1-2. school daze
3. the maud couple
4. fake it 'til you make it
5. grannies gone wild
6. surf and/or turf
7. horse play
8. the parent map
9. non-compete clause
10. the break up breakdown
11. molt down
12. marks for effort
13.
the mean 614. a matter of principals
15. the hearth's warming club
16. friendship university
17. the end in friend
18. yakity-sax
19. on the road to friendship
20. the washouts (episode)
21. a rockhoof and a hard place
Same!
[ METAGAMING REMOVED ]
Spoilered: Body horror, vulgar, mind stuff, remote control, personality alteration, expansion, violence against something non-human, dark.
âWhere are they loading these from?â Selene whispered. âI donât see any equipment. Just⊠gross stuff.â
âWhat kind of gross stuff?â Darius asked, struggling to maintain composure and situational awareness as he backed out of the truckâs cargo hold.
âRemember the movie Aliens? When Ripley goes looking for Newt? Itâs that.â
âOh. Shit,â Darius said as he noticed the irregular shapes that constituted the ceiling of their location. It seemed to be a single, giant, bowel-like tube affixed to the ceiling haphazardly, silently pulsing and contracting along its length. something heavy was lowering down to the floor level near them; a terminal end with an obvious sphincter. They watched in captivated horror as it retracted, revealing another pod like the ones Darius had just dispatched, then withdrew to the ceiling again. As their eyes followed it up, Darius nearly lost it. Selene grabbed his arm and squeezed. They were looking at a spread out, distorted, but unmistakableâŠ. face. Its lips were pulled back and its jaws didnât line up anymore, teeth poked out in random directions. But its eyes, small and normal, stared directly at them.
BLAM
The roomâs heaving and churning stopped. The tube on the ceiling began to slump and pull away, its grip failing. Selene tried to pull Darius out but he insisted on finishing the freshly-laid pod. The two barely escaped into a hallway before tons of mutant flesh impacted with a heavy THUD behind them. Somehow they could see through illusory darkness and obscuring phantom walls; the corridors were winding, to be sure, but not a lightless infinite labyrinth. They had been instructed to turn right, pass two left turns, then take the third, and that should bring them toâŠ
âYâknow, ya wee sewer-felchinâ wank-bins, we have a policy here,â the lumbering wall of rough hide and obscuring, wiry white beard said as they rounded the doorway. âYa break it, ya bought it. Ya two owe me some more eggs, and a layer.â
Darius leveled his sword and Selene took aim. âYou the boss here?â Darius asked.
âAinât noâone else but me, laddie,â the beady-eyed troll said, his voice seeming to emanate from within the inert mass of matted white hair on his face. âNow, about my replaceâments. Ya can ask yer friend Alex how we tend ta werk past these issues.â He reached for something he was keeping behind his back. Dariusâs nerve broke. He grabbed Selene by the wrist and bolted out into the hallway. She shouted for him to stop, but he was in a full panic and crying raggedly with his desperate breaths as he tried to pump his legs to safety.
He ran into a wall that wasnât supposed to be there. It was hairy. Wiry. Coarse. He recoiled from the impact just as much as from fear, and as he drew back into Selene he saw their antagonist standing before them. How did he get there so fast? Darius couldnât process it. He turned to run the other way, but Selene ripped her hand out of his and took aim. A heavy, club-like fist crumpled her, evicting the breath from her lungs and refusing to take new tenants. Her vision dimmed and little black commas seemed to swim across her eyes.
But her grunt caused Darius to brake and spin around. The mountain that walked towards him, over the prone form of Selene, was saying things. Questions? Accusations? Gloating? He didnât care, none of it mattered. He lost his nerve and now it was all over. Something something Firmament, something something production. Slowly he was able to process words as they reached him.
