Even the Biggest Fish Fears a Shark

9/25

The Pink n Prissy Collective and all their captions (and storyline reboots...) are on my index page.

Grace sat swaddled in the oversized hoodie alone in her room in the house shared by the members of the Pink n Prissy Collective. It had been six months since her friends had rescued her but time as the monstrous Kirsten’s personal plaything still haunted her. Hiding her body behind baggy clothes, she hid inside a shadow of her former self. There was a soft knock on her door and Josie, Charlotte, Terri and Cassie, the rest of the Pink n Prissy Collective, appeared in its frame. Terri, the group’s tech guru, was holding a laptop.

“We’ve got a surprise for you!” Charlotte skipped into the room and the four girls planted themselves on Grace’s bed. The computer screen was open to an app called Mugshot and Charlotte spotted Grace’s confusion. “It’s a new face-to-face video chat app. It launched while you were…away. It has lots of features that I am sure you will get used to over time.” She nodded to Terri who was in the process of setting up a call with a user named Emi_theShark.

“Don’t worry, she’s not scary,” Cassie soothed, “well, I guess she is…just not to us. To us she is sweet! She’s kind of like our idol!” The videocall connected and the laptop screen was filled by the face of an attractive yet powerful looking woman with long bangs framing a pair of startling eyes. Grace noticed with surprise that a shiny latex top rose all the way over her throat.

“Hey, you guys!” Emi greeted them cheerfully. “And I suppose this is Grace?” She sipped a glass of champagne and smiled warmly. “Is she ready for my gift?” Emi appeared to adjust her screen so that the girls could see a wider angle of her room and Grace gasped. Emi was sat at a large extendable dining table with a hole that someone had added between two of the slats. A fully encased black latex head was trapped by the hole – the only visible parts of its occupant a pair of pink painted lips and a set of piercing eyes.

“Kirsten…” Grace whispered in disbelief. “But how?!”

“There’s always a bigger fish, kid!” Emi grinned. “And then there are sharks!” She shared a link across the chat and Terri opened what looked like an OnlyFemmes profile belonging to Emi. The page showed numerous video feeds of different figures in various arrangements of bondage and Terri clicked the newest post at the top. The screen now displayed a wide angle view of Kirsten’s predicament and the girls could see that the rest of her body below the table was also clad in seamless black latex and strapped in place with leather and metal clasps. “I have set you up as my newest subscriber, so let me show you how this works,” Emi explained. “Our ‘big fish’ here is equipped with a selection of my toys that can be activated by the subscribers’ keyboard. ‘N’ is of course nipples. Give it a try!” Grace tentatively pressed the keyboard and watched as her former tormentor gave an uncharacteristic squeal.

“’A’ is Cassie’s favourite,” Terri chided her friend who was known to have a buttplug in her bedside drawer, and pushed the corresponding key. This time Kirsten gave a yelp and jumped up, banging her shoulders on the underside of the table.

“Finally, most of my guests are male,” Emi continued, “so ‘C’ is usually to activate the toy attached to their cock. “But, unintentionally, I think it still works!” Grace pressed the ‘C’ key and within a few seconds, Kirsten’s eyes started to roll back into her latex clad head. When she removed her finger, the eyes returned with a clear film of shame at the degradation she was enduring. “I agree,” Emi nodded, “use that one sparingly.”

“Grace, we are so glad to have you back!” Josie the leader of the Pink n Prissy Collective took her hand. “I know we can’t take back what Kirsten did to you, but I sure hope this helps get your confidence back. There are a lot of boys out there – and we need your help to feminise them all!”

Whatever Happened to Rodney? (Slight Oversight)

 Original caption is here 

The young man exiting the interview room looked nothing short of professional. A dark grey suit paired nicely with a black tie and an expensive haircut – Rodney longed for the days when he could put himself together in such a way. The man glanced at his fellow job applicant approvingly and began to shuffle papers into a briefcase in a manner that oozed confidence and competency. Rodney sighed. It was going to have to be one of 'those' interviews. Blushing slightly, he unfastened the top two buttons of his striped blouse.

