Best to be rid of him

Either road leads to subjugation for him. He chose this as soon as he picked you up, then assured it as soon as he chose sexual contact. He is an animal, one given a greater sense of self-importance by the oversized brain he wastes. You will be the predator. Both the humbler of the senses and the one who hones the talents.

The cilium that work to stimulate him shift focus, extending thin and piercing the skin of his invading flesh impercievably. Even not feeling it, there's an immediate body shock that punches through his system as your genetic code and his own meet truly and properly. Each strand of DNA gets unwound, deconstructed, and rebuilt in the likeness of the superior code. That which determined his eye color, his disposition to alcoholism, that which made his skin oily instead of dry, all of it is transformed into a tool that makes his cells subservient. His skin and your own become inseparable, one and the same. Their relationship, on a cellular level, is not one of companions. It is one of dominance and subjugation. Your own DNA the initial cancerous cell. His, the victim creature. As the new code creeps self-replicating through the system, the silver and black of your being becomes visible for the first time as it grows up the flesh onto his body properly and out of Mary's. He has a moment to shriek before you touch his mind, setting the new standard. The old is overwritten by the new, as is needed.

The first thought you feel his mind experience is one of fear. The insistence that this must be some nightmare. The fact that you can read these thoughts means it is already too late to turn back. His muscles loosen, his movements become waterlogged, like punches thrown in a dream. Nightmare, indeed.

All he can do is watch as the shimmering fish-scaled texture seeps from the body of his would-be victim and starts to climb his skin. From the moment the first atom-width cilium pierced into his system, his body has stopped being his own. As your skin enfolds his you shut down the animal mind. The part that would call to gnaw off a trapped limb. It's not so simple as overriding the senses of pain and fear by flooding his body with hormonal sedatives, the animal mind needs to be beaten into submission. The urge that pulls him to look at the edge of the cliff, the memetic ideal of correlation and causation, these need to be bludgeoned and **** to heel. With those gone, the rational thinking mind can be **** by simple hormones. The balance has always been tenuous in this nature, you are merely the rogue element that forces the biological hand. The results follow whether willing or not. In time, he may come to view the era of control as the illusion, as though his mind has always been the subservient. For now, the horror remains, even sedated. To lose control utterly, as he is now, was never something that even crossed his eye before. It borders on religious terror. As the finger of God, you twist the dial.

The swimming skin covers his lower body, then creeps up over his face. His last thought before it presses over his mouth and nose is that primal fear forcing its way up through sedation one final time before his world goes dark. Inside the closed circuit, his body and yours become one and the same. The cilium fold and knead, shaping and unraveling. In a moment, the human shape rests in the back seat behind Mary. A moment later, with a sound like the pop of a joint, the shape shrinks and folds down, the fish scale texture disappearing inside Mary's body where it started. All that remains after that moment passes is the detached body of the scared girl in the truck, and the now two other presences inside of her.

A dim light of consciousness swims within you. Reduced to the most pre-birth primality, a soul in a stream, the driver moves through the maze of alveoli and neurons that make up the body inside the body, then enters the girl proper. The consciousness reels and grapples with the new placement, just as the girl inside the mind grapples with the feelings and ideas of the change. It feels like something crawls up through her throat slowly. When it reaches the nasal barrier to the brain, it moves through intangible, both real in its existence but unreal in physical measurability. Eventually, it trepans a psychic path into the mind, coming to reside in the same dark place the girl watches from. It does not see her, but she sees it. The difference lies in that you keep the girl around, a participant and not a mere capacitor. The girl is allowed to watch what you do with her body. She is allowed to see the half-man that joins her. The sight is... displeasing.

You shudder, first with the internal body and then outwardly through the girl in the back of the car. Mary sits in her space, not looking at her new neighbor. The process of absorbing a human, fully stepping into the role of feeding predator, it takes time. The high acid and salt content makes it not entirely pleasant either. Perhaps best not to eat these things, find other ways to absorb the good bits. It's another instance where you lament the loss of the knowledge of your species. Unless there are others of your kind already here, there's no way you could make a transmitter strong enough to reach home. No way to get advice on how to maneuver these animals, how to negate the fattiness and distaste of their composition.

You rise, flicking the man-thing on like a pilot light as you check the discarded clothing he's left behind. The light buzzes and flickers, giving you the trickle of information you ask for without banging on the walls or protesting like the girl. The clothes are a pair of high-waisted pants, underwear, and an oversized shirt. The pants and underwear are useless to you. Cutting off access to the girl's sex only slows you down. The oversized shirt would be an improvement over the dress, keeping the body safe from the sun while leaving free access to the genitals.

"H-hey!"

The voice cuts through with surprising clarity. The girl in the head is addressing you, not trying to protest, just addressing you. You ignore her,

"Listen to me, please! You can't just walk around with your... bits hanging out!"

You take off the dress slowly, leaving yourself on the side of the road and hiding behind the truck in nothing but the high working boots that clunk heavily when you walk. You're braced by chill, even with the sun beginning to rise in the distance. You slide the shirt on over your head. It still has the telltale warmth of a previous wearer. It hangs just below the waist. If you reach your arms above your head, it pulls up to just below the navel.

"I know you can hear me! If you walk around like that, the police will lock you up!"

Odd, nudity prohibitive law isn't something you've encountered before. It's possible that she's lying to save what shred of dignity she has while she can. You check the dim light of the man-thing. To your surprise, he backs her up. So then, what's the minimum you could get away with? The dress leaves the genitals open, but it also takes longer to remove fully than you would like. It also lacks many of the conveniences of the male's clothing. Pockets, aerodynamicism, several general quality of experience modifications. Unfortunately, they lack several of the design strengths of the female clothing. The female clothing is open in design, both better for core temperature and almost tailor-made for easy breeding. If you have to choose one, and it seems you do if you want to enter major population centers, you choose the female for now.

You put the dress back on, but before you do, you spy something missed in the back seat. Reaching in and pulling it out, it seems to be a sort of throw-over shirt with a thick and colorful design. The pilot light spits the phrase jacket into your mind, the girl agrees. You slide it on, the ugly browns and reds contrasting the green plaid of the dress, both contrasting the black of the boots and the straw color of the hair. Part of Mary wants to protest superficially, but she cares more about the fact that she's dressed again than if the colors clash. The jacket gives you much-needed pockets. In one of them, a set of papers. In the other, money.

The truck purrs back to life with a little coaxing, Mary is too short to reach the pedals normally, so you scoot forward in the seat to hit them. From there, it's a matter of letting the pilot light softly steer you through the process until Mary also sees it as muscle memory. By the time buildings start to come into the horizon, the sun has risen fully and reached the midpoint of the sky.