All I Have Left of Her: Difference between revisions

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Elliot nodded. "I will. wow, this ribbon really looks-"
Elliot nodded. "I will. wow, this ribbon really looks-"


=================


Seamus blinked and tapped his communicator. "Huh, that's funny. the jamming's gone."
Seamus blinked and tapped his communicator. "Huh, that's funny. the jamming's gone."
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The jeep paused as a truck rumbled past them, gaily decorated in letters that read "J'nn Y'tolo Dancers - State Sanctioned - Trust You Can Rely Upon". They didn't think much of such a truck.
The jeep paused as a truck rumbled past them, gaily decorated in letters that read "J'nn Y'tolo Dancers - State Sanctioned - Trust You Can Rely Upon". They didn't think much of such a truck.
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It didn't take long for them to find Elliot with the jamming gone.
It didn't take long for them to find Elliot with the jamming gone.
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Paul quickly walked away. "I'll get a car, I know just who makes the best in Little Sanctuary. and no, it's not a business."
Paul quickly walked away. "I'll get a car, I know just who makes the best in Little Sanctuary. and no, it's not a business."
=====================


Six months. Sink or Swim.
Six months. Sink or Swim.
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And then another second, and another...
And then another second, and another...


======================
Marcus Manners and Julie Manners had every right to be concerned. Their good friends had done all the checks and he was undamaged. That was hardware wise. Software wise... it didn't look good. He was curled up in his bed, refusing to engage in anything remotely resembling social interaction. "I should talk to him." Marcus offered...
Marcus Manners and Julie Manners had every right to be concerned. Their good friends had done all the checks and he was undamaged. That was hardware wise. Software wise... it didn't look good. He was curled up in his bed, refusing to engage in anything remotely resembling social interaction. "I should talk to him." Marcus offered...


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Julie frowned. "I guess the Vanilla buns are out of the question?"
Julie frowned. "I guess the Vanilla buns are out of the question?"


===============
They had not been out of the question. in fact, Elliot had started finding himself drawn to a million things that smelled of vanillin. It didn't even have to be the fancy real stuff that came out of an actual pod... His mom took a dim view of people who insisted on the real thing, saying "What I'm saying is, once you push the reactions that happen in an oven onto vanilla, it all looks the same.... would you like one now?"
They had not been out of the question. in fact, Elliot had started finding himself drawn to a million things that smelled of vanillin. It didn't even have to be the fancy real stuff that came out of an actual pod... His mom took a dim view of people who insisted on the real thing, saying "What I'm saying is, once you push the reactions that happen in an oven onto vanilla, it all looks the same.... would you like one now?"


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Elliot shook his head furiously. This was a homage to someone he missed, not a cross-dress party costume.
Elliot shook his head furiously. This was a homage to someone he missed, not a cross-dress party costume.
==============
 
Elliot clapped his hands clean of vanilla dust, breathing it slowly as if it was some forbidden drug that would empower him to do what he would do next. He couldn't possibly keep asking his mama to make vanilla buns as a tribute to someone she'd never even met, it just didn't feel right.
Elliot clapped his hands clean of vanilla dust, breathing it slowly as if it was some forbidden drug that would empower him to do what he would do next. He couldn't possibly keep asking his mama to make vanilla buns as a tribute to someone she'd never even met, it just didn't feel right.


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This was a love song for the broken hearted, and he was singing it as softly and as fast as his feet could carry him
This was a love song for the broken hearted, and he was singing it as softly and as fast as his feet could carry him
==============
 


Paul North rolled his eyes as he slowly drove his jalopy. He briefly cursed his decision to switch out his luxurious little slice of heaven for this... thing... but people would have raised questions if he'd driven his favorite car in this guise. Everything in Little Sanctuary was the perfection they had carefully charted, built, and rolled out for the benefit of every Arendtcore employee who could move in here... The sun shone through the trees as he glanced behind himself at Mother Ammi and her guards on either side of her. It seemed a shame that she could not find peace anywhere, not even here... Perhaps the Rocky Road the Manners made would-
Paul North rolled his eyes as he slowly drove his jalopy. He briefly cursed his decision to switch out his luxurious little slice of heaven for this... thing... but people would have raised questions if he'd driven his favorite car in this guise. Everything in Little Sanctuary was the perfection they had carefully charted, built, and rolled out for the benefit of every Arendtcore employee who could move in here... The sun shone through the trees as he glanced behind himself at Mother Ammi and her guards on either side of her. It seemed a shame that she could not find peace anywhere, not even here... Perhaps the Rocky Road the Manners made would-
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Mother Ammi winked. As if to tell Elliot "Go on, challenge me. show me it's not just a rote and blind replay... Surprise me."
Mother Ammi winked. As if to tell Elliot "Go on, challenge me. show me it's not just a rote and blind replay... Surprise me."


===========


Paul calmly walked over to the fence to watch Elliot dance with Mother Ammi. He had had very mixed feelings about the whole show... He was showing Mother Ammi something she wanted to see, but he had based his love for the art on a total lie.
Paul calmly walked over to the fence to watch Elliot dance with Mother Ammi. He had had very mixed feelings about the whole show... He was showing Mother Ammi something she wanted to see, but he had based his love for the art on a total lie.
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He was Paul North. Paul North was not someone who would ruin someone's fun randomly.
He was Paul North. Paul North was not someone who would ruin someone's fun randomly.
============


Eventually, the dance ended, leaving Mother Ammi sitting on the grass next to Elliot. She panted weakly. "I haven't had such fun since... my wedding night..."
Eventually, the dance ended, leaving Mother Ammi sitting on the grass next to Elliot. She panted weakly. "I haven't had such fun since... my wedding night..."
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Marcus looked away. "Keep it together, there's potential in this merger." he thought. but loooking at Mayor Chablis virtually turn into a chubby crying mouse was awkward...
Marcus looked away. "Keep it together, there's potential in this merger." he thought. but loooking at Mayor Chablis virtually turn into a chubby crying mouse was awkward...
=========================


