Tale 4, Part 1; What Happens When The Cameras Aren't Rolling?

The sound of crickets awkwardly chirping filled the air in the Shamar editing studios. Julie sighed. "Man, I'm bored,"

'When are you going to get out of your funk, Tech?' Gaiphe telepathically asked the human writer. Technow was absent-mindedly twirling around and around on the library desk's swivel chair. "Heck if I know, my feathered friend. Probably whenever this little monster gets off me," he raised his eyebrows, and indicated an odd creature that was lying asleep on his chest that looked vaguely like a cat, but with hedgehog spines and cow horns.

Gearbolt moved forwards for a closer look. "Fascinating. Your writer's block is so solid, it has taken on a physical form of its own,"

"But why is it a horny cat-hog creature?" Julie questioned, following Gearbolt's lead and moving forwards. Gaiphe, evidently deciding she couldn't be bothered, lazily stretched her wings before turning away on her perch hanging from the ceiling.

"I believe I've been reading too much of El Goonish Shive," Technow explained. "El what?" Julie questioned. Ignoring the question, Technow looked around. "Hey, where's Ala?" he questioned out loud.

"Down here!" the female phoenix dragon called, from what appeared to be beside a bookcase. "Down where?" Julie questioned, looking around.

Gearbolt examined the bookcase. "According to my calculations," and, whacking the mahogany shelves with his tail, the bookcase swung open like a door, revealing a doorway and a form of slide. "This shelf is fake," he finished, smug.

"Hey!" Technow complained, standing up. Writer's Block mewed and scampered off to the corner of the room. "That's polished mahogany! Do you know how much I paid for that?"

"Barely a cent?" Julie replied. Gaiphe continued, 'Yup. You got this place for free from Professor Pickle,'

Technow looked abashed, but continued anyway. "Well, I still don't want to see it damaged!"

"Can someone help me get up from here?" Ala called.

"I'm-a coming!" Julie growled, before donning a pair of sunglasses from nowhere, splaying her paws and jumping onto the slide. At which point she lost her balance and awkwardly slid down on her belly.

"My hypothesis states that it will be necessary to construct a method of returning up the slide once having gone down it," Gearbolt concluded, before Gaiphe tired of his techno-babble and knocked him down the slide. Gearbolt grasped her claw, and they both careened down together, yet as far apart as possible.

Technow sighed and facepalmed, muttered, "It had to be me," before grasping a snowboard from nowhere, strapping it to his boots and boarded down the slide in far greater style than everyone else before him.

X

"Whoa," Julie breathed. "What is this place, bro?" Ala asked. Technow was stunned.

They were staring at the interior of a large warehouse, full of all kinds of technical marvels. Technow gasped. "This was the original place I planned to broadcast the Author's Notes in. Then Chip ruined it forever. Anyway, I thought this place was destroyed. Who'd have thought it was still down here?"

"And all this stuff is?" Ala questioned. Technow frowned. "I'm pretty sure this is all the scrapped stuff from my stories. Look, there's all the Power Rangers rip-offs I created for Chase Aiadon," he smiled, gesturing to a bunch of vehicles. Gaiphe frowned. 'Is that train themed after a snake?'

"It's a dragon. Duh," the writer pointed out. "It looks like a snake," Gearbolt added.

A vein pulsed in Technow's neck. "You try making a train themed after a dragon," he snapped, testy. "Hey, there's a lot of stuff from that old fiction here," he noticed, looking around. "What's that big ship?" Julie questioned.

"That, my dear friend, is the Nautilaer. Basically, at the start of my Swap Force adaption, the Dread-Yacht got captured by Linagarnix, so Chase built the Nautilaer, a hodgepodge amalgamation of a wide variety of unrelated objects such a a castle, a jumbo jet, an aircraft carrier, a-to-scale replica of the Nautilus from Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, and one hell of a lot of antigravity pulsars,"

The Nautilaer was in it's own right, pretty amazing. As Gearbolt walked through it, he couldn't help noticing the amazing details of the amalgamation. It had a large hub cockpit at the front with a large visor that made up most of the front and top, with several cockpits and dashboards. Progressing through, there was a large luxury area shaped like the inside of a jumbo jet, with all kinds of recliners, games, televisions and other things. There was even a large, ornate marble fireplace.

