Flexis-Fluidum

-12:30 PM. Cassadaga, Florida. August 8th, 2001.

Dennis Claude took a deep breath, the condensation immediately dripping down the front of his hazmat suit’s plastic visor and streaming together with the rest of the sweat that had been building up in the sweltering heat. He turned slowly, the thick rubber of the suit hindering his movements, to take a look at his partner. Kenny’s face, much like his own, was obscured by the reflective sheet of his visor, but his visible heaving breaths and contracted stance betrayed his tension all the same.

The two members of the emergency response team stood in the darkened lobby of St. Rose’s Hospital; a modern, three-story institution a few minutes off of the interstate. It had been nearly 10 hours since the location had last had any communication with the outside world, and the public was in a panic as they furiously tried to reach out to the employees, patients, and visitors they knew were within. Remote access to the Hospital’s computers revealed the latest headcount to hover around 400 people, all mysteriously silent. Fortunately, said list seemed to contain no children, presumably because of the presence of a dedicated children’s hospital not far away. The cries of the public quickly reached the attention of the CDC, who dispatched two highly trained local technicians to scout out the location as they readied a more substantial response force to follow behind.

Dennis scanned the empty lobby with his flashlight, his heart pounding. The entire room looked more as if a bomb had gone off then anything a medical outbreak would have resulted in. Chairs and tables were overturned, the filing cabinets had spilled their contents, covering the ground with stacks of paperwork and records, and the surfaces of the floor and walls were coated in what he could only assume was some kind of pale mud, splattered unevenly and blocking most of the sunlight that should have been streaming through the windows.

Kenny broke the silence first, his slight drawl muffled by the heavy hood he wore.

“Jesus, what the fuck happened?”

“I don’t know if I want to start listing alien abduction or zombie movies first.”

Dennis’ joke met with no reaction. “Sorry- sorry- I’m just… frightened too. Stick close to me.”

Drawing no conclusion from the lobby, the two walked to a set of doors that led to the west wing of the building. Dennis pressed the automatic open button just to the side of the frame. To his surprise, the doors did indeed begin to swing open inwards, albeit slowly.

“Backup power is working at the least,” Dennis relayed to his partner. A minimal comfort to be sure, but he had to take what he could get.

Dennis went to step through the doorway before catching himself short. The whine of the motor could still be heard, but the door had stopped halfway through its arc, running into something on the other side and grinding to a stop. With only about two feet to work with, he began to shuffle through the narrow space sideways. Squeezing through, he made it into the long, dark hall on the other side and turned around to look in the corner, checking to see what had caused the blockage. Not finding the expected tool trolley or misplaced cardboard box as he would have hoped, Dennis turned his attention to the floor.

There, across the tile, lay a misshapen mass of peach-colored sludge. Roughly the size of a bed pillow, it oozed outwards, spreading slowly across the floor, inch-by-inch. Hearing a sharp drip, he looked straight up to see a similar substance slowly fall from the ceiling in small drops.
Continuing his sweep of the hall, he began to notice similar small piles and streams of the thick liquid dotted all over the place, clinging to nearly every flat surface to be found. He knelt down to  stare closer at the pile closest to him. Uniformly-colored and reflecting a tacky, plasticy shine, it looked all the world like a prop from a cheap movie. He reached out a gloved hand to inspect the pile. Resting his hand on the surface, he could feel a slow, yet distinct, pulse rising from within.

Dennis knew that finding something so strange, so alien, was reason enough to call off the search immediately and wait for backup. However, those same qualities were also a driving force, egging on his curiosity to peer further. His curiosity won.

He pushed harder with his gloved hand. The surface trembled as his fingers seemed to break tension, causing both a small, watery ripple to travel outwards as his fingertips were ever-so-slightly submerged. The entire mass quivered in response. Dennis watched the strange reactions of this bizarre substance in utter amazement. He had to push further. Dennis took a deep breath and submerged his entire hand into the fascinating rubbery fluid.

For a moment, there was silence. The hall stood still, the only movement and sound coming from the gradual drips falling from the ceiling. But after several seconds, a loud sound began to emanate from somewhere deeper in the hospital. From where Dennis knelt, it sounded like it had to be at least 40 feet away and presumably on the floor above him. The noise grew louder as Dennis carefully tried to visualize the location of the source. It was moving.