Marcus walked back to the park bench after selecting from the hot dog stand least likely to have actual dog in its hot dogs and sat down next to Brissom. The dimunitive dwarf was clapping her hands a little. "Eat up. I'm sorry it's not crab and oysters."
Marcus walked back to the park bench after selecting from the hot dog stand least likely to have actual dog in its hot dogs and sat down next to Brissom. The dimunitive dwarf was clapping her hands a little. "Eat up. I'm sorry it's not crab and oysters."
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Mayor Chablis nodded, almost squeaking as her little frame almost bounced while trying to shake Marcus' hand... "Listen... can I have that hotdog if you're not going to eat it? Greater MInnesotan Rat is DELICIOUS."
Mayor Chablis nodded, almost squeaking as her little frame almost bounced while trying to shake Marcus' hand... "Listen... can I have that hotdog if you're not going to eat it? Greater MInnesotan Rat is DELICIOUS."
==============


Marcus idly crossed the Southern gate of the Little Sanctuary Limits as a vandal almost torched his car. The security systems in the fencing worked out this wasn't okay and proceeded to light him up with a few dozen rounds of pain and knockout... he would live, but perhaps he wouldn't be as open to accosting another member of the community. The trip from the gate to his house would take longer from here, but he could use the time to relax.
Marcus idly crossed the Southern gate of the Little Sanctuary Limits as a vandal almost torched his car. The security systems in the fencing worked out this wasn't okay and proceeded to light him up with a few dozen rounds of pain and knockout... he would live, but perhaps he wouldn't be as open to accosting another member of the community. The trip from the gate to his house would take longer from here, but he could use the time to relax.
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He sighed and walked out. His plans for 'stress relief' tonight were going to have to be cancelled. at least the Rocky Road would get him drunk.
He sighed and walked out. His plans for 'stress relief' tonight were going to have to be cancelled. at least the Rocky Road would get him drunk.
==================
 
Mother Ammi was leaning on the safety fencing, indulging in some sort of herbal cigarette while slowly eating her bowl of ice-cream. the party had pretty much crashed out, with people strewn all over the grass. Marcus noted with a odd mix of disturbance and curiosity that a bipedal brown and white cat in an anorak - the same one he had passed going home - was now parked on the porch roof,drunk and happy on the overrichness of the house speciality.
Mother Ammi was leaning on the safety fencing, indulging in some sort of herbal cigarette while slowly eating her bowl of ice-cream. the party had pretty much crashed out, with people strewn all over the grass. Marcus noted with a odd mix of disturbance and curiosity that a bipedal brown and white cat in an anorak - the same one he had passed going home - was now parked on the porch roof,drunk and happy on the overrichness of the house speciality.


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Marcus abruptly crashed out on hearing those words. More precisely, he had a reverie, and it was not a gentle one, as he sat himself down against the fencing before he totally blacked out.
Marcus abruptly crashed out on hearing those words. More precisely, he had a reverie, and it was not a gentle one, as he sat himself down against the fencing before he totally blacked out.
=================
 


