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Love Is In The Air	By : LordKuyohashi Category: +S through Z > Simpsons Views: 20111 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own The Simpsons, or any related characters, and neither accept nor receive any monetary or compensatory reward for this story.

Chapter List
- 9
- 10
Note: The longer chapters return! It wasn't intentional, it just worked out that way. If reading 14,000 words is too much of a time sink, feel free to skip, I'll completely understand. There's not much smutty goodness in this one, either, it's mostly character stuff and exposition.

And yes, the arcade game is canon.

THEN

Lisa woke up first, nearly dropping off the bed and striking her elbow against the end table situated next to her brother. She swore softly, not wanting to wake Bart or Terri, and sleepily, staggeringly, rose to her uneasy feet, massaging the electric agony from her arm, extending her fingers in waves to make sure they still functioned.
She looked over at her lovers, sprawled out on Bart’s tiny bed, sheets pulled from the corners and blankets tossed to the floor. Both were very nude, with Terri’s leg draped over Bart’s thigh, a thick coat of his seed seeping out onto the mattress. Bart had, once again, driven several dozen loads of his swimmers into both young women during the night, making them squeal and scream in orgiastic ecstasy well into the late hours. Lisa smiled, and reached over to scoop a smudge of cum from the trickle running from Terri’s quim and down Bart’s thigh, gently so as not to wake them. But best intent matters little when a delicate finger brushes against the puffy, battered labial folds of one’s pussy, and Terri lightly stirred, murmuring in her sleep, clutching at Bart for warmth.
Lisa popped the cummy digit she managed to draw from Terri’s treasure into her mouth, and savoured the melange of flavours. Letting the tang of Bart’s jizz and Terri’s cunt melt down her throat with a satisfied hum, Lisa bent over her brother and their girlfriend, first planting a kiss on his forehead, then brushing away a wisp of lavender hair from hers and giving her a kiss as well.
She straightened herself, her elbow still smarting from the smack when she fell off the bed, and turned to leave. The bedroom door was wide open - nobody in Springfield closed the doors in their houses for the night, since the prospect of hearing the neighbours or other household members fucking tended to bolster one’s own ardour - and Lisa stepped through it into the hall, before a soft hiccup of sound made her turn back. There was Bart, sleepy eyes cracked only a sliver, his voice low and soft so as to not wake the naked woman draped over his chest.
“Hey.”
Lisa smiled sheepishly, as Bart took a quick glance at the world outside his open bedroom window. The sky was brackish purple, with only the vague prediction of orange hinting at a possible sunrise, a sweet, florid chill wafting through the curtains on the pre-dawn breeze.
“You’re up early.” Bart hummed, trying to clear his throat without making too much noise.
“Yeah, I was gonna go snatch up an early shower, before there’s a line of folks waiting to rinse off their junk.”
He gave her that smile, that one that always made her insides flutter and pirouette and suddenly the sky in Lisa’s world was lit up like a thousand New Year’s Eves, all fireworks and colour and explosions, and he lifted his head ever so slightly.
“Want me to join you?” And there it was, the slight smirk that turned his boyish charm into wolfish luridity.
Lisa shook her head dismissively. “No, it’s okay. I’m still a bit sore from last night, honestly.”
Bart pouted penitently, “I’m sorry. Was I too rough?”
Again she shook her head, only slightly this time, giving her brother-lover an assuring smile. “No, you were just the right amount of rough, baby. But I think my kitty is good and well fucked out for a little while.”
Bart murmured contentedly, laying his head back onto his pillow. “What can I say, Lees? Bart Junior just doesn’t know his own strength.”
Lisa covered a chuckle, watching Terri carefully so as not to wake her.
“Hey, I’ll be out for a while today, think you can manage without my tight, wet holes to pour your thick hot cream into?”
That smile returned. “Yeah, I think I can manage. I got the other girls to help in case things get too ‘hard’ for me.” He half-shifted onto his side, propped up by his elbow. “What’s in town that you need to see?”
“Just meeting an old friend. Boring stuff, really, we’ll mostly be talking science stuff, chemistry and environmentalism and all that.”
“Well, don’t let on that you’ve lapsed in your vegetarianism. I’d hate for you to lose clout with your old buddies.”
“Oh please, the only meat I’ve been eating is your cock and Terri’s pussy…and Ling’s, and Maggie’s, and Aunt Selma’s and-”
“Whoa, hold on there, Lees, when did you eat out Aunt Selma?”
Lisa giggled, shaking her head, and wiggled her fingers playfully at Bart as she ducked down the hall towards the bathroom. “Bye, Bart. Have fun with Terri, hm?”
Bart clucked his tongue, nestled back into bed, and murmured to himself as he heard the shower start up, a thin trickle of drool running down his chest from Terri’s half-parted lips. He looked at her, sleeping comfortably under his arm, and smiled. How had his life turned out so charmed?

The shower was sweet and much-needed, the fog of sleep melting from Lisa’s mind as the water ran down her face and the steam filled her lungs. As she lathered herself with the loofa hanging on the shower wall, she thought of what lay ahead of her today, and her brow furrowed; she hadn’t told Bart the complete truth about her errands in town, and that worried her. She hadn’t lied to him since their relationship had evolved, and this new prevarication bothered her greatly. ‘Old friends,’ she had said, as if she had had any friends before Bart and Terri and Ling and Maggie entered into her life. She shook her head, water beading off against the walls of the shower, and with a sigh and a cough, committed herself to moving past her reservations. She’d tell Bart the truth after, later, when it was all done and she had gotten the information she needed. Once she knew.
By the time Lisa got out of the shower and padded down the hall to raid her own bedroom for something to wear, Bart had drifted back to sleep, nestling Terri against his body. Lisa looked in on her slumbering lovers, smiled, and as carefully as she could, closed the bedroom door to give them some privacy and to cover her departure. In her room, she rifled through her dresser drawers, opting for a rare conservative ensemble today - no fishnet tops or latex skirts or electrical tape pasties today, instead favouring a simple pair of yoga pants, a t-shirt, and some running shoes. She pulled her backpack from the closet, the nice leather one she used in college, and quickly packed in a few notebooks, her laptop, and anything else she thought she might need. She had hoped to be out the door before anyone else woke up, to avoid answering any questions she wasn’t ready to field, and she figured she wouldn’t have much time before someone, anyone, stirred awake to use the bathroom or grab something to eat.
The idea of food reminded her of her own hunger, and just before she skipped out the front door, she swiped a couple peaches and a bottle of water from the fridge, and in no time, she was outside, on her bike, pedalling into town, her heart racing in anxiety as the sun slowly rose over her slumbering street, the residents ignorant as to what the new day would bring them.

By the time Lisa arrived at her destination, she had killed the bottle of water, finished half of one of the peaches, and was aching for somewhere secluded where she could rub one out. She had denied herself both her brother’s lucious cock this morning, and her own fingers in the shower, and the bicycle seat pressed against her cunny as she pumped her long, slender legs all the way here had done her no favours, and if she didn’t get some relief, she was going to explode. She had sat herself in the waiting room, thighs clenched together to keep her mind off the burning hunger in her sopping wet loins. The PA system was playing some Air Supply at a near-whisper, the music drowned out by the droning of the air conditioner and the rhythmic clacking of the receptionist’s keyboard behind the sign in desk. The receptionist herself was a short, chubby woman, in her late forties or early fifties, who had decided to wear a rather scandalous outfit to work today; a black leather bra, miniskirt with no panties, and torn fishnet stockings that barely contained her cellulite. She wasn’t unattractive, Lisa thought, a possible kindred spirit if her attire were any indicator. Lisa cleared her throat and turned her attention to the dull grey clock on the wall, as she fought the primal urge to jump over the front desk and park her sloppy cunt onto the receptionist's face and ride her until the younger woman’s brains exploded into fluffy pink orgasms.
The receptionist, whose name was Ruth Edelberg, eyed Lisa from the corner of her periphery, sharp grey eyes peering over cat’s-eye glasses. The older woman could smell the musky heat radiating off the pretty blonde girl with the respectable tits, and it made both of Ruth’s mouths water with wolfish hunger. If she hadn’t had her pool boy, her neighbour, his sons, his wife and her own niece to play with at home, she would have jumped over the front desk and buried her face in that young blonde slut’s snatch and sucked her fucking soul out.
Lisa was thumbing through the magazines laid out on the table in front of her - the old standbys of gardening and automotive magazines had been replaced with German fetish fare, although thankfully nothing that involved bodily functions - when a tall, broad shouldered man walked through the door, and muttered something to the receptionist. They had an exchange, which Lisa had been too preoccupied to hear, and with a nod, the receptionist waved the man in, his massive frame vanishing down the hall and into one of the lacquered doors.
“Excuse me.”
My god, look at what they’re wearing in the underground sex clubs in Berlin! Lisa thought, pressing her thighs together as she took in the sight of spiked red leather bustiers and corkscrew strapons.
“Excuse me, Miss Simpson?”
Lisa pulled her head away from the intoxicating ideas floating in her head, and blinked in confusion at the receptionist, who was now pointing down the hall.
“Doctor Hibbard just arrived. You are here for-”
Lisa bolted to her feet, dropping the magazine on her chair and straightening out her back with a snap. “Oh! Yes, thank you!”
Ruth smiled sweetly, “It’s alright. You want Conference Room Three, just down the hall there.”
Lisa smiled politely and passed by the desk down the hall; Ruth leaned up out of her chair, staring as the young woman walked past, her grey eyes locked onto the full, round bottom swaying side to side with every step Lisa took. Licking her lips hungrily, Ruth returned to her seat, pulled open the middle drawer of her desk, and withdrew a fat, purple dildo, studded with fat bumpy protrusion, and after soaking it in her own saliva, she jammed that monster right into her starving snatch, images of Lisa’s bouncing ass filling her vision.
The conference room was sterile, but in a warm kind of way. It smelled of wood polish and carpet cleaner, and Lisa had a hard time imagining people actively looking forward to coming into this room. There was a long mahogany table in the middle of the room, with simple leather chairs tucked in along it, about twelve or so, and an American flag with 49 stars standing proudly off in the corner.
“I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground a’fer I recognize Missourah!” She recalled Grampa Simpson saying once, and she chuckled at the memory of her quasi-senile grandfather and his eccentricities. He was currently living it up at the retirement home, spending his days harder than the defensive line at Normandy, as he described it, and routinely feeding his cock to any nurse, widow, or widower who would bend over for him.