Suddenly, there was a crash, followed by a great rumbling. Dennis looked back towards the doors he entered from only to see the ceiling above it crack and crumble. With a rush of debris, a large chunk of the panels and supports came tumbling down, barricading him from the way out and
separating him from his partner who had been waiting outside.

“Ken! You alright?”

The noise started again, closer this time.

“Yeah man! You?” the unmistakable twang of Kenny’s voice replied through the rubble.

The noise had descended a floor.

“I’m fine! Nothing hit me. Listen, can you see what’s making that noise?”

The noise gained clarity, echoing and reverberating across the hospital walls. The low drone heard prior now sounding far more human and breathy. It took Dennis a moment to place what the sound was, but within a few more seconds it was unmistakable. A great chorus of moaning, both male and female, boomed through the halls, growing louder and louder.

The ground began to shake.

“I- I see it!” Kenny shouted.

“Ken! What is going on over there?”

“Its- its coming right for me!”

“WHAT. IS. IT!?”

Dennis would not hear the answer however; as with a great tremor and a sudden, wet-sounding smack, Kenny was carried away from the caved-in doorway, his yells fading away with the moaning as the source of the sound vanished down another hallway, deeper into the recesses of the hospital.

Things were quiet yet again. Dennis now stood at a dead end, his path back to the lobby blocked and his only way to proceed taking him further into the putty-strewn halls of the hospital. He didn’t dare make a sound. Trying to keep as much clarity as he could, he walked over to a floor plan that hung on the wall. Searching the document for alternate exits or fire escapes, he determined that the best course of action would be to take two intersections straight forward, and then take a left. Doing so would put him near an exit adjacent to the elevator bay, allowing for him to make his escape. Waiting just a minute longer for the off chance that he would hear Kenny again, Dennis headed off, his own preservation now serving as his primary goal.

He trekked on, making sure to avoid touching the piles of goop that seemed to get the attention of whatever was roaming the halls. Other than the constant dripping and the scuffing of his heavy-booted feet, the halls remained silent as he made his way forward. Turning left where he had planned, he was once again met by a set of double doors. To his dismay, however, these doors were simply caked in the shiny substance. Dennis tried looking through the viewing windows on the doors, but they seemed to be completely smothered on the other side as well, the small pane of glass completely blocked by the tan sludge.

Dennis strained his ears, trying to get any sort of bearing on where the mysterious presence might be. Not hearing anything, he figured he would just have to take his chances. With painstaking care, he slowly slid the semi-solid blobs off of the door handles and away from the door clearing. There was nothing he could conceivably do about the coating on the other side, but he was close enough to the exit that he could easily make a break for the ambulance he arrived in before he met a fate similar to his partner.

He steeled his nerves, took a deep breath, and pulled the doors open.

Time stood still as he took in what he saw. Just ahead of him, stretching from floor to ceiling and pressing against both walls of the hall, was a gigantic, quivering mass of tan and brown putty. Like the smaller masses dotted about, the large mass oozed outwards, flowing slowly like a thick mud. However, this massive sample twiched and jittered, far more active and alive than the gentle pulsing of the smaller pieces. Soft at first, but soon loud and overbearing, the moaning returned, emanating from the core of its being. Dennis took some scrambling steps back away as the mass lurched into action.

The great mass flowed forward, causing the ground to tremble and Dennis to lose his footing. His feet scrambled uselessly against the slime-slicked tiles as he tried to get himself up, but his heavy suit nullified his efforts. The mass rose up against him as small protrusions morphed themselves out of the surface and began to take definition. Out of the flexible tendrils, small digits began sprouting. The developing appendages swung wildly with little coordination, often colliding with a wet snap and breaking off into small globs that further cluttered the floor. With what seemed like a great deal of effort, the tendrils that remained refined themselves, clearly trying to facsimile the human arm and hand. Different segments of the encroaching wall jutted forward, the hands grasping for Dennis as he tried to push himself away as the moaning reached a deafening clamor. The arms reached closer, stretching past their limits and bending in ways that joints would have prevented. Finally, an arm managed to grab onto Dennis’ suit, and the whole mass jolted in reaction.

