I retrieved my clothes, spending a few moments tackling the novel problem of arranging my prodigious equipment in my pants for maximum comfort and ease of movement. It wasn't just that the shaft was of a really ridiculous size; my testicles had attained a commensurate dimensional boost as well, and these pants—pants in general, really—really just aren't designed to accommodate all the stuff I had banging around down there. I guess I needed a jockstrap or something, but I'd seen nothing of the sort in the cupboards inside the cottage, and I was reluctant to go back in. I'd literally closed the door on my encounter with Randall—though to complete the symbolism I suppose I should add that I also hadn't locked the door. I'd developed a fondness for him during our brief time together. He was obviously fond of me. But zapping that guy, and then exploding again uncontrollably afterward, had renewed my determination to stay away from everyone for their own safety. I refused to hurt anyone else. I would cut myself off. Maybe live out in the depths of the forest somewhere, or deep in the country beyond the farms, or up in the real mountains out west. That would be my life unless I found a way to control—or get rid of—whatever strange power had infused me.

I stood by the door of the cottage, clothed but with no place to go, and looked into this future appalled. Living alone in the wilderness, with maybe new strange things happening to me. Would I keep growing? Would the power discharges get worse? What else had happened to me that I didn't even know about yet?

I might have sunk into a deep despair at that point, but something about how all of this had been thrust on me unwilling started to make me angry. It was senseless. The universe had reached out and zapped me, just like I'd zapped that idiot Cameron. It was wrong. Why the fuck had the universe gone and ruined my entire life? Rage was welling up in me, a pure, thrilling rage that seemed to throw a high voltage power switch in every cell in my body, from the tips of my big toes to the backs of my hands to the hairs on the back of my neck. It felt disturbingly exhilarating. An unquenchable conflagration seemed to be roaring inside me now, consuming my very guts, an electrical fire out of control. Even in that moment of blind fury there was room in my mind for alarm—it hadn't been like this before. But I was saturated with a rage made manifest by my own seemingly endless reserve of power. I was aflame, and in that moment of heedless animal rage at what had happened to me, at what I had unwillingly become, my humanity was submerged, perhaps imperiled.

I was becoming overwhelmed. An inner island of panic was swamped by the rage and was subsumed into it, feeding my raw emotional state. Frantically I tried to find a way to release my energy, for far from discharging on its own as it had twice before it seemed to be building unendurably, spiraling into infinity.

I could see only dimly. The trees and buildings were swimming. They were green and brown smudges to me. As I cast about, though, I fixed on a pinkish smudge that seemed out of place. My rage focused on it automatically, and I squeezed my eyes to make the apparition come clear. I stumbled toward it. Inarticulate howling surrounded me, like the screams of a cornered beast. Only later did I realize those howls were coming from me. The overloading of power and emotion, fed unnaturally by my newfound access to raw power, was stripping away all reason, all understanding.

I came closer to the pinkish smudge. My vision cleared a little. All around it was a kind of glimmering. Directly before me was the face of a man, a man known even to the unhinged monster to which I had abandoned myself: It was my face, contorted in wrath into the likeness of a snarling madman.

A new surge of demonic fury suffused me like an atomic detonation, and suddenly there was nothing else in the universe but a need to destroy the creature before me. That need was my leverage, the tool I needed to stop the death spiral I was in. Of its own volition, it seemed, my power and rage left me in a waterfall-like torrent, a blast naught could survive, all with the intent of frying the image before me, blasting it apart with a force so intense that its very atoms would be rent asunder, spun out into the surrounding universe with the force of a supernova at such velocities that they would surpass the physical laws of the universe.

Then, suddenly, like the switching of a tap, it was over, and I was myself, standing woozy and spent in the midst of the clearing. Before me was a wall of shimmering air, translucent and reflecting at the same time, maybe ten feet square. That which I had tried to obliterate stood before me still unharmed, though unsteady on its feet like me: my own reflection in the shimmering wall of air. I looked at it, as if seeing were a new thing I had just discovered, and wondered; but my mind was beyond exhausted, and a blackness was taking me. I had the impression of the shimmering wall moving gently toward me as I fell. I remembered no more.

Consciousness returned slowly. For a while I was only cognizant of my immediate sensations. I opened my eyes, and they felt strange and gummy, like they'd been in storage for a long time and were only just now being reinstalled. I could see little but a vague distant whiteness. My mouth felt dry and my tongue thick. I wanted to vocalize my first thought, the expected and reasonable question "Where am I?", but speaking would require reinitializing every muscle in my mouth, throat and chest.

I was lying down of something firm but yielding. My head was throbbing. I had an impulse to sit up, but I was pretty sure that would be even more of a disaster than speaking. I lay, collecting myself, feeling a cool moving air waft gently across my skin. What had happened? Was I dead?

I became aware of my hands. They were spread out on either site of me. I could feel the cushions I was lying on. It felt like leather, or perhaps vinyl or naugahyde. I caressed the cushions with my fingertips, slowly enlarging the field of my reconnaissance, until my left hand suddenly encountered something warm. I tapped it tentatively with my fingertips. It was an arm.

I snapped my head to the left, causing an instant migraine and starting my heart pounding frantically in my chest. Still it was easy enough to make out what my hand had discovered. It was the arm of a young man—a young man, more specifically, who was at that moment lying alongside me a few feet away, watching me intently with a look of tender amusement on his beautiful, slightly Asian face.