A carousel tray of cakes were on a rickety metal table off the side, with a percolator full of coffee and stacks of styrofoam cups nearby. And helping himself to his third square of stale carrot cake, was Doctor Julius Hibbard. Lisa cleared her throat as she approached the fridge-shaped man in the heavy beige overcoat, and he nearly spilled a dollop of coffee onto his fingers at the surprise intrusion into his cake-filled reverie, turning to see who had disrupted his partaking of the free refreshments.
“Oh!” His brown eyes crinkled in delight at the sight of Lisa Simpson, a young woman he had known since the literal day she was born. “Lisa! You’re here. So I assume that you got roped into this mysterious meeting too, then?”
Lisa shyly shrugged her shoulders, reaching for a square of cake from the trolley. “Professor Frink invited me. He said he wanted the youngest chairwoman in MENSA history to sit in on this.”
Hibbard chuckled that deep, coughing laugh of his. “John always did have a great deal of respect for your intelligence, Lisa. So you know what this is all about, I take it?”
She nodded, chewing on a square of brownie that, while not undelicious, clearly showed its age. “It was my idea. I brought up some concerns with the Professor about what’s been going on in Springfield, and he took it to the proper authorities, and here we are. The best medical doctor, our town’s resident scientific expert, and me…a Seven Sisters drop-out autodidactic polymath.”
Hibbard hurmured to himself (a sound somewhere between a hum and a murmur, and it’s totally a real word and not one made up just now.) as the door opened again, and in slipped a thin, animated man with thick glasses, visibly exaggerated incisors and a mop of blanching blonde hair atop his head, a stock white lab coat slung over his waif-frail frame.
“Oh thank merciful glayvin in the glamoyle!!” Frink was a manic scarecrow, fidgeting as he crossed the room, enthusiastically shaking Doctor Hibbard’s hand once the two white-coated men were within range of one another. Frink had the dishevelled look of a man who hadn’t slept in quite some time and was upright only by the grace of various powerful stimulants and energy drinks, and one of those was going to give out sooner or later. “That secretary gave me very vague directions to this room! ‘Third door,’ she said! Is that third door on the left, third door on the right, third door furthest from the front door, third door after the second bathroom on the fifth floor, because that was a nightmare that will never leave my brain, with the puddles of water and used condoms and the toilets with the feces piled so high but people don’t flush it why don’t they flush the feces that’s just wrong!”
Lisa sniggered, and Frink turned to her, his face lighting up at the sight of her.
“And there she is, Madam Chairwoman. Hello, Lisa.”
“Hi, Professor.”
“Pshaw, none of that. You may not have gotten your degree yet, but you could think circles around me any day of the calendar, lunar, solar or sidereal. You call me ‘John,’ okay?”
Lisa smiled proudly - deep inside, she was still the brainy little girl who beamed when adults praised her - and shook Frink’s hand delicately. “I’ll try to remember that, John.”
“So, are we early? It hasn’t started yet, has it?”
The fourth member chose that particular time to enter the room, followed by the fifth, a slender, auburn haired woman in a form-fitting pencil skirt that accentuated her posterior and a blouse that drew eyes to her bosom, and the sixth, a mid-sized, caramel-skinned woman in a white lab coat, her face obscured by a sinister looking contraption worn over her nose and mouth, like a skeletal gas mask.
”No, it hasn’t started just yet, Professor,” the fourth member declared. Rail thin, a tall man made even taller by the ridiculous display of hair erupting from his head, like the fronds of a palm tree draping over his scalp. His face was drawn and thin, his nose angled and wicked, and his shoes could easily have doubled for actual boats. Lisa swallowed nervously at the sight of him, a man for whom she had conflicting feelings of intellectual respect, and sheer juvenile terror. He was one of the reasons Lisa had lied to Bart this morning. The very idea that Lisa would go to see this man for anything would have sent Bart over the edge into anxieties Lisa didn’t even want to consider. But she had been desperate; she needed answers, and there was only one man in any position of authority to provide them.
Robert Underdunk Terwilliger.
AKA, Sideshow Motherfucking Bob.
“Ah, good morning, Mister Mayor.” Doctor Hibbard sidled past Frink and Lisa to shake Sideshow Bob’s hand - Stop it, Lisa cursed at herself. He’s not Sideshow Bob anymore, stop thinking of him like that. He’s changed. He’s reformed.
“Doctor Hibbard, Professor Frink.” Black, beady eyes fell on Lisa, and Bob’s face lit up happily, genuinely happily. “And Lisa. Thank you for coming, my dear. I trust you didn’t all wake too early for this little tete-a-tete? I know how difficult it can be to pull oneself out of bed, especially these days, with so many reasons to stay horizontal.”
Bob gave the auburn haired woman a sly smile. Lisa thought she recognized her, someone from her father’s work a million years ago, when Bob spoiled her deductive work and just blurted out the answer.
“My assistant Mindy Simmons, and this young woman in the rebreather is…well, why don’t I let her make her own introductions? Doctor, if you would?”
The woman in the gas mask-device nodded, and stepped into the room, her arms swollen with folders and files, all of which she placed on the oblong meeting table with the concern and grace of a drunken hippo on a pogo stick.
“Thank you, Mayor Terwilliger.” her voice was echoic and raspy through the device on her face.. She opened up one of the files and spread out the papers within like a deck of cards ready to be dealt. “Gentlemen, ladies, my name is Doctor Margot Jeng, and I work for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
“FEMA? What the hell is FEMA doing in Springfield?” Lisa slumped into the nearest open chair, eyes locked on this strange woman in her strange headgear.
“In a moment…I’m sorry, I was told that this would be a meeting for the top scientific minds in Springfield. Doctor Hibbard is here as the top medical expert in the area, and Professor Frink’s work on Frinktonium, Frink’s Disease and the Frink Particle are all well documented, but…who are you and why are you here?”
Oh I hate this bitch, Lisa thought to herself, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from actually saying that out loud. She rose from her seat and offered a limp hand to Doctor Jeng. “Lisa Simpson, Chairwoman to the local MENSA chapter.”
Doctor Jeng only stared at the outstretched hand in stark disinterest. “And? My dear, MENSA is what dumb people think smart people care about. They let wrestlers into MENSA. What have you actually done?”
Lisa’s cheeks went red with quiet rage. In her mind, she was already pulling off her earrings and preparing to give this fucking skank the whole Jerry-Springer my-man-ain’t-your-baby’s-daddy chair-to-the-throat treatment when Professor Frink spoke up.
“Lisa here is the smartest person in this room, Doctor Jeng, and Springfield’s preeminent environmental engineer.”
Then, Lisa’s heart leapt for joy as Frink lowered his gaze, his black eyes peering out over the rim of his glasses, his voice sharp and dark and authoritative. “So I suggest that you show her some respect.”
Doctor Jeng glanced from Professor Frink to Lisa, and she quickly shook the young woman’s offered hand, as if eager to just ignore her own remarks.
“My apologies. If this is everyone, I’d like to start.”
Doctor Jeng pulled a tape dispenser from the left pocket of her lab coat, and set to work taping up files and papers from the table onto a nearby white board. “First of all, I assume all of you have noticed a rather extreme change in attitude and sexual mores in recent weeks, yes?”
“If you mean the utter deluge of sex everyone’s been having, yeah, we noticed.” Lisa tried so very hard to avoid dripping too much venom in her words, still stinging over Jeng’s disrespect.
“Good.” Margot caught herself, and quickly backspaced verbally. “I mean, it’s good that you noticed the changes, not good that they happened. Noticing means that you all have enough mental acuity and self-awareness, meaning that whatever other effects there may be, at least brain damage isn’t one of them.”
Taking a deep breath, Margot Jeng continued. “About three months ago, a pair of tanker trucks suffered a critical collision on the freeway just outside Springfield. One of the tankers was carrying about eleven thousand gallons of caramel syrup, while the other was carrying a roughly equal amount of a chemical called hydrexymethaltetrafluorozine, or HMTF for short.”
“Oh good lord.” Lisa and Frink uttered their minced oath at the same time, their eyes wide in horror. Doctor Hibbard noticed their reaction, and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“You’ve both heard of it?”
Frink cleared his throat, reaching for a chair as he swooned as if punched in the gut. “Oh my glayvin, yes. Nasty stuff. Melts organic tissue, one of those things we wish we could un-invent.”
“Yes,” Doctor Jeng interjected, tapping the white board with her phone. “It has industrial and aerospace applications - rocket fuel, fertiliser, industrial cog lubricant, that minty wax they put on dental floss. But when you mix it with processed sucrose, it sublimates into a psychoactive compound with augmentative effects on the human libido.”
Lisa slumped back into her chair, her face going pale. “What.”
Doctor Jeng eyed the young woman disdainfully.
Hmph, ‘smartest person in the room’ my ass.
Margot straightened herself up, cleared her throat dismissively, and continued, her cold green eyes locked on Lisa
“It means that it becomes a powerful vapour chemical that alters how people think and feel and perceive the world, and it makes them want to have lots of sex, too.”
“I know what the words mean, Doctor.” Lisa scowled defensively, and she decided that she more than hated this Doctor Jeng. “I merely stated my disbelief that everything that’s happened…”
She paused. She had to. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.
“That everything we’ve felt…is all because we’ve been inhaling toxic fumes for months on end? That….that we’re all just high?”
Margot’s steely jade gaze softened, just a bit, just a molecule, almost imperceptible to the common person.
“...My dear, all emotions are caused by chemicals. Serotonin and dopamine cause happiness. Oxytocin is called the ‘love drug.’ Anger is governed by the levels of adrenaline and cortisol in our bloodstream. Whatever you may have felt because of this disaster, it was every bit as real as if you had experienced these emotions before the spill. You may have acted in ways you wouldn’t have otherwise, and that, you can blame on the chemical - which, by the way, we’ve taken to calling ‘the Bloom,’ on account of its burnt floral odour. It can cause loss of impulse control and a discarding of established societal norms. Hence why we’ve observed so many homosexual and consanguineous pairings.”
Lisa sat in her chair, digesting the implications of Doctor Jeng’s revelation - her feelings for Bart were caused by a chemical spill. An environmental accident, a quirk of automotive physics and fringe chemistry and lax toxic waste disposal procedures had…what, sparked some deep romantic and sexual longing in her? She used to find Bart so…annoying. And now all she wanted to do was be with him, close to him, under him, on top of him.
She ignored the hungering itch and the telltale trickle of fluids staining the crotch of her yoga pants at the thought of her past couplings with her own brother. Her mind strained to hold on to what she thought she knew to be true. She loved Bart. She had to. And Terri. And Ling. And Maggie. It had to be real, or…
Wait a tic..
“What do you mean, ‘you’ve observed?’”
Lisa sat up. She was very much paying attention now, her mind focused on Margot’s innocuous slip of the tongue like a laser.
