Alien Space Babe: The Other Artefact (Agent to Octo-Alien TF) (Patreon)

As voted by you, my deluxe patrons! Also, if the whole 'tadpole transforming the MC into a tentacular creature' makes you think of Baldur's Gate 3, then you're immediately smarter than me. I didn't even make the connection despite playing the game a heap lately until my partner pointed it out, ha!

ByFoxFaceStories

While Serellis and Derek enjoy their new lives together, the secret facility that nearly captured the man-turned-alien woman continues to maintain artefacts from other alien races. But when new girl on the job Helena Porter gets a little bit too close to one, she finds out that she may just be the latest alien woman for the Men in Black to be concerned with. Especially with all those tentacles . . .

Original Story Here 

Alien Space Babe: The Other Artefact

Helena Porter was nervous as hell. It was only her second week at the Facility, and she wanted to make sure she didn’t screw up. It had always been her dream to research and archive the newly discovered, the strange and fantastical, the extraterrestrial. And now, after being poached (quite literally) from Harvard University after her stellar scores, she was offered the chance of a lifetime: work for the Agency, a clandestine para-governmental organisation that collected alien and supernatural artefacts for the defence of the Earth. The other choice, naturally, was to have her memory wiped, and to be returned to her university for graduation, none the wiser. Well, she’d chosen exactly what she’d always dreamed of.

One wouldn’t think it to look at her, but Helena had her determined size. At only 5’4 and with a slightly tubby middle, she gave the impression of a nervous librarian, albeit one too young for the job given that she was only twenty four years old. She had frizzy black hair that never behaved itself, no matter how well she combed it, and a pair of glasses so thick you could probably use them to start fires using the sun’s rays. Still, she was a little bit cute despite the annoyingly perpetual flab around her stomach, something that was much easier to manage when she dressed like a college student and not in the black suit and white shirts of the Agency. But there was no denying her genius. When one looked into her eyes you could see it, the fiery passion for the unknown, and the will to discover it. It was what likely pushed her over the edge for enlistment in the Agency’s ranks. That and the fact that her thesis paper had been on a series of diplomatic, archaeological, and archival protocols when dealing with the possible event of a First Contact scenario. That had gotten Mr Paler’s attention.

It was that very agent whom she was meeting, and meeting soon. Probably meeting late, in fact. For all of her genius and passion, Helena was also prone to fits of anxiety when it came to major changes, and it means the labyrinthine New Mexico facility was borderline impossible to navigate on a deadline. Still, she had to meet Mr Paler. He was her boss, and he had the same will to discover as her. But he also had a will to harness, to control, and to defend humanity, which meant that he was quite the steely, thorny individual. The fact that he had snow-white hair that offset his chilly blue eyes only made his name all the more appropriate.

“Can’t be late, can’t be late. Excuse me! Can you direct me to the Inner Archive! I’m new here!”

“Hey Helena,” a suited, masked figure set. “I’m Cam. We met on day one.”

She smiled weakly. She had no memory of him. “Sorry Cam, I - uh-”

“Don’t worry, it’s a big place. Two doors up, take a left, one floor down, then keep heading right. We need signage.”

“Absolutely we do,” she sighed, a bit puffed. “Thanks Cam.”

“Any time! And enjoy the Archive. I don’t have clearance to go there or see it, but I hear it’s pretty cool.”

“Oh, it’s very cool. And classified.”

The figure shrugged, which she assumed was a message of resignation. Not like his faceplate let her see his reaction. She thanked him again and followed his instructions, only to have to ask a couple more individuals for their help anyway: she’d gotten all turned about. By the time she arrived she was slightly flushed and feeling out of shape.

“I’m sorry!” she declared as she entered. “I was just trying to - Mr Paler!”

She snapped off a quick salute to the Facility superior. He had his own masters, but she had no idea who they were, or if they even answered to a regular government. As far as she was concerned though, he was the one in charge of the facility, and therefore the top of the list of people not to tick off. Unfortunately, he looked ticked off.

