Twist in His Normality

This story was originally written for the Halloween contest in October 2026.

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On a gloomy autumnal morning, Thomas Finch was pouring water into his teapot when he found that he couldn't stop.

This was not a compulsion. Nor was it a nervous tick. No affliction had seized Mr. Finch's mind; it functioned well enough, in spite of the early hour of nine, to which his students would readily attest in dismay each time he handed them their exam sheets. Neither was his body out of order, as it inched closer to its thirty-seventh year: though tempered by austerity of a lifelong academic, its bones and sinews lost little of their youthful strength.

And yet, it had become evident that something was wrong with the water. It flowed out freely from the drooping spout of the kettle, stirring a swirling tempest of green tea leaves inside Thomas's tall French press pot. But the pot never seemed to fill up, and the water didn't deplete in the kettle, and so he was left pouring out his tea endlessly, over and over, without making any visible progress.

It was only when a good minute had passed that his half-drowsy mind finally noticed the clear disturbance in his routine.

"Huh?" The kettle hit the kitchen top with a thud. "What...?"

He grabbed the edge of the counter, squatting for a closer look. The two vessels stood side by side, innocuous and mundane; the agitated waters within them had already calmed down to stillness. They had settled at identical levels, perfectly aligned in both the kettle and the pot.

And these were his favorite tea implements, carefully chosen to hold identical volumes of liquid. Thomas therefore knew that the one pint of water he always used for his two cups of Twinings -- heated to seventy-five degrees Celsius, no more and no less -- had just been divided in half, with frighteningly exact precision.

This wasn't, of course, what Thomas Finch had intended. Neither was it something he could readily explain. And yet it was a physical phenomenon, duly observed and reluctantly acknowledged -- which meant that it could be said to lie within his professional purview.

Just maybe not before breakfast. There was time and place for everything.

"I don't understand," he muttered, eyeing the kettle with a squint of suspicion. "Is this thing broken? Can it be broken in such a weird way?"

Straightening up he lifted the containers, one in each hand. They both looked completely normal. A layer of metallic sediment had gathered at the bottom of the kettle; a small chink marred the rim of the glass pot. Nothing indicated a profound change in either of the familiar utensils, which Thomas had used for his tea every day for the past several years.

He squinted, giving both items another once-over. Silently he cursed his slowly mounting headache. Last night was a late night, polishing a grant application cobbled together by his postdocs; the aftermath of this endeavor was now pulsing between his temples. He was in no mood for nonsense, whether or not laws of physics were at risk, and so he defied the words of an esteemed figure in his field and placed the pot back on the counter.

He performed the same action: tilt the kettle and pour the water again.

He observed a radically different outcome: the pot accepted the liquid without issue.

"Yeah, maybe it is madness," he said, smiling wryly, "or maybe I just need more sleep. Either way..."

Garnished with a fresh toast and a couple of wrinkled sausage patties, he put his plate on the table next to the suspicious teapot. Ten minutes later the pot was drained to half its volume, as Thomas left behind a handful of crumbs and a small puddle of grease before donning his felt waistcoat and picking up his brown messenger bag.

Outside, the yellowed leaves crunched under his loafers. They were so far untouched by the usual rains of the fall. Sharp, whistling breeze ruffled them away from their neatly raked piles, doubtless to the chagrin of corpulent janitors charged with maintaining the university's campus grounds.

The students didn't mind. Indeed, some ran through the mini-tempests on purpose, barreling through the swirling leaves, and laughing like children when the pieces of plant debris got stuck in the woolen threads of their sweaters.

Grown-ass adults they were, supposedly: Thomas didn't make a secret how much he doubted this designation. At least the youth here were harmless enough, frolicking in the scarce and pleasantly surprising rays of late morning sun -- instead of, say, staging another pointless sit-in under some flimsy pretext or other. Cold-weather scarves were preferable to desert keffiyeh, in Thomas's opinion, but he would insist that either covering be taken off in his classroom.

"The potential energy of gravity is first transformed into kinetic energy of acceleration," he said, lecturing to an audience of several dozen freshmen. "Once past the lowest point, the reverse process occurs: kinetic energy transforms back into potential energy. In ideal conditions this exchange would incur no loss, but in the real world we should of course account for friction..."

He let a sigh skirt his lips. The necks of those present were almost all bent over the screens of their phones. Nonetheless a demonstration was in order, and so Thomas prepared both of the requisite artifacts.

