"I'll consider these options," Dan responded without feeling any of them sounded ideal.
Impish, as always, Kat suggested, "I'd think you'd just get yourself caught. You've admitted you want that buttery goodness of finding yourself a lobster dinner."
"Will you please shut up?" Dan almost felt his mental blush warming his entire exoskeleton. "What if mom can pick up on your thoughts?"
"I'm good at keeping them hidden." Kat said. "When I want to."
Although Dan had fully meant to weigh his options, sometimes fate takes control. Dan's antennae waved. He figured the appendages were moving in response to his irritation with his sister, but then they picked up something.
His lobster body wanted, suddenly and urgently, to concentrate. "Kat, give me some time to think," he communicated.
"Don't take too long," Kat shut down the conversation. Or at least she produced a click to lull her brother into that belief. In reality, gently picking up the line again, she put out some mental tendrils to eavesdrop on her brother's basic emotional state. Kat told herself she just wanted to monitor Dan in case he found himself in jeopardy.
Dan's gills fluttered in agitation as he took some rapid breaths. He needed to calm down, but every twitch of his antennae seemed to make him more excited, more unsettled.
As yet unseen, another lobster waved her own antennae. She created an extremely accurate "image" of the object of her search hunkered down in a cozy nook in the rocks.
Success! Having determined the concealed crustacean was male, she went about releasing a cocktail of sex pheromones in the direction of the male's cave. In less polite terms, she released the pheromones with her urine, which she leaked from glands along her scaly head. The current carried the mixture into the cave, where huddled Dan received the heady mix with his own finely-tuned receptors and found himself instantly relaxing and letting go of his litany of woes.
Kat correctly recognized the jumble of intense emotions. She couldn't help but needle him with one last remark. "At least be a gentlemen and buy her a lobster dinner afterwards!"
Dan, drugged into a stupor, broadcast a mental grunt at his sister, but Kat had already ended the connection. Dan, earlier a timid, quivering mass of plump flesh and thin shell, watched without protest as a slightly smaller lobster arrived on his doorstep, as it were, and took a tentative peek within the cave.
Wary, she released another squirt of pheromones into the water and further reduced Dan to a slave of his own passions. Now, when she felt satisfied she had the male under her control, she entered his lair. Nature had conspired to help the female lobster acquire a protector during the time of her molt, when she was most exposed and defenseless. As she had done several previous times, she would find a candidate, Dan in this case, stun him with a blast of mind-addling pheromones, and take up residence with him while her new shell gradually hardened over the course of two weeks. In return for two weeks of protection, she would eventually grant her chosen mate a mere eight seconds of lobster lovemaking.
Dan's antennae twitched almost spasmodically as the female lobster sidled into the cavern, which became a little more cramped with two lobsters in occupancy. Not that Dan cared. His mind had melted down into a befuddled crustacean bliss, helped by an occasional leak of hormones from the female.
He felt himself raise his claws, which she met by bumping her own claws against his. Dan found himself grappling with the female, getting himself into position to stroke her shell with his front pair of walking legs. He kept stroking her, the shell to shell contact causing a cascade of more intoxicating feelings in his aroused lobster body.
Basically, Dan found himself extremely horny, and the female lobster intended to keep him in that state for the next couple of weeks as she molted and acquired a new exoskeleton. Having found her mark, she shed her skin and invaded Dan's cozy bachelor's den.