Max woke up the following day with the feeling that something was different. He ran his fingers across Nico’s flawless skin and smirked as she mumbled in her sleep. He wasn’t sure what had caused him to wake up this early, but he had every intention of taking advantage of the extra time to enjoy himself.

With a shift of his hips, Max moved them so that Nico was in the little spoon position with him pressed against her back and kissed her earlobe, knowing that she had made them just as sensitive as her original ones were. But when he moved his hand to cup one pert breast, he noticed something was definitely different.

Unless Nico had painted his nails while he was sleeping, which was a possibility, he didn’t have Metallic fingernails.

Nico squirming in his arms distracted him for a moment, and Max decided that he had better things to think about than a mystery System Upgrade at this time of day.

Max felt Nico’s thoughts begin to come awake as she felt him pressed against her, but she was doing her best to pretend she was still asleep while subtly teasing him.

Nico turned her head, and their eyes locked. Lust and longing sparked between them as Max kissed her cheek and let his hand travel down her soft stomach. Nico shifted her hips to trap his member between her inner thighs, and Max noticed the intrigued noise that she made. It wasn’t quite lustful, and she was certainly familiar with his anatomy on an intimate level.

So, it wasn’t until he sank into her that Max finally noticed the extent of the change that had overcome his body overnight. Nico was too soft in his hands, with none of the excess resistance that he had come to expect of her morphable shell.

He had become more durable overnight, and now his skin didn’t feel any more fragile than Nico’s.

She had noticed at the same time that Max did, and the lustful look she was giving him turned to a smirk as she drove herself hard onto him and twisted her body so she could give him a bruisingly hard kiss.

Only, this time there was no pain, and his lips were solid enough to hold up to the task of kissing Nico senseless.

“I could get used to this,” Nico mumbled around Max’s lips.

“We’ve got plenty of time for you to adapt.” Max teased while he squeezed her backside in his hands to lift her a few centimetres and hold her there, where she couldn’t quite touch his body.

“Oh, that’s how you want to play?” She giggled, then hooked his legs to pull herself back down with a happy moan.

While the two Commanders lost themselves to their morning of pleasure, Admiral Penner was having a much less pleasant morning. The new floor was open for residential transfers, and thousands of cargo ships were in a holding pattern, waiting to drop off their passengers and the household belongings that they had brought.

The previous weeks had been chaotic, but today was the culmination of their effort to populate another floor. Well, the first of ten days that it would take to get everyone on board and settled. Long gone were their plans to keep the population to a moderate growth rate, and over a million new residents were scheduled to arrive every day for the next ten days, and that still wouldn’t bring their newly created cities to more than a third of capacity.

But today, they were filling one of the deep sea locations, and that was a task that she had never undertaken before. She had tried to page the Commanders to have them on hand in case an emergency order needed to be given, but both of their wrist devices were in private mode and wouldn’t alert them to incoming messages until they were finished with whatever they were doing this morning.

[Freighter Poseidon Seventeen Four Eight CEL, prepare for docking at bay 804 Port. A pressurized pod has been prepared, equalized with the pressure of the city. Please adjust your hangar pressure to match. Water conditions are attached.] The Admiral informed the first of the deep sea ships.

[Thank you, Absolution. Pressurized liquid transport will save us six hours of adaptation time. Docking now.] The ship responded, and Admiral Penner moved on to the next ship in line.

“Where are the Commanders? It’s ten in the morning, and nobody has seen them yet.” One of the dock masters complained while he was berated by a lizardlike species for not knowing their formal greeting and bow routine.

From what he could tell, the larger of the two wasn’t bad. But the smaller one, which the dockmaster assumed was the larger one’s mate, had taken offence to virtually everything that they saw, from the interior design to the time that it would take to get their belongings from the docks to the small condo that they were moving into next to a beach on one of the larger islands.

[Team Leader, can I get a reassignment? Seriously, these people hate me.] The dock master begged.

[You think we can’t hear them from here? Nobody is going to take that one for the team. No, wait, I think we have someone here who will.] The Team Leader replied as Major Miller walked in to see how things were going.

“Miller, we need your public relations skills. Please, pretty please?” The Team leader pleaded.

“Fine, watch and learn.” Miller sighed as he walked to where the reptilian resident was loudly berating the workers.

“Good morning. The Crocs, moving to unit 483A? Such lovely and affordable little units. I had thought of getting one myself, but I will just use the corporate Villas on South Beach for now. What seems to be the problem? We are operating at maximum capacity this morning, and traffic control safety protocols dictate three hundred meters between bulk cargo pods.” The Major greeted them with a professional smile on his deceptively youthful face.

The beachfront condos weren’t cheap, as they were some of the most desirable locations on the island, but the corporate Villas on the South Beach were both on a larger beach and one with better shopping and restaurants nearby, so the residents didn’t need to travel to get to them.

Anyone who looked down on the blue-collar workers would have looked them up in advance, and the mention that he could get time in them at will meant that he had much more pull here than their mediocre wealth could buy.

[Nice flex. Please come back when you’ve finished bringing them to their unit. We’re slammed, and we need someone to pull rank on the snobs.] The Team Leader messaged as Major Miller led the pair away, giving them a glowing description of all the amenities on the island.