“Agent Porter,” he said in his calm voice. “You’re late. Again.”

“I’m really very sorry sir, it’s taking longer than I thought it would to adjust to this place.”

He sighed, but gestured for her to approach. The Inner Archive required double-clearance to enter even for him - an important security check. They both placed their palms on the pad and activated the security key. Several armed agents cleared them, checked that they were human. Agent Paler conducted an eye scan and a blood test to unlock the final seal.

The door dilated open, and the pair entered. As with the last few times she had been within the Inner Archive, Helena’s heart soared. It was vast and amazing. Huge sections of a crashed UFO were carefully maintained in sealed glass chambers, and various other forms of alien and paranatural technologies were likewise on display, with numerous screens of information regulating their temperature, energy levels, and running continual scans. Various scientists who also had access to this area were handling elements with the utmost care. She was momentarily starry-eyed until Paler directed her to follow him with a curt gesture.

“Another finding, this time in central Asia,” he said.

“Oh, wow! That’s incredible.”

He sneered. “That remains to be seen, Agent Porter. Remember, alien life is a threat to humanity. We must never stop being cautious. We must control every element.”

“Um, what about Subject 123B, sir? The one who goes by Serellis?”

Agent Paler paused, appropriately enough, right by the remnants of a UFO that had been ground zero for that particular incident.

“That is a matter of continuing concern, not hope.”

On display across the screens were images of Chad Penwick, former star athlete of a north-eastern college, in all his manly glory. And right next to it was an image of ‘his’ current form: a green-skinned humanoid half-alien that was very identifiably female. As in, supermodel figure gorgeous, though she had her own strange features that marked her as literally out of this world: a third eye on her forehead, four-digit hands instead of five, and a pair of green antennae with cute little spherical nubs at the end of them. She had a thick prehensile tail also, at the end of which was a sort of ‘hand’ like a rubbery pincer. She also had, and this was what fellow agents and guards often joked about around the facility when they played ‘Fuck, Marry, Kill’, a set of three large breasts, probably E-cups in size. Helena, who managed to have a pooch of a stomach and yet somehow no chest, was oddly jealous at the sight of it.

The half-alien had been a result of interfering with alien technology belonging to Species H. Her now-husband Derek Mayes had been her college roommate and big UFO collector, something the jock Chad found ridiculous. Not so after messing with his roommate’s recovered tech led him to turning into a gorgeous alien woman. They had been captured by the facility, but Chad - by then calling herself Serellis and accepting her new form - had demonstrated powers of wall-crawling, invisibility, and x-ray vision, allowing her to rescue herself and Derek from the Agency and rendezvous with Species H. By that point they had fallen in love, and with the backing of Species H - a fact that Agent Paler was forever grumbling about - they were allowed to stay on Earth. They’d been located in a lovely little country town for several years now, with Serellis able to adopt a human guise. They had one baby girl, and apparently another on the way.

Helena had learned all this only in the last two weeks, but found the case utterly fascinating. To think that aliens had the technology to literally transform someone’s species. It was exhilarating to think that her own asthma and poor eyesight and even her very body could be altered, leaving her slimmer and taller and healthier. Not that Paler saw such goodness in extraterrestrials. To him, the fact that Serellis, Derek, and their children were allowed to remain as US citizens was a constant danger that only kept Species H around.

“But surely there has not been any issue with them, sir. And besides, from all indications Species H has indeed kept their distance and avoided further contact or probing.”

“Hmph. For now. The one time we tried monitoring Serellis beyond the confines of our deal with Species H they were in our orbit within minutes. Penwick and Mayes should never have been allowed contact with an alien relic. Sloppy work by our scavenging crews to miss it. It won’t happen again.”

“Of course not sir. What is the newest recovery?”

