I've seen fic challenges on this site before, and while, yes, I understand the value of challenging /oneself/ as an author, I thought… hey, wouldn't competition be fun? And Shane and I have become fairly good friends (at least very intense friends) over the last month, so I thought it might be amusing to join him in his most recent challenge endeavor and he agreed.

This is, therefore, a companion piece to his "Photographs in the Wind". I'll be using the same prompts he's using and, with the exception of this first chapter, will not read his entry until I've posted my own. I'm going to try to follow his "under 500 words" guideline as well, and the short stories will be shots from an "expanded" series canon to include both derivate works from the actual books and, occasionally, derivative works from his and my other stories on the site. The latter will, of course, be fully referenced.

But enough exposition, on to the game!

First Kiss

I trembled and wondered, not for the first time, how I had gotten myself into this mess. Staying off of Visser Three's radar was priority one for any loyal Yeerk, and yet somehow I had been chosen as his experimental subject for what had to be one of the most distasteful propositions in history.

Normally watching the Visser morph to human is a relief; not that he wouldn't have you killed anyway if his whim demanded it, but without that Andalite tail you could count on the end being not quite as painful or imaginative. But this time, even as the Visser's tail dissolved and his seven-fingered Andalite hands slowly shifted in shades from blue to pink, I kept every ounce of my apprehension. I couldn't imagine how I was going to get out of this alive.

At least the Visser's morph wasn't entirely unattractive. He took his Lieutenants' advice on which hosts to use when performing the Frolis Maneuver, and six rather attractive humans were chosen for the task.

"Begin," the Visser ordered, as casually as if he were asking for a morning briefing.

I cleared my host's throat. "Well, umm… first we come closer, Visser. And then we… we sort of wrap our arms around each other. Like this." I skulked slowly forward and tentatively, awkwardly, wrapped my Commanding Officer in my best impersonation of a hug.

The Visser raised his human eyebrow momentarily, but complied easily enough, and soon we were in each other's arms. "Then what?" he asked tersely.

"Now we open our mouths," I answered, unable to keep the blush from my host's cheeks. "And we take the pink muscle inside and begin exploring the backs of each other's teeth."

«That's the most ridiculous explanation I've ever heard,» my host quipped, but I ignored it. Besides, how else do you explain a kiss to a being that's not even used to having a mouth in the first place? Get it over with, I told myself, leaning forward and doing exactly as I described.

Surprisingly, the Visser wasn't bad at it. «Maybe you should start calling him Kisser Three,» my host teased.

When I pulled back, the Visser looked at me curiously. "This is such a powerful motivation that you believe it can lead scores of hosts to us?" he asked.

I couldn't help myself. I asked the self-conscious question just as my host would. "Was I.. was it not good, Visser?"

Visser Three shrugged his human shoulders, a gesture he had learned in a previous session. "It was… pleasant enough. Hardly seems like it would be as powerful as you suggest, though."

I smiled. "Oh, it gets better than that, that's just the start," I remarked.

"What comes next?" he asked.

I blushed again. "Well, umm.. Visser… I /could/ show you the next step, but human social convention in these matters would require you to find a Yeerk with a female host body."