To either side of that area was two large castle wings, comprised internally of corridors with dozens of rooms along them. They really pulled off the entire medieval look, but, peeking into some of the cabins, they could not have been more varied. "Technow, why did you wire one of these rooms with enough explosives to pose a legitimate threat to multiple small countries?" Gearbolt had questioned. "I believe that was Boomer's room," the writer had responded.

Eventually, both corridors, one on each side, and the main room, lead into a large aircraft hangar/garage area that had been split in half horizontally. Multiple staircases, including one in the lounge, lead up to a galley area in the top half. There was a kitchen, an extremely well-stocked pantry and a small cabin at the back.

Above the lounge area were more cabins, luckily not sporting the castle motif, because that was beginning to really get tiresome, and a laboratory room constructed from a really large boiler. There was an odd apparatus inside it, a large machine with two twin sets of wires that were both connected to oddly shaped headbands.

"I don't want to know," Gearbolt decided, hastily backing out of the room, and leaving the hodgepodge ship.

X

"What's all this?" Julie questioned as she observed a large row of vehicles all lined up in rows. Ala followed her over, pausing at a massive monstrosity that looked like a World War 2 tank, except massive, and heavily armoured and armed. The plates of metal covering the caterpillar treads of the tank were both painted with a large white number 2.

Moving over, Technow couldn't help but smile in memory. "Ah, my old friend. The Number Twenty-Two. I remember writing this thing. The amount of walls I smashed with it, the castles I used it to break into, oh those were good times," His eyes suddenly lit up with an idea, and he pulled himself up, over the treads and into the camouflaged behemoth's cockpit. Julie and Ala watched in shock as the colossus ground to life, it's engine spluttering as fuel coursed through the old valves and the gyros span to life.

"I always wanted to drive this thing!" Technow shrieked boyishly, as the massive turret on top revved to life and repeatedly span in circles. Julie yipped in excitement. "You got any for me?"

Gaiphe sighed from where she circled high near the roof of the subterranean warehouse. "A semi-crazed kitsune who already has uncontrollable ice powers, with a tank. This is going to end well,"

"I am not semi-crazed! And I can control my ice powers! Most of the time! Do I look like Elsa from Frozen to you?" Julie hollered up at her, having inexplicably heard her.

"How did you hear that? It should be impossible!" Gaiphe retorted, diving and perching on the barrel atop the Number Twenty-Two.

"This is outside of continuum. Anything's possible!" Julie replied, smug. Then a frown crossed her petite, vulpine face. "This is outside of continuum, right, Tails?"

"Will Gaiphe still be perched on that barrel in ten seconds?" Technow retorted, before twisting a dial and causing the Number Twenty-Two's barrel to rapidly spin in circles. Gaiphe, unable to keep her balance, tottered off, before extending her wings and carefully landing on stable ground.

"Ooh, does that mean you can hook me up with a date with Camo?" Julie asked, excited. "Er, A, he's a character, not a living being, B, he has a girlfriend," Technow pointed out. Julie lay down, pouted and made her cutest fox face. The prospective author sighed. "And C; I can never say no when you make that face. Fine, where do you want the date to be?"

X

"So, is the anything else we might find interesting lying around here?" Julie asked Technow as she padded along the floor. Technow noted, interested, that flakes of frost appeared everywhere her paws touched the ground. That usually only happened when she was really excited. Gaiphe coasted overhead. "Hey, what's Gearbolt and Ala doing up there?" she asked, confused, spotting Gearbolt and Ala tinkering with a machine of some kind. Of rather, Gearbolt was tinkering, Ala was watching.

There was a bright flash and a small boom. Hearing this, the trio quickly moved towards the location of the explosion.