“This way. I’m hoping you can work with the team to decipher its meaning and find a proper place of storage, and for us to reverse engineer what we can.”

She continued to think of the strange case of Chad Penwick/Serellis Mayes as Paler led her around several archival benches, UFO piece displays, and several functioning laser weapons lockers. They passed through another series of checks into the live-storage units, where material gathered were yet to be determined in terms of purpose and even safe storage. A tension rose in Helena’s gut. She’d only been here a few times, but the tingling of excitement always mingled with that uncertainty. That fear. The unveiling and analysis of a new alien artefact captured her fascination beyond anything else, but she couldn’t deny that she understood Paler’s own paranoia when it came to such things. There were a lot of dangerous factors involved, and no one could know what they were dealing with.

“This one,” he said flatly, his brow creasing as he indicated through a thick glass window to a shielded item within. It was pinkish-purple, with strange markings along the side of it. It looked to be organic technology, pulsating flesh that was slightly wet, looking almost like it was part brain-matter and part cephalopod skin. It was broadly in the shape of a tadpole, albeit one the size of a closed hand leading down to the wrist before ending in a tail that undulated slowly. The whole thing was floating in a glass jar, moving about as if alive.

“That’s what I want you to study,” Paler said.

Helena beheld the strange object. It was strange, it was inhuman, and it was more than a little terrifying to judge from the sharp, almost bone-like points on its underside. And yet it was exactly what she had taken this job for. The prospect of discovering something truly alien.

“Yes, sir,” she said eagerly, a wide smile upon her face.

***

For the next month, the object now known as ‘the Tadpole’ was Helena’s primary fixation. Having apparently passed the initiation process into the Facility and knowing her way around at least slightly better, her specific assignment was almost entirely upon the Tadpole. It had not arrived via wreckage, or even been uncovered from an ancient ruin from a distant past alien visitation. No, this one had landed - intentionally or otherwise - into the South Pacific Ocean, and recovered from the seabed before any contamination could take place. It discovery had freaked Paler and his masters right out, because given the bio-technological aspect of the Tadpole, which scans had revealed to be non-sentient and not ‘alive’ in the traditional sense of the word, it could well be the first sign of an invasion from an alien empire or superorganism. Helena had seen Slithers, she knew well how such things could go even in fiction. The reality could be even more terrifying. It was thus imperative to remember that this process could well be considered a form of alien ‘seeding’ to overwhelm a planet’s biosphere and terraform it entirely, something they adamantly could not allow.

So, suffice to say, she was very, very careful, especially with Paler breathing down her neck about reports on her progress. She and her small team of scientists worked around the clock to gain samples, test them, check responses, test light refractions, photosynthesis qualities, salinity alterations, and so on upon the Tadpole. Very little had caused any reaction, though they had discovered it could live in fresh or saltwater. Outside of the water, it could survive nearly a week, but they had to put it back before leading to any final analysis of cell degradation: the Tadpole needed to be ‘wetted’ occasionally if in dry conditions.

Helena continued to apply long hours of study towards it, even more so than her compatriots. Mostly it was her sheer enthusiasm that pushed her through, but another part was her desire to prove herself. She still embarrassed herself with not knowing the layout of the Facility, and she had yet to cultivate the self-seriousness of so many other agents. The largest cause of her long hours was Agent Paler himself, however.

“What is the latest update?”

“Have you found anything about the exotic nature of the saliva it emits?”

“What purpose do we think it serves?”

“How exactly do you intend to vivisect it, if at all?

And so on. It was driving her up the wall. She wasn’t the only one being pushed to the limit. It was a regular complaint around the Facility that this was the case. Other Agents were likewise feeling the pressure, and evidently had ever since the Serellis incident with Species H.

“He’s only gotten worse since then. Paler was going for promotion up the ranks - whatever that means in our organisation. Wanted a seat at the table. But he was humiliated by how wrong it went. Now he’s obsessed with proving himself, and trying to win big for Earth’s defence in some way.”