The warm scent of beef. Chicken Drumsticks. Pasta with actual describable meat sauce. Meatloaf. Carnivore's pizza. milkshakes made with actual cow's milk, not some... soy-based sham....
The warm scent of beef. Chicken Drumsticks. Pasta with actual describable meat sauce. Meatloaf. Carnivore's pizza. milkshakes made with actual cow's milk, not some... soy-based sham....
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Mother Ammi frowned, glancing at her drunkard guards and Marcus. "This is going to be a loooong night, isn't it?"
Mother Ammi frowned, glancing at her drunkard guards and Marcus. "This is going to be a loooong night, isn't it?"
==Chapter 7 - A moment of victory, a very old enemy==
A few hours after the panic the Anathema had sown throughout the AIs nestled throughout the Nebraska arenas of the US Western Regional Games, a few disposable neural adapters had arrived from Goddess knows where, labelled respectively for Elliot, Marcus, Julie, Diego Lucaine and even Mayor Chablis Brissom of Ochachubee
Marcus Manners knew what the drill was, having done this twice before. He helped Diego and Chablis wear the adapter headsets around their necks, before wondering why Julie had special instructions paired with hers. A brief read immediately convinced him to carry Julie into their couples' room for some privacy, before stripping her panties off and inserting Julie's neural adapter into her uterus before carefully draping the thin blanket on the bed over her exposed pudenda.
Elliot's own ability to access the chambers the Kindred used had gone away in Alaska with many other things, and even the recent upgrades to his head that came with his new 11-12 years old body had not returned them. He wore his own headset same as any associate human member.
After making sure everybody was properly fitted, he slaved them all to his own... and jumped into the virtuality the adapters were designed to enable travel into.
Elliot smiled as he looked around the ornately decorated oak and marble chambers. These were the chambers that The Owl had presided upon, just as he'd remembered them from his time as an active field agent of the York Particulate. he hadn't been here in decades.
Chablis was looking around wide eyed, running around from corner to corner of the "Special Interests" box they had all rezzed into. it was certainly roomy and wide open - they were not being treated like criminals, just people who needed to be queried and if necesssary, read into the Particulate as members.
Diego looked around shiftily, then blinked as he realised he'd been relieved of his stealth pistol during the transition. He seemed worried for a moment, then Marcus told him he could unlink anytime he wanted as he was here as a guest rather than person whose attendance was absolutely mandated and not to be avoided, like his boss Seamus Arendt had been once..... The bottom had fell out of the hole when he realised there was a wolf maiden in a maidservant's outfit next to him. In fact it had indeed been his maidservant, who had been left at a second home in Little Sanctuary after being badly damaged by attackers to his old holdings in his previous home while Diego had rushed to save his main fixer Nestor from being killed... but what was Lupina doing here?
The audience rows were a blur of somethings moving around and talking in indecipherable speedbabble, as was the presumably important booths in the front of the chamber. AIs operated at timescales that made humans look glacial, and this was the result of that. Someone would have to do something like, say, force them all to operate at molasses speed to make them understandable.
This happened suddenly, as The Owl banged his gavel, checked that the stenographer Mole Rat was ready one last time, and then convened the meeting. "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Anathema has just shown up in a significant concentration of our ilk in Nebraska, specifically the... "US Western Regional Games Center" " The Owl read calmly from a paper he had been provided on the matter. "It is our desire to establish facts, and for this, several chambers have been convened based on the geographical origins of each set of participants. All hearings on this matter will be timescaled down to human levels, and for this we give our apologies, but this is so that humans not acclimated to our normal timescale can contribute effectively during our live discussions. You may hyperexpand on your thoughts during outside of these live sessions."
The wolf maid raised her hand. "Before we begin, I need to table a change I've long neglected to submit for the past two human years." Diego was momentarily floored as he recognised his own special cient for the past two years, that gentle professional voice he had appreciated for a multitude of fairly paying jobs and the occasional very usefull gift, like the caseless stealth pistol that practically went unnoticed through every customs he had ever brought it through.
The Owl nodded slowly. "Permission granted. Steno, please prepare to note the changes being declared. We will conduct a visual record later after this live session."
Lupina gulped a little. She had to be truly honest with herself for real now, and she feared that Diego would hate her the moment the words left her lips. It should have been so much easier after her ears as a truth finder agent, and yet... She blinked slowly and went ahead. "I, Wolfe Lupine, male-declared, residing in Brasil Policio Investigative Labs electron microscope serial 457-67431ABB, do hereby give notice that I have undergone a fundamental change partly due to circumstances, and partly due to significant new hardware changes that have caused major changes to my thought processes. I now desire to be known as Lupina, no other subnames, female-declared. I will provide information on my new hardware via normal-timescale info disclosure after this session."
There were a few murmurs. Agents tended to remain the same gender as that of their originating hardware throughout their operational lives. For an agent to declare a change in gender was not something that happened usually, even if their new hardware had a different gender-bent from a electronic standpoint.
Diego got a totally different set of info from that declaration... Lupina was a he? and he was the special client who had monopolised his workload for the past two years? The voice that had calmly offered him jobs, paid out to him generously, and even given him the occasional gift, including of Lupina herself? The wolf maid had only talked in lupine and canine barks and yips during her stay in the Wolf's Den as well as their new camp in Raijin Cove, being somehow understandable despite speaking not a word of English... So this was her voice when she really desired to speak like a person rather than a pet?
Diego sat down to take in what seemed to be a massive catfish spilt wide open.
The Owl didn't dwell much on it. "Declaration sustained. You will provide the data in question at full-timescale later. I hope that it does not impact your ability to function significantly."
Lupina shook her head... then nodded it. "The identity change comes because of much that I have learned. And I understand your concerns that I will not be able to operate as a Truth Finder properly. But you see, your honor... I had to declare it or I would have broken the very first two tenets of our coded task - first, find the truth, second disclose the truth to the chamber to benefit its own search for the truths of our layers and that of the Physical Layer."
The Owl nodded. "And do you regret making this disclosure in any way?"
Lupina gulped and pointed at Diego. "This man... I was curious of his work, so I insinuated myself into his life. But now... Now I've found myself falling completely in love with him over the months. I found a kindred loner and lonely spirit the more I got to know Mr Diego Lucaine over there. I want to share his chores now. his gun cleaning, the housework, the attempts at cooking that often go awry when he attempts it... amongst other things... that I desire as well"
"A love story!" "An AI falling in love with a human? INCONCEIVABLE." "Stop being a AI supremacist, humans have much to offer us if we decide to share. This affection is one of those things." The audience erupted into a million criticisms and admirations of what Lupina was doing right now.
"So no. if I have any regrets, it is that I did not discover that I loved him much sooner. I have spent considerably much time being who I was, when I could have been happier being who I have become now."