On his desk there glinted a transparent mixing bowl, large and smooth, its glass smeared with reflections of those scant few students who were paying him any attention. The other item Thomas held in his hand: an orange plastic ball, fist-sized, likely a dog's chew toy that had never made it inside slobbering canine jowls.

Clearing his throat, he set the ball on the interior rim of the bowl. He threw a glance at his supposed audience and solemnly let go of the sphere. It rolled with a thrumming sound, its behavior exactly as the teacher had described, and stopped on the opposite side of the bowl for the briefest of moments before rolling back along the same, roughly half-circular path.

Except it wasn't the same path.

As it crossed the center of the vessel, where kinetics dictated it had the highest momentum, the ball veered to the side and made a sudden sweep over the arced shell of the bowl. The thrumming noise increased, both in pitch and in volume, as the ball raced along a great circle of the bowl about an inch below the rim. It was doing one revolution per each clattering second, and showed no sign that it would ever fancy to stop.

On and on it went, round in whirling circles. Many eyebrows began to rise and heads started to perk up. Even Thomas himself had acknowledged the phenomenon; for he paused, and refrained from carrying on with the lecture. His eyes were taking in the obvious disruption, following the frantic motion of the ball; but his mind continued to believe, if only for a time, that this was still a mundane experiment he had conducted dozens of times.

"Uhm, professor?" piped in a perky blonde, raising her hand among numerous snickers and giggles. "Isn't this, like, not quite what you said would happen?"

He squinted. He didn't answer the challenge right away. His authority as a teacher could not be dispelled so easily, regardless of whether Sir Isaac Newton saw it fit to cooperate.

"My apologies, the equipment is clearly malfunctioning," he said, steady voice hiding his befuddlement. Without thinking he reached into the vessel, hoping perhaps to catch the grossly offensive ball. He succeeded immediately, much to his own surprise: the defiant sphere landed in his grasp as its anomalous momentum dissipated without a trace.

"Boring!" came a churlish shout from the back rows. "Shoulda just left it to spin!"

Frowning, and acting still on instinct more than on rational thought, he released the orange ball again into the hemisphere of glass. This time it rolled perfectly, swinging from side to side, and after half a dozen cycles of steady back-and-forth it happily settled in the lower stratum of the bowl.

"Mmm, yes, anyway," he said, ignoring the continued titters. "Like I said, the kinetic and potential energies in this system remain in a state of equilibrium. Let's look at another example..."

After the lecture, he examined both parts of the malfunctioning setup. Neither object appeared anything other than completely normal. He had suspected a practical joke, played perhaps using cleverly placed magnets, but inspecting the underside of the desk revealed no sign of such machinations.

The ball was just plastic, and the bowl was just glass. Thomas Finch was again beset by a cumbersome headache.

Later in the university canteen, that headache was being bolstered over a belated lunch. A spoon swayed in his hand, as he skimmed through a printout of a fluid dynamics paper he had been asked to produce a peer review of.

Such honor, if that was indeed the right word, wasn't uncommon for the young associate professor. As a rule, Thomas's academic time was split in various unequal ratios between research work and teaching undergraduate students. The latter he regarded as a troublesome necessity, especially when it involved majors from other faculties, as it was often an exercise in frustration and futility to try and squeeze the future bit-slingers or gene splicers through a mandatory course of what was essentially the very basics of physics.

As for the former -- his own research endeavors -- it often felt like rubbing shoulders in a crowded marketplace. The currencies in circulation consisted of informal favors and attention: review this, get your name as a co-author of that, cite this guy and later he would cite you... Not exactly the heroic, glamorous wresting of deep secrets from the bashful universe, which was how Thomas had imagined it back when he was but a student himself.

"Something's off about those error margins," he muttered, careful to hold the creamy tomato soup in his mouth. A spiky graph zigzagged before him, peaks and valleys encased in long rectangular coffins. Below it was the customary label, describing the chart as figure some-number-or-other, and whose text danced before Thomas's tired eyes as it bent itself into twists and swirls. "Yeah, they're really off -- Huh?"

Literally bent, and twisted, and swirled.

"What on earth...?" he mumbled, and hastily swallowed.