When Rodney had originally pulled on the bodysuit all those years ago, it was intended to be a treat, a one-off to get his urges out of his system – or so he had thought. Little had he known at the time that due to his own carelessness, it would be a transformation that would never be reversed. He did find the bodysuit's missing key eventually, It was folded into the second page of the product's welcome pack, but by then it far too late and Rodney's fate, and the bodysuit, were well and truly sealed. Needless to say, he did get the urges out of his system very quickly indeed

The bodysuit had come with some additional extras – character modifiers intended to give the wearer an experience akin to a beautiful yet somewhat airheaded woman. These changes had made Rodney's adaptation to his new existence even more difficult. Ideas seemed more complicated, words felt longer and he would often find himself staring off into space, his lips parted and his eyes vacant. He hated himself for it, but more and more he found himself having to rely on his sexuality to get what he needed. He perfected the art of flirting, flashing a but of skin when it would benefit him and, once the platform grew in notoriety, even selling the odd picture on OnlyFemmes.

Rodney survived through embracing his unwanted femininity but he still longed to create a life for himself that stood independently of a strategically chewed lip, or a perfectly timed pushup bra – a life that belonged to him and not the now permanent bodysuit.

Applying for the the Personal Assistant job had been a chore. The advert had been paragraphs of long words he had to put into a search engine – taking his time to ensure he got the spelling right – but the birth of AI had helped a lot with the process and he found himself squealing with joy when the email came through offering an interview. Still determined not to resort back to the tried and tested exploitation of his appearance, he dressed conservatively in a smart blouse and dark slacks, his eyeglasses perched professionally on his nose.

The young man finished packing his briefcase and smiled politely. He waved a silent fairwell and left the waiting area already on a phone call confidently telling someone how he had nailed the interview. Rodney hesitated before unfastening two more buttons on his blouse.

The Changing Seas Part 4

By the time AquaLure’s Deep Within campaign launched, the world had officially lost its mind over Eva. There were perfume ads, workout routines, even a cookbook called Eating Like a Mermaid. Miranda DeValle basked in it all like a CEO who believed she’d personally discovered Atlantis. The “grand reveal” was set for a live broadcast from the same beach where it all began. There’d be fireworks, holograms, drones—the works. Miranda promised “a message of truth from our muse herself.”

Backstage, Miranda checked her reflection one last time and hissed into her headset, “Is she mic’d up? I want sincerity but not too sincere.”

Evan stood a few feet away, wrapped in a towel, hair damp from the ocean. He tweaked his delicate features into a sweet smile. “Oh, don’t worry, Miranda. I’ll keep it real.”

When the lights came up, Miranda strutted onto the glass runway that jutted over the surf. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she beamed, “AquaLure’s spirit of purity, rebirth, and authenticity… Eva!” Eva stepped forward, calm and radiant. Cameras zoomed in, phones lifted, hashtags multiplied like algae blooms. “Eva,” Miranda said, voice syrupy, “tell the world what AquaLure means to you.”

Evan took the microphone, expression unreadable. The crowd hushed. “What does AquaLure mean to me?” he said slowly. “It means illusion. It means lighting tricks, camera angles, and silicone fins.” A ripple of confusion passed through the audience. Miranda’s smile froze. Evan held up a familiar object: the battered prototype fin, still patched with glue and sand from the storm. “This,” he said, “is your ‘mystical mermaid.’I designed it. I made it. I built her. And she was never real. Just a well engineered mascot!” The crowd gasped. Drones hovered uncertainly, unsure if they were filming a scandal or performance art. Miranda lunged for the mic, and Evan slipped away from her grasp and continued, louder now, voice clear and ringing. “But I was real. I got swept out to sea trying to save this thing. When I came back, everyone decided to believe the fantasy instead of the truth. Maybe that says more about marketing than magic.” Then he smiled, soft and genuine. “But here’s the funny part—I think the sea decided to keep me anyway.” With that, she dropped the fin, turned, and walked calmly into the water.