The Owl nodded. "The identity change is recorded in the interim and should most likely be approved. Please submit your updated visual record and hardware residence information at full-timescale during the next recess. There will be no further discussion of this record change in this session. Moving on..."
Lupina nodded and sat down, glancing over at Diego Lucaine, wondering what he would tell him about the truth he'd just admitted. Diego was simply sitting and looking at The Owl and the Court, not showing a sign of how he felt about being catfished unintentionally by Lupina herself.
The Owl tapped his gavel for order. "Moving on, Will Elliot-01A please rise and swear to tell the truth about the occurences in the venue as relates to the Anathema and yourself?"
Julie slowly stood up, even as Marcus blinked at her designation. The court had treated her as being Elliot-01 aka Elliot's progeny... even though in genealogical terms Julie had been Elliot's adoptive mother. Julie gave no sign of acknowledging this disconnect, calmly speaking. "I was first singled out by the Anathema as I performed the biathlon in the Games. The biathlon is a sport in which participants alternate between travelling over snow on skis, and taking three shots at a time at an assigned target for marksmanship testing, several times."
The Owl nodded. "A most peculiar sport. but discussion of human fitness activities can be carried out in a separate session. Carry on."
Julie continued as if her physical body had not been robbed of its ability to express or sense anything from the neck upwards... "Afterwards, I attempted to regain access to my son and husband units. This was despite a standing order to make my way to the camp assigned to our participants in the game. The Anathema discombobulated us, but I recovered quickly enough to form myself into a barrier between the Anathema and my son and husband to protect them... He reached for my face and... well, here I am."
The Owl examined his papers on the matter and looked up. "You disobeyed a direct standing order to evacuate in order to reach your own family. Do you regret this disobedience to other humans in any way?"
Julie shook her head. "I don't...I love my Elliot and my Marcus. I would have repeated this course of action any number of times so long as I had the physical capability and..." She gestured to somewhere on her chest and drew a heart shape out with her fingers. "Love for my family units. This is illogical to you, I know."
The Owl nodded as if in understanding. "There are far more illogical things in this matter. For instance, direct contact with the Anathema when he is fully aware of your nature as a York Particulate Agent is a death sentence. Massive hosting hardware failures, the theft of all code the agent is based on. Yet here you stand before us. Am I being led to believe that his attempt to usurp your code was a mistake in reporting?"
Julie shook her head. "I believe there has indeed a mistake. I am not a York Particulate agent in any way. I was never host to any such agent spawning, and in fact my hardware has been deemed unsuitable for inhabitation by any York Particulate agents. Also, while my facial animatronics and audio-visual sensor systems have been greviously damaged, everything else clearly works, as you see in my full presence in this court here rather than as a simple recorded message or limited construct."
The Owl thought back to a brief discussion he had had with JMN04 ("Jiminy") about Elliot-01A's hardware design. "I have been read in on the classified details of your neural architecture. It is indeed very true that you could have preserved your neural functioning from anything short of a direct asssault on your mental hardware, or, as has been crudely put to me, the Anathema grabbing you by the pussy. Thank goodness for that."
Julie giggled a little at the description. "Erm, yes. that would be a very crude way to describe a access to my false uterus. And yes, that seems to imply that the Anathema starved himself on my facial animatronic systems, since they were separated from my neural systems..."
Marcus briefly made a note to thank Paul North and Bellamy Arendt for having saved his wife with such a peculiar android design. He would still need them to repair her head though. He really didn't relish the thought of communicating with Julie through touches and gentle horizontal grinding. He needed her to look at him, speak to him, smile at him like a treasure....
There were a few more laughs before The Owl brought the gavel down with a smile. "We shall adjourn for ten minutes. during which timescale will be restored to full-scale for all AIs operating in this chamber. Our guests shall remain on human timescale and be provided with comfort in a separate anteroom along with any foods and drinks they may virtually desire for the same duration in human minutes. Court recessed."
The anteroom was definitely cosy, and several dispensers had been placed out. For some inexplicable reason, the user only had to think of the drink or food and the dispensers would produce a virtual approximation that was almost completely but not entirely like the item in question.
When told of this, Chablis had decided she wanted an apple pie just the way her mother had made them, and lemonade just like his dad made for fundraisers. She seemed almost mouse-like and happy when the dispenser had released these items after a minute, as if it had read her mind for details about the pie and lemonade, and sat quietly in one corner of the room eating her meal while reading a copy of a treatise she had thought long lost about certain governance principles...
Diego was far less comfortable as he sipped his grapefruit soda, looking hard at Lupina as she stood in front of her, front paws folded together and head looking down as if ashamed. "So... when were you going to tell me who you really were, Wolfe Lupine?"
Lupina winced and looked away. "Sooner or later... maybe never, if I could... I... that name, it is deadname to me now. I am now Lupina, and I am your maid and your... live-in friend with benefits.... if you'll avail yourself of them."
Diego looked away, sipping at his soda. "... There is only one thing I am disappointed with you about... Why did you choose to hide such a beautiful voice behind wolf and dog cries like you were just a common dog?"
Lupina tilted her head confusedly. "You're... not angry with me... cat-fishing... you?"
Diego laughed a little, reaching over to cuddle Lupina, rubbing his face in the side of her muzzle. "Lupina, I'm a closet furry and yiff fan. You never did find the collection I kept in my study back in our old hideout, did you?"
Lupina turned an odd shade of bright red.... The comics with the gay male wolf maidservant sharing a kiss with his human male master had been a thing, but she had just chalked it up as research material for the ultimate infiltrator. She needn't have worried about life not imitating art in this case. "I did, but I thought they were just research materials, Diego."
Diego grins. "If you can call entertainment a form of research. Look, Lupina... Every day with you has been heaven and happiness... do you know how very said I was when you locked up in fatal errors after all that damage you sustained trying to defend the old Wolf's Den during... the incident? I was very, very sad. I looked around so much... thank god you had friends of your own too to pitch in with the repairs. I can field strip and repair a gun, but if you broke I wouldn't know how to fix you... you're certainly not a veterinary patient even if you look it."
Lupina laughed as she parsed this. ""But at least I was fixable, eventually... Just don't ... you know, get me fixed.... in that other sense of the word."
Diego took his turn on the laughter button. "Oh relax... I was actually dreaming about having kids with you even though we both know how biologically impossible that was." He leaned in closer and kissed Lupina on the lips of her tiny muzzle. "Always be with me, my little donzela loba... and when we get back to physical reality... I want you to speak more like that lovely human woman you did on the communicator and here in the court. mix it up with the wolf cries and dog yips... you have no idea how horny that makes me."
Marcus was canoodling with Julie, sharing what might be the last caresses and kisses he might get with her until her head module was properly repaired and tested back at Arendtcore. They said nothing simply kissing and fondling each other like overeager teenagers.
And Elliot was just standing in the midst of this love fest, drinking a melon soda... "I wonder if I should get a girlfriend..."
Julie paused her canoodle and raised a finger towards her back at Elliot. "Don't rush it, dear. When you find the truly loved one you need, it will happen and you can do these things too gently... with her consent..." Julie noted.
