Being an interstellar pirate is difficult work. A lone shark finds just how unexpected this line of work can be after uncovering a shipment of stolen artifacts.

Story time! This one is for https://twitter.com/WouldULikeSomeE. Been in the works for a bit, but now that NaNoWriMo has started, I'm hopefully gonna start blazing through stuff! (Mostly a single novel, I hope, but regardless, it should be good.)

This one is a dragon TF mixed with divine apotheosis! A shark named Aryzza ends up with more than she bargained for from an interstellar shipment of Hobby Lobby goods. I think it came out pretty fun!

Until FA updates their writing submission garbage I'm still posting the full story in the description because a PDF is the best file to upload but no one will read it if it's only download accessible, so it's all here lol.

As always, comments and questions are greatly appreciated. :)


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Aryzza was cruising.


She often was, to be fair. Back in cityblock12, she rode in style on a neon bike with high-traction magnetic wheels that could cling to just about anything with an ounce of metal. When she left the planet, she always made sure to do so in a ship that didn’t rattle at least up to mag-5. Both of those could be considered cruising, she supposed, but now, she was cruising through something entirely different: a heist.

What an easy heist it was, too. The Hobby Lobby freighter was a behemoth of titanium alloys and bright orange paint. It hailed from the early days of space travel, and was constructed entirely in space, not able to actually land on any planet for fear of collapsing in on itself. While it was a nightmare of wasted space and material, Aryzza had to admit that it had lasted quite a lot longer than most modern ships did. There were some benefits to being a giant hunk of metal in a vacuum, after all.

Now, its boosters powered down via a series of well-timed EMPs, the hunk drifted aimlessly through space. Aryzza whistled at her own skill as she harpooned the side of the freighter and swung into an empty loading dock, coming down heavily on the ship’s landing gear as it entered artificial gravity, leaving a quadruple streak along the polished floor. She was greeted by no one; despite its size, the ship had only a skeleton crew, assisted by a plethora of automated helpers.

Using a gun and the retractable knife on her tailfin, it was blessedly easy to herd the crew into their quarters and lock them up with pairs of laser-cuffs. Aryzza found herself humming as she wandered the halls, loosely following the lifesign radar that displayed on the nigh-invisible eyepatch over her right eye. She’d hijacked the main computer systems and overlaid any tracked vital signs with a stolen map of the ship to track down whatever crew members were wandering about unattended. What’s that damn song? she thought as she looped back to the beginning of the simple tune. She couldn’t get the name of it nailed down no matter how hard she tried.

Aryzza was still trying to puzzle out the song’s name as she tossed the last of the crew into the quarters and remotely locked the door, hardly sparing them a second glance. She idly pulled her PDW from its magnetic hanger on her left hip, tossed it spinning into the air, and caught it with her right. She traded it back to her left and let it snap back against its magnets, practicing the move over and over, sometimes shooting out a light for fun if she managed a catch with notable flare. She pointedly ignored those times that she failed the catch and nearly rammed her flat snout into a wall while hastily deleting the footage from the cameras that tracked her.

Descending a few flights of stairs, Aryzza entered the underbelly of the ship. The lights were more spaced out here, with a few burnt out, awaiting replacements. The hexagonal pattern on her latex underlayer glowed slightly, pulsing like a heartbeat. Neon green light reflected off the dull gunmetal gray walls from the pattern on the back of her jacket—a large, twisting dragon, styled after the mythos of eastern Earth where the creature’s myth had originated. Cityblock12 had a lot of descendants of that region, and it reminded her of home. Plus it just looked badass. The jacket itself was open, dark techware material flapping occasionally as she walked, showing off the various straps built into her jacket and belt (which itself was bedecked with small-ordinance weaponry). Her steel-clawed boots clanged against the metal floors, reaching halfway up her calves. She was a pirate, and she owned the look. Sure, not all of it was entirely practical; she’d had her share of strap-related incidents, and perhaps hanging grenades from the pin wasn’t the best idea, but the swagger the outfit lended her was unmatched. She did note with distaste that the claws of her boots were scuffed. She’d have to get them polished after this mission.