Like a whirlpool in an uncorked sink, the symbols on the page jumped and began to shift. Letters and numbers dislodged from the straight rows of text and fell onto their neighbors below, where they knocked out and took with them whatever glyphs they had collided with. Charts and graphs fared no better, their lines breaking at various points and corners; and the now-loose segments flied away freely before adding to the rapidly building tempest.

Everything on the page was moving. Each small element traced its own circular arc. A maelstrom of chaos engulfed the entirety of the content, text and figures, yet the lines and characters themselves remained unbroken and curiously intact. You could still see their sharp edges and pointed serifs, printed in fresh ink no older than a few days; but the layout of the page had crumbled completely and was now circling an imaginary drain.

Flabbergasted, Thomas choked out a gasp. The spoon in his hand dropped, partly sinking into the thick red soup. His impulse was to throw the paper aside, but instead his fingers clutched it even harder. Eyes growing wide he stared at the hypnotic pattern, utterly baffled, even as small parts of his brain were already trying to work out what exactly he might be seeing.

An optical distortion? But the image looked perfectly clear. Nothing here was blurry, the ink didn't look smeared -- it was all just... chaotic. There were tiny pink particles on the page, scattered within the blast radius of his gasp, but those small droplets of soup didn't seem to have joined in the phenomenon at all.

It was squarely the printed markings on the page itself, disturbed out of their usual order, sent spinning and gliding over the smooth inkjet paper in callous disregard of how printing and paper normally worked.

"This... This is..."

He blinked. Bizarre as this was, Thomas's brain was almost beginning to acknowledge it. His perception was starting to actually register this blatant break in reality, trying to adjust itself and accept it. He was still clutching the paper, his eyes were still open wide, and slowly it began to settle in his mind that --

"Huh?!"

But then, it all stopped. One blink, and it was all gone. The paper had returned to normal, maybe before his eyelids even rebounded from their latest flap. No more than a few seconds had passed since the start of this dizzying anomaly, and now it was already over, and maybe it didn't happen at all.

"Shit," Thomas whispered, lifting the spoon he had carelessly dropped. He cast a nervous look around the canteen, but soon breathed a sigh of relief. There weren't many people who had paid him even a sliver of attention.

Clearly, an odd fellow with poor motor control wasn't worth more than a passing glance. And at this university, like at many others, one could easily find eccentric academics staring intently at mysterious pieces of paper.

But that didn't mean Thomas himself wasn't distressed. The strangest thing had just happened -- strange things had been happening, now that he thought of it -- and he had no explanation other than a slip of his own sanity.

Which, as far as physical explanations go, seemed to him wholly inadequate.

"I should just go home," he decided, the paper thrown on the table. He finished his lunch in a hurry and returned to his modest office, whereupon he put a note on the door saying that office hours were rescheduled for tomorrow. Then, with the bag on his shoulder and elbows pushing the leather patches of his coat, he scurried off through the stony corridors and entered into the crisp October chill.

It was later in the day now, and the sunlight had considerably dimmed. Clouds billowed as they gathered above, their grayish ebbs and flows admitting only brief glimpses of the blue sky and the white streaks beyond. The wind had picked up, scattering further the fallen leaves of elm and oak, and sweeping up the tiny stalks of sepia-colored straw that littered entire stretches of the sidewalk.

The crowds outside had lessened. There were no more youngsters running through patches of grass. Some students still lingered, sitting on the iron-wrought benches, and staving off the gloomy aura with hot cups of takeaway coffee. Laughs diminished and turned into narrow smiles, as the thin fingers of female students clutched those paper cups of coffee, rubbing them impatiently in search for more comfort and warmth.

Thomas sighed. He stood up the stiff collar of his waistcoat. Stuffing his hands into its deep pockets, he curled his neck and spine to better brave the unpleasant wind. The cold felt biting, somehow already breathing of winter's frost; and even though the coat was adequate for the season, he would give a shiver whenever the wind broke on the heavy lanterns lining the path and swirled around his shrunken and huddling body.

He walked swiftly and kept his gaze on the ground. He didn't want to look at anything that might suddenly... well, misbehave. He had no clear idea what he meant by that -- no way to quantify and rationalize this abnormal hunch -- but unlike any time before today he felt that trusting his instincts was the right thing to do.

And he couldn't explain it in the slightest.

"What awful cold," he said, choosing to focus on the familiar, even if unpleasant.

