For the first time in memory, Petre Predav felt at peace.

He had awoken to a beautiful woman's smile (He did not even mind her grey skin or peculiar body odor anymore) for the past three mornings, and had scarcely felt the need to leave his bed. Blurb's new form was voracious. She hungered for his touch and embrace, and Petre was all too eager to oblige.

"Blurb wAnT fun-fun."

Petre felt a wet hand slide down his chest. It was almost like a morning ritual, though he was not sure if Blurb slept. In the three days since her transformation, Blurb's black goo had hardened like wax. She felt more solid, though her lithe body was still a ripple of grey goo that delighted to be pinched and nibbled and-

"I am going to make myself blush!" Petre said, and he surprised himself by pushing Blurb's questing hand away.

"No fun-fUn?" Blurb asked. Her new almond face tilted in confusion as Petre struggled out of bed.

"N-not right now," Petre said. He fell onto the floor as he disentangled from Blurb's wet embrace. It was a decision he had made the night before after he had realized he had not eaten once the whole day.

"What do? wHaT Do you dO?"

Her speech was no longer the same wet pop, and each day it seemed her vocabulary expanded.

"Petre wants to go outside," he said as he roused to his feet. "Remember? I said I wanted to go outside last night?"

"bLurB remember, remembers," Blurb said, and her small almond face bounced in understanding. "Blurb come?"

Her words inspired a terrible fear in Petre. All the morning's warmth left him in a cold sweat. Because the outside was dangerous. Blurb was remarkable. Blurb was a treasure, and Petre knew that others would want to steal her from him.

"bLuRB?" She titled her head (If she had a neck, or rather some vertebrae, it would have snapped) even further.

"Petre is fine," he said, and he returned to the bed to stroke her hair. "I-I don't think you should leave just yet."

He left the gray goo to pout on his messy bed as he stumbled into the hallway. His apartment almost looked foreign to him.

"And that is pathetic," Petre said. He felt like one of those gamer types that holed up in their homes when a new video title was released.

The bathroom was his first visit. Because he loved Blurb. She was a delight. She was perfection.

"But she's also wet, and who knows what sort of bacteria lives in that goo of hers."

He wanted a shower. A very hot shower.

And so as he stepped into the bathroom and flipped on the light switch, he glanced over at the mirror and felt his heart start to climb out of his throat. He loosed a shrill cry (Not much unlike a thirteen-year-old girl who saw an icky spider) in surprise.

Blurb appeared immediately at his side. He tore his eyes away from his reflection only reluctantly and looked down at Blurb. Her once lithe and supple body looked... strange and different. He tried to rub away the confusion that lay over his eyes, to understand the cold unease that tickled his neck, but then Blurb was back to her almond self, beautiful and adorable.

"wHy? Scream. WhY scReaM noise mAke?" Blurb asked. She pulled him into a protective wet embrace, and Petre patted her reassuringly on her sopping head.

"I-it was nothing," Petre lied, and he looked back at his reflection. He could scarcely keep his mouth from hanging open.

His hair fell in thick ropes halfway to his shoulders. A scraggly beard erupted across his cheeks. He had not eaten at all yesterday (And who knew about the two days before that), but his face looked fuller. His chest and arms seemed downright plump, and as his gaze wandered, he could not remember ever having so much chest hair.

Forget three days. It looked as though he had been in his bedroom for three months!

"bLuRb wanT fun-fuN," and her wet embrace slowly slid down his waist.

"P-please," Petre said, gingerly pulling at his gooey lover's fingers. "I want to... Blurb? Please listen?"

And she released him from her affectionate hold. She slid out of the bathroom without a word, though her stare lingered for a moment at the doorway.

Petre loosed a sigh and stared at his own transformation in the mirror.

"I guess... I'll have to get a haircut?"

Petre felt alive as he walked down the empty streets outside the Bayksu Flats. Three days. He had spent three days filling his small bedroom with foul smells and fouler noises (And it had been delightful). Part of him even wanted to run back and gobble up Blurb, to take in more of her essence, to experiment.

"But that is the problem," Petre said, and he jabbed at the air in exclamation. That was not healthy. He was certainly not healthy.

"And all this hair is proof enough of that."

