Scabs was always nervous when wandering into a new town. Highway patrol was easy enough to avoid at night, but rural sheriffs and city PDs did like to use their spotlights at the edge of the urban sprawl. The overcast weather gave a diffuse glow over everything that was, in some ways, worse than full moon light for stealth. It meant no stark shadows to break up his outline as he tried to make his way clandestinely into the middle rung of the city, looking for abandoned strip malls or boarded-up drive-throughs to hole up in. And on this particular night, it also meant he had to move fast or the few rain drops he felt breaking against his dirty face and hands would turn into a miserable downpour. He could already smell rain in the air, it was just a matter of time.

Looking for where the streetlights and parking lots weren’t, he tread along an on-ramp and found something that seemed promising. A plaza with few cars, cracked asphalt, no working lights, and a low row of buildings with plywood fixed to the doors and windows.

Scabs walked casually, trying not to look out of place. He pulled the tattered ball cap’s bill lower to obscure his face as he glanced everywhere at once. Closer and closer, he crept up to the nearest corner of the building and chanced a look around. Loading bays, ventilation shafts, rusted steel doors, broken rooftop access ladders, and old junk and scrap littered a gravel utility area behind the old shops.

Not a single cop car in sight. Maybe he’d stay dry tonight after all. If nobody else had ‘claimed’ these shambles first, that is. Dealers and gangs didn’t care if you were a hobo or a neighborhood brat, they’d run you out just the same. So he advanced as quietly as his crumbling old sneakers could over the crunchy gravel, quietly trying each door and noting which vent shafts looked promising as he went.

Somewhere in the middle of the complex his sun-baked hand found a free-turning door knob. Just as the drops of water on his coat were starting to fall heavier and harder, he pulled the door open cautiously and stepped inside, ears wide open for the sounds of any potential occupants. A rumble. Thunder accompanying the breaking rain, nothing more. He released his breath and padded quietly, deliberately into the building from the rear entrance.

There was a dull, violet glow coming from the main floor through the stock area. It looked like blacklight or something. He wondered if he’d stumbled into the secret weed den for a bunch of stoner teens or something. There was a certain thickness in the air, he noticed, but it didn’t smell like pot. It smelled kind of like… the woods? Earthy, damp, but clean and inviting, wholesome natural air. More addictive to some than any drug.

The stock room he crept through was full of dilapidated old cardboard boxes, slumping from years of uncontrolled climate probably, filled with shapeless piles and rags. He passed them silently, scoping out his potential shelter for the night to make sure it was his and not someone else’s. Through the open stockroom door he came out into… a rave for invisible partiers.

Or something like that. The weird light was everywhere, there was mist or smoke curling into a thick, obscuring curtain in the distance towards the boarded storefront, and rows upon rows of psychedelic colors pulsating luridly in the sourceless blacklight. It looked like a picture covered in iridescent oilslick. Despite the clean woodland smell to the place, nothing here had a single natural color. It was like a national storeroom for headshop employee uniforms or something. Or maybe an old costume supply house? Rows of grotesque, inhuman faces lined the walls above the shirts and garments, locked in an endless staring contest with each other. One in particular stood out from the others, in part because of its distinctive color. It was the only starkly white thing in the shop, and it was some sort of doll-like rendition of a beautiful unicorn with cutesy big eyes outlined in fluffy black lashes and a demure little mouth on a tiny snout, pursed in a constant state of wonder and child-like awe.

Scabs wondered what was so special about this mask that it didn’t look like something Jackson Pollack vomited up after a bender. He stepped over piles of oily-looking rags and heaps of old clothing to get a closer look. Somehow the strange ambient light cast an alluring glow over this one mask, making it appear just-so and conspicuous. It looked clean and dirt-free, unlike the finger he stretched out to feel its texture. Somehow the cheek he touched felt warm and yielding, like real flesh. He wondered how anyone wearing it was supposed to see, trying to guess where the hidden eye holes might be at, when the glossy limpid eyes of the mask suddenly twitched and converged on him. It was looking at him, he was certain of it!

“Yay!” the mask exclaimed in a voice like a tinkling golden bell, smiling gleefully at him from the wall. “It’s my tur-urn! It’s my tur-urn!” it chanted triumphantly as Scabs stood dumbfounded. “Finally! I’ve never had a host before! I hope this is super-duper extra fun! WHEEEEE!” the apparently female unicorn mask giggled and grinned.