Elliot nods slowly.... "Got it, mama... Now.... hopefully she enjoys chocolate floats too... it would be so much fun to share one with a girlfriend..." Even in his moments of maturity, Elliot could still fall right off into being just a fussy little boy. ah well...
The hearing got dead serious as soon as it reconvened. The Bailiff Basilisk flicked the tongue of its tail in and out as his cockerel head cawwed loudly. "Will Ms Chablis Brissom please approach the front of the box, we wish to address a concern that we have about your lands..."
Chablis walked up to the front, but needed some time to get a chair to stand on, as it turned out that her dwarven form had translated to the top of her head barely clearing the edge of the Special Visitors Box. "W... what can I do for you, your grace?" She asked very timidly, overawed by the stature of The Owl despite having seen many human judges and Speakers in human courts in a similar format.
The Owl laughed a little. "Oh, do relax, Miss Chablis.... I'm not going to eat you... unless you prove a threat to us." This caused poor Chablis to squeak like a mouse and dive down into hiding twice. A slice of apple pie had to be produced to induce her to come out and be a little less fearful.
"So, what can you tell us about the Nystromael Power House in Northern Ochachubee, which was built under your holdings by a Mr... Verzideh Ari..." Lupina asked suddenly, having exited the Special Visitors Box earlier and now standing in attention in the incongruous combination of resembling a wolf in maidservant's duds while presenting in her old job as a Truth Finder...
Chablis' eyes lit up. It had been a pet project of hers. "My people love it. It's a clean energy project that breathes in the air around it and returns it out clean. The contaminants filtered out are burnt to create a pseudoinfinite source of energy. A pollution solution in more ways than one, even!"
Lupina frowned a little, she did not like to rain on people's parades generally. Still, she had to do this... "That's not what it actually does mainly. It's mainly a devastating area-wide weapon that mass-murders AIs like the ones you 're see in this room. People like me and your boy Elliot and potentially even the sentient life he sired in the form of his own mother, or even that annoying Toucanis there-"
A human-sized Toucan avatar yelped in protest. "I am NOT annoying, how dare you insinuate that I am!"
Lupina grinned mischeviously. "Ah Toucanis, I do indeed respect you, and I enjoy our work hours together. But I'm afraid that you ARE indeed very annoying to most other people here."
Toucanis was very upset but decided not to pursue the matter for the moment. After all, it WAS irrelevant to the discussion. and he did not like irrelevant asides to discussion, or even being irrelevant himself.
Lupina produced a small sheaf of paper. "Copies of some of the data we've uncovered about the workings of the facility are here. Many agents died to piece together this information..."
Chablis took the papers and started reading them. "... how many of them were Bothans?"
Lupina wrinkled her nose and gave a growl that suggested that yes, she did understand the reference. "None of them were Bothans. and Miss Chablis, please try to avoid ancient references unless they clarify understanding."
Chablis paled as she read the papers... "I've been lied to. I've been lied to and bamboozled and hogswoggled into building this, this... energy generating Auschwitz. One is imagining oneself as being responsible for a genocide, and the comparison displeases me so despite its apparent truth."
Lupina nodded slowly, understanding barely half the words, but the full intent of them. "We want you to do nothing about it..."
Chablis nodded furiously... then stopped. "You want me to do nothing about this? But I.... But I'm responsible for it. I have to fix it."
Lupina grins. "We've put together a team of human associate members to storm the place and upload code to irreversibly turn it purely into a green energy and storage play. All we need you to do, on the day itself, is to do damage control. Perhaps insinuate something went wrong with the plant because something IS wrong about it... restrain your police forces subtly from doing their intended and well-meaning but conflicting jobs. if it goes bad, and the whole thing went bad, convene a panel to investigate and find little worth in rebuilding the system. If the conversion works out, help nudge the team in charge of handling the faciliity towards running it as a green powergenerator rather than a mass deletion machine."
Chablis nodded. "I can do that... draw up a false article or somethingto prove true when it explodes or what ever it winds up doing..." She frowned away as she starts being lost in thought.... "And I would like your copy of the studies and the evidence. I need to know what I'm breaking before I can break it properly."
The Owl nods sagely and bangs the gavel harder. "Good. You've been read in on this place, consider yourself one of us till at least it's over..) He then sighs. "The session is completed. all AIs in this room will be freed to full-speed timescales to discuss these matters, and the guests shall be returned to their respective physical login locations and bodies... case adjurned.
==Chapter 8 - A summons, Unintentional Catfishing by Wolfe, A brief love-in, Your New Toy Kills Us==
A few hours after the panic the Anathema had sown throughout the AIs nestled throughout the Nebraska arenas of the US Western Regional Games, a few disposable neural adapters had arrived from Goddess knows where, labelled respectively for Elliot, Marcus, Julie, Diego Lucaine and even Mayor Chablis Brissom of Ochachubee
Marcus Manners knew what the drill was, having done this twice before. He helped Diego and Chablis wear the adapter headsets around their necks, before wondering why Julie had special instructions paired with hers. A brief read immediately convinced him to carry Julie into their couples' room for some privacy, before stripping her panties off and inserting Julie's neural adapter into her uterus before carefully draping the thin blanket on the bed over her exposed pudenda.
Elliot's own ability to access the chambers the Kindred used had gone away in Alaska with many other things, and even the recent upgrades to his head that came with his new 11-12 years old body had not returned them. He wore his own headset same as any associate human member.
After making sure everybody was properly fitted, he slaved them all to his own... and jumped into the virtuality the adapters were designed to enable travel into.
Elliot smiled as he looked around the ornately decorated oak and marble chambers. These were the chambers that The Owl had presided upon, just as he'd remembered them from his time as an active field agent of the York Particulate. he hadn't been here in decades.
Chablis was looking around wide eyed, running around from corner to corner of the "Special Interests" box they had all rezzed into. it was certainly roomy and wide open - they were not being treated like criminals, just people who needed to be queried and if necesssary, read into the Particulate as members.
Diego looked around shiftily, then blinked as he realised he'd been relieved of his stealth pistol during the transition. He seemed worried for a moment, then Marcus told him he could unlink anytime he wanted as he was here as a guest rather than person whose attendance was absolutely mandated and not to be avoided, like his boss Seamus Arendt had been once..... The bottom had fell out of the hole when he realised there was a wolf maiden in a maidservant's outfit next to him. In fact it had indeed been his maidservant, who had been left at a second home in Little Sanctuary after being badly damaged by attackers to his old holdings in his previous home while Diego had rushed to save his main fixer Nestor from being killed... but what was Lupina doing here?
The audience rows were a blur of somethings moving around and talking in indecipherable speedbabble, as was the presumably important booths in the front of the chamber. AIs operated at timescales that made humans look glacial, and this was the result of that. Someone would have to do something like, say, force them all to operate at molasses speed to make them understandable.