The words belonged to Agent David June, who was Helena’s closest friend in the Facility. He had been with the facility for nearly ten years, and considered himself a veteran agent. He was a fellow researcher, though he’d been on quite a few mobile operations and scavenge runs, even been in a few hairy situations, which made Helena marvel.

“Well, he has me working around the clock, David,” Helena said as they ate at the cafeteria together.

“Bastard.”

“Well, at least it’s exciting.”

“Just wait until you step wrong. Trust me, Paler is bad news. He’ll turn on you if he thinks it’ll help the mission. You just watch out, Helena.”

Helena nodded. “I will. Don’t worry. I’m a big girl.”

David chuckled. “And don’t do anything stupid with alien tech just because you’re a total nerd!”

The young researcher rolled her eyes. “Hey, I’m an Agent, remember? I fully intend to be the one analysing alien matter, not accidentally being turned into one like Chad Penwick was.”

“The one that got away. How weird, huh? Imagine being transformed into some alien freak.”

***

Helena was tired. She was studying the artefact after hours, trying to take another tissue sample from it. The rest of her crew had clocked out, but she was determined to draw some of the Tadpole’s blood, though it was a difficult thing - where the blood was located seemed to change at any given time. The team had tried several methods and several needles, but had called it a day. Unfortunately, as the head of this particular team, Helena was on the hook for Agent Paler’s constant need for updates and progress, and so she was once again blinking through tired eyes late into the night, trying to make an advancement. She was keen to. She was happy to. But God, she would prefer to do it in the morning.

“You are such a finicky alien bit of bio-tech,” she said aloud. She was wearing a protective hazmat suit per protocol, but it made her movements clumsy as she tried to insert the needle. For just a moment she thought she saw a throbbing vein, but then it was reabsorbed back within the pink celephapodic skin before she could get to it.

“Damn it all,” she said, frustrated as hell and needing to sleep. “Maybe if I just removed one glove. Be really careful.”

It was a bad idea, but her tired mind didn’t recognise all the dangers. So she removed one glove, leaving one hand bare. She reached out and gripped the Tadpole with her gloved hand in the miniature aquarium that contained it, then quickly dug the needle in the next visible vein much more accurately.

“Success!” she cried.

And then all hell broke loose. As if sensing the presence of available organic flesh, the Tadpole squirmed and extended, coming alive - more alive than usual - and writhing out of her hand in such a way that it practically leapt to her other one.

“Shit!” she cried. She tried to pull it off her hand with her glove, but the Tadpole dug into her hand and wrist painfully. She cried out, immediately realising what she had done wrong as the alien tech literally fused with her hand, wrapping around it like it was silly putty so that her fingers and thumb were completely covered, and only the tail of the Tadpole serves as the end of her arm. The ‘teeth’ of the strange organic tech dug into her skin, causing her to suck in her breath. Small tears formed in response to the brief agony, and then something amazing and terrifying happened.

The Tadpole became part of her.

She could feel it. The squamous flesh. The fatty substance of it. The way it could stretch and squeeze and thin itself to pass through small spaces just like an octopus. The prehensile nature of its boneless structure.

“Oh God,” she said, wanting to throw up. “Oh God. Oh shit. I’ve done a dumb thing. I’ve done a v-very dumb thing. Shit, how am I going to get this off of me?”

There was no one around. In cases like this, the immediate response was to hit the alarm and initiate a hard lockdown of the Facility. But Helena was new, and nervous, and wanting to prove herself. She didn’t want Paler to lock her away like he wanted to with Serellis. She had to get to work to remove this thing.

She immediately began to take off the hazmat suit as best as she could, without letting her ‘new’ hand touch any other part of her. It was an arduous process, and the worst part was how she could practically feel her fingers losing their sensation. It was almost like they were being devoured by the Tadpole, shrinking away and losing their bones as they became part of the structure.