Like a bursting bubble, the mass broke down into a wave of thick, viscous liquid. The arms melted back upon themselves as the wall crashed forward, rushing upon Dennis’ prone position. Moving with startling speed and a complete lack of uniformity, the mass splattered about as it landed on him in the form of hundreds of droplets, the impact of which on the heavy rubber suit sounding like a torrential downpour from within a tent. Dennis was soon completely submerged in the writhing mass, feeling awash in a current as he was pulled and pushed by multiple opposing forces. The internal lights of his suit helmet activated, illuminating his visor.

All he could see was pulsating tan, swirls of brown, and the passing by of forming and deforming limbs. A face suddenly was smashed against his visor and slowly dragged across by the current. It was a woman’s face, and a particularly attractive one at that, the deep ruby red of her open lips tracing two bold lines across the hard plastic as they slid across and slowly melted. Reaching the opposite end, the face was whisked away by the swirling vortex, disappearing into the ocean of flesh.

The hands that washed about within the mass were grabbing at him, trying to find a way to grasp on to the clasps that held his hazmat suit together, longing to reach the person within. Dennis twisted, trying to get himself out, but he was now too far deep to possibly escape. He reached out his hands blindly, trying to feel for anything around that might help him. He brushed something hard.

The wall. That means there should be…

He reached his arm out as far as it could go, patting down the wall as he desperately searched for what he was looking for. He felt two bumps, and pushed the top one.

*DING*

The elevator doors slid open as the rushing rapids of liquified flesh poured in, carrying Dennis along with it. In the commotion, Dennis got himself back on his feet and hammered at the 3rd floor button. The doors closed, cutting off the flow as the elevator began its way slowly upwards and the moaning gradually faded as it moved farther away. He was up to his knees in the small portion of the mass that had accompanied him, but was relieved to see it slowly go inert, like the small piles that dotted the downstairs hall.

*DING*

The doors slid open, causing the pooling flesh to wash out and dissipate. Dennis stepped out into the third floor halls. While still in a bit of a mess, this floor was far less cluttered, and had no sign of the fleshy blobs anywhere, save what had accompanied him. Dennis took the moment to breathe heavily, sweat pouring down his face. He focused on calming himself and letting the cool air at his back be a source of relaxation.

Wait.

I can feel the air.

Dennis immediately reached around with his gloved arms and felt behind him. With a sense of dread, he prodded around as his back before finding the foot-long tear that had been ripped open in the chaos downstairs. Needing to inspect the damage further, he unclasped the suit and tore it off. His heart stopped when he saw himself utterly coated in the puttylike liquid, having gone unnoticed alongside the already wet sensation of sweat caused by the scorching heat of the building. Already fearing what he would see, he knelt down and spat. A drop of tan liquid sputtered out and splashed on the floor. He slid down the wall, collapsing into a seated position with his legs straight out.
Dennis’ stomach burned. Having been in all manner of horrific situations during his time as an emergency responder, he knew that it wasn’t nerves. He was changing. He could feel his insides begin to churn as his head felt light and airy. He sat in silence, wondering if he had any options left, when he suddenly detected a new sound.

A faint pitter-patter of bare feet was approaching his way.

Someone was coming, right around from the nearest corner of the hallway. Dennis tried to push himself upwards but found himself lacking the strength to do so. The wet sounds drew closer as Dennis pushed himself backwards against the wall, trying to get some distance. The steps stopped, and was then proceeded by a soft squeaking sound. A head popped around the corner.

“Heya!”

The voice and head belonged to a young woman, someone Dennis guessed was in their mid-20s. Her head poked in sideways from around the corner, with just an inch or so of neck visible. Dennis was immediately drawn to how cute she was, especially after the harrowing experiences he had gone through already. She had a medium-length, disorganized wave of frizzy blonde hair and a smattering of freckles, just below her shiny green eyes. She looked as if she would fit the classic Southern Belle stereotype, if said Belle had just woken up late for work. Her voice was dripping with honey as she spoke with with a tone as sweet as the iced tea she likely preferred.

“I thought I heard those folks making a ruckus downstairs! You must be one of those doctor fellas I saw pull in!”

Her head disappeared around the corner for a moment before she walked fully into view. Dennis did a double take as he saw the glistening body that stood before him. Naked and incredibly shiny, her frame defied belief. The curve of her engorged breasts hung heavily on her chest, far bigger than her short stature would typically allow. She walked right up to him and squatted low before letting her pleasantly pillowy bottom drop to the floor with a soft plop. She shuffled her seated self up close to Dennis, tracing a finger down his arm and scooping off some of the fleshy putty that coated him.