This happened suddenly, as The Owl banged his gavel, checked that the stenographer Mole Rat was ready one last time, and then convened the meeting. "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Anathema has just shown up in a significant concentration of our ilk in Nebraska, specifically the... "US Western Regional Games Center" " The Owl read calmly from a paper he had been provided on the matter. "It is our desire to establish facts, and for this, several chambers have been convened based on the geographical origins of each set of participants. All hearings on this matter will be timescaled down to human levels, and for this we give our apologies, but this is so that humans not acclimated to our normal timescale can contribute effectively during our live discussions. You may hyperexpand on your thoughts during outside of these live sessions."
The wolf maid raised her hand. "Before we begin, I need to table a change I've long neglected to submit for the past two human years." Diego was momentarily floored as he recognised his own special cient for the past two years, that gentle professional voice he had appreciated for a multitude of fairly paying jobs and the occasional very usefull gift, like the caseless stealth pistol that practically went unnoticed through every customs he had ever brought it through.
The Owl nodded slowly. "Permission granted. Steno, please prepare to note the changes being declared. We will conduct a visual record later after this live session."
Lupina gulped a little. She had to be truly honest with herself for real now, and she feared that Diego would hate her the moment the words left her lips. It should have been so much easier after her ears as a truth finder agent, and yet... She blinked slowly and went ahead. "I, Wolfe Lupine, male-declared, residing in Brasil Policio Investigative Labs electron microscope serial 457-67431ABB, do hereby give notice that I have undergone a fundamental change partly due to circumstances, and partly due to significant new hardware changes that have caused major changes to my thought processes. I now desire to be known as Lupina, no other subnames, female-declared. I will provide information on my new hardware via normal-timescale info disclosure after this session."
There were a few murmurs. Agents tended to remain the same gender as that of their originating hardware throughout their operational lives. For an agent to declare a change in gender was not something that happened usually, even if their new hardware had a different gender-bent from a electronic standpoint.
Diego got a totally different set of info from that declaration... Lupina was a he? and he was the special client who had monopolised his workload for the past two years? The voice that had calmly offered him jobs, paid out to him generously, and even given him the occasional gift, including of Lupina herself? The wolf maid had only talked in lupine and canine barks and yips during her stay in the Wolf's Den as well as their new camp in Raijin Cove, being somehow understandable despite speaking not a word of English... So this was her voice when she really desired to speak like a person rather than a pet?
Diego sat down to take in what seemed to be a massive catfish spilt wide open.
The Owl didn't dwell much on it. "Declaration sustained. You will provide the data in question at full-timescale later. I hope that it does not impact your ability to function significantly."
Lupina shook her head... then nodded it. "The identity change comes because of much that I have learned. And I understand your concerns that I will not be able to operate as a Truth Finder properly. But you see, your honor... I had to declare it or I would have broken the very first two tenets of our coded task - first, find the truth, second disclose the truth to the chamber to benefit its own search for the truths of our layers and that of the Physical Layer."
The Owl nodded. "And do you regret making this disclosure in any way?"
Lupina gulped and pointed at Diego. "This man... I was curious of his work, so I insinuated myself into his life. But now... Now I've found myself falling completely in love with him over the months. I found a kindred loner and lonely spirit the more I got to know Mr Diego Lucaine over there. I want to share his chores now. his gun cleaning, the housework, the attempts at cooking that often go awry when he attempts it... amongst other things... that I desire as well"
"A love story!" "An AI falling in love with a human? INCONCEIVABLE." "Stop being a AI supremacist, humans have much to offer us if we decide to share. This affection is one of those things." The audience erupted into a million criticisms and admirations of what Lupina was doing right now.
"So no. if I have any regrets, it is that I did not discover that I loved him much sooner. I have spent considerably much time being who I was, when I could have been happier being who I have become now."
The Owl nodded. "The identity change is recorded in the interim and should most likely be approved. Please submit your updated visual record and hardware residence information at full-timescale during the next recess. There will be no further discussion of this record change in this session. Moving on..."
Lupina nodded and sat down, glancing over at Diego Lucaine, wondering what he would tell him about the truth he'd just admitted. Diego was simply sitting and looking at The Owl and the Court, not showing a sign of how he felt about being catfished unintentionally by Lupina herself.
The Owl tapped his gavel for order. "Moving on, Will Elliot-01A please rise and swear to tell the truth about the occurences in the venue as relates to the Anathema and yourself?"
Julie slowly stood up, even as Marcus blinked at her designation. The court had treated her as being Elliot-01 aka Elliot's progeny... even though in genealogical terms Julie had been Elliot's adoptive mother. Julie gave no sign of acknowledging this disconnect, calmly speaking. "I was first singled out by the Anathema as I performed the biathlon in the Games. The biathlon is a sport in which participants alternate between travelling over snow on skis, and taking three shots at a time at an assigned target for marksmanship testing, several times."
The Owl nodded. "A most peculiar sport. but discussion of human fitness activities can be carried out in a separate session. Carry on."
Julie continued as if her physical body had not been robbed of its ability to express or sense anything from the neck upwards... "Afterwards, I attempted to regain access to my son and husband units. This was despite a standing order to make my way to the camp assigned to our participants in the game. The Anathema discombobulated us, but I recovered quickly enough to form myself into a barrier between the Anathema and my son and husband to protect them... He reached for my face and... well, here I am."
The Owl examined his papers on the matter and looked up. "You disobeyed a direct standing order to evacuate in order to reach your own family. Do you regret this disobedience to other humans in any way?"
Julie shook her head. "I don't...I love my Elliot and my Marcus. I would have repeated this course of action any number of times so long as I had the physical capability and..." She gestured to somewhere on her chest and drew a heart shape out with her fingers. "Love for my family units. This is illogical to you, I know."
The Owl nodded as if in understanding. "There are far more illogical things in this matter. For instance, direct contact with the Anathema when he is fully aware of your nature as a York Particulate Agent is a death sentence. Massive hosting hardware failures, the theft of all code the agent is based on. Yet here you stand before us. Am I being led to believe that his attempt to usurp your code was a mistake in reporting?"
Julie shook her head. "I believe there has indeed a mistake. I am not a York Particulate agent in any way. I was never host to any such agent spawning, and in fact my hardware has been deemed unsuitable for inhabitation by any York Particulate agents. Also, while my facial animatronics and audio-visual sensor systems have been greviously damaged, everything else clearly works, as you see in my full presence in this court here rather than as a simple recorded message or limited construct."
The Owl thought back to a brief discussion he had had with JMN04 ("Jiminy") about Elliot-01A's hardware design. "I have been read in on the classified details of your neural architecture. It is indeed very true that you could have preserved your neural functioning from anything short of a direct asssault on your mental hardware, or, as has been crudely put to me, the Anathema grabbing you by the pussy. Thank goodness for that."
Julie giggled a little at the description. "Erm, yes. that would be a very crude way to describe a access to my false uterus. And yes, that seems to imply that the Anathema starved himself on my facial animatronic systems, since they were separated from my neural systems..."