â⊠both serve me purposes. And so will tha two of ya. BecauseâŠâ here his clenched fist was raised and outstretched, toe-like talons unfolding to reveal a small disk, dark in color, with four glowing arcs of colored light. Yellow, green, red, and blue. They pulsed, waiting for the words to unleash their warping energies. âSimon-â
The gunshots were muffled by the thick obstacle of Simonsonâs body filling nearly the entire area of the hallway they were in. He didnât shake, didnât shudder, didnât explode in a fountain of gore like in the movies. But he did stop. âS-SimonâŠS-s-â his words were lost in a fizzling sound. Somehow his malfunction prompted Darius to swing with a practiced arc, nitro-fueled by desperate energy, which cleaved the meaty mitt halfway down to the wrist and jostled the strange, glowing disk to the floor. It hit with a hollow, plastic sound.
Simonson stood there, dumb and immobile. His neckless thumb-like head nodded. One of his eyes fell out and rolled with a smooth motion on the floor. A marble. It left a patch of smooth skin behind. No sockets. The head slumped again, but not, Darius saw, from gravity. It was being tugged. The swollen growth flipped forward, leaving no neck stump in the shirt. Just more smooth skin. It hung and swung from the inert body, a dark patch on the underside where the throat should have been. The beard reared up and the head quivered, shook, and expanded⊠contracted⊠twisted where the four thickly-furred white legs curled and relaxed, loosening their grip on the stump of a body. Like a spider lowering itself from a strand of silk, the beard and head rappelled down the torso and thick legs of Simonsonâs fleshy, headless frame on a cable made of glistening red and black nerves and veins. The four legs, each one quarter of the beardâs fluffy volume, groped for the hard floor below.
Darius suddenly imagined a dried spider husk, pinned to a collectorâs mount in a frame. He flicked his arm and made one of his own, pinning the hair flesh-spider to the un-piloted Simonson body. It twitched, it writhed, it twisted its body on the blade like a wheel on an axle, sputtering green foam dripping from the wound, and then from tears and pores and openings in the spider-thingâs body⊠soaking its white leg fur. The eyeless thing contorted until something opened. It drew breath. Ya done broke it now, laddie. Hereâs mud in yer eye, something thought angrily into his brain. But that was all the warning he needed. He dodged as the green wad of snot sailed past him and splattered on the wall to his right. The furry legs of the spider-thing twitched and curled in, nerves firing randomly as whatever coordinated them shut down. Whatever fluid filled the sack-like body of the thing was clearly leaking out and vaporizing in the foam that still erupted from its pierced body like an overloaded dishwasher.
It was quiet for a full minute before Darius worked up the courage to sneak past the inert, dead things in the hallway. He rounded the hulking form and saw a wall of green foam running down its back. Selene was laying on the floor, breathing shallow and wet breaths. He ran over and cradled her head, feeling her hand. It was cold. Her skin was pale⊠er than usual. Her were sluggish.
âFucker crunched my ribs,â she said, spots of blood flying out of her lips.
A loud explosion roared through the hallway. Jay was there, rushing over with a first aid kit. âBroken ribs,â Darius muttered to him.
âWe have to get her back. Dev?â he said to nobody in particular.
âI got you locked,â Dariusâs father said from some hidden device on Jayâs person. âDarius, can you hear me?â
âYeah, Pops,â Darius said, his voice quavering. âI fucked up. I fucked up, Iâm sorry, I fucked up I fucked up fucked up fucked-â
â-up I fuckedâŠâ He was holding Selene in the basement game room, some of the house staff standing around. They instantly dove in to assess the two, put Selene on a stretcher, and wrapped Darius in a blanket as he kept apologizing with his eyes fixed on the floor.
Darius knew that to even get this far, it had taken a full day of intensive âtrainingâ and counter-programming by members of Firmament, under advisement from his father (who seemed to have peculiarly insightful wisdom to offer). It was Jay, Dr. Hutchins, whoâd had the idea of unlocking the ârootâ password to her. Of course she wouldnât just give it, but with what he called âprompt engineering,â he coaxed her into unlocking the porn folder on Alexâs laptop, slowly and with the password visible, so that it could be written down. Then he tried the phrase âCorrect horse battery stapleâ on her. She acknowledged the password. Score one for lousy OpSec, right?