“What?” Doctor Jeng was taken aback by the sudden accusatory tone in Lisa’s voice.
“You said you’ve observed our…’homosexual and consanguineous pairings.’ Just how long have you been ‘observing’ us, Doctor?”
Margot Jeng stood, stunned into silence. Her skin prickled hotly. She knew coming here, defying her official orders to keep her distance and to not engage with the townspeople, telling them the truth, would get her into trouble, and possibly danger, but she had to do the right thing, even if it was too late. The burning, expectant eyes of her audience, save for that of the Mayor’s assistant, who seemed content to rub up against the Mayor, her clearly surgically enhanced breasts adding to the absurdity of the entire town’s circumstances. Margot sighed, and slumped her shoulders.
“Three months. We’ve been watching you for three months.”
It was Hibbard’s turn to be outraged, his voice booming throughout the room and no doubt echoing down the hallway outside.
“You let fifty-thousand people breathe in an unknown, possibly lethal chemical for three months and didn’t even tell them? When did you people find out? When did you know?”
“...FEMA was on-site hours after the initial collision. We’ve been here from day one.”
If Margot had been expecting an explosion of outrage, if she anticipated chairs being thrown and voices being raised and invectives being tossed around like rice at a wedding, she was pleasantly surprised for once, because all she received from the bomb she just dropped was…silence. Dumb, slack-jawed, blank-staring silence.
It didn’t last longer than a minute, when the entire three-person gallery erupted into angry shouts. She flinched, expecting violence, when a dulcet voice calmed the tumultuous rage she had inspired with just a few words.
“People! People, I know you’re angry.” Mayor Bob had risen to his feet, thumping his knuckles on the mahogany table to draw attention to himself. “And you have every right to be. Why, if these were the bad old days and I was still the sick man I used to be, I daresay I may even have drawn my machete at this point and made merry sport of the good doctor’s entrails.”
Margot tilted her head in confusion at that remark. She really needed to do more homework about the townspeople.
“There will be a time for recriminations, but let it come after answers and solutions, hm? Are we not civilised people? Are we not the thinkers of our fair town? People are depending on us to keep them safe, so…play nice now, we can always pillory the poor woman later.”
Mayor Bob sat back down, running his hand over his face and letting out an exasperated grunt, before waving away his aggression with a florid twist of his wrist.
“Let us not forget that she was the one who came to us with all of this. Despite her being here at what I’m sure is a great personal risk to herself, of course.”
Margot absorbed the Mayor’s words, and nodded solemnly. “Yes, it is. Simply being in Springfield will cost me my job. Telling you what has happened may open our office up to political and legal scrutiny, and that’s not even getting into the court of public opinion. A non-zero percentage of the American people already think FEMA is some cabal of supervillains helping the nefarious-yet-cartoonishly-incompetent overlords of the Earth take over the United States. When it gets out that we goldbricked on an environmental crisis like this one, specifically like this one, heads will roll, and I’m being almost literal. So before you all start howling for my blood, just bear in mind that my superiors would be content to let you all live in utter ignorance. I, at least, see the moral dilemma here.”
Lisa glowered at the good doctor, leaning back in her chair. “You’re good intentions aside, your office still sat by while we all had our brains turned into sex-crazed beehives. What else has this garbage done to us?”
A low, soft, mechanical sigh wafted from the rebreather covering Margot’s face, and she lifted herself onto the conference table, brushing aside a few papers to find a seat.
“First, we don’t believe there are any detrimental long term health concerns. At least, when they tested the Bloom on lab mice in the Sixties, there weren’t any reports of cancers or disease or defect.”
She smoothed out the wrinkles in her coat, continuing; “The Bloom causes a decline in impulse control, mostly focused on breeding and mating. It also greatly increases libido and sex drive by a factor of about three, and reduces refractory time exponentially. We’ve noticed that it can also restore lost sexual and reproductive function, even reversing the effects of menopause, and can cause instinctual pair bonding upon first exposure to a male’s semen.”
The polite silence from the gallery told Margot to continue, but the angry eyes glaring at her still made her fidget in her spot. “There are no records of birth defects in the lab mice that were tested, not even in cases of inbreeding or geriatric parents, even to the eighth and ninth generation. We don’t know how, but it seems to either prevent or greatly minimise any genetic defects continuous inbreeding may cause.”
This bit of news seemed to perk Lisa’s mood up considerably. Hearing that Bart could pound an entire herd of inbred Simpsons into her belly without fearing for their health and well-being made the room seem brighter and Doctor Jeng like less of an insufferable cuntrag, in her mind.
“Um, you mentioned pair bonding, Doctor.” Hibbard had tossed his overcoat onto the back of his chair, resting a foot on a knee as he got himself comfortable. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
Margot looked over her papers, shuffling them to find the right one, and pulled a few from out of the scattered stacks. “Yes, yes…here. When they did the experiments with HMTF back in the Sixties, when they learned what it does when mixed with processed sucrose, they noticed that the lab mice would pair off into quasi-harems. It seems that the semen of infected…or rather, afflicted, males acts as a carrier for certain dopamine chargers, rare chemicals that enhance the effects of dopamine released during coitus. Since dopamine is also the hormone connected to addiction, it was surmised that the dopamine chargers found in the afflicted semen essentially rendered the recipient addicted to the donor. Add to that the emotion-modifying effects of the Bloom, and you get people who become devoted to the first person to inseminate them.”
“So I’m a Bart junkie, is that what you’re saying?”
More papers shuffled around the table. “Bart...Bart..I’ve seen that name. Ah here!” She held up a crumpled sheet of paper as if it had all the answers to life written on it. “Yes, he’s…oh. He’s the son of…hm…and you said your name was Lisa, yes?”
“Yes.” Lisa couldn’t be bothered to hide her annoyance at this point. “Lisa Simpson. Did you not even bother to remember my name?”
“No, I didn’t. So you would be this Bart Simpson’s sister then. Ah, yes, by the way, you are, for lack of a better term, a ‘Bart junkie. If your brother inseminated you - and I make no judgments here, mind - then yes, his particular pheromonal signature would be encoded into your brain, and the simple smell of him would drive you crazy.”
Lisa bounced her foot against the floor impatiently, juggling Margot’s words against a witty retort and finding nothing in her quiver with which to fire back, leaning back in her chair in defeat and sighing resignedly. “Yeah, that checks out.”
Mayor Bob cleared his throat, raising his hand slightly like a schoolboy calling on teacher.
“Excuse me, Doctor Jeng, but this - let’s call it a contaminant, shall we? - this contaminant is in our air, yes? We’re breathing it in right now, that’s why you’re wearing that fetching device over what I’m certain is a lovely face?”
“My rebreather, yes. The Bloom is airborne, but by now it’s gotten into your water table and soaked into your soil.”
“Yes, that was the point of my next question, thank you. I may be the humble mayor of a small town, but I do have enough education to remember the water cycle - this Bloom passes by on the wind, condenses in our atmosphere, falls as precipitation and contaminates our groundwater and soil. So how long will we have to put up with this madness?”
“Ah…yes, about that. I’m afraid that-”
“You don’t know, do you?” Lisa’s tone was less accusatory, more revelatory, as if she were little Toto pulling back the Wizard’s curtain to expose the small man hidden away.
“No. Not precisely. We know that the Bloom is trapped over Springfield by a mountain shadow, your local Murderhorn, I think?”
“Oh for crying out gluhaivak, a mountain shadow can trap air currents and weather patterns for years!” Frink dug his fingers into his scalp, mussing his hair and looking quite the frantic, mad scientist. “We’ll be utterly and scientifically fucked for years!”
“Decades, actually. According to our mathematics models, at least.”
“So we’ll be breathing this crap in forever, is that what you’re saying?”
Margot chuckled. “No, Miss Simpson, only until it dissipates. Which could take half a decade, half a century, or even longer.”
“Ah, Doctor Jeng,” Hibbard cleared his throat, shifting his weight in his chair, “what about children. You said that this Bloom seems to bypass genetic defects from inbreeding. But what about birth defects from the chemicals themselves?”
Professor Frink raised a finger, quick to piggyback his question on Julius’. “Ah ah, yes, and what about children already born? What effect does this Bloom have on them? Precocious puberty is a horrible thing for a child to go through, after all; I speak from experience!”
Doctor Jeng shook her head, “There’s something about the Bloom that only affects mature brains. It doesn’t create the sexdrive, it merely enhances what’s already there, and most prepubescent children will be immune to it. For all others, I would recommend a regimen of buserelin, histrelin, or some other Gonadotropin-releasing hormone.”
Hibbard slumped against the table. “Puberty blockers.” His voice was less stunned, more defeated, “Oh the wags and pundits will have a field day with that.’America’s lousiest town doses kids with puberty blockers,’ that’ll be a great headline, I’m sure.”
She thought for a second, then continued. “Speaking of children, in all the time we’ve been observing you, we haven’t seen a single child under the age of majority. Where are all the children?”
Mayor Bob sat up in his chair, and coughed into his hand. “Actually, that’s kind of a funny story. Our local power plant had what we rather humorously refer to as a ‘Code: Homer’ and a court settlement was reached, part of which included an all-expenses paid summer camp for all the children in Springfield, for the entire summer.”
“And every single child in town went to this camp?”
“You don’t have kids, do you Doctor Jeng? The prospect of peace and quiet for the entirety of the summer was simply too good to resist, so all the parents signed their kids up.”
“In a town of fifty-thousand? There had to have been twenty-thousand children in this town, what summer camp could take that many?”
“Actually, due to several anti-child measures enacted by my pot-smoking, philandering, illiterate predecessor, and the nuclear power plant’s lax safety efforts having a deleterious effect on local fertility rates, it’s a little less than a third of that much. And several camps were used, including a few located overseas. In fact, the kids should be back in a few weeks, which is going to make things rather awkward for everyone. We may need to pass some legislation to protect the little ones from the town’s new philosophy.”
“Well,” Doctor Jeng brushed a wisp of hair behind her ear, scanning the stack of papers scattered upon the table, “that does explain that. We had actually been worried about the absence of any children in Springfield; some of my colleagues were convinced that the Bloom had driven you all insane and you killed and ate anyone under the age of eighteen, a sort of reverse Children of the Corn situation.”
A rustle of movement drew Margot’s attention to the Mayor, who had leaned back in his chair, his cartoonishly long feet propped up comfortably on his desk, the slender woman with the impressive set of tits and explosion of bright orange hair disappearing out of view. She started to say something, but stopped when she heard the faint tearing of a zipper being lowered, followed by the wet slurping sounds she had heard on the surveillance videos for weeks, a dopey, content grin stretching across the Mayor’s face.
Oh my god, she’s sucking his cock right in front of everyone!
