#a mix of daydreaming run amok and intuitive thought that's more interactive

[twitchesandstitches]

Tiashar peeked over the table, sprawled on the ground on her belly and clearly trying to be sneaky. Her gigantic butt rose up nearly as high as a three-person shack, her tail curling above even that in a thick mass nearly as large around as she was, and her enormous breast rose her off the ground by nearly six feet, so she was clearly not doing well.

A large robotic bee, approximately the size of a train, had been watching her politely for some time. As far as the bee robot could tell, Tiashar was staring suspiciously at a large plate of pancakes sitting on the table.

She was very still. The only thing moving on her was the automatic twitch of her hair tendrils, glistening pink in the sunlight; they weren’t quite translucent, but they weren’t totally opaque, light filtering through them in lovely patterns, painting the slick surface of her black skin in neon stripes. The enormous, blunt tail crowning her backside curled around her, wobbling faintly, squishing against whatever touched it like a big water balloon with an endoskeleton.

The robot bee had been puzzling over her behavior for some time. She couldn’t take the curiosity anymore, and took off, flying near Tiashar and transforming; her body reconfigured, morphing into a bipedal and extreme feminine form. She was built on broadly the same hyper-curvy lines as Tiashar, most of her body mass apparently in her hips, an enormous set of thighs with matching backside, and enormous biomechanical breasts glowing with a substance quite similar to honey.

There was still a certain bee-ness to her. Her abdomen had folded into her body, its mass assimilated into her new backside and hips, but a small pair of antannae extended from her forehead, her legs were alarmingly slim for her size (at least, below the knees) and her feet tiny little grippers, with a very high ankle for superior sprinting. A pair of wing-engines lay against her back, currently folded away.

Her name was Fixerup. She was technically a doctor; she was specialized for working on biomechanical systems like her own, so she supposed she was mostly a cybernetic specialist. Nevertheless, she was fascinated by life different from her own, and Tiashar was certainly an interest study.

She spoke. “Miss Tia. What the heck are you doing?”

“Shh!” Tiashar said urgently. “Don’t let it see you!”

“Don’t let... what see me?”

“That!” a pink tentacle pointed at, of all things, the breakfast.

“...The pancakes?”

“Yes!” Tiashar said, hissing. “My breakfast! It’s plotting AGAINST me.”

There was a long pause.

“...IS it now,” said Fixerup calmly.

“You should see the things it’s saying about your finish,” Tiashar said, sounding hurt on her behalf. “It’s very mean.”

“If you say so!” Fixerup said brightly.

Fixerup did not see anything particular about what happened. But Tiashar did. She alone saw it; just as she saw colors that shouldn’t exist, or her clothing speaking to her when she was confused or thoughtful.

It was not, in any objective sense, real. Not real in the sense that, if no one had been there, it would have kept on happening.

But magic makes the concept of objectively real a fuzzy matter.

The pancakes opened, like a mouth. “She’ll never believe you now, butt-monster!”

Tiashar gasped. “You speak lies! And stop making fun of my butt!”

Fixerup tilted her head. She had seen nothing. The pancakes, to her, had simply sat there like innocent breakfast foods.

------

“It’s called chimerical reality,” Viomira the elf necromancer said, putting away books in a makeshift laboratory.

Elumai the purpleblood troll nodded dreamily. She was enormously huge, even by troll standards; she loomed over Viomira, her plump belly above the elf’s gaze. Dark coats, long lacy dresses, and hooded coverings outlined her fantastically curvaceous body, on a broad build very similar to her mother, Sekhma. But Sekhma was more muscular than her; Elumai was not as interested in refining the tool of her muscles, and so where her mother was athletic, Elumai was soft, her expansive backside idea for either devouring chairs or squishing into them.

“Chimerical,” Elumai repeated. “I have heard that word before. It is like a fusion, correct?”

“Yes, indeed. Chimerical reality is... well, it’s not exactly real, in a typical sense. It’s... you might call it the reality layer of imagination.”

“How so?”

“It’s informed by mortal minds; brief ideas, daydreams and other such things, drifting about and smashing into each other. Not like the astral sea; that’s made form all thoughts and ideas, forever, while the chimerical realm is more transitory. Some people draw power from it to create things; beings made from imagination. or impossible devices. And some people with a lot of power but little control might find it... leaking in.”

“That seems a worrying thought.”

“Not normally; they require an outside focus to be given true volition. Otherwise it’s more like parts of your brains speaking to you, or your imagination being overly active.” Viomira paused, as if she worked something out. “Ah, that’s a good way to put it, in fact. The chimerical realm is where your imagination leaks out in the astral plane, pools together with magic, and I suppose you might see things. Or talk to them.”

“Sounds kind of trippy.”

“Oh, certainly. The important thing is to know they’re only as real as you encourage them to be.”