Technow was stunned to find the sight that awaited them. Ala and Gearbolt were lying blackened on the floor, but there were some rather notable differences. Gearbolt's horns were shorter and straighter, and his body and tail were more slender. His claws, curved before, were now hooked, and there were all sorts of feminine draconic distinctions that had not been there before.

With Ala, it was the opposite. Her feathered wings had become wider, less sleek, more toned. All over her body, her muscles had become more defined, her tail seemed a bit shorter, and her beak, long and slender, had become shorter, like Sunburn's.

Technow walked over to the machine they were nearby, for some reason holding his breath. Moving away again, he breathed for a few seconds, before asking, "Gearbolt, why the hell did you blow up the coded mutagen capsule on the special animogenetiser designed to change people's genders?"

"Oh, is that what it was?" Gearbolt weakly asked, in a voice much higher-pitched than normal.

"Okay, Gaiphe, Julie, be careful where you breathe, unless you want to be male," Technow instructed. "Why would you even create something like that?" Gaiphe asked, annoyed.

"In my old fiction, there was a character named Scott who wanted to change genders and be a girl because of another character, named Feng, 's obsession with him. Don't know why he was complaining, but anyway. So he specially programmed this animogenetiser to change the gender of whoever used it. And an animogenetiser was a device that, according to programming, could transform anything into anything at all, as long as it was alive. And now that Gearbolt's blown it up, the trans-gender mutagen is currently in the air around us," Technow explained, before taking a couple of deep breaths to refill his lungs. Big mistake.

Collapsing to the floor, he moaned in some kind of emotion somewhere between pain and pleasure as, with the phoenix and alpine kitsune watching, his posterior swelled to a decent size and thick, humanly attractive breasts grew out of his chest. His arms slimmed down and thighs widened as his/her hair follicles went into overdrive, and his/her hair grew down to his/her waist. They couldn't see through his pants, but the other changes, and the way his moans had been steadily growing higher- and higher-pitched, it was fairly obvious to assume that the change was complete and their writer was now a rather attractive (in human terms, anyway) teenaged girl wearing rather ill-fitting boy's clothes.

"Why would you even get something like that involved in the plot of a story anyway?" Gaiphe asked, raising a feathered brow.

"I told you, transformation-based fiction is a guilty pleasure of mine," Technow told her. "But hey, that reminds me. There's something I've always wanted to try,"

She walked, surprisingly comfortable on her petite, feminine feet, over to one of the other animogenetisers and started inputting code, before calmly walking into the chamber and closing the door behind her.

Seconds later, he walked out, male again. But not human by a long shot.

Four pairs of long, feathery wings, coloured a burning red on the primary feathers and deep black on the secondary feathers, extended from his back. Frills of golden-red feathers protruded from the back of his head, which was suddenly adorned with protruding fox ears and several horns. Like his sister, or brother, his eyes had black sclera, green irises and oddly large black pupils. His hands had morphed into taloned, phoenix-like claws, and light grey fur covered his underbelly while strong, three-digeted feet were at the end of his legs, which were covered in soft-looking crimson feathers. Two long, scaly draconic tails the same colour as his new underbelly's fur with lion-like tufts on the end that matched his leg-feathers.

Technow smiled through his new beak that perfectly matched his sister/brother's. "And that wraps that up. Now, since I'm right here, I don't think I really need an author's note. Anyway, I basically wrote this as a sort of apology for taking so long with updating anything. I have a lot going on at home, and I've been swamped in writer's block for weeks. So, wish me luck with that! Peace!"

"Wait, you're gonna leave me and Gearbolt the opposite gender?" Ala asked, as they had just woken up. "Gearbolt doesn't look like he's complaining. And relax, I'm sure it'll wear off by the next author's note," Technow reassured him, gesturing to Gearbolt. The lightning dragon was rubbing himself and randomly emitting squeals of pleasure. "Yeah, yeah, everyone loves becoming a girl but hates becoming a guy. Quit stereotyping, bro!" Ala hotly complained.

Technow pouted. "What about peace don't you under -"