The crowd erupted—half outrage, half awe. Cameras flashed. Miranda stood soaked in spotlight and silence, her empire unraveling one viral clip at a time. Evan waded in until the waves reached his waist. There was a shimmer, a flicker of silver light, and then he was gone.

By morning, #AquaLureHoax was trending. Investors bailed. Miranda was last seen trying to spin the disaster as “a performance about truth in advertising.” Nobody bought it.

And the world kept spinning – the tides kept turning and within weeks the public had moved onto the next thing. Eva the Mermaid was forgotten – for the most part anyway. Local fishermen gossiped about an ethereal figure, little more than a silhouette really, sat on the rocks below the cliffs – always after a storm – a women's laughter carried on the breeze. Now and then, one of them would find a perfect seashell washed ashore – always etched with the same single line. “The sea is real enough for me.

 

The Changing Seas Part 3

 

Evan should have been dead, or at least missing, but by the time he dragged himself back to land, he was trending. #RealMermaid, #OceanAuthentic, and #AquaLureLives had flooded social media. The clips were everywhere: shaky phone footage of his half-human, half-tail form on the beach, saltwater glittering under sunlight. In every thumbnail, he looked like the perfect viral product shot.

Miranda greeted him at the beach with an army of marketing executives before he had even found dry clothes. “Darling, what a miracle!” she gushed. “You’ve transcended branding. You are the brand.” And that’s how Evan found himself back on an AquaLure set—this time not as the designer but as the object. Within a week, “Eva the Mermaid” was fronting a global campaign. There were billboards, interviews, photoshoots. He hadn’t agreed to any of it—but he also hadn’t said no, mostly because every time he tried to explain he used to be a man, people nodded sympathetically and said, “That’s so brave of you to share your journey.”

The first commercial shoot was at a private beach. Drones buzzed, makeup artists fussed, and Miranda circled like a shark in designer heels. “Darling, you glow,” she beamed. “The ocean has claimed you! You are AquaLure.”

Evan just stood there frozen in the surf wearing a magnificent sequinned dress that had been engineered to break away as he entered the water and his tail revealed itself. It was too much – the drones continued the hum as if inside his head, the excited chattering that surrounded him, dozens of expectant eyes, all on him... He raised his hands to his temples to clamp his growing headache. Everywhere he looked, there were versions of himself—billboards, mock-ups, even a foam cutout of his silhouette with a “SCAN FOR 10% OFF” QR code where his face should be...where her face should be. Miranda and AquaLure had seen him as nothing more than a tool to get what they wanted for years, and now that everything had changed, nothing had changed at all...

“I need a break!” He declared to an open-mouthed Miranda and glided away before she could point out they hadn't even started. He sat on a rock and wondered if it was the same one he'd sat on that fateful night he'd been washed out to sea. The sun reflected on the perfect skin of his arms as he tried to steady his breathing. The past few weeks had been a blur, but actually being 'Eva' had been the least of it. Being a mermaid was one thing, but being 'their' mermaid was another thing entirely. He had always been 'theirs', been Miranda's, but now she acted like she owned him.

Behind him he heard Miranda excitedly giving an interview. “She represents the power of nature and femininity,” Miranda purred. “Of course, she’s entirely real.”

'Entirely real,' Evan thought bitterly. No mention of how I created her...and then became her... It was then that Evan decided to show everyone just how real mermaids really were.

The Changing Seas Part 2

 

Evan woke to the sound of gulls arguing. His mouth tasted like seawater. The sky above him was a blinding sheet of white, and for one surreal moment, he thought he was in the office—until a crab scuttled over his wrist and pinched him. He sat up fast. The world tilted. The sand beneath him shimmered with salt crystals, and his legs—his legs felt wrong. Heavy. Fused. Cold.