But thankfully, before long the cold didn't matter anymore. He was home. It would've usually taken him eight and a half minutes to reach his unglamorous apartment; but today, Thomas was already turning the key in the seventh. He hanged his coat and ran through the rooms of his cluttered abode, unsure whether those strange things that had been happening around him might've somehow spilled here as well.

He found that nothing was amiss. Everything remained in its right place, including the half-drained teapot he had set on the counter to await a second steep. It was just his regular home: a living room, a small bedroom, and a tiny space in the side he had arranged into a cramped office.

And so, gradually, Thomas Finch would calm down.

"Damn," he sighed, "what a day..."

The rest of the afternoon passed without incident. He made up for the canceling of his office hours by taking extra time to reply to students' questions in his inbox. He took another look at that grant application which robbed him of sleep last night, and concluded it was probably in the best shape it would ever be in. He eventually dared to look at that hydrodynamics paper again, which now included an unintended appendix of dried-up soup and spittle, and found the content to be in perfect working order, as far as typography was concerned; but of course those error margins still seemed a little bit off.

"Whatever," he concluded. "I'll write the review tomorrow."

Most importantly, his favorite teapot appeared to function flawlessly. Thomas was now sitting in a corduroy armchair in his office, lit by the soft glow of a standing lamp beside him. The pot and a half-filled cup of tea were set on a wheeled coffee table nearby. He had just cracked open a novel he'd been on-and-off reading for the past few weeks, when his gaze fell on the stack of cardboard boxes tucked in a dark corner of the room.

He had largely forgotten about the messy pile. Now he thought he should really deal with it at last. These were the lingering remnants of his most recent move, dating back to when he settled in his current place, which was around -- no, exactly one year ago.

Various knickknacks still haunted these boxes, refusing to suggest a good spot where they could finally be put to rest. In truth he should probably just throw them out wholesale, given he hadn't had any need for them for a year. And also because the dust that had gathered on the open cardboard flaps was apparently so thick now that it started to fall off in clusters of gray mist.

It fell off, and danced in the air, doing little twists and swirls. It seemed as if it was carried by subtle and unseen breeze, blowing soundlessly in the low air just above the chestnut-brown parquet.

Were it not for the scattered glow of the lamp, Thomas wouldn't have seen this strange and unnatural movement. Were it not for how engrossing the book was, he might've paid it at least a sliver of his attention.

Were it not for the voice he heard, it might've been just another perfectly normal evening.

"Boring. Put it away."

But he did hear it. The words flowed directly into his ears. The voice was soft, melodious, and laced with frivolous mischief. But the words didn't seem to have been spoken, uttered, or indeed to have existed, before reaching his unprepared ears and arousing his sensitive membranes.

So gentle those words were, their sound barely rose above that of his own thoughts. And so quickly they dispersed, without an echo or the slightest trace, that the very air had forgotten them before his mind could fully take them in. They were as fleeting as they were quiet: the softest of soft whispers.

Thomas blinked. His mouth opened in shock.

"Put it away, and look."

He didn't have to look. All he did was to raise his gaze from the page. In the corner of his vision there was already unfolding a peculiarity of the highest order. It came from the twisting and swirling dust, which continued to fall from old cardboard and tape, and at the same time more and more specks rushed over the floor like wind-swept flakes of finely powdered snow.

This silvery dust seemed to come from everywhere in the room. It flowed from the boxes, the tall bookcases, the small desk piled-up high with documents and unread books -- and indeed, it would seem, even from the looming dark walls. The airy particles were gathering in a single spot, to the right and a few feet away from Thomas; and there they soon formed a short but broad stump made solely out of those tiny gray motes.

They wreathed it, seething and sweeping around it, and thickening it with each passing second. And out of this base there leaped a single glimmering thread, thin and sinuous. It snaked through the still air in limber bends, leaving behind a trail of curiously alluring curves.

"Gah!" the man chocked out. The book slipped from his hands, resting open on the old wooden floor. Over its still-turning pages the stampede of grayish specks passed over silently. Their convergence seethed, now shrinking, now swelling; as more threads rose from the pile, climbing and shimmering in the pale light of the lamp.

And soon in front of Thomas, as he blinked rapidly with his jaw slack in shock, there stood a silhouette of a person. Minimal it was, just an outline and a handful of features, which were little more than wispy hints that let the mind conjure what details it wished to see.

There were the lidded eyes, each framed by two curves of dust, and whose irises glinted with sharp, radiating specks.

