shoulders, mounted under the first but tapered in just a bit from the top, from which extended two additional arms ending in hands as well and between which were two slightly smaller but otherwise perfect medium-sized and fairly firm breasts.
Just below this was yet a third set of shoulders, again mounted under the first and in just a bit from the second set, with a third set of arms, hands, even breasts, in a threesome that cascaded down in such a way that each succeeding set was perhaps ten percent or so smaller than the set on top and, interestingly, was proportioned so that all three pairs of hands ended at the exact same point on the body. This, however, left room for only a small flat stomach area with no visible navel, and then the whole thing tapered into the hips so narrowly that it all appeared to be on a giant ball joint. The only girl with top measurements thirty-six-thirty-three–thirty and a waist of maybe twenty-two, Joe thought. But the hips really blew it.
Those hips were very wide, supporting two thickly thighed and very nonhuman legs that might have more properly been on a bipedal lizard or perhaps a small dinosaur. That is, the legs were attached to the hips slightly splayed rather than straight down, which was why the hip area looked so wide in the first place, and it was this that had given her clothed figure the appearance of being fat. Extending out from the tailbone and crotch area rearward was a thick, tapered tail in keeping with the lower body but rather stiff-looking for all that and relatively short. In fact, it appeared to be somewhat rigid, although her movement showed that the tail could be brought in against the legs, forming a sort of third appendage between and in the back that wasn't quite long enough to reach the ankles, let alone the ground. This tail was designed as acounterweight, for balance, not support, and to some extent its operation was automatic.
As startling was the patterning of the whole lower area starting just below the small third breast pair. It was asif a gang of mad tattoo artists had beset her, producing a riot of attractive but totally abstract designs and colors over her whole lower body. The skin was quite smooth and had a texture similar to that of her human part; the colors were not dull, either, but bright and vibrant, the design about as complex as could be imagined. Only the underside of the tail, revealed through the opening between the legs, was left au naturel, a somewhat segmented-looking off-white.
There was no hair anywhere except on the head or any obvious sign of female genitalia. If it was there, then it was lost in disguise in that riot of color and shape and form, although Joe reflected that anything fairly small might well be anything but obvious in that riotous yet attractive mass.
"You kept—this—a secret even from part of a household? And from anybody around?"
She nodded. "It's not as hard as you think, and I was used to it, raised to control it. Growing up, they used to tie my lower arms to my sides all the time so I wouldn't reflexively move them, and my tail got lashed to my leg for the same reason. That was tougher. I always had to walk really slowly and deliberately because I couldn't use it for balance. The hands, too, were aproblem, mostly if I lost my balance or something. Your instinct is to use everything you have to break a fall. I spent a lot of time in my quarters, alone or with the two serving maids whose folks had been with the family for generations, just to be free of those despicable straps and my tent dresses. I yearned to be outside like this, free, able to run and stretch and not pretend. But it never happened."
The tremendous difference in Alvi would have made any sort of medical solution more grotesque than the social one her father had adopted. Still, if a big, ugly Injun truck driver could wind up anymph, surely there was something that a rich guy like her father could summon up from