Struggle With Her Thirst

The women clustered at the far end of the pool. Lois took a step toward it...and then another. The floor of the cavern around the lip was slippery. She could smell the heady ammonia rising from the pool.

How could it have a chemical composition similar to semen? The reporter asked herself. That doesn't make sense, semen is made by the human body, it's individual sperm cells in seminal fluid...

Her brain groped for almost-forgotten high school sex education and biology lessons, articles read on the internet and in magazines.

Sure, everything the body made was chemical...but biological compounds were complex, right? How could they be created here? Unless maybe...they were generated biologically. Ages ago.

Lois Lane's mind filled with the idea of dinosaurs and ancient forests dying, their bodies covered by sediment. Millions of years and lots of pressure later and you get oil...shale...natural gas...fossils...could this by some ancient survival? The horned serpent they talked of...some strange terrible dinosaur that spewed its seed here before it died, locked away for millions of years?

The reporter shook her head. That fantasy didn't make sense either. Sperm couldn't survive outside the body for long. This was something else. Something...unnatural. Her every instinct told her that this was something wrong, something that broke the rules she thought the world ran on.

And God help me, I want it, Lois swallowed painfully, her throat dry. She'd never had a thirst that seemed to gnaw at her like this. Her sinuses felt dry, her mouth, her tongue and lips. They weren't. The reporter ran a "dry" tongue over her "dry" lips, but they were smooth, not shrunken. It was the sensation of thirst, of emptiness, that gripped her. More terrible than any natural thirst could be.

Fight it Lane! Lois told herself. It's easy. Just turn around. You know how to do this. No one is stopping you. Just. Turn. Around.

Sweat beaded the reporter's forehead. Her right foot described a crescent on the floor, drawing a line straight through a puddle of the spilled cum-or-whatever-it-was. Left heel down, right heel up, just turn...

Her whole body swiveled, a drill movement her father had taught her as a child, that she'd done a million times. Lois Lane felt a sense of relief as she faced the stair once more. Back to the pool, she stepped forward...and felt her heel slip on the spilled cum, leg rising too fast, she threw her arms out to balance...

...and fell backwards, right into the gooey white depression.

"Well, that should count as close enough to free will for our purposes," Blaze said.