Frosty sprays of phlegm gushed all around him and her while they slid down the slick living membrane. Their eyes met briefly, and it was love at first sight --- interrupted suddenly as the membrane-cum-waterslide undulated in reflex, sending him flinging to the far end of the organism they lived in.

Paul landed with a ((pa-show!)), belly-flopping into a calf-deep pool of black, peat-like substance. He wasted no time, he twitched himself into a squatting position and scooped the stuff into his mouth with cupped hands. He gave no chase to Cathy, gorging; cosmic love was trumped by hunger.

Cathy continued to slide down the membrane, approaching speeds in the neighborhood of fifty miles per. She saw Paul on her way down, a small pink speck against a fleshy platform dotted by little lakes of black. A distance of ten feet separated them while she was parallel to the platform. Later on they'd meet again.

---

Cathy slid to a gradual stop in a bevel about forty feet later. Who was that handsome, charming man? She back-flipped in order to dodge the mouthed, barrel-diametered tendril attempting to swallow her whole.

"WORMS!" She huffed

She took off in the right direction, her bare, speedy legs taking on the appearance of a solid-white calcite triangle.

--

They reached the Last Leg plains at about the same time. In fact, they collided with one another. Cathy swung from a cilia-barbed cord of organic tissue that dangled taughtly from an invisible high-point. Paul punched head first through a snotty, semisolid sheath sealing the exit of an oily tunnel he'd navigated in blinding, slippery dimness.

The moment his waist breached the surface, Paul bothered to look up, and his eyes met the sight of an incoming Cathy. He reacted by tensing, leaning back, and positioning himself to bear-hug her lower body.

Paul's lungs lost all air with the force. Cathy probably bruised her upper thighs. They landed entangled in a heap atop a spongy, fleshstalk-haired surface, with Paul's nose in Cathy's vagina. How did your parents meet?

The slow re-emergence of inner ear equilibrium permitting, Cathy scrambled off of Paul. He took in a ratcheted breath. They stood and faced each other eye to eye.

"Fancy meeting you here."

"It must be destiny."

"Would you like to hold hands?"

"Yes."

--

Nothing could touch them. It was all too easy. The largest, most intimidating WORM in all history came charging at them from the darkness, moving with nauseating, feral slickness. They spat triumphantly in it's face, confident in the inevitability of their victory.

Paul grabbed Cathy by the waist and tossed her into the air. The WORM snapped it's toothless, crackly-gummed prostomium backward one-hundred-and-eighty degrees as she flew past and caught it's attention.

It lunged at her, but Paul had thrown her into a tiny alcove dug into the moist, cat-tongue surface of a nearby wall. It was far too narrow an opening for the WORM, who slammed head first, and probably died.

--

They were sharing a rest chamber. They had about six hours before the muck-lined pod spilled them out and they started over.

"Hi, I'm Paul by the way."

"I'm Cathy."

Paul was visibly aroused. "So, you want to make some kids, right?"

"Yeah," Cathy was sanguine all over and batting her eyelashes with a dashing flutter, "That all got me pretty hot."

Paul quickly straddled her. She grabbed the backs of his lower hamstrings and-

"WAIT! WAIT! STOP!"

"What? What is it?" Paul drew back with a look of genuine concern on his face.

"You have knock-knees, Paul. We can't be in love."

"What? So what? What's that going to do?"

"I'm going to be spending a lot of time on this kid. I don't want him to die as soon as he gets too big to carry because he can't run correctly."

"I can run!"

"I can't risk the knee problems becoming more pronounced with subsequent generations. And furthermore, what if you can only run because other parts of your legs are exceptionally strong and compensate for your weak knees, and our kid doesn't inherit those compensatory traits, ON TOP of inheriting further weakened knees? WHAT THEN?"

"Well god damn."

"Sorry Paul."

"Can you at least give me head?"

--

"Jeez, she didn't even give you head?"

"No, she said it might arouse her too much, and lead to exactly what she wasn't keen on happening." Paul spoke between swallows and around mouthfuls of the peat.

"Well, at least she was honest."

"At least she was A BITCH!" Paul scoffed with sarcastic resentment. Then he realized he was being a misogynist. "Yeah," he sighed, "I guess I don't have some kind of vagina entitlement. She can do what she wants."

"That's the attitude. Some chicks out there figure knock-knees provide their offspring with superior tendril-clutching abilities. You'll run into one eventually."

"Yeah, I'm sure."

Paul and Randy, long-time friends who had known each other two minutes, were too engrossed by their conversation about the true nature of romance-- as well their delicious black peat-like substance feast -- to notice a WORM creeping up behind them. It swallowed Paul whole. After a brief, frenzied struggle, he gave up. He ran his sharpened fingernail against the inside of the WORM's throat as it drew him inward, just to piss it off.

--

It came as an incredible surprise to Paul when he didn't end up dying. Dumped out onto a patch of sparse summer grass and dry earth, he was cold for the first time in his life. The daylight only made him squint a little; his eyes could tolerate brightness because areas within the organism had been illuminated by biovoltaic processes.

"Ho there! Man of The Organism!"

The shock of being shouted at re-engaged Paul's action mechanism; he kung-fu wind-milled himself from his knees and elbows into a ready stance. "What the fuck!?" Paul yelled, seeing he was being rushed at by a not particularly surefooted, floppy young man, clothed and carrying some kind of stick.

"You! The guy who just got eaten by a WORM!"

"Yeah! What!? Holy shitball salad what the fuck is going on!?"

The young man stopped a few feet short of Paul, panting while attempting to maintain strict military rigidity. Paul noted with some measure of consternation that the young man eyed his nude groin for a few moments before beginning to speak again.

"I welcome you in the name of the Kingdom of Magalagadoo, Man of The Organism. I am Second Royal Ensign Joe Flurbel, of the Expellee Watch Brigade." The young man brought the side of his palm to his forehead in a starchy salute, and sported a torrential erection.

"What? I'm a man of the organism? What organism?"

"Look behind you."

Paul did as instructed, and at first only saw an expansive pink wall, textured like burn victim skin. But, craning his neck upward, he noted the wall was in fact an incredible, rotund blob, stretching upward past the cloud layer. It breathed and heaved, and puffed a white smoke that Paul had an intuitive feeling was somehow lifegiving.

"Holy motherfuck shit McShit."

"Yeah, um, it's pretty incredible. I, uh, actually have to tell you a few things and then we have to get going pretty quickly."

Paul turned and looked at Joe with shocked, juju-traumatized eyes and a white face. "Ok, what?"

Joe spoke rapidly, sweat cascading down his chin. "So, you've managed to keep from being swallowed by the organism for a while, right? And your parents did too, and their parents, and so on. That means you probably have fairly strong genes. Natural selection, you know." Joe dared a quick glance at his erection, and seeing that he hadn't in fact willed reality to stop recognizing it, brought his gaze back up quickly, red-faced, "Stronger than all the persons previously expelled by the organism, anyway." His voice cracked as he continued to speak while Paul shifted uneasily, "So, anyway, the Kingdom is going to want to breed you. Magalagadoo maintains a pool of nubile virgins for this purpose, at all times. They enter the pool at age seventeen and leave at age twenty-four, to be replaced by another seventeen year-old. The size of the Pool is increased by one hundred for each year we go without another Man of the Organism being expelled. You're the first in fifteen years. "

"I'm not very good at math."

"That's fifteen hundred, plus the initial pool size of six-hundred. Two-thousand and one hundred. That's how many you're going to need to impregnate"

"Holy crap! That's rad! And my girlfriend just dumped me!"