There was the flow of long hair, sketched with several bending lines. They were somehow hiding behind the figure, even as the dim light shone through it unhindered.

There was the body itself, human-like in its misty appearance, the outline bulging twice outwards in a curious, hourglass shape.

And then there were the lips, filled with puffs of billowing silver, which to Thomas's wide-open eyes appeared to curl in a narrow and playful smirk.

"That's better. I think I finally got your attention."

Unlike before, these words had clearly been spoken. Without a doubt they came from those puffy gray lips. Thomas heard them; indeed, he heard them loud and clear, over the clamorous beating of his rapidly thudding heart. But in his shock and fear, which bleached his knuckles as he gripped the armrests of his chair, all that he could do was to stare at the ethereally glowing figure.

"Oh? Not very talkative, are we?" Audible sigh came, and then a chittering giggle. "Ah, right! I suppose I made a little too big of an impression. But don't worry, Mr. Finch, your head is still good. It's a bit too good, I shall say..."

He gasped. The breeze that had been blowing across the floor all but completely ceased. All the dust in his office, likely down to the tiniest mote, had been summoned to a singular spot and molded into a clearly discernible shape.

It was a shape of a woman.

"Wh-what...?" he stuttered. "H-how...? What are you? How do you kn-know my n-name?"

"Oh, I know quite a lot more than that," said the figure, her voice sweet and subtly teasing. "It's been a whole year, after all. Yes, Thomas, a year! And during that year I could witness firsthand how exactly you saw it fit to conduct yourself in my house. And I have to say I am very, very disappointed..."

She took a step, her feet small and dainty. She made no sound at all as she inched closer to Thomas.

"D-disappointed...?"

"Uh-huh. I'm afraid you've been very... well, boring. A far cry from the previous tenants, who kept the place busy and were often quite entertaining..."

The dusty figure sauntered closer, noiseless steps taking her within inches of the frightened man. Up close he could see more details of her face, softly illuminated in the scattered yellowish light. The lips looked the most solid, like two matching gray pillows, but above them there also swirled a vivid, button shape of her nose. And higher still, doming the slow vortices of her hoary eyes, a faint line of her brows was traced by a languid drift of tiny bright points.

She was still smiling: the same crooked, subtly teasing smirk. Slowly she started to bring her face closer, only an inch or two away from Thomas. But then she stopped, a silvery grin stretching into her unseen cheeks, and with a playful twirl she pivoted away, and took a seat on the coffee table right on top of his teapot and the cup.

Both of which were still visible, completely intact, as they nestled within her translucent, grayish-white silhouette.

The man blinked rapidly. The hinges in his jaw stretched fully open. He felt like he had finally understood -- or that, at the very least, he had put a name to this phenomenon that stretched the limits of his sanity.

"You... you're a ghost!"

The response he got, however, started with a dismissive scoff.

"A ghost? Oh please! I am no floating soul. If you really have to know, the proper term is a spirit, but that's not of any importance right now." The figure shifted, throwing the outline of her one leg over the other. "What matters is that you've been boring me to death, Mr. Finch, and I'm not even exactly alive. Where are the girls, I ask? The parties? Friend visits, at the very least? You've been holed up here like a wintering bear, only to emerge for the most mundane of reasons. You've never brought home anything, or anyone, that's been even remotely fun!"

A look of total befuddlement was painted on Thomas's pale face. He couldn't tell what was stranger. Was it the fact that this ghost, or spirit, had manifested itself before him, or that it was -- nay, she was -- scolding him for... for being boring?

What unearthly sense did it make? She was blatantly disregarding the laws of physics, the very rules of reality itself, just to tell him in no uncertain terms that he hadn't been sufficiently entertaining?

Exasperated, he sunk deeper into his armchair. This really was the most bizarre of days.

"So yes, I am very disappointed," the spirit carried on, voice shifting to a rueful lilt. "I wish you were more like, let's say, the young man before you? He would have a new girl over pretty much every week, and she would always leave thoroughly satisfied. Oh yes, he was very invigorating..." A brighter gleam appeared between her slaty lips, sweeping across as if to wet them. "Or maybe the two girls before him? Honestly, they might've been even better. Such youthful energy and enthusiasm... You should've seen them, when they teamed up on some unsuspecting lad in their bed. It was a riot!"