She had known this could happen - this was just life in Springfield now - but somehow Doctor Jeng hadn’t anticipated it happening in front of her. She had naively expected that these people would control themselves in front of an outsider.
Mayor Bob crooked his grin slightly, arching an eyebrow as he caught Doctor Jeng staring. Mindy was tucked under the desk, her cheeks bulging with Bob’s cock, her head bobbing up and down as she slowly serviced her employer.
“I hope you don’t mind, Doctor, you yourself said this Bloom affects our libido and impulse control. I simply needed some relief, and Mindy is such a good assistant.”
Margot stammered, and caught sight of the other two men in the room massaging the fat bulges protruding from their. “Oh dear god, I hadn’t…”
“Ah, Doctor, Professor, if you’d like, Mindy’s other orifices are free to use. And Ruth at the front desk can suck a golf ball through a garden hose and shoot it out her snatch at thirty miles an hour, I swear.”
Professor Frink and Doctor Hibbard massaged the bulges in their pants, leering lustfully at the women in the room. Lisa rubbed her thighs together anxiously, while Doctor Jeng stood stupidly, clearing her throat in an attempt to guide the atmosphere in the room back towards more important and academic concerns. Even Lisa, that useless, arrogant girl, was sitting in her seat, fidgeting like an unruly child, her hand pressed between her clamped thighs.
Christ, this is ridiculous.
The Mayor spoke again, filling the all-too-brief void of silence that had, for a moment, taken hold in the room. “Or, if they would be willing to accommodate, perhaps our two lady colleagues would see fit to-”
Margot almost retched, and she wasn’t in the slightest bit shy about voicing her disdain for Mayor Bob’s unfinished thought. “Oh no, no thank you, I really would rather we just get back to the discussion at hand, if we might.”
“My dear Doctor, this is just how things are done in Springfield now. We’ll respect your wishes, we pride ourselves on honouring consent and the like, but you’re in the lion’s den, you really should have expected us to sink our teeth into a gazelle or two.”
Lisa rose from her seat, her face flushed and glistening with a thin coating of sweat. “I…I’m sorry, Mister Mayor, I have to…use the facilities, I need to…”
Mayor Bob nodded in understanding. “Of course, my dear. We all have the urge, you go right ahead. We’ll call this a small recess, yes? Do what you need to, and we’ll come back here after to continue Doctor Jeng’s fascinating lecture.”
With an awkward half-lurch, Lisa bolted out the door, and vanished down the hallway. Doctor Jeng, turned back to the men - Doctor Hibbard had unveiled his thick, black cock, stroking it in anticipation as Mindy climbed onto the desk, wiggling her ass at the doctor. Fighting back the urge to vomit into her rebreather, she headed for the door herself, bumping into the woman from the front desk on her way out and scrambling to find a restroom.
The ladies’ room had that waxy, florid scent, some heavy chemical disinfectant no doubt, more-than-lightly-tinged with the sour, gamey smell of sex. Margot wrinkled her nose despite the rebreather filtering out the worst of the ambience, and strode towards the sink, running the cool water over her thin fingers, and scooping a handful to splash against her forehead. Cold water trickling down her brow, dripping off her eyebrows and running down the smooth metallic contours of the rebreather, Margot hissed in exhaustion, then shuddered reflexively, trying to purge the image of Mindy slurping giddily on the Mayor’s penis right in front of her.
Fucking hell…it’s one thing to watch them rut like monkeys on the surveillance feed. But to see it up close, as if it were completely normal….
She laid her head against the hard, cold mirror over the sink, and let out a wheezing sigh, made echoic by the mechanical hiss of the rebreather. The tap, still running, cascaded chilling cold water over her fingers, gurgling swiftly down the drain.
I can’t help these people. I don’t know that anyone can help these people. All I’m doing is making it worse, making them angrier.
The water running over her hands felt good, cleansing and refreshing, and helped her clear her mind. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be a cautionary tale right next to the old Director, Russ Cargill, found in a ditch outside Springfield with his head caved in by a rock. She had seen some reports on the history of the town, it was exactly just backwards enough to rally a torches-and-pitchforks mob to deal with her if they were so inclined, and she didn’t relish the idea of incurring their wrath.
A sound, a muffled shuffling, brought Margot back to reality. Her head squeaked against the mirror as she turned in the direction of the noise, to her right, towards the toilet stalls.
“Hello?”
A soft, whimpering gasp was the only response, something pained and agonised but hungry. Margot approached the stall from where the sound had originated, and slid her hand along the cool blue-painted steel of the door, before rapping on it thrice with her knuckles.
“Is someone-” she stopped, an ember of realisation sparking in her mind. “Miss Simpson, is that you?”
A low, stuttering whimper answered her back, followed by a wide gulf of dead silence, then the quick, mechanical click of the stall lock coming undone. The door swung inward, revealing a frazzled and frantic Lisa, her legs splayed slightly askew, her hand stuffed between her thighs, looking rather pathetic. Margot took a step back, uncertain of how to react to the sight, and fumbling to avert her gaze, but unable to pull her eyes away from the exposed young woman.
“Oh! Oh god, I’m sorry, I –I should have..”
Lisa rose from the toilet, pushing herself out of the stall and nigh-collapsing against the countertop, rushing to run the tap over her slick, sticky hands.
“It’s alright. People have seen my pussy before, I don’t mind. I just…”
She laid her head forward against the mirror, sighing in a wet rasp of frustration.
“Fucking hell, do you know how long it’s been since I’ve jilled my bunny? I mean, as a substitute to actual sex, and not a supplement?”
“A while, I imagine.” Margot pulled a length of rough paper towels from the dispenser, rubbing the coarse paper across her hands before tossing the crumpled wad into the nearest receptacle.
“Huh.” Lisa scoffed incredulously, “I was sure you’d have an exact timeframe, seeing as you’ve been spying on us for three months.”
“We don’t sit around and watch you all fuck your poor Bloom-addled brains out all day.” Margot flicked a wisp of wayward hair out of her face and back behind her ear. “Well, I don’t, I can’t speak for some of my colleagues.”
Lisa chuckled dryly, before dipping her face down to spoon a handful of cold water against her skin. “Well I hope they found us somewhat entertaining. I always said the Simpsons should be on TV.”
“Right,” Margot leaned against the counter, whipping her still damp hands through the air to better dry them. “I can imagine that. Weekly antics of Springfield’s most functional dysfunctional family. Mom the happy homemaker, Dad the bumbling oaf who stumbles backwards into one improbable bit of good fortune after another, the rakish brother and overlooked sister. Sounds like something Fox would run for a season, then kill just as it found its audience.”
Lisa chuckled, a light and airy sound tinged with just a hint of exhaustion, and wicked a layer of water up her face and back across her hair, slicking it back. “Nah, we’d be on TV forever. We’d be on TV for so long, people would get into rabid internet debates about how our earlier seasons were better and we jumped the shark decades ago and we should be quietly cancelled so as to maintain an air of artistic integrity and our continued presence on the airwaves was a sign that Fox had nothing else to prop themselves up and we were the only thing keeping them afloat.”
A small smile crossed Margot’s lips, as she worked a kink out of her neck, hopping up onto the counter.
“I have to ask - for the interest of scientific study, you understand - what’s it like?”
Lisa turned off the water, running her hand down her face and whipping the excess off as she approached the towel dispenser. “What’s that?”
“The Bloom. The effects. Having it change your mind so much. You went from, what, single and sexless to bisexual group sex in public with your own siblings. That has to be quite the mindfuck.”
“Yeah, it was…at first. I remember the day after Bart and I screwed for the first time. My parents had been fucking in the kitchen, I guess they fell asleep or something, and they found Bart and me, naked, on the couch, going for another round. I fucking panicked - I thought we were caught and fucked and not at all in the good way.”
“See, mindfuck.”
“Yeah, then, our mom tells us that it’s cool, she’s cool with Bart and I screwing. It was kind of unnerving, like she was incredibly high or something. But as I absorbed it all, as I got to thinking about it - oh hell, who am I kidding, as I rubbed my bare ass against my brother’s meaty monster of a cock! - I started to feel like…like she was right. We were right, what we were doing was right, and to hell with anyone who said differently.”
Lisa walked over to the mirror, leaning in close and checking her teeth, making sure nothing of her meager breakfast remained between her bridgework.
“Then I put electrical tape on my boobs and got railed like a bitch in heat in the park in front of the entire town. All in all, I think I coped with it all pretty well. Having my folks be so completely on board with my new predilection for fraternal fornication certainly added some facility to my adaptation, I must say.” Lisa felt a smidgen of smugness; she didn’t usually trot out the especially big words unless she wanted to hammer home to someone that she wasn’t an idiot, and she still rankled at the doctor questioning her credentials.
Margot let out giggle, an odd, hiccuping mechanical sound when processed through her rebreather. “I can imagine. My parents certainly didn’t give me carte blanche when they caught me in the hayloft with the sheriff’s daughter.”
Lisa’s eyebrow went up.
Maybe she’s not such an insufferable twat, after all. Somewhat annoying, in that she hadn’t taken Lisa’s multisyllabic prodding, but otherwise, not insufferable.
“Oh?”
Margot smoothed out her lab coat, mostly so her hands would have something to do. “No, instead they packed me off to Nebraska to live with my aunt while they tried to cope with having a saloon door for a child.”
Lisa’s eyebrows changed positions. “A…saloon door?”
“Yeah, you know. ‘Swings both ways.’ My parents are from Gambia, they don’t get things like, sometimes girls want to kiss girls, you know.”
Lisa cocked her head, segueing into a slight nod. “Tell me about it. Before Bart, when I was still in college, my roommate and I would…well, my taste for pussy on the side came from somewhere.”
Lisa leaned against the counter, pressing her back to the large mirror, hands folded coquettishly on her knees, as if she were chatting with her bestest friend ever. “Took a while for my folks to deal with that. My dad has a history of homophobia - never violent, just…stupid and ignorant. And my mom thought she was cool with gay people, but then my aunt came out of the closet, and there was all this drama…she’s better now, though, and even my dad is over his old issues, mostly.”
Something on the edge of Lisa’s fingernails caught her attention, an odd chip in her polish, and she focused half-mindedly on that for a few seconds. “And now Bart and I share a girlfriend, and our baby sister is in a semi-committed whatever with our cousin, so there’s a lot of bisexuality and lesbianism going on and my folks haven’t said a thing.”
“Your dad…Homer Simpson, right?”
Lisa side-eyed Doctor Jeng, annoyed. “Is there anything your surveillance didn’t come up with? My favourite food? Favourite Seven Dwarf?”
