You guys know the story, right? After the Second War, there were some hybrids who basically started demanding human rights, because they were half-human, after all. The dangerous ones were put down, usually when they became violent, but most of the rest integrated more or less normally into society. And most of them, as you might have expected, lived alongside human men and women near the oceans, or in the deep habitats underneath them.

And then it was lawsuit-time. The EEOC went crazy trying to handle all the claims and counter-claims. See, most of the hybrids could withstand exposure to deep-sea environments without the need for protective gear – a simple scuba mask would protect most, and a few didn’t even need that. So, of course, anyone doing deep-sea exploration or construction work wanted to hire them, instead of investing in much more costly human-style protective gear. Well, not just anyone, because pretty soon a number of contractors and construction firms started turning away any hybrids who were looking for work. And like I said, people – human and hybrid alike – started turning to the courts, claiming unlawful job discrimination.

It’s all settled down, more or less, a few years and a few riots later. The hybrids have legal full equality and discrimination is officially banned.

And wouldn’t you know? I encountered one while working on an ADA claim. Often these are very interesting, because while building owners are required to provide reasonable accommodation, there’s a whole body of case-law and legal reasoning to sift through and argue over what counts as reasonable.

In this case, the complainant was a woman with no legs. Not a cripple, but she’d never been born with legs in the first place – she had a mass of tentacles, instead. Think of her as having the lower body of an octopus and you’ll understand what I mean. Her specific complaint was that her employer had transferred her, and her entire workforce, to a new set of dormitories (she was a site supervisor for an energy company that ran a lot of undersea wells), but the dorms were of such a design that you went through an airlock on ground level first, then climbed the stairs. The old designs had stairs seaside, and then you went through the airlock straight into the dormitory. Well, she could handle the stairs on the outside, but once she was in the air, she really struggled to climb stairs. I met with her a number of times. She looked like she was in good physical shape, at least from the waist up (because who can tell, with legs like hers?) but it was a pathetic sight, the way she had to drag herself over things.

Management said it would be an unreasonable demand for them to construct a habitat module just for her, and there was as yet no safe modification to the newer design that would have allowed her to function there. Keep in mind that these dormitories are assembled on the surface, out of prefab materials, and then weighted and sunk to the bottom.

Well, the case eventually went to court, the complainant and counsel (the lawyer I was working for) went to town on corporate management, and the court ruled that, in fact, they were obligated to provide her with housing that she could access. They chose, in the end, to pull one of their old modules out of storage and sink it right beside the dorm. As I understand it, a few of the workers actually moved in with her to show solidarity, so that was pretty cool.

We kept in touch.

She eventually quit her job on work-sites and ascended to the loftier ranks of corporate management – the same people I had helped her prevail against in that court case. She was working compensation, and they were paying her pretty well – enough that she was able to get a lifetime lease on a little house by the shore and have it modified to fit her needs. I visited her there, at her invitation.

Now, from the outside you don’t see the changes, but once you get in the front door it’s absolutely amazing. For one thing: the floor is immersed in water. It’s about an inch deep at most. She has these taps emerging from the floor or the walls that just produce a flow of water, keeping the floor surface wet. Turns out as long as she’s on a wet surface, she can use the suckers on her octopus arms to get around. And the water runs down into collectors, at the edges of the floors, where it gets piped back into a tank containing…

“What is that, exactly?” I said, repelled by it and yet fascinated. It looked like a mutant bivalve, with more tentacles than it should have had, and a cluster of stalked eyes that looked unpleasantly human.

“It’s a charybdis,” she said. We were eating sandwiches; she broke off a piece of hers and tossed it into the tank. The eyes followed it until it was within reach, and then the tentacles shot out and ensnared it, pulling the morsel back into its shell. “I don’t think it’s a kind of hybrid at all. I think it’s alien. But it’s pretty neat to watch, it’s easily fed, and it keeps the water reasonably clean. I filter it after the charybdis gets done with it, anyway.”

I like pets too, but all I have is a dog. She keeps an actual living alien in a tank in her house. Amazing.

Well, we talked of inconsequential things – what our careers were like lately, the state of the economy, and we brushed some on political matters. At that time, we were gearing up for a presidential election, and the Solidarity hopeful was a hybrid who had tentacles for a beard. Poor fellow faced a slew of “Vote Cthulhu in ‘28” posters from his opponents. It was cruel. It was racist. It was also slightly amusing, if you weren’t a hybrid. But, I mean, people are wretched to each other, you know how it is.

Anyway, we ended up sitting side by side on her couch – as you might imagine, it was waterproofed – and she looked at me shyly, then looked away, twining the tips of her legs together. I didn’t say anything. That was a nervous habit of hers, so she had something on her mind.

What I wasn’t expecting was, “Would you like to go out to dinner next Friday night?”

“Sure,” I said, surprised. “Do you have a place in mind?”

“Yeah, there’s a seafood restaurant right on the water in the city, downshelf. It’s partially submerged, through – like here, only more so – so you might want to dress appropriately.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “I guess I’d love to. Just let’s agree on a time and place to meet first.”

“Here, at five?”

“Works for me.”

She pulled one of the hair-pins out of her hair and licked it full of ink – it was a brush, I hadn’t realized until now – and then, in delicate calligraphy, she wrote it on her date pad, then held it up for my eyes. “Date with FS, 5:00 PM.”

Well, so it was. It was a nice dinner and a nice date, we went out to see a late show of a nice movie, we had a good time throughout. I even got a nice kiss, although it made my lips a little numb… it seems her ink has a venom in it. Oh well. I can think of some uses for that, for after our next couple of dates. Don’t tell her I said that.

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As seen on 4chan's /tg/ board.

Pic is a Xarquid, a living terror weapon from XCOM: TFTD. This story is a reference to both TFTD and its immediate sequel, Apocalypse. This is also one of the few stories where I definitely want to write a somewhat more raunchy sequel, involving the venom this lovely young woman has in her saliva/ink. (I know that is not how mollusks work, don't bother me on that.)