Something thick and heavy wrapped around Scabs’ ankles. He broke off from the talking mask and saw a swirl of oozing fluid colors rising up his dirty pant legs from a puddle that surrounded him entirely. He tried to pick up a foot and take a step, but it was like he’d sunk into mud up to his thighs. He was held fast, and held faster still as the rainbow goop swelled and advanced upwards inexorably, converging over his crotch and still going to engulf his hips. His legs felt numb. Then his stomach. He only thought to cry for help when it was too late, and the day-glow muck had swallowed his sternum and put his lungs out of action.

A curtain of purple hair fell around his face and something was squeezing the top of his head.

“Aw, what’s this? Get out of the way!” the girlish voice said in annoyance as something pulled the ball cap down and let it fall onto the rising pillar of slime that was now spreading under and around his shoulders, robbing them of feeling. The squeezing atop his head became more urgent and was now wriggling over his crown of oily, unkempt hair, pressing over his forehead, down over his eyes and casting him into darkness.

Isabella yawned and stretched her slender, chalk-white arms. Arching her back, she felt the weight of her plump breasts shift and wobble in their neat, tidy lace bra that was mostly hidden beneath her sheer silk top. She wiggled her ears and rubbed her eyes, then worked her toes in the nicely-fitted black satin high-heeled shoes that wrapped and protected her delicate feet.

She bent forward and stretched her fingertips towards the floor, then stood straight and twisted her thin waist to the left, then the right. Having a body at long last was so much fun! It was tall, slim, youthful and energetic yet full-grown and shapely, so soft and warm and smooth! She didn’t have much to go by, but she was confident this one would be a real looker! The perfect body for her purposes.

“Whee, this is gre-ooops!” a gruff, masculine voice started and caught itself. Isabella reached up and felt for the clasp of the collar around her neck, found it, and snapped it securely. “Hehe, whee! This is great!” she said in her usual chipper, girly tones. “Time to get out there and do my job!”

She rummaged through the aisles until she found a small black handbag. Crouching down, she held the flap open and aimed the bag at a loose pile of uncategorizable, colorful mass. It responded obediently and started flowing towards her purse, forming a pseudopod that probed the inside of her bag and settled in heavily. She stood up straight again, letting some of the goop stretch into a thin stream before flicking it with a delicate fingertip. It broke cleanly, and the bit trailing out of her purse retracted to join the rest of its substance inside. Zipping the purse shut, she gave it a gentle pat of reassurance and took one last look at the store where she’d spent decades awaiting her chance at a host. She was going to miss her staring contests with Regina the Goblin, but she was sure a whole new world of fun was waiting for her on the outside.

Closing her heavily-lashed eyes for a moment, she turned inwards and slithered through her dormant host’s memories to find how it had gotten in. She recalled the stockroom, the passage to the back loading area, the gravel access lot, and then the outside. Where all the people were!

“Okay, I’m off to bring joy and happiness to the world! Bye-yeeeee!” she said, wriggling her fingers at the rest of her kind and figuring out how to skip in her long, narrow shoes as she bounced out of the abandoned building like a young girl leaving school for an exciting field trip.

As soon as she was in the open night air, gentle raindrops kissing her shoulders and hair playfully, she felt hundreds of distant points of interest fill her spacial awareness all at once.

“Oooo, so many adult virgins out there!” she observed reverently, humbled by the task she had to fulfill. She glanced at the slim silver watch that adorned her right wrist and tried to get some temporal perspective. “It’ll take a long time to deflower all of them! I’d better get started tonight!”

The gravel paving wasn’t really amenable to skipping, so she settled for taking big strides and swinging her arms forward and back, bringing her purse up and down and in and out, careful not to let any of the slime fall out. Eventually she’d found a nice safe place for it to be planted in and grow in seclusion, setting up a new shop safely away from the old one. It was her number one priority! Well, number two… right after reducing the GAV (global adult virgin) population.

She was a unicorn, after all, and what else are pretty unicorn girls like her for?

Isabella headed for the nearest sensation of suitably untarnished, unspent libido she could find, humming and singing a silly song about unicorns appearing to virgins and taking away their stress and loneliness. For her, it was a mission akin to a religious calling. Technically it would be her first time, too, so she giggled at the realization that her first mission would be an extra special double-deflowering! All thanks to her gracious host for volunteering his body to the cause. And his memories were super helpful, too! Thanks to his English major, she realized she could rhyme “virgin reduction” with “urge and seduction” and immediately worked that into her silly song as she went, rain parting for her approach and closing again in her wake.

Meanwhile, back in the strange abandoned store, the ever-shifting technicolor caul receded from an angular female goblin’s face, leaving its blankly staring visage starkly green and conspicuous among all the other items that had no distinctive color of their own.