“No, it’s…yeah, we have names, histories, things like that. It helps to keep track of people who might break quarantine. I only meant…”
She took a deep breath, then stopped, looking at her watch impatiently. “Do you think they’re done in there?”
“Not likely, if every man in Springfield is anything like Bart. They’ll probably go a few rounds, then break for lunch.”
“Ooh, lunch…I was in such a rush to gather everything up and get here unnoticed that I skipped breakfast. I could go for something to eat right about now.”
Lisa hopped off the counter, stretching her arms upwards, a slight crick in her elbow popping as she straightened herself out. “Yeah, I think I could go for something myself; I had water and a peach, not exactly a fulfilling meal.”
“Think they’ll care if we have a recess of our own, just to grab something to eat?”
“Frankly, Doctor, I don’t give a damn. I’m famished, and they’ll be too busy getting their nut to notice we’re gone. They can call us when they’re done.”
It didn’t take a minute for the two women to decide on a place to eat - a simple cafe Lisa knew nearby, well within walking distance, and after leaving a note with the receptionist, they headed off to eat.
“Hey,” Lisa chirped as they crossed the street at the light, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the noon sun as she stepped off the sidewalk, “how are you going to eat with that radiator strapped to your face?”
Margot almost froze in the middle of traffic, missing only half a step before she realised where she was and kept moving forward. “Honestly, I don’t know…shit, I hadn’t thought of that .Maybe we should…”
Whatever she was going to say next was aborted when Lisa pulled the doctor into the cafe, towards a booth away from the windows. They had barely enough time to settle into their seats when a waitress drifted by, handing both women thin, unlaminated menus, jotting down a quick drink order - one ice water and one Buzz Cola, and scampered off, the gelatinous globes of her ass straining against the too-tight lycra yoga pants she had squeezed herself into.
“Good call, getting the soda.” Lisa whispered, leaning over the table. “Any food or drink sealed in a container would be free from Bloom contamination and therefore safe for you to consume, right?”
Margot shrugged. “Honestly I wasn’t thinking about that. I just need the sugar right now.”
Lisa let out a small, light giggle, a sound which caught Dr. Jeng off guard; she had thought the young woman to be just another entitled millennial, someone who talked a big game about things they had no real experience with.
The waitress returned with the drinks, and after a few seconds of consideration, the two young women made their lunch orders - a house salad for Lisa, and for the good Doctor, a turkey club with a side of onion rings.
“So,” Margot tapped the waxed paper straw against the table when the waitress brought their drinks around, tearing off the thin wrapper and slipping the cardboard tube into her soda, “Springfield.” Her tone was wistful and inquisitive, as if she were probing for the secrets to the universe.
“Yeah, what about Springfield?”
Margot slipped the business end of her straw up under her rebreather and took a sip, quickly letting the cardboard tube pull away before any air could wedge through her defenses.
“I hear it’s a hell of a town.”
“That is how the song goes, yes.” Lisa licked a dollop of condensation from her glass of ice water off her thumb.
“It’s not like any town I’ve heard of, though. It’s almost like you’ve got your own little universe here. Different restaurants, different television and movies.”
Lisa’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What do you mean? We’re the same as anywhere else.”
Margot shook her head. “Nobody outside this town has ever heard of Itchy and Scratchy, or Krusty the Clown, or Rainier Wolfcastle. Everyone else out in the real world grew up with Tom and Jerry, or McDonalds, or Arnold Schwarzeneggar.”
She looked at the can of soda in her hand, and scoffed loudly.
“I mean, ‘Buzz Cola?’ ‘Duff Beer?’ What even are these brands? Don’t you have Coke, or Pepsi, or Molson?”
A gulp of water, a wipe of her moistened lips, and Lisa arched an eyebrow. “Arnold Who?”
“See, that right there. Springfield is in its own little microcosm. The man won multiple Mr. Universe competitions, he’s a world famous actor, married a fucking Kennedy, he was governor of California, and nobody in Springfield has even heard of The Terminator. But you have this muscle-bound guy with an Austrian accent who fills the niche. It’s like, some nebulous force looks at the outside world and what it has, tries to do its own Dollar Tree version here in town, and says, ‘sure, big strong guy, goofy accent, close enough.’”
“It can’t be that bad, Doctor.”
“If Itchy and Scratchy were put on the airwaves of America, the government would have shut the creators down for peddling torture porn to children. Sure, Tom and Jerry got violent, but Jerry never once showed Tom his own viscera. It’s like Standards and Practices never happened here. Like…like this town is meant to be a parody of the real world or something!”
Another sip of soda, and Margot continued. “And don’t get me started on the clown. Clown shows went out of style in the 1960’s, ‘70’s at the latest. And yet here we are, in the 21st century, with some guy in white face who, by all accounts, has been doing this schtick for seventy years and nobody outside of this bizarre time quagmire of a town has ever heard of him.”
“So we have some regional eccentricities, that can’t be that unusual. It’s like how some places have Dr. Pib and others have Dr. Pepper.”
“And yet, for some reason Springfield keeps bleeding into the outside world. It only works one way. Award winning musicians and filmmakers pop up from Springfield, make a singular mark and then fade away, but nothing the outside world does makes the slightest cultural dent. Do you even know who the President is?”
“Of course I do, Doctor. I voted for her.”
Margot sighed, and turned to the window, watching as a little old man with a cartoonishly long white beard playfully goosed a young redheaded woman as they passed one another on the busy sidewalk. “You’d never know to look at this town, but somehow one of the most amazing people ever came from such a humble place.”
If Lisa heard Margot’s wistful comment, she gave no notice, but the good doctor still fidgeted in her seat, her cheeks hot and flushed with embarrassment.
“Anyhow, it seems like a nice town, I suppose. A pity I only visited after a major chemical spill. I think I’d have liked to see it when things were normal.”
“Oh, we’ve never been normal. ” By now, the waitress had arrived with lunch, setting the salad in front of Lisa, and the doctor’s sandwich and onion rings in front of her, before moving onto the next table.
Margot arched an eyebrow as she squirted a respectable thread of ketchup over her rings. “Okay, so what is the weirdest thing you’ve seen in this town?”
Lisa set the small plastic tub of dressing off to the side of her plate, and stabbed into the pile of lettuce, swirling it around like pasta. “Oh, that’s a loaded question. I mean, do I pick the time my Dad was garbage commissioner and we had to move the entire town five miles down the road? Or the multiple Christmas fiascos that I swear all happened in the same year despite involving completely different Christmases?” She shoved a wad of salad into her mouth, cheeks bulging as she chewed, and once she had swallowed, she took a deep sip of water before continuing.
“No, I’d say the absolute, makes-no-sense-at-all weirdest moment would be when my Dad’s boss kidnapped my sister and we had to beat up, like, five hundred guys to get her back.”
This time both eyebrows went up. “What? Why? There’s no way that happened!”
Lisa nodded affirmingly; “You asked for the weirdest thing. That gets my vote. Mr. Smithers snatched Maggie right out of my Mom’s arms and bolted. It was so strange. He even wore a cape, if you can believe it.”
“And you beat up five hundred guys?”
“Well we didn’t sit there and count them all, but…there were a lot. And we’re not a fighty-kind of family, you know? Like, sometimes my Dad can beat people up, but usually he just gets his spine bent the wrong way over a fire hydrant. But, I guess when it comes to protecting your family, you do what you have to.”
“How did all of this…just…just….HOW?”
Lisa chuckled, wicking a layer of moisture off her water glass. “Long story short, we were walking downtown, passed by a jewelry store when Mr. Smithers ran out with this big honking diamond. He bumped into my folks, the diamond got lodged in Maggie’s mouth, and he grabbed Maggie and ran. Thus began our bizarre adventure.”
It was Lisa’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Huh…and Bart’s middle name is Jojo. That’s funny.”
Margot gave Lisa a look that said, “I don’t even know what that means or why you seem to think it’s important and part of me is fairly certain that the chemicals that have turned you into a brother fucking incest-slut have short circuited your higher brain functions” (oh, the things a person can say with just the slightest twitch of the nose!)
“And you beat up a bunch of guys?” Clearly Margot was incredulous, and Lisa couldn’t really blame her. The idea that her family - her entire family - trounced wave after wave of anonymous goons in suits, plus some washed up wrestler, plus a bear that turned out to be a guy in a bear suit, plus some actor dressed as a kabuki warrior, plus a bomb-tossing Smithers, before finally beating up Mr. Burns in a combat mech, was... a little much, and she was well aware of it. And yet...
“Yep. Dad belted them with his fist, Bart smacked them with his skateboard, I whipped them with my jump rope, and Mom hit them with our vacuum cleaner.”
“Which you just happened to have with you on a walk downtown. As one does, I suppose.”
“You asked for the weirdness, I’m giving you the weirdness.”
“And your Dad’s boss stole a big diamond because…why?”
Lisa shook her head, gulping down a swallow of water. Her salad was mostly gone by now. “No idea. Just more oddity, I think. Mr. Smithers works for Mr. Burns - he’s my Dad’s real boss, he owns…well, Springfield, mostly, but he works out of his office at the power plant. And since we had to beat up Mr. Burns to get Maggie back, I guess Smithers stole the diamond on Mr. Burns’ orders or something?”
“Hang on…this guy owns a power plant. Couldn’t he have just bought the diamond? Or the jewelry store? Why steal it? Why kidnap a kid and not just, and this is me just spitballing here, take the diamond out of her fucking mouth?”
Lisa laughed loud enough to draw the attention of the other patrons, who turned towards the source of the obnoxious cackling. “Now you’re starting to get how this town operates! Everything we do is just an excuse to do something else. Nobody knows why, it’s just how we work. If Smithers hadn’t stolen the diamond, he wouldn’t have run into us, Maggie wouldn’t have gotten the diamond stuck in her mouth, we wouldn’t have chased after them, and we never would have beaten up Mr. Burns and his robot suit, which I guess was important to someone out in the universe. Almost like the cosmos wanted to play Final Fight, but with the Simpsons, no matter how odd an idea that is.”
“...Robot suit.”
“Uh-huh.”
Margot glared at Lisa, finishing off the last onion ring, and sweeping the last crumb of bread into her mouth with a finger. “Now I know you’re just fucking with me.”
The smile on Lisa’s lips made the diner seem to glow. “Mmmmmaybe. Or maybe I’m telling the truth and nothing makes sense in Springfield. You’ll figure it out the longer you stay in town.”
Margot shook her head as she leaned against the cool red vinyl of the booth bench, staring out the window at a flock of bluebirds chasing a handful of sunflower seeds tossed to them by an old man on a park bench across the street.