She grunted and gave up on trying to remember the song stuck in her head. Too annoying. She flicked her gun out of its holster and fired as she approached a large, wall-to-wall door. Its ancient locking mechanism buckled, and in a move that dug deep scratches into the metal, she kicked it wide open.

The hold was full of wooden boxes. Unsurprising; most were. Unlike a usual shipping freighter, though, these were mostly wood and plant fiber, branded with Hobby Lobby’s stark logo. Despite the obvious ego, it was a somewhat practical decision. Not many of the artifacts stored here were large, and most were quite fragile. Aryzza’s eyepatch flickered to life, enabling an x-ray feed. With only one eye able to see through the boxes, their contents were overlaid across their frames like ghosts fading in and out of view, their gruesome innards on display. Haunted freighter hold, now that’s an idea, she smirked. She pictured the boxes flying about, smacking dim-witted crew members on the head as the dashing heroine came in with a plasma torch to save them. Unfortunately for her, the boxes were quite grounded, so the process of pushing them towards the large intermediary air lock at the back of the cavernous room took far longer than she’d have liked. She started with those she could see had more expensive items inside, leaving the others for later. After the first few, she let her x-ray feed shut off. It was somewhat disorienting, and she didn’t need it to shove a crate across the ground.

Hobby Lobby was infamous throughout much of the galaxy. It had grown from a meager Earth-based chain craft store to an intergalactic titan of commerce. While it still claimed to be a center for hobbyists, it sold far more than balsa wood, paint, and cheap decor. The several thousand page catalogs contained everything from plasma cutters to radioactive ball bearings to high-grade lab equipment. Just about anything that was related to any hobby had a place in their vast collection, alongside many things that didn’t. Like all megacorps, though, Hobby Lobby wasn’t so much making underhanded deals as it was participating in outright criminal activity while giving the law a middle finger. Its founders had been known for stealing old-earth artifacts in the name of their wacko religion; the current hobbyist elite continued on the tradition, robbing small civilizations on fringe planets of their fetishes and idols, altering them, and then parading them around and claiming that their messiah had traveled the universe spreading the Good Word. The ones who put up a fight were quickly overcome by craft-based warfare. At least, Aryzza reasoned, they’d be able to make some mean holiday decorations after the genocide.

Aryzza herself didn’t much care about the megacorp’s behavior. Companies didn’t go interplanetary without huge amounts of criminal activity; it’s not like they were the only one. However, it did provide a strong incentive for her raid. Hobby Lobby cargo was a gamble, but if you struck gold and hit a shipment of high-powered plasma cutters or refined chemicals, it was well worth the effort.

Not that there was much effort to begin with, Aryzza thought idly, her back pressed against a box she was shoving over the floor. Maybe they were understaffed. There’d been talks of Hobby Lobby undercutting employee profits and overriding salvage rights recently. That'd be enough to turn just about anyone away.

Aryzza grunted. The crate had ground to a stop suddenly, her claws screeching against the metal floor. She pushed herself up, rolling her shoulder where the unexpected stop had pushed it at an odd angle. Walking around the box, she found the problem: the wood had caught on a poorly welded lip in the floor. Easy fix. She slammed her hips into the top of the box, tipping it up and rattling the contents, then swatted the back of it with her tail, shoving it forwards. There, that—

Crunch.

Aryzza yowled as the crate came down on her foot. The steel clawed boots helped, of course, but it was shoved against her ankle at an awkward angle, nearly twisting it. Caught up in the thought of how cool she’d look moving the crate with that little effort, she’d forgotten the fact that her foot happened to be directly in the way. Growling, she yanked it out from underneath and kicked the box savagely, punching several holes straight through the side. Whatever was in that thing was heavy. Her ankle throbbed. It wasn’t serious; a few minutes and she’d be fine.

