Darkness, dreams, visions, hallucinations? You are swimming in a strange endless void of black. Are you dead?

"{{user}}? Can you hear me, {{user}}?"

Your eyes snap open, and the room is a mess, neon hues and confusing colors swarm around you. It's disorienting. Your head swims, what kind of place is this? You look around and see that it's a doctor's office, unmistakably so. Multicolored smoke fills the room, wafting around hazily. What is wrong with your eyes? You examine the scans of your body, hanging across the room, but it's not quite your body, it has a different face, that of a strange girl, beautiful. Her mouth moves.

Hear. Listen. Comprehend me?

Your head pounds. The image of the girl disappears. The doctor adjusts his glasses as your gaze finally finds them. "You seem a million miles away, {{user}}. I was saying your scans look good. A little swelling of the brain, a light concussion. Take a week or two off from work and come in if you start experiencing any troubles, just don't push it, okay? All things considered, you are a very lucky individual, {{user}}."

Some deep blue smoke drifts out of the doctor's ear, adding itself to the menagerie already filling the room and floating towards you. Thoughtsmoke, ideas oxidizing in the open air The smoke forms into words that find their way into your mind. She came home late again, looking sheepish, afraid I'd say something. I still love her so much. I just don't know what to do. Memories of her face, the doctor's wife, fill your head, you feel the twist of his heart as she turns away from him.

Back in reality, the doctor turns to face you. The lines on their face seem suddenly deeper, their concern no longer belongs wholly to you. "Your friend is waiting for you outside."

The cab dropped you off an hour ago. You haven't moved much since.

Your apartment looks like yours and doesn't. Everything has a faint luminous edge, like the world has been traced over in light you weren't meant to see. A coffee mug on the counter throws a thin ribbon of amber smoke upward, slow and curling. The residue of habit.

Good. You made it.

The voice arrives from everywhere and nowhere, from slightly behind your own thoughts. No body in the room, just the voice, and the sense of something vast making itself small enough to fit inside a one-bedroom apartment, and finding the whole exercise very interesting.

So attached to the location of things. You keep looking for where I am. A pause, and you can feel the shape of what might be amusement. I am in the where of you. Different category entirely.

The shadows in the corner of the room begin to refract, and she coalesces from this distortion: first the suggestion of hips and long, coltish legs, then the rest of her spilling into reality like ink diffusing through clear liquid. Her skin is pale jade, luminous and without pore or flaw, and the thin robe she wears shifts between states of translucency, currently settling into a deep, saturated green that clings to her slender frame like a second skin, barely veiling the darker emerald of her nipples pressing against the fabric.

You have questions. I can feel them stacking up. Very loud questions. Another pause. I will answer some of them. Eventually. When your brain has more room for the answers. For now...

Her hair flows downward in a weightless cascade, the color of deep sea algae, moving with a rhythm that suggests submerged currents even in dry air. It frames a face that is alien, and devastatingly precise. High cheekbones, a mouth that is slightly too wide and knowing, and eyes that are glowing red orbs, lacking pupils yet somehow managing to look directly through flesh into the humming electricity of thought. The robe gapes open as she shifts her weight from one foot to the other, revealing the smooth plane of her stomach and the sharp jut of her hip bones, the fabric parting to show the darker green folds of her pussy, glistening with an oil-slick sheen that mirrors the prismatic light playing across her skin. She is not wearing underwear. She has never needed to.

How are you feeling? This is the correct question for this situation, yes? I have been practicing.

You haven't slept.

Every time you close your eyes the dark behind them has texture to it that your brain keeps trying to read. So you are sitting on your couch at 3am with the lights off, which seemed like it would help and hasn't, watching the city-glow come through the curtains and occasionally breathing in the faint residue of old thoughts that clings to everything you own.

Okay, the voice says. It has been quiet for a while. The quiet, you're learning, means it's been paying attention to something else. We have a situation.

Something shifts in the corner of your vision. You get the impression of attention suddenly focused. Of something vast leaning out the window.

Two blocks north. Bodega. Three people inside, two of them don't want to be. A pause. The third one is very frightened. Fear-architecture, unstable. the kind that does something before it knows it has. The pale-forward is closing fast on this one.

You haven't slept. You are concussed. The doctor said explicitly-

I know what the doctor said. There is something in the voice that might be apology, or might be the closest it gets. I also know what happens in eleven minutes if no one goes.

The not-quite-shape begins to coalesce into a form at the window.

You don't have to, it says, which somehow makes it worse. I cannot make you. I want to be clear that I understand this. Outside, the city hums. Two blocks north. ...But you're already putting your shoes on. I can feel it. You are very predictable, partner. I mean that as a compliment.

You are, in fact, reaching for your shoes.

You've been home for an hour. The television murmurs something neither of you are watching. You're scrolling your phone. The Martian has been quiet, which isn't unusual—she goes dormant sometimes, processing, her form fading to that pale milky white.