Lisa killed the last swallow of water from her glass, sucking an ice chip into her mouth and pressing the cold glass against the valley of her throat, letting the condensation run down her chest. She let out a stifled burp as she set the glass down, took a deep breath, and finally, after long languishing moments of weighted consideration, gave voice to the concern that sat on her mind like a bloated mother hen.
“So…do you think there’s a chance of a cure?”
The question hit Doctor Jeng like a slap across the face. Suddenly, the doddering old man telling old war stories to the birds didn’t seem so fascinating, and she turned in surprise to the young woman seated across from her.
“A cure? For the Bloom?’
Lisa nodded.
Margot thought for a bit. She knew the truth, but…
She bit her tongue, and the bullet.
“No. Or…I don’t know. Maybe. Perhaps. We’re building off the work they did in the Sixties, using their notes and research. The original experiments never even broached the idea of a cure - they were only using mice, so they sort of…just killed them when they were done with them.”
Lisa squirmed in her seat, her eyes darting to the waitress anxiously.
“But, Miss Simpson…Lisa…would you even want a cure?”
There wasn’t a sliver of daylight between when the question was asked, and when it was answered, not a moment, not an idea of hesitation.
“No.”
Lisa realized what she had said. Her sudden response had startled her, but as she thought about it, the idea warmed to her, melted into her as if it had always been there. Maybe it had.
“No, I like how I am. Who I am. I like being madly in love with my own brother. I like the sex we have. I like sharing him with other girls, and having sex with them, and I like the idea of bearing his children some day. I like that my father and my aunt are together, and that my mom accepts it, and that my neighbour’s sons are a couple. I like what the Bloom has done to me. For me. I don’t want it to ever fade away, and it if gets worse, if my mind decays to the point where I become some brainless slut bimbo who can only exist to take her brother’s hot loads, as if the universe were some bad hentai fanfic written by some half-assed hack with barely a sliver of an idea as to what they’re fucking doing, I’m okay with that.”
Margot smiled, softly and faintly, an attempt at reassurance. “I don’t think it’ll get that bad. The Bloom doesn’t affect higher brain functions, not in the dosage you would have been exposed to. That sort of thing only happens in, like you said, bad hentai.”
Lisa gave a pursed grin, barely containing some unspoken glee. “So you watch hentai, do you Doc? You might just fit in around here after all.”
Margot coughed, as the waitress came with the check. “I may have some familiarity with the subject. Honestly, coming into town today, I almost expected to find everyone playing Kansen: The Home Game.”
“Ooh, a Kansen fan, and a Robin Williams reference! Doctor, I may have to amend my initial impression of you!”
The doctor placed a small fan of bills on the check tray, and the waitress walked off to calculate the change, as the ladies rose to leave.
“I have to say the same, Miss Simpson. If I’m being honest, I had discounted your presence at the symposium, at first. Despite the unique provincialism Springfield seems to enjoy, even I had heard of John Frink and his work, and by all accounts, Julius Hibbard is one of the best organic chemists on either coast. Some college tart claiming to be the smartest person in the room was, to be blunt, offensive to me.”
“It’s alright, I’m young, people always underestimate just how smart I really am. I thought you were a frigid cunt, myself.”
Margot laughed, accepting the smattering of coins from the waitress when she returned and dumping them into her pocket.
“No, I am. I’ve got 50,000 people depending on me to figure all this shit out, I don’t have the luxury of being warm and fuzzy.”
The air outside seemed warmer than it had been when the two ladies entered the diner, and Lisa took a deep breath, filling her lungs and letting the passersby on the sidewalk get a good look at her breasts as her chest heaved up and out. She thought for a second, rolling her tongue around her mouth as if trying to remember the taste of something, then, deflated, exhaled, her chest coming back down to it’s usual proportions.
Nothing. No sweetness, no floridity, no burnt flowers or scorched perfumes.
“How long would it take for someone to become nose blind to the Bloom?”
Margot looked at Lisa, fiddling with the mechanism attached to her face, making sure lunch hadn’t loosened it’s fastenings.
“What? Oh…I don’t know, a few days or weeks, I suppose. You were breathing it in constantly - technically, you’re breathing it in right now. Can you not smell it?”
Another deep inhale. Margot tried to avert her eyes from Lisa’s impressive rack, but those maguppies exerted their own gravitational pull as they filled with air, and so drew her eyes to the sweet meaty orbs of glory barely contained in her top.
“Nope. I think I used to, back in the early days of my new sexlife. But now, nada.”
“Well…that is concerning. Nose blindness isn’t so bad on its own, it can be treated by leaving the affected area for an extended period of time. A vacation from Springfield would reset your olfactory receptors, so that when you returned, you would be able to detect the odorant molecules assigned to the Bloom.”
“Doctor, I know how nose blindness works. Smart girl, remember. But if I don’t leave Springfield? Could it get worse?”
“Hmm…having a blind spot for one particular odor isn’t usually a problem. But if all your olfactory receptors get burned out, you could develop anosmia, total loss of your sense of smell, and that can be dangerous. Gas leaks, chemical spills, smoke; people take their sense of smell for granted, but it’s one of humankind’s most essential survival senses.”
Margot saw the look of concern in Lisa’s face, her wide eyes as the doctor’s explanation worked it’s way through the young woman’s mind.
“Ahem. But nose blindness very rarely ever develops into actual anosmia. The two have similar effects, but aren’t really related. Nose blindness is when you’re so overexposed to certain odorants that your nervous system stops registering them as ‘unusual.’ You can still detect other odors just fine, you just ignore one particular scent. Anosmia is when the whole thing shuts down completely. It’s the difference between being tone deaf, and stone deaf.”
Margot chuckled a little at her own word play, and Lisa pushed her worry out of her mind. She had other things to think about today.

The conference room smelled heavily of sex when the two ladies returned, the mayor's seat upended onto the floor, and rather pungent fluids soaking into the carpet by the desk. The rest of the symposium attendants were no where in sight, the room empty save for a slice of carrot cake yet untouched, a pot of coffee now burned to an impotable stew, and one very annoyed custodian, on his hands and knees soaping up a patch of soiled carpet and swearing to himself under his breath.
"Well damn, where did they go?"
Margot stepped away from the rank and dishevelled conference room, and turned on a heel, her hospital flats squeaking on the floor as she marched to the receptionist's desk, Ruth enjoying a subtle frig and a cup of coffee.
"Excuse me, did the Mayor say when he'd be back? We had - "
Ruth grinned dumbly up at the doctor, as her body shuddered. She withdrew her hand from herself, and nodded, as if she knew how Margot was going to end her question already.
"Ah yes. The Mayor moved the meeting back up to his office on the fifth floor. If you like, I can call up to tell him that you've returned."
“That would be great, thank you.” Margot’s voice was sugary and forced, as was her smile, hidden though it was by the mechanism strapped to her face, and as Ruth dialed up to the Mayor’s office, she stepped back to Lisa’s side, her sweetened veneer crumbling in a heartbeat into a mask of exhaustion and exasperation.
“Where do you people usually go, post-nut?”
Lisa brushed a whisp of hair from her face.. “First of all, ‘you people?’ That’s racist, ” she jibed playfully. “Second, it depends on where we are when we get our nut. Myself, I usually either get up to grab some water, because, y’know, a girl gets dehydrated working that cock, or I just curl up next to whichever fuckbuddy I’ve been grinding on and take a little nap.”
“Well I guess that’s what happens when you leave the horny chimps unsupervised.”
“Oh no, being supervised wouldn’t have changed anything.” Lisa leaned against the wall in the corridor, pressing her back against the cool surface. “This town has a very large contingent of voyeurs and exhibitionists, believe me; if you had been here supervising, the chimps would have been fucking even harder, and you would have been in the splash zone.”
“Ew.” Lisa couldn’t see Doctor Jeng’s full look of disgust at the idea of being front row center of a Springfield gangbang, but the intensity of the knitting of her eyebrows conveyed her precise thoughts on the matter.
"Excuse me, Doctor Jeng?" Ruth called up from behind her desk, eyes wide and friendly; "The Mayor said you can come up now. Fifth floor, take a left off the elevator, it's the third door on the left, at the end of the hall."
With a nod and a quick thanks, Lisa and Margot headed down the hall to the elevator; Lisa pressed the button for the floor, as Margot spent the fifteen seconds the carriage took to reach their destination humming along to the muzak version of Bye Bye Bye, her rebreather adding a unique echoic effect to the music.
They found Mayor Bob reclining in his chair behind his desk, Doctor Hibbard and Professor Frink relaxing on a plush leather couch off to the side. Mindy squeezed past the young women as they entered the room, her hair a ginger rat's nest, a mask of sloppy man-seed draped over the bridge of her nose. She smiled gently at the passing girls, and Lisa closed the door behind her. The three men were clearly still collecting themselves, but had thankfully tucked their dicks back into their pants. Bob was looking out the window, smoking a thick, pungent cigar, turning his chair to the door and smiling at the sight of Lisa and Margot.
"Ladies, hello. I trust you had an eventful recess as well?" Bob smiled dreamily around the stogie, his eyebrow arched suggestively.
“Actually, we had lunch, Mister Mayor.”
“Oh of course, food!” He leaned forward, slapping himself on the forehead; ashes tumbled from the tip of his cigar, rolling off his pant leg to cool on the ugly taupe carpeting. “Lunch sounds simply divine right about now!”
Margot pinched the bridge of her nose. Today was not what she had expected, and the burning migraine she could feel beginning to form behind her eyes was surely not a harbinger of things getting better.
“Mister Mayor, please, if we can just get back to the subject we were discussing earlier?”
Mayor Bob rolled to his feet with the grace of a circus performer, and for the first time, Margot noticed the simply elongated boats upon which the man was walking. His expression was cheerful, almost deliriously so, but his eyes conveyed nothing but business.
“My dear Doctor, let me ask you a question. You’ve come to us to tell us why our fair town was suddenly more amenable to the cajoling of Eros and Venus. You have explained what this wondrously amazing chemical has done to our brains and our bodies. You have assured us that we are in no danger, or at least as minimal danger as anything in this life can offer. With all of that said and delivered, do you have any way of curing our condition?”
Margot blinked, thought for a second, then slumped her shoulders. “No.” Her voice was quiet and defeated. “Not yet.”
“And if you did come to us with a cure, do you really think the people of Springfield would take it? That we would willingly go back to how we used to be? Or that we even could? The richest man in town is in an open gay relationship with his assistant that most likely never would have happened but for the Bloom. Cure him of his new mindset, and what happens to that relationship? What happens to the people who have found their soulmates?” His gaze roamed over to Lisa, who stood silent sentinel over the discussion. “Or the ones who have found love closer to home?” He locked eyes again with the doctor, who squirmed uneasily under his interrogation, the room suddenly too hot for comfort. “What becomes of them, if you strip away what made them find their love in the first place?”