“Not being eaten,” she said manically. “Not being eaten!”

But by the time she’d gotten the suit off, there was no denying that this may well be what was indeed happening: the Tadpole was getting bigger. Like a pink slug slowly creeping along, it was extending down her arm, now past her wrist. The bones there were like wax. Her ‘hand’ was now more like the end of a tentacle, curling oddly around itself in a way that was far more dexterous than she could ever normally manage.

“Fuck. Um, it responded to shocks before!”

She opened up one of the surgical draws and got out the minor electrical prod. She put it on a mid-setting and placed it against her pink, tentacular ‘hand.’ Her heart beat tremulously in her chest. Helena squeezed her eyes shut.

“Please let this work.”

She activated it, and was instantly hit with an intense pain that reverberated throughout her body. The Tadpole - if it even was a separate thing anymore - squirmed and writhed like a limb gone wild. Helena cried out and dropped the electric prod. Somehow, she had only ticked it off: the infection spread rapidly further down her right arm. Where it went, her bones melted away, leaving her arm squishy and elastic. Small suckers developed on the underside, round and slightly darker pink than the rest of her new skin, which had a slightly wet sheen to it. Even stranger, where the change passed, her arm became longer too.

“Ohhhhhhh that f-feels s-sooo weird! Ahhh! And p-painful!”

Thankfully, it was weirder than it was painful. She now had a pair of utterly mismatched arms, one over a hand’s length longer than the other. And it was still spreading.

“Gotta find a way. Have to - salinity! Change the temperature!”

She thrust her tentacular arm into the open aquarium that had stored the Tadpole. She was suddenly hit by a nice absorbent feeling, one that left her changing tentacle-arm slightly fuller and noodly than it had been before, and stronger too.

“Ahhhh - no! Don’t make me enjoy that! You’re eating me!”

She adjusted several of the dials on the aquarium, increasing the amount of salt, raising the temperature by a number of degrees, and increasing the Ph levels to borderline incredibly toxic levels. Her anxiousness was overwhelming by that point, but it only got worse as hope after hope was dashed: the change finally reached her shoulder, and her arm extended yet further so that her long tentacle-arm reached all the way down to a little past her knee. It undulated slightly, its muscles within tensing, unused to their new arrangement.

“N-no! Please! Not my ch-chest!”

But the transformation was only speeding up. Helena groaned from a mix of pain, pressure, and strange release as her skin turned pink and rubber all across her front and back. She was so caught up in the strangeness of the change that when it accelerated, she didn’t pay attention to which arm was trying to tug at her shirt. She accidentally used her tentacle arm, and using strength she could never have imagined it possessed she tore her shirt open at the front completely, ripping the whole thing off.

“Holy fuck! I didn’t mean to - eeuurgh! EUGH!!”

She had no time to try to be modest. All that was left was her meagre bra and her trousers and shoes, but the first of those was about to come off too, because her entire form was growing. Helena let out a long wail and her flesh expanded, the Tadpole’s expanse creeping over her flesh and altering it, possibly permanently. Her slightly plump body became even plumper, Her spine dissipating vertebrae by vertebrae until it was only a series of muscles and fat deposits that kept her from toppling over. Her belly ballooned out until she almost looked pregnant. For a moment she was terrified that she was, but it had a softness to it that said otherwise, at least for now. It wasn’t enough to assuage her fears. She rapidly reached for something - anything - that could help prevent the changes or at least slow them down, but she was instantly hit by a wave of nausea as a pressure grew in her small breasts.

“T-too much! No! N-no more! Someone help! Oh G-God! OHHHH!!!”