My lips formed the "wh" of "who," but he lifted a hand and gently touched a warm finger to my lips, and I said nothing. His touch was pleasant and I was disappointed when he withdrew it. I tried to take him in quickly, in case he should vanish, though he was clearly no illusion. He was shaped like I knew myself to be now: very tall and extremely lanky, with long limbs and large feet and hands, yet generously muscled, especially about the upper torso. Like me he was hairless, but his head hair was thick and black to my brow, and his eyes were black. He was clad in simple, loose white garments (as I now discovered myself to be). His slacks revealed little until, as he did now, he moved and stood up, and the movement of his garments betrayed an organ of considerable heft concealed within, asleep and docile for now.

He was standing on the leathery cushion, which was pale gray in color and extended for some distance in all directions. He smiled down at me and extended his massive hand. Hesitantly I lifted my hand and placed it in his. I felt a stirring inside me which was partly erotic and partly something different, something more, a connectedness that was latent between us, needing only to be awoken.

He helped me to my feet, and I stood, enjoying the unexpected pleasure of my bare feet on the textured cushion. We stood before each other, inches apart, and before I even finished thinking that it was necessary for us to kiss we were doing so. It was warm, gentle and welcoming, like the embrace he was enfolding me in, and it occurred to me that he was indeed welcoming me to wherever we were. Welcoming me to what I now was.

Speech, I thought, is overrated. This is much better.

He drew back, preventing me from indulging in further welcoming, and smiled brilliantly at me. He was outstandingly handsome, almost a little too handsome. Was that part of the physical changes that had happened to us? Clearly we had gone through some of the same transformations. As a gangly, acne-scarred teenager I was so used to thinking of myself the antithesis of sexy that I was unable to consider whether it was possible for me to have become as handsome as this boy-god before me. Even much later, when it was confirmed to me that this had indeed happened, I refused to believe it for a long time.

We stood with our arms around each other for a perfect moment and then he gently detached himself, drawing me with him by the hand. We walked across the cushioned floor and through a doorless entryway into a long open hallway. Everything was white, with high ceilings, and such was the presence of light that the air seemed to glimmer a little like the shimmering wall I'd fallen through—a portal, obviously, into wherever I now was. We passed down the corridor and through a high archway into a tremendous chamber, a cathedral of whiteness and light. I craned my neck, but the ceilings were too high to be seen; it felt like we had passed outdoors into a world with a blazing white sky.

We were not alone. Here and there all around us, some far away, some near at hand, were couples and small groups of people—and they were all people like us: lanky boy-gods, dressed in loose white, enjoying the sensation of each other's physical presence the way you might enjoy a good swim or a really pleasant breeze. There was of course great variety: different races, different hair and features; but they were all built in the same way, and they were all inhumanly beautiful. All were touching each other in various ways, holding hands or embracing or pressed together like two partners in a slow dance; a few were kissing, including some of the groups of three or four, but most were just enjoying each other's company. Everyone was relaxed but alert. There was no languor here, only an absence of negative feelings.

My companion drew me into the center of the great room, and I was aware of the attention of the others. They moved toward us and around us a little, casually. A momentary pang of fear flashed briefly in my mind and evaporated as I became aware of the concentrated sense of goodwill coming from all around me. I saw to my surprise that I was slightly taller than most of the others, my companion included. I sensed deep-seated appreciation as well as welcome from all these men. I was the new model.

As if by arrangement they come forward, some individually and some in pairs, and gave me the warm, gentle welcoming kiss.

Heaven, I thought, could not be better than this.

After a while the circle parted and the most beautiful boy-god of them all came through. He was so beautiful he seemed to exude beauty, like the sun. In my mind I named him Apollo almost automatically. He appeared to be young, as young as all the other boy-gods around me (who all seemed only a little older that I was if at all), and he stood only a few inches taller than us; yet the intensity of his presence dominated us and all around us, filling this vast chamber.

I'm not sure when exactly I had gotten hard, but I became aware of my erection now. Though I hadn't adjusted it it was somehow standing straight up, gently tethered by the waistband of the loose-fitting slacks, and I now noticed it was throbbing obscenely against my twelve-pack abs under my loose white shirt. I became aware of it mainly because Apollo too gave me the welcoming kiss, and the warm thrill it imparted to me seemed to make my cock three times as hard as before, so hard it was almost painful. Then he spoke, softly and sweetly, his face a few inches from mine so that I could taste the breath of his speech.

"Come," he said. And I did. I ejaculated what felt like quarts of superheated cum as waves of orgasmic pleasure washed over me. Somehow it felt like this place augmented the pleasure of the orgasm, so that my ecstasy seemed infinite and unbounded. I felt Apollo's warm powerful hands on my shoulders, steadying me until I was spent. When I could see again he was smiling at me in simple joy at my happiness.

All the others were smiling too, though I felt an undercurrent of arousal as well. But I only had eyes for the big guy in front of me. He winked at me and said, "Now—come," cocking his head just slightly toward the doorway we'd entered by. I grinned sheepishly. He took my free hand (for I was still holding hands with my companion from the cushions), and together we made our way through the crowd of beautiful men toward the secrets of my new life that were now to be revealed to me at last.