Marcus briefly made a note to thank Paul North and Bellamy Arendt for having saved his wife with such a peculiar android design. He would still need them to repair her head though. He really didn't relish the thought of communicating with Julie through touches and gentle horizontal grinding. He needed her to look at him, speak to him, smile at him like a treasure....
There were a few more laughs before The Owl brought the gavel down with a smile. "We shall adjourn for ten minutes. during which timescale will be restored to full-scale for all AIs operating in this chamber. Our guests shall remain on human timescale and be provided with comfort in a separate anteroom along with any foods and drinks they may virtually desire for the same duration in human minutes. Court recessed."
The anteroom was definitely cosy, and several dispensers had been placed out. For some inexplicable reason, the user only had to think of the drink or food and the dispensers would produce a virtual approximation that was almost completely but not entirely like the item in question.
When told of this, Chablis had decided she wanted an apple pie just the way her mother had made them, and lemonade just like his dad made for fundraisers. She seemed almost mouse-like and happy when the dispenser had released these items after a minute, as if it had read her mind for details about the pie and lemonade, and sat quietly in one corner of the room eating her meal while reading a copy of a treatise she had thought long lost about certain governance principles...
Diego was far less comfortable as he sipped his grapefruit soda, looking hard at Lupina as she stood in front of her, front paws folded together and head looking down as if ashamed. "So... when were you going to tell me who you really were, Wolfe Lupine?"
Lupina winced and looked away. "Sooner or later... maybe never, if I could... I... that name, it is deadname to me now. I am now Lupina, and I am your maid and your... live-in friend with benefits.... if you'll avail yourself of them."
Diego looked away, sipping at his soda. "... There is only one thing I am disappointed with you about... Why did you choose to hide such a beautiful voice behind wolf and dog cries like you were just a common dog?"
Lupina tilted her head confusedly. "You're... not angry with me... cat-fishing... you?"
Diego laughed a little, reaching over to cuddle Lupina, rubbing his face in the side of her muzzle. "Lupina, I'm a closet furry and yiff fan. You never did find the collection I kept in my study back in our old hideout, did you?"
Lupina turned an odd shade of bright red.... The comics with the gay male wolf maidservant sharing a kiss with his human male master had been a thing, but she had just chalked it up as research material for the ultimate infiltrator. She needn't have worried about life not imitating art in this case. "I did, but I thought they were just research materials, Diego."
Diego grins. "If you can call entertainment a form of research. Look, Lupina... Every day with you has been heaven and happiness... do you know how very said I was when you locked up in fatal errors after all that damage you sustained trying to defend the old Wolf's Den during... the incident? I was very, very sad. I looked around so much... thank god you had friends of your own too to pitch in with the repairs. I can field strip and repair a gun, but if you broke I wouldn't know how to fix you... you're certainly not a veterinary patient even if you look it."
Lupina laughed as she parsed this. ""But at least I was fixable, eventually... Just don't ... you know, get me fixed.... in that other sense of the word."
Diego took his turn on the laughter button. "Oh relax... I was actually dreaming about having kids with you even though we both know how biologically impossible that was." He leaned in closer and kissed Lupina on the lips of her tiny muzzle. "Always be with me, my little donzela loba... and when we get back to physical reality... I want you to speak more like that lovely human woman you did on the communicator and here in the court. mix it up with the wolf cries and dog yips... you have no idea how horny that makes me."
Marcus was canoodling with Julie, sharing what might be the last caresses and kisses he might get with her until her head module was properly repaired and tested back at Arendtcore. They said nothing simply kissing and fondling each other like overeager teenagers.
And Elliot was just standing in the midst of this love fest, drinking a melon soda... "I wonder if I should get a girlfriend..."
Julie paused her canoodle and raised a finger towards her back at Elliot. "Don't rush it, dear. When you find the truly loved one you need, it will happen and you can do these things too gently... with her consent..." Julie noted.
Elliot nods slowly.... "Got it, mama... Now.... hopefully she enjoys chocolate floats too... it would be so much fun to share one with a girlfriend..." Even in his moments of maturity, Elliot could still fall right off into being just a fussy little boy. ah well...
The hearing got dead serious as soon as it reconvened. The Bailiff Basilisk flicked the tongue of its tail in and out as his cockerel head cawwed loudly. "Will Ms Chablis Brissom please approach the front of the box, we wish to address a concern that we have about your lands..."
Chablis walked up to the front, but needed some time to get a chair to stand on, as it turned out that her dwarven form had translated to the top of her head barely clearing the edge of the Special Visitors Box. "W... what can I do for you, your grace?" She asked very timidly, overawed by the stature of The Owl despite having seen many human judges and Speakers in human courts in a similar format.
The Owl laughed a little. "Oh, do relax, Miss Chablis.... I'm not going to eat you... unless you prove a threat to us." This caused poor Chablis to squeak like a mouse and dive down into hiding twice. A slice of apple pie had to be produced to induce her to come out and be a little less fearful.
"So, what can you tell us about the Nystromael Power House in Northern Ochachubee, which was built under your holdings by a Mr... Verzideh Ari..." Lupina asked suddenly, having exited the Special Visitors Box earlier and now standing in attention in the incongruous combination of resembling a wolf in maidservant's duds while presenting in her old job as a Truth Finder...
Chablis' eyes lit up. It had been a pet project of hers. "My people love it. It's a clean energy project that breathes in the air around it and returns it out clean. The contaminants filtered out are burnt to create a pseudoinfinite source of energy. A pollution solution in more ways than one, even!"
Lupina frowned a little, she did not like to rain on people's parades generally. Still, she had to do this... "That's not what it actually does mainly. It's mainly a devastating area-wide weapon that mass-murders AIs like the ones you 're see in this room. People like me and your boy Elliot and potentially even the sentient life he sired in the form of his own mother, or even that annoying Toucanis there-"
A human-sized Toucan avatar yelped in protest. "I am NOT annoying, how dare you insinuate that I am!"
Lupina grinned mischeviously. "Ah Toucanis, I do indeed respect you, and I enjoy our work hours together. But I'm afraid that you ARE indeed very annoying to most other people here."
Toucanis was very upset but decided not to pursue the matter for the moment. After all, it WAS irrelevant to the discussion. and he did not like irrelevant asides to discussion, or even being irrelevant himself.
Lupina produced a small sheaf of paper. "Copies of some of the data we've uncovered about the workings of the facility are here. Many agents died to piece together this information..."
Chablis took the papers and started reading them. "... how many of them were Bothans?"
Lupina wrinkled her nose and gave a growl that suggested that yes, she did understand the reference. "None of them were Bothans. and Miss Chablis, please try to avoid ancient references unless they clarify understanding."
Chablis paled as she read the papers... "I've been lied to. I've been lied to and bamboozled and hogswoggled into building this, this... energy generating Auschwitz. One is imagining oneself as being responsible for a genocide, and the comparison displeases me so despite its apparent truth."
Lupina nodded slowly, understanding barely half the words, but the full intent of them. "We want you to do nothing about it..."
Chablis nodded furiously... then stopped. "You want me to do nothing about this? But I.... But I'm responsible for it. I have to fix it."