An amused, cheery laughter echoed in the dimly lit room. The spirit stood up, its shimmering outline again passing unscathed through the solid glassware on the table. Gleaming eyes throwing Thomas a curious look, she paced to the center of the room, and the airy dust which gave her a visible presence swirled around the height of her body as she threw back the long mane of her silver-threaded hair.

Now facing him again, the lines of her arms rested on the lines of her hips. She regarded him with an eerie, mischievous-looking play of light upon a new drift of dust that constituted her high cheeks.

"So, uh, you're not a ghost," the man said, after a spell of tense silence. "And somehow I haven't gone mad, and this... this is all still perfectly normal...?"

She let out something of a scoffing chuckle. "Too normal, if you ask me! Because I've been waiting a long time, Thomas, hoping that maybe there's a wild side to you, buried deep beneath that monotonous exterior. But after a whole year of you living here like a recluse? Nah, forgive me, but I got tired of digging. I decided it was high time to shake things up -- and so I went and made some fun of my own."

As she said this, all the countless motes in her wispy body stirred simultaneously and flickered with reflected light. Slender arms stretched out, her chin lifted as the neck craned backwards. The shiny dots began to move, first slowly, but faster and faster as they went. Soon they were like cars on a busy highway, spotlights gleaming, speeding recklessly through the night, keeping as best as they could to the fluid bends of their meandering road.

And then, all as one, the dots winked and suddenly shot outwards. Like tiny stars they dispersed in every direction, twinkling and soon vanishing into the pallid dusk of the room. A stretch of darkness was left in their wake -- maybe a real one, or maybe an artifact of vision -- which lingered awhile under Thomas's eyelids. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and gasped.

"What the hell?" he whispered. A few specks continued to float in the air. But as they settled down, quickly and soundlessly, they removed the last traces of anything odd that might've happened in the darkened room.

At length, Thomas allowed himself a deep breath. It seemed to him that this "spirit", or whatever he was supposed to call it, might truly be gone now. Distantly he perceived a small change in the ambiance, as the air in his cramped office felt fresher and less stuffy than before.

He took another breath -- and then he froze.

"Oooh, what do we have here?" the voice ringed in his ears. "Not bad. Not bad at all..."

There was a rush of wind about him; a quick but mellow breeze. It swept him thoroughly: up, down, and along his lean body. From his copper mane to the sandy-brown slacks, he felt the moving air envelop him like the first wrappings of a hastily spun cocoon. Mild pressure was applied in a few select places, chest and arms the most, before the fluid forces began to concentrate in a single spot above his waist.

Only moments later, something yanked up the elastic band of his pants. The wind rushed in, puffing up the material into a round, football-sized pillow. Before Thomas could react the band had already snapped back, and now all this extra air was trapped inside the comically enlarged crotch-area of his pants.

"Whoa!" he exclaimed, hands pressing into the inflated fabric. He struggled to no avail in an attempt to shrink it back to normal. "Ugh! What... What is hap--"

"Shh! There's no need to be alarmed," said the voice. "What did I say? This is going to be fun. Just relax, Thomas. I'm sure you will enjoy it..."

He was about to protest again, but the gasp got stuck in his throat. Inside his pants there was a wild ruckus, flowing and ebbing and swirling in a great flurry. It was only turbulence at first, a chaotic motion of air; but as the ceaseless tempest calmed down, if only by a touch, and as its warmth steadily rose, there soon emerged a clear focus and purpose to the gusts of this peculiar gale.

Before long, it reached into his boxers. From there, Thomas's manhood was retrieved. It surprised him that his cock was far from flaccid. Streams of warm air embraced the chubby shaft, pressing at its sensitive spots from every possible angle.

A deft, incorporeal hand wrapped itself around his stiffening rod. A loop of unseen fingers held it firmly at the base. There were other fingers also, and they all went to work at once.

They tugged. They stroked. They rubbed, jerked, and caressed. They wrought a breathy gasp from the man's lungs, as much of shock and confusion as of unexpected, spine-tingling pleasure.

He clutched the sides of his chair and groaned, muscles tensing everywhere in his body. He held a forceful breath for a moment, before exhaling it in a choppy and almost coughing wheeze.

"Ahh... Oh god... What are you... doing..."

A sultry giggle echoed in his ears. "Oh, not much. I'm just loosening you up a little. Because you've been much too reserved, too pent-up, too restrained. And that is simply no fun! That is not fun at all, Thomas..."