They began to expand, slowly at first but then with alarming rapidity as the Tadpole continued to spread through her body, taking over it. She’d been the owner of modest B-cups, and now they were expanding to full flushed C’s, then D’s, then beyond that to large E-cups and overwhelming F-cups. She grimaced, clenching her jaw as they bloated and bloated, becoming heavier and rounder and softer, hanging off of her form and drooping lower. They were still astonishingly pert and full though, large rounded melons that must have easily been J-cups or larger by the time they finished expanding, having become soft and pink and covered in a wet sheen. Her nipples were enormous, having turned a dark purple. Her bra gave way, snapping off to a corner of the room and providing a modicum of relief for the transforming agent.

“So b-big! Too big! Ohhhhh! Why are they s-so sensitive?”

She tried to grasp them, but only one hand could do so. The other tentacle simply wrapped around and squeezed, leaving her to moan in reluctant pleasure. They were enormous, each nearly double the size of her own head. It was only because of her lack of spine that her body could even hold them up: numerous celephapodic muscles kept her upright: barely.

And still the changes continued. Helena activated a mirror screen across one wall, and gasped at her reflection. She was becoming some kind of alien monster! Worse, the changes were beginning to extend across to her other shoulder even as they slid down to her nethers. She grabbed a scalpel, intent on trying to cut into the flesh, but even that was a limp, pathetic effort, because the pink Tadpole flesh surged forth, overtaking her left arm and extending it to the same length as her right one. In just a minute or so it had become the same pink tentacle as the other, with the same bulbous end that worked as a sort of ‘grabber’ or manipulable hand, albeit with not actual digits. The scalpel fell from her unfamiliar limb, and the changes raced downwards.

“Lockdown! Have to initiate a lockdown!”

She’d delayed far too long already. Paler would be furious, or worse. She lumbered towards the lockdown switch on the adjacent wall, moving as fast as her now-heavier body would allow. Unfortunately, the Tadpole’s influence spread yet further, coursing down her hips and causing them to spread so much wider. Her entire centre of gravity shifted, and she nearly toppled over entirely, especially because her massive pink breasts were also so gravity-altering.

And then she fell over anyway with a yelp.

“What!? My legs!” she cried. “What’s happening - ohhh! EUGH! NGGHH!!”

The strangest change yet was occurring. Up until this point, the changes had still left her broadly humanoid. Sure, she had tentacles for arms, ones that were still utterly foreign and difficult to use at this stage, but she was still bipedal, still only possessing four limbs.

That was about to change.

Helena’s struggle towards the switch was brought to an abrupt end by the fact that her legs began to quite literally split apart. It was the most appropriately alien feeling in the world: first the bones dissolved as the pink, sponge-like skin took over, and then the limbs themselves separated slowly yet surely. It wasn’t painful like the other changes, but it was supremely discomforting. She cried out in horror as her shoes and socks fell off. Out the ends of her pant legs were now a series of writhing tentacles - four or five out each pants leg and more every second! Worse, they were growing rapidly, swelling wide and getting larger at the base. Her hips and rear swelled, expanding in a now-circular fashion. The trousers could take no more: Helena squealed in a brief moment of pain as her growing flesh strained against the fabric, only for the latter to give way. Her trousers, her underwear, everything gave way, tearing apart so that her new monstrous form was naked and fully unveiled.

“Oh God! My ass! What’s happening to - MHMHPH!!”

She hated how strangely pleasurable the following sensation was. Her anus literally shifted as her cheeks fused together to form just another part of her ring of tentacles. It moved down, altering shape and even purpose. It grew hard.

“Oh fuck, it’s like an octopus! It’s a beak! I’m growing a fucking - EEeeEEeeEE!!!”

It grew outwards, a beak for consumption. She wasn’t even sure where her reproductive equipment was even located anymore, but an intense throbbing in her overly-large nipples - nipples that now had vertical slits on them - told her that perhaps her alien biology was now really, really alien.

More tentacles grew out, spreading all over the floor. They were long, easily five or six feet long each, and they curled around one another, at least two dozen of them from her lower half. They were shockingly strong though, but having so many new limbs was impossible to navigate, until thankfully some kind of alien instinct took over and allowed her to lift herself up upon her ring of tentacles. The foreign, very unlovely sensation of her beak snapping in satisfaction in the middle of all them was something she just couldn’t avoid.