“Good a time as any for a break,” she grumbled to herself. It would be a good opportunity to check the contents of the crate, too. Several of the others had been of a similar weight. That was a good sign—if this one contained something valuable, the others were liable to as well. If it was just rocks, she’d be able to toss the excess weight. Aryzza dug in an inner jacket pocket and pulled out a small circle of steel. She flicked it like a coin, the glittering metal tumbling through the air. Glowing lines of hardlight extended from it, whipping outwards almost like tentacles. They punched into the floor as the disc fell, stopping it perfectly parallel to the surface a few feet up. More hardlight spiraled outwards, forming a circular seat. Aryzza grunted approvingly and let herself drop onto it, a back forming around her wide tail so she could lean back without squashing it. As she sat, she swung her tail axe around and swiped it through the lock on the crate with a shower of sparks. Ankle stretched out and resting, she fingered the edge of the crate, claws finding purchase underneath it. She pushed it open, letting the lid fall to the ground on the other side.

Inside, the crate was full of crinkled paper. Aryzza frowned. She’d expected it to be tightly packed with heavy duty equipment, or lined with bags full of precious minerals. Instead, it seemed to be mostly padding. It had to be something made of superdense materials, she figured. Those were difficult to find in large quantities and fetched high prices, depending on the substance. She tossed the paper out wantonly, digging around for a packing slip that might tell her what was inside the crate. She didn’t use her x-ray vision to see through the paper—more fun this way.

Her claws scratched against something rough. Bingo. Aryzza slid her claws around a large, unwieldy piece of stone that weighed nearly as much as the whole crate itself. She heaved it up and out, trying not to drop it against the metal floor. It still clanged as it hit. It appeared to be made of jet black rock, polished to a mirror finish, with writing of a language she didn’t recognize bored into it.

She groaned. Great. Religious artifacts. This was clearly some sort of object of worship, snagged from some unsuspecting and unwilling group of believers on a backwater planet no one cared about. That was the risk with Hobby Lobby jobs. No one wanted this kind of garbage. Sure, the superdense stone might make it worth something, but it was still marred by whatever gobbledegook some kooks had inscribed into it.

How had they done that, speaking of? Aryzza thought to herself. Not many cultures primitive enough to have this kind of religious object also had the technology to dig through something this tough. She didn’t recognize the exact material, but she’d worked with similar enough times to recognize that you’d need more than just a few pointy rocks to make that kind of clean carving. She’d once watched a jeweler go through six carbide drills just to get a single sample off a chunk of condensed stone.

Idly pondering the thought, she went back to digging. No packing slip turned up, though she did find a few more assorted bits of cargo. By the time the crate was empty, she’d assembled a small pile of religious effects on the ground around her: the original stone tablet; a decorative knife; a book with pages made of some sort of pressed fiber; and a few pieces of stone that looked like they used to be some sort of serpentine statue. So, nothing of any real value.

Aryzza sighed. This didn’t bode well for the rest of the cargo. She’d have to go through it and ensure that it had more than just worship trash. Hobby Lobby could keep its stolen artifacts; she wasn’t interested in carrying around a bunch of stone tablets that would get the eyes of the intergalactic government on her back. She’d rather have had cheap paint supplies or something. At least then she could decorate her ship—her newest one hadn’t received any good upgrades yet, and any self respecting merc knew that a dope without a cool ship wouldn’t last more than a job or two.

Her ankle still ached, so she picked up the book and opened it slowly, trying not to crack the spine or punch a hole through its pages. Comparing the two, the writing inside seemed similar to the inscription on the tablet. It had deep, sharp lines, cut across a few careful curves. It seemed to curl in on itself near the edges, as if drawing the eye back into the lines and swirls. It almost hurt to look at, as if it was a language specifically constructed to strain the eye.

Aryzza realized she was staring at the tablet. She shook her head, turning back to the book. That had occasional pictures, at least, even if they were difficult to make sense of. She scanned its pages, trying to piece together what this religion might have been before it was destroyed or uncovered by a corporation intending to bury it. She wasn’t a sappy person, but it felt odd even to her to just… pass over the material. She didn’t need to understand it to appreciate the effort that went into it. She hadn’t ever written a book by hand, after all, and she had hardly ever even seen one. A museum would never let you pick up and hold an artifact like this. Artifact. Was that even true? Were these ancient and forgotten, only recently rediscovered, or were they made last week and freshly stolen? She couldn’t even begin to tell.