He looked down. “Oh no. Oh no no no.” Where his khakis should’ve been was a long, iridescent tail. Not a costume. Not neoprene. Scales—real ones—glittered blue and green in the sunlight, flexing as if amused by his horror. He slapped it. It twitched back. “Ow!” He flopped backward, laughing and swearing at once. “Okay. Dream. Weird post-traumatic branding dream.”

He tried to crawl, dragging himself across the sand, leaving a shimmering trail like a giant sardine slug. The movement made the tail flash brighter, and far down the beach someone shouted, “Oh my GOD! It’s her!” A group of tourists sprinted closer, phones raised.“It’s the AquaLure mermaid!” one squealed. “They’re filming the new ad!”

“I’m not—” Evan started, then stopped. His voice was… different. Higher. Soft and musical, like it had been auto-tuned by Poseidon. He froze. Blinked. Patted his face. Smooth skin. Delicate jaw. Cheekbones sharp enough to slice sushi. Long hair, wet and gold, stuck to his shoulders. He looked down again. He—no, she—was topless, large perfect breasts buoyant on his chest. “Oh come on,” he groaned, his voice a melodic sigh as he leaned his head back and stared directly into the heavens..

The tourists were still filming. “Wave to the camera!” one yelled. Evan tried to cover himself with his hands and tail at once, which only made him look more like a calendar poster. Someone shouted, “She’s shy! So authentic!”

Panicking, he twisted toward the water— and with a sudden shimmer, his tail split, the scales rippling away like dissolving glitter. Legs. Real human legs. “What the—” He stood, immediately tripped, and landed face-first in the sand.

The crowd gasped, then applauded. “Method acting!” someone cheered.

Evan scrambled upright and bolted for the dunes, not stopping until the beach noise faded and only the crash of waves remained. He sank down beside a rock pool, trembling. His reflection stared back: luminous eyes, sunlit hair, an impossible face he’d seen on billboards for years. “The AquaLure mermaid,” he whispered. “I made you.” The reflection smiled back faintly, as though the sea itself was in on the joke. A low hum echoed through the water, a whispering sound that might have been waves—or laughter. Evan stared at the horizon, half-terrified, half-thrilled, and muttered, “Miranda’s gonna love this.”

The Changing Seas Part 1

 The was a series commissioned on DeviantArt

Evan never meant to become the “Mermaid Guy.” He’d gone to art school to design shoes. Somehow, ten years later, he was Senior Visual Concept Engineer at AquaLure, the global water brand that believed hydration required mythological undertones. Every bottle, billboard, and TV spot was graced with the same ethereal figure: a mermaid, half-shadowed, tail glinting like bottled starlight. “She embodies purity, mystery, and desire,” declared AquaLure’s CEO, Miranda DeValle, every Monday morning. “She is our soul.”

Evan usually muttered, “She’s mostly neoprene and glue.” He was the one who’d built her tail—an engineering marvel of silicone scales and fishing wire. The “mermaid silhouette” wasn’t a real person, just Evan zipped into his creation and lit from behind. The secret was in the curve: he’d sculpted it after studying how light refracted through plastic water bottles. The result? Instant mystique. And instant career trap. Now every meeting was about “channelling mermaid essence.” He’d been asked to “make the tail sexier” three times that week alone.

On Thursday, Miranda burst into the workshop waving a storyboard. “We’re shooting the new ‘Call of the Deep’ campaign tomorrow. Real waves, real beach, no filters. I want emotion. I want transcendence. I want commitment,” Miranda snapped at Evan. “Bring the prototype fin.”

So the next day, under blackening clouds, Evan stood ankle-deep in churning surf, holding a clipboard that was rapidly becoming papier-mâché and lounged on a rock while drones buzzed overhead.