“My my… they really did have their way with you down there…” her eyes swept across him, looking closer at the skin underneath. She let out a lusty chuckle.

“...and it seems you didn’t put up much of a fight- just look at that shine!” Dennis’ attention was whisked away to examine his arm, which, as she indicated, gleamed with the same tacky shine that was found on every fleshy surface found dotted around the hospital, this woman included. The woman nimbly curled up closer, flexibly positioning her face just away from his ear. She dragged out her breathy words, the heat of her voice tingling his softening ear.

“You, mister… are going to get as soft… and as squishy… and as sensitive as the rest of us…”

She gave the glob on her finger a playful lick as the distant sounds of the moaning collective rose in the distance before dying down again.

Dennis finally found the strength to raise his voice. “That thing down there… I’m going to become like it?” His skin crawled. He didn’t dare prod, but he could already feel a looseness to the muscles in his arms and legs, a looseness that was spreading throughout his entire body with a dull vibration.

“That thing down there is just regular folks like you or I.” She lifted herself away from him, and crossed her arms. “This gumminess started just yesterday. Everyone was kind of just confused at becoming squishy at first, but then one visitor started getting… intimate with her spouse, and well…” The woman grinned perversely at the memory. “The sight of those two fucking each other into paste kind of got the rest of the building going. Oh god, it’s been hours now… I wonder when they’ll settle down…”

“And you didn’t join them?”

She grinned maniacally “Oh, I joined- I just didn’t seem to melt the same way everyone else did. I certainly changed though, just watch…” With just a moment’s thought, the strange young woman’s extended legs shot across the hall, gaining foot upon foot as they skidded across the slick tile. She tried desperately to keep a straight face as she stretched, the sensation of which clearly overloading her senses. She bit her lip in limited restraint, her teeth pressing little indents into the achingly soft flesh. Forcing herself to stop, her legs now tapered off a good 15 feet away from her as she panted heavily to regain her focus.

Dennis watched in awe as the impossible sensuality of everything he was seeing began to burn away the fear of the situation he was in. With her attention elsewhere, he roughly pinched at his forearm in curiosity. Despite the force between his fingers, he felt none of the squeezing pain that he would have expected. Intrigued by this woman’s incredible ability to stretch, he moved his hand gently, pulling at the small fold of flesh. He managed just an inch before a sudden, knee-buckling impact of pleasure hit, causing him to let his fingers slip. The small fold snapped back somewhat as he choked back a small cry of pleasure. The woman, having gotten a grip on her composure, turned back to face him and continued.

“To think- I got sent here three days ago after I got in a car crash. Legs broken in two places; they said I probably wouldn’t walk again for months. I bet the doctors would love to get this shit under an x-ray…” She gave a kick of her legs, causing a waving motion to travel down their ropy lengths. She shivered. “Everything- everything feels this good.”

The woman stared intently at Dennis, only to be met with a blank expression. She let out a sigh. “Look- I know more people are coming. I know they’ll try and fix and prod at whatever fucked-up supervirus this is. I know there are a bunch of folks down there who will eventually want to get their own bodies back. But the thing is, this is the most fun I’ve had in years…” Reaching down with her arms, she grabbed hold of where her knees ought to have been and began the slow process of reeling back, hand-over-hand, the incredible lengths of leg that she now possessed. She continued talking, but now had to pause with each tug as she frequently ran out of breath due to a mixture of exertion and stimulation.

“And now…” *tug* “that you’re here…” *tug* “it seems like I’ll have one- more- shot…” She took a moment to catch her breath, “to make the most of this situation…” Her legs now back to their normal sizes, she raised herself to a kneeling position and edged right up against him, her torso stretching alongside his chest at a glacial pace.

Dennis gave a herculean effort to try and ignore the sliding feeling of her smooth form against his. “W- well I’m sorry… I just don’t see myself wanting to…” He cleared his throat and wiped at his brow, brushing aside several distinctly tan drips as he did so.

“I don’t have any interest in taking pleasure with this dangerous disease.” He stated boldly.

The woman didn’t say anything, her neck silently stretching out to look him dead in the eye. Glancing down, she deliberately looked at the pinched fold of skin Dennis had thought would go unnoticed. She looked back up into his face, pursing her lips as she cocked an eyebrow.