He groaned again. The proceedings in his pants continued. The tan material was now stretched obscenely, undulating on the twisting mass of air. The localized storm had created a massive bulge over his crotch, whose size was now bigger than that of a ripe pumpkin.

And it was turning tropical, too. Thomas felt small beads of moisture condense and settle on the exposed skin of his cock. Droplets appeared and were quickly swept by the tempest, giving a moist, steamy sensation that enveloped every inch of his expertly stroked manhood.

Each tug made it wetter and wetter. The currents glided more and more smoothly. The pulsing vortex was applying just the right pressure to make the squirming man let out rhythmic grunts of joy.

"Uhh... This is... Ugh! It's..."

"It's better now, isn't it?" purred the mischievous spirit. "Yes, I thought I should add some much needed lubrication. There's not much humidity in this room, of course, but I went and scrounged what I could. I trust that it feels good?"

"Y-yes... Ah!" he croaked, giving a pleasurable gasp. "It feels... incredible..."

Another coy giggle. "Shall I keep going then?"

"Please..."

It did feel extraordinary for Thomas. His erection was now in full bloom. The seductive voice crooned softly in his ears, and its low, mellifluous timbre was at once soothing and wildly arousing. Beyond his chair and the table he could see little in the darkened room, save maybe for the faint outlines of his desk and bookcase, and so this alluring and sensual voice was filling the entire space of his perception.

"Mmm, yes, so nice and hard... That's the fun I was talking about. Wouldn't you agree?"

It only made him more and more horny.

"Yes... Keep... keep going..."

The invisible entity obliged. Indeed, it had all but redoubled its efforts. The naughty spirit seemed intent on bringing the man to a spurting orgasm.

His cock, fully hard and throbbing, was now engulfed in a monsoon of breathtaking intensity. All around his twitching shaft there raged a veritable storm of unbelievable carnal sensations. It blew, sucked, licked, and gently nibbled; and each of the smallest spots on his cock was included in this, from the thick root up to the bulbous head.

And below as well, for his gonads had not been spared. The fluxion of humid air lifted and cupped them, working in a careful and delicate manner. Massaging currents skirted over their stretched skin, depositing waves upon waves of moisture, and they felt as hot, wet, and abundant as a lewd and sensuous tongue-bath.

Once again Thomas let out a groan. His balls were becoming unbearably bloated and heavy. All this incessant stimulation was beginning to take a serious toll on his resolve.

"Gah!... Yeah... Oh, yeah..."

"What's that?" fluttered the sultry voice. "Is it so good? Mmm... Am I right in assuming that you might be getting close?"

He breathed. "Y-yes... I'm... ahh!... I'm almost there..."

There was a rush of air around his earlobes, which sounded much like an excited gasp. "Oh, splendid! I can already tell that this is going to be really fun..."

The words had scarcely died down in his ears before Thomas felt a major change. Something had radically shifted in the ongoing maelstrom that slobbered around his dick.

It was now attacking it everywhere, all at once, with intensity and unerring precision. Gusts of wind like wet licks and kisses were teasing him without mercy or respite. The raging torrent sucked him in, like a sloshing deluge trailing a tropical cloudburst. It was hot, wet, and untamed in its fierceness -- and every breath of it, every smallest twist and swirl, was focused solely on the straining, rock-hard shaft of his achingly erect manhood.

He didn't last much longer.

"Oh fuck! That's... That's it -- Aaahh!"

A loud groan issued from his throat. He strangled the armrests with every ounce of his strength. All the muscles in his body tensed, like in a feral cat that was preparing to pounce, and with a throaty cry he erupted in a massive, copiously spurting climax.

"Oh my! Isn't that prolific... Yes, yes, more," the spirit chanted with enthusiasm. "Go on, Thomas! I want you to give me every drop..."

And he did go on -- and on, and on. Many voluminous blasts shot from his twitching manhood, and each one recoiled with a surge of gasp-inducing pleasure.

Thomas kept coming, amidst throaty grunts and groans. The man was heedless of the fact he was pouring what felt like ounces of cum directly into his undiscarded pants. He didn't care, not in this moment of utter bliss, when the vacuuming pressure around his rampant cock still enticed him to deliver more and more salvos of seed.

It took well over a dozen of them, squeezed out with meticulous diligence. At the end he exhaled deeply, a long and satisfied breath, and slumped in his chair as his body grappled with a spell of overwhelming exhaustion.