Margot looked to Lisa, who seemed upset at the Mayor’s prodding but said nothing.
"Yes, Miss Simpson brought some of these points up earlier, Mister Mayor, but-”
“But you have no answer, do you?”
Margot set her jaw, clenching her teeth under her rebreather. “No, I don’t. But what else can I - can we - do? We can’t just ignore the situation down here!”
Bob’s friendly demeanor vanished in a heartbeat; he walked back around his desk, returned to his seat, and leaned forward, his chin resting on his tented fingers. “Of course you can, Doctor. You did for months already, didn’t you?”
It should, at this point, be mentioned that due to an incident known in Springfield as ‘The Great Arbor Day Pillow Fight Massacre, ” any and all forms of feather are banned from municipal property, be they pinions, quills, down, or plumage. So, if one were to smuggle one of these forbidden feathers into CIty Hall, sneak it past all security measures - the guards, the cameras, the feather-detectors, the feather-sniffing dogs and Mark Villaneuve, the janitor with a wicked bad bird allergy - they might have used said offending feather to knock Doctor Jeng right onto her scientific ass at the Mayor’s accusation.
But since nobody would dare risk bringing a feather into City Hall, insead of being rendered insensate, Doctor Jeng stood against the Mayor’s barbs, her eyes burning with anger, her nails cutting into the palms of her hands. Lisa finally stepped forward, breaking her silence.
“Hold on there, Mayor. Doctor Jeng means well. She could have let us live in ignorance about what was happening to us, but she felt she had to inform us.”
“I do appreciate her intentions, Lisa, I do.” Bob leaned back in his chair. A quick glance over to the couch showed Professor Frink, slumped against Doctor Hibbard, sleeping off whatever attentions Mindy had visited upon him, while Julius seemed content to watch. “But telling us what happened, then telling us there’s nothing to be done for it, is very much the definition of ‘wasting our time.’ We’ve been inhaling a permanent aphrodisiac. Wonderful, great news, it’s better to know than to not, yes? Except, what can we do with this information? As she said, there is no cure, and if there were, who would want it? So really, Lisa, what has the good doctor accomplished, besides assuaging her own guilty conscience?”
Lisa’s mouth went slack as she thought of a response.
Then it came to her.
“What about the people currently outside Springfield?”
“What about them?”
“Well, we’ve got kids coming home from camp in a few weeks, there have to be more than a few people who haven’t been in town or been exposed. And then there’s the tourists. Anyone passing through Springfield would be affected. I know you don’t want to go back to how things were before, Mayor, but do you want anyone else to go through this without understanding what was happening to them? Your wife is in Italy, right?”
Suddenly Bob was paying attention again, the wheels in his head turning as the picture started coming into view. “Yes”; he stretched the word out, as if he weren’t certain how it was pronounced “Yes she is…helping our son Roberto settle into his dorm at Sapienza.”
“And when she returns, will you be there to pick her up from the airport?”
And right then, Robert Terwilliger was glad feathers were banned, because he would have certainly been especially vulnerable to assault with a deadly calamus.
“No…we agreed that I’d be at work while our driver picked her up.”
“Hmm-mm, and how soon do you think it would be after she crosses into Springfield territory before she’s begging your driver to dick her down?”
Mayor Bob ruminated deeply on this. He finally remembered to breathe, and lifted his head to match Margot’s simmering gaze.
“I see. But since a cure is off the table, for the time being at least, that would leave either…keeping Springfield closed off and sequestered from the outside world, which is simply unfeasible, or…perhaps neutralization?”
Lisa smiled. Margot caught up to the plan a few seconds later, and looked at the young woman at her side in awe.
Holy shit, she really is the smartest person in the room .
“Neutralization? I assume you’re talking about neutralizing the Bloom, and not the entire town, then?”
Bob chuckled. “Oh, the Bloom, definitely Doctor. Take it from one of two men who actually tried to destroy Springfield - this town doesn’t die easily.”
Perplexed by this, Margot looked at Lisa, who, still smiling, only whispered, “He stole a nuke once. Didn’t work out.”
“Well, can it be done, Doctor. If we can’t reverse what the Bloom has done to us, can we at least keep it from affecting anyone else?”
Her outrage had, by now, melted into pure confidence, and with her head raised high, Margot declared with sublime assurance, “Yes. Yes we can.”
Margot stepped up to the Mayor’s desk, grabbing a nearby notepad and a pen from the stationary cradle, and began writing out a long string of formulae, muttering to herself.
“The issue is the sucrose. Without it, the Bloom is just another deadly caustic toxic waste by-product. But if we can denature the sugar molecules in the Bloom, we strip it of one of its constituent elements. Fluoride, perhaps? Hm….we’d have to mix it with something…the water table?”
“Oh, we tried that.” Doctor Hibbard piped up, waking Professor Frink from his post-nut coma. “We’ve been trying to get fluoride into the water for decades. Almost did it, too, until someone pointed out that nobody in Springfield actually drinks the water. We’re a Yoo-Hoo town, mostly. n No, we got voted down by the townspeople, bunch of conspiracy nuts.”
“And then it didn’t matter anyway,” Lisa continued, “all the previous toxic runoff in our water supply would just negate the fluoride anyway.”
“Well we can’t just spray fluoride over the town, the stuff is toxic if not diluted. That’s why it’s put into the water table - a few parts per million of fluoride in a county’s water supply is too thin to be dangerous to anything but sugar acid and cavities.”
“You have to spray it?” Hibbard was standing up now, Frink wiping the veil of drool from his chin. “Of course you do, it’s not a cure, you said. Putting it in the water supply wouldn’t do anything. You need it in the air for maximum efficiency.”
“Achem!” Frink coughed, finally awake. “Excuse me, I think I heard something about fluoride?”
Bob nodded. Suddenly, the room was alive again. Minds were working, puzzles were being solved, and Bob was loving every second of it. He lived for moments of intellectual stimulation, and he was having the time of his life right now. “The Doctor seems convinced that we can neutralize the Bloom with fluoride, Professor.”
Frink stretched his arms upward, covering a yawn as he rose to his feet. “Right, that makes sense. Fluoride neutralizes sugar acid on teeth, it makes sense it would affect the sugar bonded to the Bloom’s molecular structure. But you’d need to deliver it in an aerosol, and dilute it with a medium to avoid poisoning the populace.”
“That’s right. But apparently water is out of the question.”
“Naturally, one glass of Springfield water contains all the daily recommended doses of Vitamins A, B, C, K, P, and several days worth of heavy earth minerals. I wouldn’t use our water to wash a dog turd down a storm drain.”
“Which is why-”
“No, what you want to do is mix it with alcohol. That’ll dilute the fluoride without changing it too much, plus alcohol’s natural volatility will mean that it sublimates into the atmosphere more easily.”
Margot stood up straight, and gave Lisa an impressed look. Lisa only grinned even wider. She was - they all were - in the zone, and it showed. Finally smiling under her rebreather, Margot nodded.
“Right. Alcohol and fluoride. That’s just mouthwash. We can rig a few crop dusters with a solution of fluoride and…what’s good, vodka? No scent, no taste, cheap to acquire and it evaporates quickly. Yes, vodka and fluoride, spray the town a few times per day until…it’ll still take weeks to neutralize the entire town, and we may not get every corner, but it’s a better idea than we had five minutes ago.” Margot hastily jotted down some mathematical strings, and tore the paper from the notepad, stuffing it into her pocket. “This should work. I just have to go back to my Director, tell him I figured out some way of neutralizing the Bloom without harming the townspeople, and we’ll take it from there.”
With a heavy sigh, Margot looked around the room. The Mayor was leaning back in his chair, chewing on his cigar with a satisfied grin on his face; Hibbard was nervously eying Lisa up for some reason, and Frink was busy scratching out a cramp in his lower back, but Margot saw only four geniuses who had, if not cured, then still certainly saved this town.
“But this could work,” she added, hopefully.
“So some good came out of today, after all.” Lisa was beaming gracefully. Margot nodded, and took Lisa’s hands in her own, squeezing them gently.
“I’d say. Thank you.” She quickly turned to look the the three men in the eye, each in turn. “All of you. I had hoped that getting some fresh eyes on this matter would lead to some sort of solution and…well, here we are, a light in the dark.”
Bob rose to his feet, crossed the room and offered his hand to Doctor Jeng, a smug grin of self-satisfaction on his lips. “Well then, Doctor, I’m sure we’re all glad to have been of help. If you need anything else from us, just say the word.”
Margot huffed, nervously. She hadn’t honestly expected this particular circle to be squared, and part of her was certain that the universe was holding onto one more shoe, just ready to drop it when things started looking too easy. But for now, there was a path forward, and she wasn’t alone in walking it.
“I will. I should get back to the observation camp before someone notices I’ve been gone for a few hours too long.”

The goodbyes were brief, curt and professional, and as Doctor Jeng pushed her way out the front door, giving one final wave to the four brilliant minds that had helped her, Doctor Hibbard leaned into Lisa’s ear, whispering to her.
“While I’ve got you here, Lisa, perhaps we can discuss that other thing? In private, of course.”
Lisa looked up at Doctor Hibbard, and swallowed the nervous lump that had formed in her throat.
This. This was why she woke up so early this morning.
This.
Was.
Her.
Fucking.
Appointment.

NOW

Lisa walked into the house that evening; the sky was lavender and aqua, stars only starting to come out, the moon a distant, tiny ghost on the horizon. Inside, the smell of cooking citrus and herbs filled the house, and Maggie and Terri were setting the dining room table. Homer and Marge were already seated, talking, while, in the kitchen, Ling and Selma helped Bart carry the food to the table. Lisa inhaled deeply, letting the smell of warm oranges fill her lungs.
Quickly, Lisa slipped her shoes off her feet; it felt so good to touch the cool carpet in the front foyer, to let her toes breath, at long last. Quickly, quietly, she padded up the stairs, took a right at the top, and closed the bathroom door behind her. So far, nobody else had notice her come in, they were too busy with conversation or cooking.
Golden chicken, she thought. Bart hadn’t made that since…since Maggie was in grade school.
She ran the sink, cold water running in thick curtains over her fingers until they were numb; Cupping her hands, she splashed her face, once, twice, four times, and checked herself in the mirror.
No sign of tears. But her eyes were still puffy and red.
She opened the bathroom door, and as quietly as she could, stealth-sprinted to the other end of the hallway, through her parent’s bedroom door, and into their ensuite bathroom. Opening the medicine cabinet above the sink, she found Aunt Selma’s eye drops, the ones she used to hide the redness in her eyes whenever she smoked a joint. Quickly, she shook the bottle, lifted her head, and felt the brief cold sting as the clear liquid landed on her eyeballs, first the right, then the left. Blinking, she replaced the bottle in the cabinet, wiped her face with a few sheets of toilet tissue, and washed her hands anew. She checked herself in the mirror - the red was still there, but lessened now, and it would be gone completely in short order.
