soothing of Veronica. The children themselves felt more excited than anything else. Content with stuffing their faces with a variety of food and drink and blithely considering the transformation that they might not be mature enough to understand, but also might keep them from being abused ever again.

He left them and went to an empty table, spying the new device in the middle. Blake nudged it over to a cushion with his tail and ordered some haggis from Patience. His plan had many parts and would take some time before he had something to show for it. He had it arranged in six steps in his head. The first was to keep anyone else from dying. The last was to tell Airini and Manaaki the good news that he'd found their children. Simple.

Blake tried to order a drink to fortify himself for this and learned something new from Patience. That alcohol was toxic to a Child, while Dreamers thrived on it. Instead, the Golden-Eyed One offered him a gnarled root.

"Ginger produces many of the same effects in a Child when held beneath the tongue. The chemical THC does as well. I suggest you imbibe one of these substances instead of risking the more unpredictable effects of ethanol alcohol in your system."

Blake, no stranger to recreational enjoyments, asked for and received a large hookah laden with grass and an automatically igniting sparker. When he exhaled his first hit after sucking on one hose lodged between the fangs of his snout, he found a familiar and relaxing sensation settle over him. The peripheral inputs of the others falling away. The twin curls of smoke exiting his nostrils making it look like he could breathe fire.

" Dragon Transformation New Zealand Video," Blake tried as his first search on itube. The letters appearing in the search bar as quickly as he looked at them on the on-screen keyboard. He needed a name to go with a Child of the Egg, a contact, who might still be in his home country.

He found three hundred hits and clicked on the first with a thought. He took another drag of the hookah as the video started. The drug gave him a warming buzz like alcohol, dampening his anxiety at having to watch others go through what remained crystal clear in his mind. He wanted to forget those days spent with his body tearing itself apart.

The shaky cell phone video was on a metro bus. A map near the ceiling showed it was in Christchurch.

A man was kneeling next to a woman on the floor of the bus. She had a crowd gathered around her, calling out with concern. Beside her was a spilled bag of groceries being ground to pieces by her hands and knees.

"Bethany? What's wrong?"

The woman with violet dye in her black hair didn't answer. Instead, raising her face to the camera and revealing that her lips were drawn back from her teeth in pain. The tendons of her neck stood out along with the pulsating length of her artery as her blood pressure skyrocketed.

Blake couldn't bring himself to look away as the woman moaned. The sound of tearing cloth came from somewhere unseen, and Bethany swelled in girth, her clothes drawing tight against her. Seams ripped to reveal white skin tessellating into hardened translucent plates. The woman's moans turned into heaving cries as pressure built within her frame.

She opened her eyes; they were three different colors; the pupils slitted. Blake's heart raced as his own metamorphosis re-surged to the front of his thoughts. In crystal clarity, he relived all over again the feel of each scale tore through his skin. His body burned as muscle and bone knit, pushing against his too tight skin. The pain of her growth was his as she shrieked a name. Blake's tail lashed and his breathing grew frantic. His jaws opening as he panted his distress. Hearing her words but feeling his own change.

"Aidan!" the woman screamed before an enormous tail shredded her yoga pants to whip back and forth against the legs of the terrified onlookers. "Help me!" she wailed as her new appendage injured those its thickening black mass slammed into.

Blake, in throes of his own resurgent anguish, couldn't separate himself from what he was watching. Bawling his pain, he swatted back at the mental caresses, trying to calm him. The world blurred as he flung his head in denial, upending his table and his repast.

There were flapping wings and shouts of alarm around him. The screams from the woman in the video continuing in Blake's earpieces. His pain matching hers. The feeling of his spine cracking and reforming as more and more vertebrae were added, stretching far beyond where it should have ended. Muscle that stitched to life to shroud bone before being sheathed in hide and scale. How his body doubled in length with the sprouting of his tail. As long as his torso, head, and neck combined.

"Hold him!" a familiar voice said. "It is me, Blake. It is Kanna. You are not that woman in that video. Someone turn that off!" she commanded, reaching to remove Blake's earpieces and the tips of her claws scratching at the scales around his ear holes. "You are safe. Please be still. You are safe. It is over." She said something else in human, but without his earpieces he could not understand her Japanese. But he could understand her scent and wilted against her. His high, breathy, whistling cries announcing his pain. Waves of sympathy washed over him, cocooning his torment to sweep it away.

"How can we help?" a human-Dreamer that Blake didn't know asked. He gasped his reply, wishing that his little ones were there. That he could feel them within his grasp.

"Aidan. Bethany. See if we can find them. We need to contact Children in New Zealand. We need a Matriarch. It is not safe for them. It is not safe for them." Blake burst into tears as the wings of the others covered him.