“This can’t be happening - am I going to have to eat with that now!?”

Her tentacles writhed, and she nearly fell to the side. Thankfully, several others planted themselves, catching her. They could shift their fat all about: getting thick at the base or at the tip depending on what was required. Each was incredibly flexible despite being quite fat. It would have been a marvel if she were the one studying the changes instead of experiencing them. As it was, she was feeling faint and full of adrenaline at the same time.

“Lockdown. Have to start . . . lockdown!”

Testing her tentacles slowly at first, she managed to manipulate them to bring her forward. Instinct was her best bet here: she found that if she concentrated she could move one individually, but it was too much to handle just yet. If things went really pear-shaped, she might have no choice but to get used to them all.

“No! Not getting stuck like this!” she yelled. “I’m not living as some octopus alien woman with a beak between my legs - tentacles, whatever! - and a set of wombs on my damn chest! I’m a researcher, not some f-freak!”

Unfortunately, the tadpole’s influence was arguing otherwise, because it began to spread north, up to her neck. A set of fine gills came into being there. For a moment she lost all ability to breathe, only for it to thankfully return, albeit with a feeling of being parched. Her skin was wet, but she’d need more water soon unless the changes were counteracted.

“Lockdown. Get. To. Lockdown.”

It was just across the room. She could do it. But progress was slow. Her tentacles writhed, and she didn’t even know what to do with her long arms, dexterous as they were. The mirror showed her changes as she advanced. The final change was coming.

“Lockdown! LOCKDOWN!!!”

She made it just as the tadpole’s influence creeped up her face. Helena extended out a tentacular left arm and wrapped it around the lockdown switch. It was over four feet away, but her limbs could seemingly extend themselves several extra feet at will. She pulled down the switch just as the final changes overcame her face. She watched it happen in real time.

‘LOCKDOWN ALERT. LOCKDOWN ALERT. INNER ARCHIVES ON LOCKDOWN. ALIEN ARTEFACT LEAKAGE. PROCEED WITH CAUTION. LOCKDOWN ALERT -’

Red lights flashed outside the room, but Helena’s entire focus was on her face and head. She closed her eyes for a brief moment, and then the Tadpole’s final infection came over her. She breathed quickly, holding onto hope that she would not lose her mind and become some kind of octopus zombie. For just a split second, she saw an image of thousands and thousands of her new kind, swimming on some alien biome filled with vibrant turquoise water, their ships watery domains for traversing deep seas and deep space alike.

They were oddly beautiful. Oddly free. At peace.

She felt that peace wash over her as her head ballooned larger at the back, and her eyes enlarged, and her hair erupted into a set of tentacles like some kind of octopoid medusa. When she opened them again, there was an alien female staring back at her with large golden eyes that were easily twice the size of human ones. She had no nose anymore, just two small vertical slits that were oddly elegant. Her mouth was gone, her jaw as well, though at least she didn’t have tentacles sprouting from her jawline. Instead they emerged from her head, almost two feet long each, and also fully manipulable, as if she didn’t have enough tentacles already. The back of her head had a kind of sac like an octopus’. It was almost like an organic hoodie of sorts.

‘What on Earth did I just become?’ she thought, and her mind seemed to warble, projecting the words out into reality as if they were a spoken voice. ‘Wait, holy crap, can I speak telepathically? But like, making actual sounds with my mind?’

It seemed to be the case. Helena ran through her memories thinking deeply on her own life. Nothing was missing as far as she could tell. There were no desires to conquer, to infect, to destroy. Not even, at least for now, to mate, though her breasts were oddly aroused in a way they’d never quite been. In fact, the only alien compulsions seemed to be helpful: how else could she work with the fact that, head tentacles included, she seemed to have something approaching thirty limbs or so.