But even ârootâ access only allowed so much influence. When the Alex-alike clone had been killed, the tablet heâd brought with him stopped working. So now they were stuck trying to fight her âsettingsâ with the much weaker influence of spoken commands and suggestions. What theyâd ended up with by the time Darius came to visit was a decent approximation of the Lexi heâd met at the mall a few weeks ago, except physically. And, they told him, she would always have those âservice rolesâ the fake Alex had instilled in her, lurking below the surface. At lest until his father and some of the others at Firmament could find some way to reverse the process at the same level Simonson used on her in the first place.
âSo you donât remember being Alex at all?â Darius asked, his mood sinking.
âItâs not that I donât remember my life. I remember growing up, meeting you, all the shit we used to do, all of it. I remember being a guy at the time, too. Itâs just that when I try to remember what my name was back then, itâs literally a blank. I reach for it and itâs justâŠ.â she paused, letting the space paint the picture. âSo you tell me my name was ⊠that, but it doesnât connect. Even now, try and tell me my name is that word.â
âAlex, your name is Alex.â
âOkay, have me repeat it.â
âRepeat after me,â Darius said, then with deliberate slowness, âMy name is Alex Alverson.â
âMy name is Pr- ⊠â she trailed off. âWell, you know. It just doesnât work. Itâs impossible for me to do it.â
âSo what -is- your name, then?â
âPrincess Sugartits,â Princess Sugartits said matter-of-factly. âBut I also answer to Sugartits, Honeysnatch, Bitch, Babe, and Lexi the Magical Unicorn,â she rattled off without even blinking.
âThatâs fucked up,â Darius said when he finally understood that this wasnât some kind of amnesia, or learning disability, but an ongoing psychological barrier.
âYeah. But you know what the most fucked up part about that is?â she asked. âI donât even want that name.â
âWhy not? Donât you want to get back to normal?â Darius asked.
âMostly, exceptâŠâ Princess Sugartits paused, bit her lip, and mulled over what she was about to say. âLook, thereâs something I realized when I started hanging out with you guys again after a few years apart. Back then, the person I was before all this happened? I hate him. He never grew up. What he wanted is what made me like this,â she said, motioning to her entire body. âIâm not exaggerating. Whatever psycho-whatsits that thing pumped into me, it literally just made me into the things I wanted the most. And what I wanted was a huge-breasted personal slut, and an Internet Pony toy. Do you know how humiliating it is to be confronted with that kind of pathetic entitlement? To understand what you expected of people, and the world in general, and find out how fucking awful it all is? That Master- well, I guess I can say the user alex alverson who had me trapped and had his way with me in that apartment? That was just the old me, deep down inside. And to make matters worse, he was a better me than I was. He had a great body, a huge dick, a car, a good relationship with both my parents, and he had a perfect plan to sit around all day playing video games while his perfectly obedient fuck-toy-slash-housekeeper catered to his every whim, no matter how degrading, and sold her sex appeal online to pay the rent. That? That was all me,â she said, her face wet and her eyes stinging. âSo no, I donât want to be anything to do with that shitstain. I was a better person when I was Lexi. JustâŠâ she was bawling now, ugly crying. âJust c-c-c-call me L-L-L-Lex-si, ok-k-k-kay?â She sobbed into a pillow for a few moments, while Darius turned his head. Eventually he heard her continue. âI know you wonât call me any of my other names, and I canât blame you, so just call me⊠Lexi⊠please?â
âI think itâll do in a pinch,â Lexi said reluctantly, having to throw herself into odd postures to counterbalance the weight of the fleshy pair. They weighed as much as the rest of her combined did at this point. âBut Iâm not sure even a reinforced corset would do much better. Itâs just⊠too much, you know? And theyâre still⊠still⊠gettingâŠâ
Selene slipped her hand into Lexiâs and wrapped the other one around her shoulder, leaning her head in close for a cheek-to-cheek nuzzle, hoping to head off those tears at the pass. After a while, they tried the shirt theyâd made together from a custom pattern. Selene helped as much as she could, as long as it didnât require her to bend over or hold heavy things and risk her rib cageâs recovery.
Now he could safely acclimate again, faster than ever, and make his escape. Mirror-mall was nice this time of orbit, and Firmament couldnât tread there for long. Heâd have to be sneaky to make it there, but once he was in the clear⊠he had some rowdy customers to bring under heel.