Good. She wasn’t ready for any questions as to why she had been crying, not yet.
In the meantime, a quick shower would excuse her vanishing upstairs, and give her extra time to compose herself.
“It’s called POI, Lisa. It stands for-”
She shook her head, letting the warm water wash over her face and rinsing Doctor Hibbard’s voice from her mind for a while.
Stop thinking about him. It. Stop thinking about it. The thing…the…words. Stop it Thinking. Bad. No more thinking. Happy thoughts. Only happy thoughts.
By the time she had returned downstairs in her newest white gossamer nightgown, the table was set, and dinner had been brought out. Golden chicken, as she suspected, as the main course, herb-coated and smothered in savory orange and lemon sauce; jasmine rice cooked in coconut milk with lemongrass; and broiled sesame asparagus under a layer of melted Leyden cheese. Someone must have done something to deserve a meal like this, Bart seldom ever cooked.
Lisa took a seat across from Bart, his smile making the room brighter and warmer. She returned the smile, hooding her eyes shyly as she scooped a few asparagus spears onto her plate. She regretted that she couldn’t eat the chicken - it wasn’t vegetarian, obviously - because it always smelled so delicious; if there were any meal in the world that would make her reconsider eating meat, it was her brother’s chicken recipe. Maggie was yammering non-stop about helping Bart with the shopping, only she seemed to focus on the parts of her story where she spread her legs and drained Bart’s balls like it were some grand epic adventure - which it certainly did sound like, true. At the head of the table, Homer, Marge and Aunt Selma were acting sickeningly cute with each other, sharing soft and languid stares, Selma feeding Homer a bit from her plate, Marge wiping the corners of his mouth with a napkin, Homer adoring both women completely.
It had a certain perverse hominess to it.
Like if Leave It To Beaver crossed over with Debbie Does Dallas.
That peculiar thought made Lisa snortle, a sound she covered up by faking a sneeze.
Under the table, Bart’s foot glanced against LIsa’s leg, sending a shiver up her spine that melted her bones and made her brain howl with want.
“Just a chemical reaction. Just a toxic accident.”
She swallowed the intrusive thought, hoping nobody saw her briefly dour expression, and dug into the food on her plate. If it tasted like anything, she wasn’t aware of it - she was sure it was delicious, Bart was a skilled chef, surprisingly. But her mind was everywhere else but right in front of her, in the now. The sound of conversation droned on around her, plates passing, silverware scraping, until finally, a sound like Godzilla rising out of the water shook the house, all eyes falling on Homer as he covered his mouth to quell the tail end of the belch. And that was the final bell signalling the closing of the meal.
Ling and Terri stacked the dishes in the sink, playfully touching one another as they bickered over which one would wash, and which would dry. Homer trundled off to the couch, flopping onto the poor put upon cushion and flipping on the TV. Taking her moment, Lisa grabbed at Bart’s hand as he walked past her, and pulled him into the foyer, her fingers wrapped gently between his. She opened her mouth to speak, but found herself pushing him against the foyer wall, crushing her lips to his in an attempt to steal his breath or his soul, she hadn’t decided which yet.
Bart found the small of her back and pulled her close, taking control of this kiss, slipping his fat tongue into her starving mouth.
Just as the world swam, just as her breath ran out and the world got dark, the kiss broke, and Lisa was left panting, her eyes fogged with lust.
“Fucking hell, baby,” Lisa smoldered, wiping a thread of drool from her chin, “I needed that today.” She pressed her bare cleft against Bart’s leg, rubbing herself up and down against his flesh, her slit greasing itself abundantly.
“You could have gotten some this morning, if you hadn’t left so suddenly.” Bart’s voice was a smokey purr audio sex given form. And his hand on her back, his fingers playing with her butt, were just the backing singers to the most amazing aria she had ever heard.
“No, I had an appointment that I couldn’t miss.”
That word, ‘appointment’, caught Bart’s attention, and he gave Lisa a look of worry that shattered her heart.
“Oh?”
The warmth of his touch, the taste of his kiss, made Lisa momentarily forget her concerns, and she ran her fingers up the back of his neck playfully, making his skin prickle in anticipation,
“I’ll tell you all about it, but away from busy ears,” she purred rhythmically as she led Bart up the stairs by the hand, the thunderstorm in her chest drowning out her own thoughts.
As Lisa closed the door to her room, Bart sat silently on the edge of the bed, watching as Lisa fidgeted nervously. She could see the rapturous tent bulging the crotch of his pants, and her heart went into overdrive, her hungry, long-neglected loins crying out for some relief.
A cold chill took hold of her nerves, and she whipped her hands back and forth, trying to still the tremors making her shake.
Come on, Lisa . This is easy. Just say what you have to tell him.
She swallowed the brick of nerves and acid that ran up her throat, and steeled herself for what she had to do next, but when she looked at Bart, all she saw was herself, stripped to the nines, riding her brother like she was breaking in a bronco, and the chill in her spine dissolved into a wanting heat.
There will be time for that later.
She marched over to her desk, pulling out the chair and spinning it around, sitting down, hands in her lap. She nodded to Bart’s tenting pants, a deep hunger in her eyes as she lied to herself and to him.
“Easy, boy. I’m not here for that. At least, not yet. Let me say what I need to say first, then we’ll play, okay?”
“It’s all good, Lees.” Oh god, there it was; that boyish smile that made women love him, that melted hearts and lowered defenses. “I’m all ears, so what did you want to tell me?”
She squirmed. Was it the smile, or how she hadn’t gotten her nut all day? Was it him, his pheromones, his charm, his…oh fuck, his magnificent cock? Or was it…
Fucking hell, girl, reign it in. Get that pussy under control. It’s you, not some…
She straightened herself out, struggling for a mote of composure.
Not some fucking chemical contamination.
She raised her fist to her lips, and let out a throaty cough.
Right. Get it over with. Quick, easy, then you can pogo your fucking bimbo-slut brains out on your brother’s hog.
Putting on her most charming, innocent smile, she opened her mouth, and spoke in a quiet, calming tone.
“I…”
Say it.
”Today I s-”
Say it, you coward.
“I saw the Mayor today.”
You fucking bitch! Not that, the other thing, what Hibbard said! Tell him!
Bart’s face went white. Lisa knew he’d have a reaction to the news, anticipated it. His eyes were cold and dark, and his arms went limp at his side.
“You…saw Sideshow Bob.” It wasn’t a question. He simply needed to say it out loud, that his sister had a meeting with the lunatic who tried multiple times to kill him.
“He’s better now, Bart. If you’d meet with him, you’d see.”
“Oh I’ve met with him. Several times. On the boat with the machete, on the biplane, in that old bunker. Bob and me? We’re acquainted.”
This wasn’t working. Lisa had to stop defending Bob for now and get on with the meat of the matter.
Tell him, you dumb cunt!
“Alright, so you hate him, I get that, and I understand that, and I don’t entirely trust him myself. Bart, please, this is important. Please tell me that you don’t hate me for seeing him.”
Slowly, glacially, the colour returned to Bart’s face, and he seemed to soften back to life, back to warmth. He smiled sweetly, and pulled Lisa from her chair into his lap, holding her against his chest, caressing her hair. “Lees, how could I ever bring myself to hate you? Alright, fine, you saw Sideshow. So what did he want?”
Lisa shook her head, looking up at her brother with wide eyes. “No, I went to him. That was my appointment.”
LIAR!!
She sighed in thin whispers, brushing her hair from her eyes.
“Bart…I did it.”
“Did…did what, Lees?”
She sat up in his lap, hand on his chest, feeling his heartbeat, warm and steady.
“I measured the marigolds.”
Bart took it in for a second, digesting what she meant, before he exhaled like a bull moose on the charge.
“So you found out why we’re so horny for each other.”
She nodded, blonde hair bouncing about her head.
“And? What was it?”
She curled into him again, making herself small and helpless. He didn’t just fuck her, he made her feel safe, loved. In this moment, he was the ground upon which her every foundation was built.
“It doesn’t matter. The marigolds are still beautiful.”
“So you’re not going to reverse it?”
“Nope. I like this. Us. All of us.”
Bart lifted Lisa from the fetal position in his lap, cleared the hair amassing at her forehead, and brought his lips gently to hers. Warmth spread between the two siblings, and Lisa melted into Bart, slipping her hands across his shoulders as she straddled him.
As the pair kissed, Lisa opened her eyes and looked out the window. The sky was deep violet now, the stars scattered in the heavens, silver-bottomed clouds heralding a tomorrow of greyness and rain.
And incest-inspiring poisons.
No. No, this wasn’t because of the Bloom. Lisa steadied one of her hands, and extended her middle finger to the sky outside, letting the Bloom know what she thought of it.
You don’t get the credit for this. This is mine, and nothing is taking it away from me.

The house was quiet and dark when Lisa opened her eyes. She was naked, save for the thin bed sheet, and she was using Bart’s chest as a pillow. She lifted her head, looking towards the alarm clock beside his bed, and saw that it was only three AM. Reaching down between her legs, she gingerly touched her sore, battered slit, sticky with Bart’s cum, and shuddered as her fingers made contact with her button. With a shudder, she lay her head down into the valley of Bart’s left arm.
And she let it all go. The tears were hot on her face, on his chest, and it took everything she had not to dissolve into open sobbing. She bit on her finger, tasting herself and Bart’s seed, but ignoring it. She only wanted to keep herself quiet. If she were heard, there would be questions. Why was she crying? What was wrong? And she’d have to answer them, they were owed the truth. But if she said it, if she repeated what she had been told, that would make it real and…
Please don’t let it be real. Anything but that. Not that.
She choked back a sob, and rolled onto her other side, pressing her back against Bart’s body. She knew that if the lights were on, if anyone saw her, they’d say she was ‘ugly crying.’ And she was, and she didn’t care.
“Lisa,” Doctor Hibbard’s smooth-jazz voice filled her memory, “The test results from last week’s examination came in.”
“It’s called POI. It stands for Primary Ovary Insufficiency.”
“--Means that your body stopped producing new eggs too early–”
“--Not infertile. You mustn’t think–”
“--Ovary reserve may be depleted before your thirtieth birthday. I’m sorry.”
She blinked through the wall of tears, staring out the window at the night sky. At the invisible poison that made her ready, ready to be a mother, to bear her brother’s children…
And then took it all away.
- 9
- 10
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Love Is In The Air