He could not stop touching the explosive growth of hair that covered both his head and cheeks. He half expected it to disappear as he ran his hands through it. Thick as a horse's mane, and it was not the only strangeness.

Petre had gotten dressed for his walk and had found that none of his clothes fit properly. He could still put them on (Otherwise he would have had to wear a pair of black garbage bags), but the clothes clung to him like a mother's hug, which made no sense. He had just received the entire outfit from those buffoons at the mall earlier that week.

"And I know I didn't sleep through the month like some sort of bear."

He had checked his phone, had responded to another of nuncle's texts. The clock on his phone brokered no argument nor did a quick search for the date online.

"Which means not only do I have to get a haircut, but I need to buy new clothes."

Need was a strong word, but a thought had tickled Petre not long after he had left the apartment. There were a number of outfits he would like to see Blurb in, though he imagined the clothes would inevitably end up on the floor. He did not want to think of her as a doll, but it would be a delight to dress her up.

Such idle thoughts filled his head as the black van pulled up beside him on the empty road. He did not even turn to look at the screech of tire, but if he had, he would have seen four men tear open the truck's sliding doors with long rifles hanging over their chests.

"Wha- " Petre cried out as he felt rough hands on him, but his words quickly became muffled as something was shoved into his open mouth. Tears filled his eyes as his arms were yanked painfully back. He tried to turn towards the violence, but the world went dark as some kind of heavy cloth was thrown over his head.

"Tar...et sec...ed!"

"Go...go!"

"En...ty has a...ared!"

"Target sec...d!"

"There is p...uit! I ...eat! pur...t!"

Petre could scarcely hear the shouts that rang out over his head as something bit painfully into his wrists. Blind and hapless, he was pushed and pulled. His feet lost the touch of ground, and he flailed about as the violent purr of a vehicle flared. He felt the cold kiss of metal as he was shoved inside, and then there was movement beneath and all around him.

"Ec..o Te... eli...ated! Re...t! ...cho is e...minated!"

"W...t the d...ek?! Wh...e are ...he su...res...rs?"

"Ent...y is p...uing! L...e them, Ko...an!"

Petre thrashed about in blind terror, and whatever bound his wrists snapped free. He clawed at his face and tore a wet ball of cloth from his mouth. The world revealed itself in a mad rush of jostling bodies as the hood over his head fell off in pieces.

The four men wore black balaclavas with only their bulging eyes visible. They all gripped enormous rifles, larger than anything Petre had seen on television or in movies. They seemed obsessed with something in the front-seat. They crowded around the driver as the van bounced and jostled.

"The Ravens have failed to intercept, failed to intercept!" The voice crackled out from a radio at the front of the truck. "Entity remains in pursuit, remains in pursuit!"

"It shouldn't be this fast!" one of the soldiers said, and Petre surprised himself. Because these were soldiers, the same he had dreaded that fateful day when the landlord had been attacked in his apartment. "They said it should be weaker now!"

Petre jumped as one of the balaclava-clad men turned to face him, and the soldier jumped themselves.

"Holy shit!" the soldier cried out as he leveled his rifle with Petre's head. Despite the glitter of his body armor and the steel of his enormous gun, the man sounded like a frightened child. "The SEC! He's free!"

The other three soldiers all swirled about, and Petre's eyes were drawn to the mad tremble of one's finger. He knew nothing about guns, and it was such an inconsequential movement, but he saw the finger twitch, and he knew what was about to happen.

The barrel of the gun flashed and a fire erupted across Petre's body. In the next moment, the truck and everything in it was tossed onto its side. His pain was forgotten as he lost all sense of up and down.

The world filled with a horrible metallic screech that rattled the brain. There came a fatal thunk and then the truck became still.

A scratchy voice was calling out from the radio, but Petre's head rang with church bells, and the words were reduced to mere noise.

[ W̴̤͔̋i̸̻͘͘L̵̬̅͌l̴͇̃̏ ̴̫̠́̎n̸̙̯͌O̶̡͐t̴̥̘̓̏ ̷͓̌͋b̶͕͂E̴̞̖̓ ̸̥̕r̶͎̥͛ỏ̷̢̥̽B̸̠̖́͌b̸̼̲̕Ë̶̢́̄d ]

The truck filled with a blaze of light and the violent screech of metal. The world spun wherever Petre looked, but something dripping black and foul stood before a gaping hole in the side of the truck. Serrated spikes poked out from its vaguely human shape like syringes, and ichor dribbled from their needles in ceaseless profusion.