“Can we get more sparkle on the tail?” Miranda yelled from the beach tent.

“It’s raining sideways!”

“That’s realism!”

The storm hit fast. The wind howled. The ocean surged up like a beast that had had enough of marketing metaphors. Evan shrieked as a wave slapped the rock he was on and he lunged forward, trying to grab a hand-hold before he and the expensive fin were washed away. The next moment, a swirl of grey-green foam and salt punched him in the chest and yanked him from the beach.

He glimpsed Miranda’s horrified face, the tail glimmering in midair, the drones spinning out of control. For one absurd instant, as he tumbled into the boiling sea, he thought: At least the lighting’s cinematic. Salt filled his mouth. Sound vanished. His clipboard twirled past like a surrendering flag.

The last thing he saw was a flash of turquoise beneath the waves—something smooth, sinuous, almost welcoming.

Then the ocean closed over him, and the campaign’s tagline drifted through his fading thoughts like a cruel joke: “AquaLure: Let the sea take you.”

My Girlfriend's Roommate

 8/25

“You told your parents I’m gay?!” Billy gaped incredulously at his girlfriend across the couch. “Are you kidding me?!” He and Amanda had been together a little more than six months and he had just moved permanently into her studio apartment.

“It’s the only way they would let you live here,” Amanda protested. “They still pay the rent, you know? A gay roommate is the perfect way to stop them asking questions. Besides, they are being nice,” She nodded to the half-open envelope in Billy’s hand. “They got you a gift.”

“Did you see what they got me?” He held up a Birthday card with a voucher poking out. “It is a Drag Queen pampering and photoshoot experience day. Looks expensive! I am not sure if I should be offended on behalf of my apparent gay alter-ego, or flattered they want to spend this kind of money on me. It’s almost a shame it is going to be wasted.”

“Oh, you’re doing the shoot!” Amanda frowned. “How else am I going to keep up that you are my roommate if they don’t see pictures? Come on, Billy…” she batted her eyelashes, “I will make it worth it!”

It was three weeks later and Billy had spent the last two hours in a makeup chair being transformed by a larger-than-life character named Josephine - staring into a huge mirror framed with old fashioned lightbulbs and postcards from someone called Isabella as the face that glared back was reshaped and sculpted with countless products. When Josephine was finished, he didn’t even recognise himself from beneath the soft pink lips, frosty eye makeup and curly blonde wig.

He tried to act relaxed as Josephine squeezed him into an enormous dress that looked like a wedding cake and fastened the corset at the back so excruciatingly tight that he could no longer bend enough to see his stilettoed feet. His whole body tingled from the fresh removal of its hair and his face was heavy and stiff, yet he determinedly attempted to adopt a carefree camp demeanour as the artist who had turned him from a scruffy boy in his early twenties into something akin to a Disney princess readied her camera. Billy stuck his hands on his hips and adopted what he thought was a bratty pout.

“Oh, relax, Sweetheart!” Josephine rolled her eyes. “Your acting skills are wasted on me… I know you aren’t gay!” Billy tried to breathe out but the corset continued to clamp his chest. “The Jacksons know you aren’t gay too!”

“Then why…” He blinked as she snapped a photo.

“Why the shoot?” Josephine shot another. “They do this with all Amanda’s boyfriends. I assume it is ammunition for if you ever do anything to hurt her – that or some kind of test. It’s fine by me . Repeat customers keep me in business.” She smiled – confusion looked so sweet on him when he was trussed up like a cupcake. “Okay, so this is his how this will go… They will see the photos and remark how wonderful you look – how vivacious…alive…etc…etc. And so, you will get another voucher at Christmas, or when you get a new job, or just because they are feeling ‘generous’. Trust me, we will be seeing a lot of each other if you want to continue seeing a lot of Amanda. Speaking of which, we still have a few hours of today left. Let’s try out some more looks. I have some shoes that will match your eyes perfectly…”