‘Paler’s gonna kill me,’ she mused, looking into the mirror. ‘I’ve literally turned myself into a monster!’

But ‘monster’ didn’t quite seem the right way to describe herself, much as she wanted to think so. That brief image of beauty stuck with Helena, and try as she might to hide those feelings away, she couldn’t deny that there was something oddly beautiful about her new, full, octopoid body. Like a gorgeous plus-sized model with full breasts, only made utterly alien.

‘I do look strangely beautiful, at least? Oh God, I’m something out of a hentai!’

***

When Paler and the team uncovered the alien creature that was Helena, it took a great deal of discussion and negotiation and then literal weeks of continuous study and monitoring to even prove it was fully her. Brain scans revealed a lot of development in her capacity for memory, analysis, critical thinking, recall, and - naturally - tentacle-hand coordination. But while these changes were not insignificant, her actual personality and desires had not changed, and while she doubted she would ever be leaving the Facility and its wider grounds again, she at least was able to be granted some autonomy.

Paler was, as expected, furious at first. That was, until the enormous amount of information about her biology began to make sense to the team of researchers set to study her. Helena didn’t love the fact that she was a living science experiment having data harvested from her all the time, or the fact that she was naked the whole time, but when she contributed to her own research she became surprisingly full of passion, able to communicate telepathically to individual members of ‘her’ team or others at will. She could even chat to David June halfway across the complex, who had been very worried about her, then admonishing of her, then later on just found the whole situation really darkly hilarious.

In the end, Paler had gone from furious to joyous. They still hadn’t determined the full intent of the Tadpole being sent to humanity, but the leading theory was that it was literally a way of sending biological knowledge of a long-gone civilisation. Helena had ‘accepted’ the Tadpole and been ‘blessed’ with a body that would live a long time, be able to conduct highly complex tasks in a highly intelligent way, and pass on crucial memories of a civilisation that had been shattered in the past. It saddened Helena, but in her dreams she did indeed dream of that turquoise ocean paradise, and their eventual death. Something in their home system had gone wrong, and they had not explored beyond it. The Tadpoles were their last hope of both recreating their kind, and letting others know they had existed at all.

In that way, she could feel sort of blessed. Certainly, her body was damn useful once it was determined not infectious. Sure, she was an alien freak for whom clothes just felt way too damn wrong, but with all her tentacles and brainpower she could issue orders to other archivists, speak telepathically to numerous individuals at once, and conduct several complex experiments and scans all at once. Sure, having to eat with her ‘bottom’ was highly embarrassing, but after having to have that recorded several times she was able to at least get privacy from then on out.

But best of all was her aquarium. Paler wasn’t the kind to ‘thank’ people, but the amount of biological engineering data coming from Helena’s new form was literally gamechanging for their organisation. So, as a necessity, he was able to arrange for an enormous aquarium to be constructed and joined to a nearby lake, in order to house her. She needed to stay wet, after all, and being sprayed just wasn’t enough to do it for her.

So in many ways, as much as the changes were bizarre and weird, Helena’s passion for the unknown had come to fruition. Her subject of study - herself - was always with her, and she was able to continue the work she loved. Yes, there were many jokes, and weirdly more than a few come-ons from male members of staff that found her oddly sexy, but even that was nice in a way: it meant that she was one of them, still: an alien agent, but an agent nonetheless. A happy ending, all things considered.

She just wished she would stop feeling so horny all the time, and feeling those strong monthly urges to have someone inseminate her breasts. The species that spawned her transformation may have been gone, but obviously they wanted their kind be reborn peacefully and consensually back into the universe after the initial first change. She mused on that more than once in her aquarium home at night before falling asleep in her nook.

‘Hmmm. Agent June does seem really into me, and he is pretty attractive. Kind of cute too. And we do get along. Maybe we could have a little more fun in the water the next time he comes swimming? I’m sure Agent Paler won’t be too angry. Right?’

The End