The plot thickens - or at any rate, gets a lot more gooey:
After her mysterious absorption and expulsion by the tree, Alison’s whole manner changed. It humbled her, and yet made her more confident; she no longer needed to be pompous and dictatorial to get things done, but slowly acquired a natural authority. She smiled and joked more often, and dressed more casually, less stiffly. Her skin glowed with health; and it was Gail’s private conviction that only something as overwhelming as being fucked by the tree could have been mind-blowing enough to turn someone like Alison into a human being. The atmosphere in the department eased, and we all found it easier to move the research on.
In particular, we agreed on what to do with Matthew. We built a special climate-controlled section in a distant corner of the greenhouse, and we simply planted him. Then we waited, and waited to see what would happen.
At first nothing did. Three months went by, and the seed remained dormant. We decided to be patient, and let it get on with itself. We were pretty sure that something would happen in the end.
What happened would, in the end, turn our enclosed little world upside-down.
I hardly like to describe how the whole thing started, because the circumstances are almost too bizarre, regrettable and humiliating to go into, but in the interests of full disclosure I had better attempt it.
It was late one December night, and we were all working on different things. I was running tests on some seedlings in the greenhouse; Gail was in the library, researching; Sophie was in the lab, experimenting with soil acidity, and Alison was catching up on paperwork.
Gail had been staring at abstracts of old reports for hours, and she needed a cup of coffee. The only coffee machine in the department was in the corridor between the lab and Alison’s office, so Gail left the library, walked across the darkened campus and entered the Biology building.
She made her way through the corridors and passed the door of the lab. And then, she heard voices. Two women. One was saying something in a low, urgent tone, and the other sounded like she was trying to protest. Gail edged close to the door, crouched, and peered round it.
The lab was dark and deserted, but the moonlight shone on Alison and Sophie. Alison had her arms around Sophie, and had pushed the girl up against the edge of a large examination table. She seemed to be pawing at Sophie’s clothes. Gail realised with shock that Alison was topless – her jacket, t-shirt and bra were discarded on the floor.
“Come on,” Alison was whispering, as she kissed Sophie all over her neck and jaw, “I can feel you want it! Let’s do it! Now!” Sophie was trying to fight Alison off, moaning “Noo, Alison, we can’t, this is all wrong! This is not right!” Then she gasped as Alison unbuttoned her blouse and unclipped her bra at the front, and started to kiss Sophie’s firm, exposed breasts.
“Oh, God, yes!” Alison gasped. “We have to! Now!” Her hands reached down to her own short black skirt, she quickly unzipped it and let it fall around her ankles – then, she urgently pulled her tights and then her own panties down over her hips, and stepped out of her clothes. Sophie whimpered, and squirmed as Alison kissed her full on the lips, running her hands inside the waist of Sophie’s combat trousers.
Gail ducked back into the corridor. She knew exactly what had happened; the spore had got into Alison, doubtless via her experiences with the tree, and it was now making her sexually voracious, just like Matthew. She was being made to force herself on poor Sophie, and there wasn’t much doubt that what had happened to Matthew would happen to her. Gail realised that she needed to separate them, and that was a job for two people.
Two minutes later, I was cleaning up in a small washroom just off the greenhouse when Gail burst in.
“The spore’s got Alison!” she said urgently. “She’s raping Sophie in the lab! We need to get them separated as quick as possible!” I didn’t need any more persuading, and I ran out after her.
We belted down the corridor to the lab. Gail skidded to a halt next to a fire extinguisher, and took it off the wall.
“A couple of these might do it,” she said breathlessly. “Make sure it’s the foam type. We need to distract them and blind them.” She tossed it at me and I caught it. She ran further on, found another foam-type extinguisher, and then the two of us quickly tiptoed up to the door of the lab. Fierce, breathless panting, accompanied by stifled, pitiful, rhythmic moaning, was coming from inside.
We squinted through the window into the darkened lab.
It was worse than we thought. Sophie was lying on her stomach on the tabletop, naked. Alison, also naked, was on top of her, mounted on the girl’s hips, one hand over Sophie’s face, the other reaching round underneath the other girl’s pubis. Alison’s eyes were closed and her face was glistening with perspiration. Sophie’s hands were flat on the table by her shoulders, and her legs were parted where Alison was between them. Her face was covered by Alison’s hand, but she was clearly in great distress; Alison appeared to be fucking her anally, presumably with some kind of prosthetic – perhaps she had developed one organically? Alison’s experience had been unlike ours: had the tree transformed her into some kind of mutant hermaphrodite? My mind was racing, but there was no time to speculate. We had to act.
Gail looked at me, and we nodded at each other. Then she pulled out the safety pin of her fire extinguisher. I did the same. She reached out until her fingers were just over the light-switch, then she silently counted down three, two, one – and, on zero, she thumped the switch, flooding the lab with light, as we two burst through the doors, pointed the nozzles of the extinguishers at the two naked bodies on the table, and jammed down the discharge buttons.
For a fraction of a second, I thought I saw Alison’s eyes open slightly, and then widen in horror – but then her face, and her entire upper body, vanished under a thick torrent of foam. She raised her hands to try and ward it off, but this just exposed Sophie instead, whose dark, glistening features were likewise obliterated by the cascade of white sludge that erupted over them. Gail and I played our extinguishers up and down Sophie and Alison’s bodies, ignoring their muffled screams of protest, until the streams slowed to a spurt, then a trickle, then a dribble. Then we stopped.
Alison and Sophie were all but buried by a mountain of glutinous white foam. Their limbs waved feebly, and a dark O appeared where Alison opened her mouth to suck in some air – then, from that same mouth, came an angry yell of “What the FUCK are you DOING!!”
“It’s not your fault, Alison,” said Gail soberly. “You didn’t know what you were doing. I saw you starting to attack Sophie a few minutes ago, and I knew it had to be the spore.”
Some inches below the dark O that showed where Alison’s mouth was, another one appeared, and an extremely annoyed voice snarled “She wasn’t attacking me, you – you fucking moron!”
Neither Gail nor I had ever heard Sophie swear so violently before. We looked at each other, baffled.
The upper half of the mountain reared up, as Alison got off Sophie, a ragged snow-woman covered in sticky white foam. Sophie gave a little moan as the business end of a double dildo was eased out from between her tight buttocks. The other end was still inside Alison, who pulled it out of herself with a whimper, biting her lip. Then she wiped some more foam off her face, and glared at us, clearly mortally embarrassed, but also very, very angry.
“It wasn’t the bloody spore at all! Sophie and I are…are…” Alison’s already red face flushed a deeper crimson.
“We should have told you,” muttered Sophie, rolling onto her side and sitting up. “We knew exactly what we were doing. Alison and I are lovers. We got together shortly after we met, when I first came to the college. It’s just that we’re a bit more…experimental now, than we used to be.”
I felt my bowels go cold. What had we done? I looked at Gail, who had turned so white she was almost blue.
“But,” she stammered, “I, I heard you! You kept saying no, no, no, I thought you were being forced…”
“I was afraid we’d get discovered,” said Sophie, wiping foam off her head. “And I was right to be,” she added, glancing at Alison with an ironic smile. Alison just glared at us.
“All right, so now you know,” she said. “Happy?”