“Not interested, you say?”

“Err, well… I was accidentally… I- I had an itch you see-”

The woman rolled her eyes, reached one arm over, grabbed at the fold, and yanked with all her might.

Dennis broke.

“P- please…?”

Holding her arm in place for an agonizingly long time, she watched as Dennis’ eyes began to water as he quivered in place.

“I- need… I-”

She released the fold, letting it droop slowly to the floor. Her expression brightened back up to the cheery smile she introduced herself with.

“Good, now THAT’S the attitude!.”

Dennis sat quietly, not believing the series of events that had led him to this point. The woman just smiled, a slight crazed hunger in her eyes.

“Take off your clothes, rip them off if you have to- because when I’m through with you, they will either not fit…” she gestured towards her superhumanly-endowed breasts, “...or you won’t even have a shape to put them on.” Dennis hastily complied, taking off the simple button-down and cargo shorts he had worn under the suit, the thought of either option that she had listed wracking his mind as he reclined on the slick floor.

She pounced the very moment he was exposed, jumping upon him without a care for how she landed. Landing on his chest with a heavy, wet clap, Dennis was winded by the impact as he felt his chest distort by several inches. Her hands landed in an equally graceless manner, one bouncing off the floor as the other pressed down into his elbow, causing it to hyperextend. Despite his body’s newfound willingness to be bent in such a way, Dennis couldn’t help but cry out in absolute surprise, his expectation of blunt pain being met instead by a crashing euphoria as his physiology took a sick pleasure towards its own destruction.

The two’s faces were nearly adjacent, causing their lower halves to be somewhat misaligned for any possibilities of penetration they might have had in mind. The woman waited patiently for Dennis to get over the sensation of his newly-flexed arm, but as he just lay there panting, she realized that she would have to take a bit of initiative. Taking advantage of her stretchable limbs, she lengthened each one out by several feet, staving off the pleasure with a mental promise of even bigger things to come. Each of her limbs coiled countlessly about his counterparts, tightening with a vice grip and squeezing the appendages thinner and thinner. With a burst of energy from her core, she crunched, pulling her, and Dennis’ legs upwards.

While she simply bent her nearly endlessly flexible body to adjust to the shift, Dennis’ continually softening body was not so lucky. With his entire lower half shoved upwards, his torso compacted, the puttylike flesh squeezing together and extruding outwards. Now reduced to nearly the same height as his partner, the two’s parts aligned as her slit began to drip with anticipation.
Dennis however, now reeling at yet another distortion of his form, was still in no position to properly initiate anything as he lay still, nearly half unconscious from the bursting impacts of sensation that accompanied every change she inflicted on him. She blew a few wayward locks of hair out of her eyes, beginning to get frustrated.

“It’s hardly polite to be making a lady like myself do all the work, but I suppose I’ll do what I must.”

Not releasing a single limb from its coils, she simply extended one arm even further and snaked it downwards. Blindly grasping about for a few seconds, it took a few tries for her to find what she was looking for. She flexed her fingers hungrily before going in for the kill. With a crushing grip, she snatched his shaft in one decisive motion. Without a moment’s hesitation or a hint of remorse, she yanked.

Dennis’ eyes shot open, the intense precision of this new sensation breaking him out of his stupor.
Having drawn him out several inches beyond his human maximum, the woman greedily stuffed herself, taking in a great fistful of his manhood as her inner walls bulged to accommodate.

Finally connected, Dennis’ newly gummified body began to tremble with activity. His still-softening limbs were squeezed even tighter by the coils as he thrusted weakly, held back by his misshapenly smushed torso. Seeing his problem, the woman took the effort to provide her own motion, using her lengthy appendages to rock herself over him again and again.

Dennis could feel himself start to fall apart under her grip. A wet feeling, not dissimilar to coming out of the shower enveloped him as he felt the entirely alien sensation of bits of his very being slip away and drip to the floor. Acknowledging his inevitable fate as just another fleshy blob to be scattered about, he redoubled his efforts in thrusting into her pliable embrace. His body reacted in turn, channeling his mass into his already overstretched rod.