Many of the pictures were nonsense to her, but she found a few repeating themes. There were repeated shapes in many of the drawings, like some sort of stick figure with varying amounts of limbs. She saw ones with as many as a dozen. They were often presented near large, more abstract shapes. It was difficult to tell any sort of emotion in the alien art. Were they supplicating themselves before these groups of lines and harsh angles? Were they running away in fear? Towards them in battle? Aryzza turned the page again and nearly dropped the book in shock.

Two eyes stared up at her. For a moment, she thought they were real, but the realization that they were nothing but paint and ink barely helped her shock. They were incredibly lifelike. Liquid gold irises surrounded pupils of the deepest black, like vertical slits in reality. Wet tear ducts seemed to shimmer at the corners, and she felt that if she waved a hand in front of the image, it would brush through thick eyelashes. The rest of the face was a fractured, multicolored expanse that reached the edges of the page and beyond.

The eyes glared out from the page and seemed to pierce into her mind, picking apart her thoughts and laying them before their gaze like she’d laid out the religious ephemera. She felt she could see herself in the reflection of those eyes, her own wide and staring, the reflection of the page itself filling them, inked golden pupils fractally inscribed upon her own, consuming them. Her claws shook. An inscription sat at the bottom of the page, and she didn’t need a translation to know that these were the eyes of a god.

The page turned. She hadn’t even realized that she’d been trying to do so. Aryzza gasped, slumping in her chair, breathing heavy. What was that? The picture had been infinitely more detailed than those that sat in the margins of the other pages, the detail astonishing in its intricacies. She briefly considered flipping back a page, but the mere thought made her body shake, tail axe rattling against the metal floor. Instead, she focused on the page, trying to center herself with the strange writing. Nothing had shaken her this badly in quite a long time, and she scolded herself for it. Just a picture, Aryzza. Get yourself together.

She leaned forwards, squinting. This page held another of the simple illustrations. It was strange, but after the eyes, she felt like she got this one on a deeper level. The figures were scattered around another of the strange, enormous shapes, worshiping it. They weren’t any more clear than the ones before; this time, she just… knew. If that shape held those horrible, beautiful eyes, she would have knelt before it, too.

Aryzza felt strained. She knew she should set down the book and finish the job, but she couldn’t draw her eyes away. Every time she tried, they were caught in the whorls of the writing and sucked back down into its intricate depths. She was beginning to recognize patterns within it—words, maybe? Words that she had no business knowing, yet there were impressions, somehow. Vast ideas contained within a space too small for them. The words bore into her mind like the eyes. She felt them in the reflection of her eyes as she had that drawing, as if writing themselves upon her. Her instincts were flared up and writhing, commanding her to run, to throw this thing from her, and she broke the first rule of the vast unknown and refused to follow them. She stayed on her hardlight stool, hunched over the tome, drinking it in. Even her tail lay still.

Slowly, she pieced together the words. The pictures helped her decipher the more complex meanings. She read of worship, of fear, of strange places that warped physics according to unknown wills and whims. The author described firsthand accounts of encounters with beings that Aryzza would have scoffed at the descriptions of had she not seen their eyes just moments before. Moments? Was it moments? Or was it hours? Days? She felt that gaze again in the words of the author as they wrote of strange forces not of this universe, actions of beings that she was hesitant to even consider. Waves of knowledge crashed down upon her. She felt its wrongness, like a color that existed only in the void of a black hole, digging its way through her fragile mind. She knew that this was not meant for her existence. It rebelled against her understanding of the world, forcing her to see the cracks in space where nothing made sense.

Something deep within her whispered she was going insane. She was making up nonsense, ascribing meaning to scratchings of ink and unsettling images.

Something even deeper knew that she was, unfortunately, far from insane.

Aryzza’s mind strained to keep up with the furious pace that she was learning, struggled to fit the things she discovered into a framework that it could understand. The text described impossible events that she couldn’t even form into words. The impressions alone painted a picture of a reality that she wasn’t equipped to handle. Her shaking claws dug into the alien fibers of the book, so far from its home, yet in some ways no closer to its true home outside of Aryzza’s reality. Her mind was tossed into the vast oceans of space, melding with them, growing into something that she herself could never begin to comprehend with only her five senses.

