Guy and Mandeela have dinner with a work friend, his wife, and their parasitic alien baby. The tender evening convinces the couple. On the other side of four abdominal eruptions, they too will have a family. The procedure is called PIPS-Plasmanellid Implantation Pregnancy Sequence--but the couple will not know what a plasmanellid is, or the true toll of the eruptions, until one of them is dead. Mystery shrouds the conception technology, which is not administered by a hospital, but a church--a cult that keeps an unholy secret chained in a cave. *** was originally published as an audio series on podcast. It is collected here with an additional afterword on the biographical inspiration for the story.