Fight below decks

HMAT Tyche — Mary Protandry’s Quarters — 15 September 1946 — 1451 Hours

Jack swung the life boat oar into the thug’s wrist. There was a cracking of bone and the machine gun clattered across the floor. The thug staggered — but didn’t fall. Instead, he screamed.

Jack, Mary, Kruger and Irwin stared in growing horror and disbelief as the thug started to change. His skin boiled almost instantly, huge blisters forming and bursting with wet pops. A vile stench — burnt hair and cooked blood — hit like a hammer. But the changes continued as his bones twisted with sickening snaps, arms lengthening unevenly, the elbows bending the wrong way. His mouth wrenched wide open and then his teeth rained out, bouncing across the deck like loose pebbles.

“Help… me…” he gurgled as he stood there, smoking like barbecue meat, gumming the air in horror, mewling like a wounded calf. Then came the worst part. His eyes ballooned — bulging out of their sockets, sagging like overripe grapes as with a soft, wet pop, they pushed free — long, quivering stalks erupting from his ruined face, waving blindly like a snail’s feelers, the eyes blinking in shocked terror. They twitched madly, dripping viscous smoking slime, seeking any source of light.

Every twitch, ever change, seemed fueled by some deeper insanity — a wild, Lovecraftian chaos that didn’t know or care about human anatomy. It was utter wrongness. Mary choked on a scream as the thug’s spine arched backward, vertebrae punching through his skin in sharp ridges.

And then Mary’s wildcard turned as well. Suddenly, the room tensed, as if the very air had been pulled taut by an outre gravitational attraction. Mary’s could sense that the weird **** was coming from her, but it was inexplicable and she had no control or understanding of it. Her breath caught in her throat as whatever she had unleashed took its toll on Jack.

His bones compressed, shoulders pulling in tight. His body seemed to shrink inward. His muscles tightened, pulling his frame into something rounder and more feminine as his hips flared, boots slipping loose. His jaw softened, his broad features now seeming too delicate, the sharpness in his eyes cutting through the confusion of the moment. Hair sprouting in a luscious cascade from his head. Then he felt the flesh on his chest start to swell into two impossibly round orbs, nipples larger than he could have imagined pressing against his shirt. His eyes widened as he felt a tugging in his groin. He could feel it as his manhood shrank and changed. “Oh fuck…” even his voice was female, high and… cute!?

Jack’s now overlarge clothes shifted uncomfortably — the sleeves rolled up his arms, the boots too big for him. He felt uncertain. Scared... he wasn’t Jack anymore. She was… Jill?

Across the cabin, Gasspuk, once an imposing man, was shrinking into something entirely different. He grunted in disbelief as he shrunk, his once-broad frame collapsing into those of a tiny but still vicious woman. His frame slimmed down — his once impressive stature now reduced to that of a small ballerina’s, wiry and quick, blonde haired, blue eyed and gorgeous. His blond hair lengthened. She stared in shock at her body, the knife falling from her fingers.

Irwin fared no better — the dapper man shrinking down into a petite, bird-boned girl, clutching at the oversized clothes that now puddled around her ankles. A squeaky, humiliated whimper slipped from her lips. Irwin dropped to her bottom in an awkward flail of limbs, his new form petite, his body now almost frail. His new voice, high and squeaky, made his words almost incomprehensible, like the **** croak of a child. “What is happening!?” Then her skin went grey in colour as her wildcard turned. She stared in horror, unaware that Mary’s ace power had just saved her life, that she had been extremely lucky to draw an ace, even if it left her looking less human. None of them were aware that Mary had the power of probability manipulation…

But it was the Joker who horrified them all beyond comprehension. For where there was good fortune there must also be bad. The smoking disfigured monstrosity twitched and jerked as skin ripped and reformed improbably. It should be dead by now but it didn’t have such luck. Its flesh melted and reshaped in impossible, sickening ways, each layer of transformation more grotesque and painfully horrific for the thing than the last.

Irwin watched the thing. Like Kruger it had been a guard at the concentration camp, a creature or abominable cruelty and inhumanity. Still Irwin would not wish this fate on anyone.

Breasts, bloated and misshapen, erupted from every part of its body as Mary’s gender manipulating power mixed with it’s drawing of the Black Queen. Its body seemed to vibrate as if trying to hold itself together, but it was only coming undone. And still, the eyes on stalks swayed, blinking helplessly, grotesque and alien. The thing tried to scream, but only a sickening, wet sound emerged. It wasn’t human anymore. It wasn’t anything anyone could recognize, a twisted mass of flesh.

Jack recoiled — heart hammering — only to realize that he - no she was again changing, her own wildcard turning in the best possible way thanks to Mary. Pain raked him from the inside out as, unknowingly, her own wildcard turned. Her muscles seemed to shudder and flex as her bones and muscle mass grew heavier by an order of magnitude and she felt an alien surge of power in her new form. She was heavier but felt lighter. She almost fell due to her unfamiliar mass and new centre of gravity, catching herself on one knee, fists clenched. She burned with adrenaline that quelled her fear and uncertainty. In that instant she was again ready to fight. But the body was different. Sharper? Leaner? Faster?

Realising that Kruger was still a threat she leaped upon the Nazi, quicker and stronger than she would have ever dreamed. The chaos around her felt oddly clear. She wasn’t sure yet what this new body could do, but she would find out as in an instant she had the petite Nazi around the throat, held above the ground by one had.

Kruger’s blue eyes looked down at Jack and the Aryan bitch smiled as something changed within her, her wildcard flipping fortuitously as well and in direct response to Jack’s attack. “Strong… ja?” She said, unaware that she had just exhaled a small puff of nutty, almond smelling smoke. Jack frowned as the small woman seemed to grow heavier. She moved suddenly, her kick also fast and powerful, sending Jack flying across the room. Jack hit the wall and the thick sheet metal bent, steel rivets popping. She shook off the blow.

The Joker-thug’s mewling grew louder in and the pair paused in their fight to watch it. One breast grew grotesquely from its side, then another from its collarbone, obscene and misplaced. They kept coming — a cancerous bloom of jiggly rounded nippled flesh. An obscene profusion of breasts. Its torso twisted unnaturally, warping into a parody of female shape — hideously asymmetrical. Breasts, dozens of them, continued to spill across its broken form. Some dribbling milk. Some hanging like rotten fruit. Others twitching spasmodically, milkless and raw. Its jaw shrank, leaving a small, gaping toothless mouth that quivered and leaked thin, blood-tinged drool. Its voice became a high, wet, animal sound, halfway between a woman’s sob and a dying seagull. It crawled, sightless, mewling toward the wall, dragging itself by boneless fingers. The Joker-abomination whimpered at the wall, its stalk-eyes twitching helplessly. Then it died.