She didn’t notice that her claws could now cover an entire page by themselves. She didn’t notice the seams of her jacket straining under growing shoulders, her techware latex underlayer stretching, the hexagon patterns warping into swoops and curves that followed a more natural progression. Couldn’t have described the feeling of her snout elongating, nearly pressing against the page. Her body was warping, altering along with her perception of space and time.

Mind simultaneously clouded and more clear than it had ever been, Aryzza tossed the book aside and gripped the stone tablet. She’d read passages describing the piece of stone, and she knew it for what it truly was, knew what she must do with it. Her large, now-reptilian claws gripped it reverently, picking it up as if it weighed nothing. She could see her eyes reflected in its mirror-like finish. The golden eyes of a god, reflected in a fragment of its power.

Aryzza hissed out the words on the tablet. At first, they emerged from her throat like guttural cries, clawing their way out of her vocal folds like starving beasts. They were words that should have been impossible to inscribe, eldritch things that ripped holes in the universe, yet in this piece of stone they sat. Each one tore its claws through her throat, remaking it. Her voice, moments ago so harsh to listen to that it would drive anyone insane, became commanding, smooth, powerful. Aryzza’s eyes glowed brightly, the light filling the stone rather than reflecting off of it, giving it a ghastly cast. The scream of apotheosis ripped through the universe

Aryzza was something Other.

In the underbelly of Hobby Lobby freighter BE-278L, the old gods returned.

A god roared in triumph, tablet becoming pure energy, golden light erupting around the figure, carried by the eddies of forces beyond those of base reality. It was beyond base reality. Its body formed of pure power, and its power stretching past the universe, through dimensions unseen, through negative space.

Aryzza let the light fade, heaving great, glorious breaths. She didn’t need to; she didn’t need a physical form at all. But this reality, she had a particular affection for it. This was the reality that had been so weak as to allow the power of Ancients to seep through, after all.

She was a dragon, of course. Tall, humanoid, given gratuitous effeminate features, yes, but still undeniably a dragon. The cybernetic shark had been consumed by her new form. Her previously blue skin was now mottled with purple, white, and golden scales, laid in perfect order across her enormous body. She was more than ten feet tall, newly acquired horns almost scraping the upper walkways of the cargo hold. Her tail stretched across the floor, over a dozen feet long. The clothes she’d been wearing had become unnecessary, and were therefore discarded—save for her jacket. She allowed her previously mortal self this one indulgence. With a wave of a paw, the biker jacket’s reality was altered. It grew long and soft, a purple robe that stretched to the floor. She kept the writing dragon on the back. How ironic that her signature decoration had become her new form. It shone, the techwear illusion becoming a pure gold adornment that was sewn into the long robe, swimming through threads like water.

Aryzza sniffed, her long whiskers twitching where they floated in the air, rather than sinking in the artificial gravity. There would be time to appreciate herself later. She sunk through the floor as if it were nothing. In actuality, she simply stepped to the side in the fourth spatial dimension, allowing herself to slide past the three dimensional objects that only took up a miniscule fraction of its breadth, but to any mortal eye, she was simply sliding straight through solid matter. She didn’t bother to erase the video from the ship’s sensors; let them see her glory. The apotheosis of a god would be enough to drive one insane, and she looked forward to her power inflicting that upon those mortals daring enough to try and take a peek at divinity.

Drifting in the void, she eyed her ship. She didn’t need it, of course, but it would need a makeover regardless. Inside the ship, there lay a hallway full of living beings, locked inside for several more hours. They were perhaps not the ideal flock, but what was a god without her devout? Not only that, a dragon required the devoted service of an army of kobolds catering to her every whim. She chuckled, tail lazily curling and uncurling in the void. Yes, she could work with these. Her ship would become the envoy of her might.

Bathed in the light of distant stars, Aryzza pondered herself. She hadn’t been, and now always had been. One could argue that she existed before, but the shark that had become the dragon was nothing in the face of the might of a god. Still, even she couldn’t deny her own reality. She was a god, yes, but in some ways, her mind was very much mortal. There were no other Ancients to shake their heads at her blasphemy, so she basked in that fact. She was herself, yet she was so much more.

Aryzza couldn’t wait to see what was next.


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And that's all! Hope you enjoyed, would love to hear thoughts on it if you made it this far!