The monolithic organ doubled, tripled in size as the woman was forced to reshape herself in reaction, the intensity of doing so causing her to almost let her coiling limbs shake loose.
“Finally having some fun with it, are we? I think it’s time to see just how stretchy you can get!”
Tightening her grasp further as his limbs softened to a claylike degree, she pulled upwards on his torso, bending the two at a right angle. Their legs on the floor, Dennis was bent forward as the woman bent reversely in an utterly backbreaking curve as they found themselves facing “upright”.
The woman stretched her torso forward as their lower halves churned in place. Her torso arced through the air, staying smooth and full as she extended herself further and further. Dennis wasn’t as lucky. Reacting in a far more tactile manner, his torso was drawn thinner and thinner until a bare thread of his ductile flesh connected his halves.

The two slammed into the doors of the elevator, the woman's weight pressing his delicate flesh up against the cool steel, his form threatening to degenerate into an amorphous blob at any moment as his loosening flesh smeared across the plating. Many feet away, their lower halves thrusted against one another at an increasing tempo, the solidity of Dennis’ said half deteriorating at a worrying rate. The thin strand that Dennis’ torso consisted of began to droop.

Stretched and squeezed to his absolute limits, Dennis felt the onset of his orgasmic release, his body unable to go any further.

His comically oversized member twitched within her as his puttylike form gave one last attempt at stiffness, his mast standing defiant as he shot off a mighty load. His lower form collapsed, his legs and waist sinking into the floor as a pile of mush, drenching the woman’s coiled legs in his own fluid form. The wire-thin connection holding his top and bottom together tapered off as his completely amorphous lower half finished its transition into complete homogeneity. The last indication of solidity being his manhood, which sunk like a ships mast into his pooling form.
The woman, still holding Dennis’ now dazed form up against the elevator doors, was in the intense throes of her own climax, her arms extending wildly as yet more loops closed around his upper body. Her legs, with nothing for them to wrap about, scrambled erratically on the floor as the gravity took hold of the now unsupported duo. The two came tumbling down, dashing their happily distorted forms across the tile.

The two lay there for hours, the overpowering potency of their new sexual pleasure systems keeping them incapacitated as steady streams of their juices pooled out, surrounding the two masses of gummy flesh and the long coils of limbs that connected them.

Night fell as the cool air finally gave the woman the push she needed to get herself back together, as her yards upon yards of flesh began to stir.

“Hmm- fell apart already?” She clicked her tongue as she drew every extended part of her anatomy inwards, collapsing back into her augmented, but human, frame. She stood over the two small piles of Dennis’ flesh, baring a saccharine grin as she watched his last few features fade away. “Well, it seems like I’ll have to continue looking for someone who shares my… resistance after all…” She turned to leave, but felt a momentary pang of guilt for leaving the poor man behind. She turned back and sighed.

“Although, I suppose I could do just ONE more favor before I leave…”
____________________________________________________________________________

*Scrape… scrape… squish…* *DING*

*Scrape… scrape… squish…* *DING*

*Scrape… scrape… squish…* *DING*

The repeated series of noises looped throughout the third floor of the hospital. Dennis’ amorphous blob of a body was gathered up and placed in the elevator doorway, the doors opening and closing upon him in an endless pattern that sent his body quivering with each impact long into the early hours of the morning.

____________________________________________________________________________

EPILOGUE

Kenny, by some miracle, remained uninfected, escaped, and stood guard to inform the full response team about the wandering “melting collective”, as some of the doctors would later go on to call it. Keeping close observation on the building, the team waited until the collective finally seemed to enter a state of rest before attempting any sort of evacuation. The entire operation of extracting the gummified population took several days to undertake, and it wouldn’t be until several weeks later that the techniques needed to properly separate everyone and ensure that separated masses were properly re-integrated to the right people were developed.

The woman, who wished to remain anonymous in any news reports, proved critical to researchers working on a cure, her genetic immunity to melting providing invaluable data that would later form the backbone of the reforming treatment which would become the standard in future instances of the disease.

Other outbreaks soon began to pop out around the world, eventually leading to nearly 10% of the world’s population catching the disease, but fortunately, news of the “St. Rose Incident” caught the world by fire and most instances were able to be remedied in a far more calm and organized manner.

Later years would see the development of further treatments, controversy, and an emerging subculture of “Gummy-lovers”. The long term effects of the disease on society are still unknown,  but Gummies and the uninfected alike remain optimistic for what lays in store.