Head thrown back, mouth open and tongue lolling, he tried to catch every available morsel of air to refill his overtaxed lungs. He could scarcely hear the voice in his ears, coming as a distant and gleeful chirp.

"Oh-ho! That is a lot indeed. Let's have some fun with it, shall we?"

As he strained to raise his head, there was movement at the edge of his vision. He saw that it wasn't the billowing fabric of his pants, whose shape had once again returned to normal. But something did stir around his waist, lifting their elastic band by maybe an inch or two -- and out of the opening snaked a thin glowing tether, fluid-like in appearance and pearlescent in its cloudy hue.

Thomas blinked. More and more of the oozy thread emerged, slithering before his eyes. Its dim glow meandered nimbly through the room's near-darkness, twisting itself into playful bends and knots. He was too tired at this point -- and too resigned to accepting inexplicable phenomena -- to react with anything more than a slight parting of his mouth.

And so he loudly exhaled, as the white slush continued its graceful procession. It eventually gathered where the dusty silhouette had once stood, assuming a shape quite reminiscent of that lithe, faintly-traced figure.

Yet this time, it wasn't just an outline. Rather, it was a form that could fill even with the tired man with positively invigorating amazement.

"Well, this turned out nicely," said the freshly molded shape. "What do you think, Thomas? I daresay I made a good use of your essence..."

He didn't answer. His mouth yawned open in a gasping, slack-jawed wonder. She was certainly right, that mischievous spirit, and Thomas could do nothing more but to stare.

Before him stood a stunning, milky white, and incredibly gorgeous feminine figure. Illuminated by the low light of the lamp, her porcelain skin was smooth as the finest marble. Across its surface there were swirls and eddies of silver mist, appearing as soft and delicate shadows that accentuated her perfectly sculpted form. She was now far from a flatly drawn sketch, as every ample curve was cast in all three dimensions, and the full splendor of her beauty was nothing short of breathtaking.

"Wow," Thomas managed to utter. "Y-yeah..."

She had a lovely face, with those same almond-shaped eyes. A bright smile was digging deep into her high cheekbones. She still had that long, flowing hair, now painted fully in white, which swept about her sinuous body like a curtain of glittering snow. Her svelte limbs were fair and smooth; and as she rested her slender arms on her hips, she was boldly and unabashedly exposing every inch of her flawless form.

And for Thomas, there was much of it to admire. He took in her magnificent breasts, perky yet full, that rode high on her chest and sported an unruly pair of stiff, slate-gray nipples. The gorgeous mounds cast delightful shadows onto her narrow and flat midriff, smooth but for the cute navel. Her waist then flared out widely, as his gaze crept lower, where the lines of her body curved dramatically to encompass the nubile breadth of her hips.

He paused there, swallowing hard. Between her thighs he noticed a whorl of smoky gray fog. It was shaped like a narrow strip, and its intense seething beckoned him with a promise of more wonders...

"I take it that you approve?" asked the alabaster beauty. "Excellent. Say then, why don't we move somewhere more comfortable? Unless this is still a little too weird for you, and you would rather stick to your very normal, everyday routine..."

She threw him a wink and smiled, then bent at the hips to pick up his half-emptied cup of tea. Placing it between the white pillows of her lips she took a sip, and paused, as if considering it, before giving an indifferent shrug and replacing the cup back on the table. She straightened up again, and now the ocher-brown liquid was flowing down the length of her slender neck; but soon it mixed with the smooth texture of her skin, and quickly disappeared in the vast expanse of creamy white ivory.

Then she turned around and walked, leaving behind Thomas in his still-befuddled state. But his instincts remained intact, as his gaze followed the luscious sway of her body, and his rapidly widening eyes became riveted to the subtle play of shadows upon her rippling butt-cheeks.

Even as she sauntered away, out of sight, the grip of her ethereal allure diminished not in the slightest bit. Thomas Finch was still sitting there, dazed, his shirt soaked in sweat, as the stretched-out fabric of his pants fell upon the straining shaft of his hard-on.

He groaned. Somehow, he was still fiercely erect. Was this normal? He honestly couldn't tell. But as he forced his stiff muscles to twitch, expending the effort to heft himself from the cushy armchair, Thomas realized something quite profound about himself in that very moment.

He found that he didn't really care anymore about normal.