[ G̶̖͝ḯ̸͍V̷̑ͅe̵̖͚̾ ̶̈͜ȉ̶̻T̷̡̻̅ ̵̦͚̽́b̸̤̀A̷̼̐c̵̲̳̎͒K ]

"Entity... has breached..." one of the soldiers croaked from beside Petre in a jumble of bodies. "Burn in... in hell."

Petre watched the man's hand drift away from his rifle and then there was a blinding flash of white. Petre felt fire tickled his face, and then all was black and wet. Waves of heat pulsed through the blinding membrane, and when he tried to breathe, a familiar wet filled his lungs.

And then the sun returned. Petre tried to blink away his confusion as the city rushed to surround him.

The truck was gone, but he found its smoldering frame a few feet away. Some of the road was gone, as well, and it was in that smoky crater that Petre found himself.

A trail of destruction snaked through the streets as far as Petre could see. Plumes of smoke rose like campfires, and the distant cries of human misery were a constant hum.

At the destruction's end stood a monster. It body cloyed with blackest hate. Foul sludge rippled like hot sewage from its malformed head, ebbing to and fro in a relentless vibration. Numerous spikes shot out from its head and arms, for it seemed almost human, like some inflated clay doll left to melt under a heat lamp.

[ b̷̾̂ͅḺ̸̥͚͊u̸̘̍̾͒r̶̲̓B̴̯̋̆͝ ̵͕̺͎̓c̸̩͝ͅŌ̴̤̼̺̓m̶̭͇̽͊͝ḛ̴̉́ ]

Petre stumbled back as the monster slid towards him in a sloppy slather of wet flesh.

The air cracked with lightning and the monstrous creature was engulfed in a ball of fire. Petre looked away, the light blinding, its heat too much to breathe. His eyes fell upon another group of soldiers, all in balaclavas and with various smoking weapons.

And then a rope of black appeared amidst them and the men fell apart. Petre watched in stunned confusion as one of the soldiers' heads rolled off their neck and bounced a few feet away. The same black rope wrapped itself around another soldier's arm, and the limb fell off as though the glue had lost its grip. The soldier cried out, but then fell suddenly quiet.

"Shit, shit, shit!"

The air puffed with a green flame as one soldier flailed about with some sort of flamethrower. He tried to catch the black rope in its arch, but then the flamethrower fell to the ground with a clack, the man's arms slid off as if he were a doll, and his body flew through the air towards the monstrous black blob.

There was a scream and then another abrupt silence. The entire city seemed to hold its breath as the monstrous creature turned towards Petre.

[ b̵̔L̵̒ur̶̝̈́B̴̼̏͌ ̵̻͈̜̒pr̶̞̽̒ơ̶̝̊͘t̸͈̊̄̆ë̸́̕c̸̗̩̫̈́̊t̸̆s ]

With a quiet horror, Petre realized that the monster was Blurb. And he remembered that Blurb was a monster. He realized he had spent three days imprisoned in his bedroom by this freak. Somehow he had forgotten. Somehow he had been deceived.

And then Blurb descended on him in a foul splash of black ichor. He felt its venomous stench fill his mouth as he gagged and sputtered. The trickle of foulest ash tickled his throat and filled him with such delightful splendor.

Blurb pulled back from her kiss, and Petre looked over his savior. Because that was what had happened. He had always known the military would abduct him, but Blurb had saved him.

"You poor thing," Petre said as he tried to flatten an unkempt spike of her hair. Blurb's adorable almond face looked down at him in a confused pout. They looked like small horns, the spikes of hair, and no matter how he mussed with them, the unkempt hair sprang right back up.

"bLurB... bLuRb protEct..."

Petre blushed as Blurb ripped off his shirt, but then he saw the red stain of blood. Odd that he could not feel the hurt, but it leaked a steady flow of wet down his chest. He had been shot.

Blurb brought her mouth to the bullet hole as though in a kiss. He felt her labor in love over his hurt, and he smiled for his adorable little alien.