Thumbnail art by  crimsoneclipse (excuse the low-quality scan, I assume the final is lost at this point)

It wasn’t something you’d really considered before, but you had almost been jealous of the friend you brought with you to the TF street fair. They had won a mystery prize, and ever since, they’d been a bit different. Mouthier. But not in the more talkative sense, they weren’t doing much of that at all anymore. You could understand their gestures pretty well considering they just had huge, puffy fin-arms, but that was about it. They were a towering, fat, inflatable hammerhead shark, with a thick, sturdy tail tipped by a tall fin, short, almost vestigial legs… and a cavernous, fully-modeled mouth and two rows of individual teeth.

And boy had they gotten bitey.

It wasn’t malicious, or even conscious. Just sometimes they’d catch movement, and they’d be latched onto your arm or shoulder like an angry dog. It didn’t hurt; their teeth were just as inflatable as the rest of them, so all you had to do was thump them on the head, and they’d come to their senses.

You felt a little odd wherever they hit bare skin, but that faded after a couple of minutes. So mostly, it was kind of fun, even if your friend was a little sheepish about it.

You get something to eat, asking if they want anything more out of courtesy than anything else. They shake their wide head and pat their transparent belly, in which somehow floats several separate vinyl fish, as though in a snowglobe. They've perpetually already eaten.

You sit down on a bench and enjoy your snack, and they sit down next to you, smushing their huge tail off to the side. It's a little bit awkward, given that their eye extends further out than their shoulder does and looks straight down at you, and one of their handles pushes into your hip, but it's nice.

They slyly reach their arm around you - or at least they try to. It's hard to miss the blue fin as big around as a body pillow with a handle on top of it, and it pushes you forwards a good bit, but you smile and humor the gesture as you go for another bite.

But they beat you to the punch. You drop your spoon in surprise as the world goes dark, and you suddenly find soft, foldable teeth around your neck. You briefly notice their printed-on tongue before they start ravenously chewing on your head.

You chuckle and thump where you guess their nose is. Still chewing. You push. You fold in their face a bit, but they bear down harder. You call their name a couple of times, but you're muffled by voracious pooltoy on all sides. So you sigh, close your eyes, and opt to wait it out. As before, it doesn't feel *bad,* it's just kind of squishy and smooth. Kind of strong smelling, since they're technically made of brand-new plastic.

The chewing gets at once even squishier and also tighter, and the chewing slows and stops. You almost feel like you dozed off briefly, and your eyes take a moment to adjust as your head fwumps out of theirs.

You don't have a frame of reference what it's like to leave a pooltoy's mouth, but "fwump" was probably the wrong physical sensation for your own head to be making.

You turn to them to ask what that was all about, and they look back at you surprised. Granted, they always looked a little bit surprised; that's just how sharks work. But this was different. You were different.

Your viewpoint was higher than normal. You tried to speak, but no sound came out. You opened your mouth, and the top of your head went *up* instead of your jaw going *down.*

Even though you could see further around yourself than normal, you couldn't see your own face. So instead you set down your food and reach up to feel yourself.

Vinyl. You feel vinyl, instead of your head. There's some very familiar soft, play-friendly teeth that fold and crush under your hands. You're more conventionally-shaped than your friend, at least as cartoon sharks go. Normally set, screenprinted eyes, a triangular overall shape that ended in an upturned snout.

You were sharked from the neck up, and with no clear way to restore yourself, there was only one option. You stuck both hands in your friend's mouth. Time to see if you could fit all the way in.