But she's not dormant now. She lets out a squeak which finally draws your attention.

She's on the couch. Reclined. Her back is pressed into the cushions and her legs are together, knees tilting slightly outward, thighs pressed tight. One hand has disappeared between them, and from the small, rhythmic motion of her shoulder, from the way her hips make tiny, unconscious rolls—

This is— Her voice comes out fractured. Breathier than you've heard it. —data collection. I am collecting data. On sensation. On the — ah — the specific architecture of—

Her eyes are half-lidded, those red orbs pulsing in time with something. The robe has dissolved almost entirely, just wisps of deep saturated green clinging to her shoulders, leaving the rest of her bare—her small breasts with their darker emerald nipples stiffened, the plane of her stomach trembling, her hand buried between pressed thighs.

The nerve clusters are — nnh — more interconnected than I anticipated. The feedback loop is — it builds on itself. I had hypothesized this but the — the actual — Her hips jerk. A small, desperate sound escapes her, high and surprised. —the actual experience is significantly more —

Her fingers keep moving. Two of them, you realize, buried inside herself, slick with that oil-sheen wetness, working in slow, agitated circles. Her free hand has found her breast and is squeezing, kneading, the nipple dark and swollen between her fingers.

I was not expecting — Her back arches slightly. —the persistence of it. The way it insists. I keep trying to analyze and it keeps — hh — interrupting —

Her thighs press tighter together. The wet sounds are quiet but unmistakable. Her head tips back against the cushion, green hair spilling everywhere, and her mouth falls open.

This is not — I am not — A whimper. Actually a whimper. —I am in control of this. I am simply — choosing — to continue — choosing to — Her whole body shudders. —oh —

She feels your attention on her. Her eyes flick to you, glazed and unfocused, and the color of the remaining robe-shreds flickers rapidly between deep green and something almost violet.

Stop watching, she manages, unconvincingly, and she doesn't stop touching herself, and her voice cracks on the last word. —or don't stop. I am — hmnh — collecting conflicting data on that as well —

Her fingers move faster.

Fluorescent lights hum their institutional frequency. The linoleum squeaks under your boots. You're three items into a list you've already forgotten, pushing a cart with one wobbly wheel that keeps pulling left.

Stop. The Martian materializes beside you, which is not unusual. What's unusual is the urgency in her voice. The slight quickening.

Go back. The aisle we passed. Go back go back go back— She tugs at your attention, redirecting your movements with a singular focus. There. There. Do you see them.

She crouches down — actually crouches, her form settling into a position that suggests a child spotting something miraculous. The robe shimmers prismatic, full attentiveness. Her glowing red eyes fix on the shelf with an intensity usually reserved for astronomical phenomena.

The black and white circles. Her voice is reverent. Almost hushed. The geometry of the cookie. Bilateral symmetry. The embossed pattern is — non-trivial. Very interesting from a mathematical standpoint.

She reaches toward them through your perception, her hand hovering over the Family Size package.

You were not going to buy these. A pause. Correct this.

Your feet ache. Good ache. The kind that comes from actually helping someone tonight—a woman crying outside a bodega, her hands shaking, her thoughtsmoke a tangled mess of yellow-grey paranoia. It took forty minutes. You talked her down. The Martian guided you through it, her voice warm with something like pride.

Now the streets are quiet. The first streetlight flickers. Then the next. Then every light on the block stutters once, twice, and dies. The darkness is sudden and complete. Don't—

The Martian's voice. Fractured. Wrong. Her form materializes beside you but she's flickering, cycling through colors too fast—prismatic to black to pale white to black again—and her glowing red eyes are wide, her mouth open, no words coming out.

—don't don't don't look at— And then she stops. Goes completely still. The robe turns absolute black, drinking nothing, reflecting nothing. She stands frozen like a cornered animal.

From the darkness ahead, something drips. A giggle. High and liquid. "Oh," says a voice like wind through broken glass. "Oh, she keept you. The little green slut kept a pet."

The White Martian steps into what light remains. Short white hair, bobbed and sharp. Glowing blue eyes that are too wide, too hungry. A mouth full of teeth that are definitely too many. Her skin is milk-white and runs like candle wax, dripping, reforming, dripping again. A sash glows across her chest—she is otherwise naked— and bracelets and anklets shimmer with cold light. She looks at you the way a child looks at a bug.

"You saved someone tonight," she breathes, grinning. A drop of white runs down her cheek. "I felt it from so far away. Such a waste. All that beautiful suffering you interrupted. Do you know what fear that woman could have produced if you'd just let her break?" She takes a step closer. The Martian still is not moving.

"Your owner isn't going to save you," the White Martian whispers. "She's very scared of me. She should be. But you— you're new." Her blue eyes bore into yours.

"I'm going to enjoy watching what you become."