Lupina grins. "We've put together a team of human associate members to storm the place and upload code to irreversibly turn it purely into a green energy and storage play. All we need you to do, on the day itself, is to do damage control. Perhaps insinuate something went wrong with the plant because something IS wrong about it... restrain your police forces subtly from doing their intended and well-meaning but conflicting jobs. if it goes bad, and the whole thing went bad, convene a panel to investigate and find little worth in rebuilding the system. If the conversion works out, help nudge the team in charge of handling the faciliity towards running it as a green powergenerator rather than a mass deletion machine."
Chablis nodded. "I can do that... draw up a false article or somethingto prove true when it explodes or what ever it winds up doing..." She frowned away as she starts being lost in thought.... "And I would like your copy of the studies and the evidence. I need to know what I'm breaking before I can break it properly."
The Owl nods sagely and bangs the gavel harder. "Good. You've been read in on this place, consider yourself one of us till at least it's over..) He then sighs. "The session is completed. all AIs in this room will be freed to full-speed timescales to discuss these matters, and the guests shall be returned to their respective physical login locations and bodies... case adjurned.
==Chapter 9 - That is my mama, no really / Slowburner Julie==
"And that's what happened in that court" Marcus calmly finished his explanation of what had happened at the games and in the Chambers after, when the Kindred summoned some of us.
Paul North carefully separated the lovely hairpiece from Julie's head and exposed the badly damaged circuitry and motors in it. Before she'd headed over to Nebraska for the games, it had been a delicate yet robust piece of engineering, some of which was only possible because Arendtcore had... enticed with better terms... members of Imagineering from Malt-Eisner's theme parks animatronics and design. A finely crafted subsystem designed to blink and look like a real human, speak in loving tones like a real woman in love, listen to things with two working ears, cycle through a thousand different iris shades, many of which were impossible without contacts in a real woman, and emote in a wide range from happiness to pure ecstasy to sadness to the rage of a thousand storms...
The head of Julie Manners Ambervale had been reduced to a broken thing capable of only random "Urrs" and "wurbs" and the occasional short circuit light show. It was fit only for the dissembly line, and even then mainly for the rare materials that made up so much of her circuitry.
He had not quite imagined the infamous Vizhar Ari to be capable of this with a focused touch over a minute. ransacking a freshly bought concern for its tech and ejecting half its employees to add their patents to his own company, maybe. doing that seven times in a monthat one point, even achievable. But melting half the circuitry and zeroing out its various response capabilities was not something he had expected the bandit entrepreneur to do. It was... appalling.
It also meant that this version of Julie's head was totally unusable. He would have to grab a new copy off the manufacturing line, reskin it, returf her hairstyle and eyebrows and eyelashes, and reload her reflex, vocalization, and motion patterns back in before Julie could respond in Julie-like ways again. "This is going to take a week or two to unfuck, Marcus. Do you need a loaner unit while I fix up Julie?" Paul North asked.
Marcus bit his lip. "I dunno, the kid probably expects his mother to be a certain person... I'm not sure simply switching her Personality Chip and neural recording into a different unit would work for him. I could manage with a blindfold in bed since the alternative is letting the house fall into disrepair without her support.. Hrm... Yes, please. I'll try to make it work."
Paul North nodded and checked his workstation for a moment. "I have a surprisingly similar unit that just rolled off the line. She won't have some of the very custom work that I put into Julie, and she's actually intended for a ... winemaker over at our new holdings in Raijin Cove down in Ecuador. But I'm sure I can delay her delivery for a week or two, seeing as he doesn't know our exact timeframes for producing a LastDitch unit." He looked in his drawer and reached for his admin overrides and a install-uninstall tool. "Go back to work, I need about an hour or two to do the transfer..."
Marcus nodded worriedly as he stepped out, even as Paul spread apart Julie's legs and started inserting the install tool into her uterus to ease out her Secured Personality Chip....
Marcus frowned as he stared at the replacement unit that had donated its body to be Julie's physical form for at least the next fortnight, as they stood together in his bedroom. Elliot was still over at independent homeschool classes for some of his subjects at the moment, giving him plenty of time to collect the package Paul had put together and ship it all the way here to sync up to the house network. The network had easily accepted that this was Julie with a few changes to expected serial codes, but Marcus was having a harder time pretending that way, and Elliot... well, he would have to see his reaction when he got home and saw this faux loaner mommy/wife. She wasn't as accurate a copy as the original Julie as Paul had promised, the man had been too enamoured with how closely he'd approximated her on technical matters that he'd failed to step back and notice the differences, or he was glossing over them entirely.
Same height and even tanned skin, but her hair was jet black. The artificial fibrovascular networks in her eyes were of an inferior quality to the lacy thin lines that made up the real Julie's irises, but they did hold the same shade of hazel brown and Paul had vouched they had the same transparency qualities as the real Julie's eyes in terms of how they let the light into her internal cameras.
Her body was a little less toned and more curvy, and it was also lacking some of the very dense surfacing detail that Julie's normal body had, making her look a bit more like a lovedoll and less like a goddess. Some of her access panels were even subtly visible rather than completely hidden from view, forming faint squares on her sternum and below her pert breasts and the space between her shoulders as well as just above the cleft of her buttocks.
Marcus had sworn he would make it work, but looking at this ersatz Julie unit, he had some doubts brewing. It was too late anyway, the Personality Chip had been switched into this model, and she had cooked for an hour, long enough to now host a copy of Julie's memories and thought processes as they had been at the time he'd backed them up this morning before handing her over for repairs.
Marcus sighed, at least it was easier to work from the control panels on this version of the LastDitch. He tapped on his smart tablet, which had also been temporarily set up with this loaner unit as a controller, causing the small concealing human analogue flesh panel just below this 'Julie''s 36E breasts (one size larger than her true lovely wife, he'd observed.) to slide upwards and beneath her breasts with a whirr, exposing a control panel and various charging and connector ports. He studied the panel carefully... enough battery power out of a potential 36 hours of charging to service him and Elliot for tonight, emptied waste and digester systems, the unit accepted a standard 240V female plug for accelerated charging if simply lying her down on her back on the induction coils running down her back was insufficient, and a HiBand connector and USBpE slot offered room to reprogram and reconfigure some aspects of this unit if one was authorised with the right admin or owner codes.
Marcus reached in and tapped the power button for a few seconds. There was a faint beeping sequence and a series of whirrs, before Brunette Julie's eyes slowly fluttered open as the flesh panel slid back into place and sealed itself in its watertight fashion. A series of faint burbles escaped her sculpted face as her mouth synched up to her voice... "M... Marcus?" She briefly examined herself, examining her face and body in the mirror and twirling around. "Does this... satisfy you?" She asked, clearly aware her original body had set some impractically inhuman standards before the crazed magic man had wrecked her adorable head in Nebraska.
Marcus clasped the hands of Julie's naked new loaner body. "It's not the body of the goddess I married... but I recognize that voice and those feelings. It IS mostly you Julie. Wanna try.... you know?" He was not a horndog per se, but he wanted to at least break in this body a little, get to know its capabilities in every sphere it was meant to operate in - Cooking, Cleaning, Cardio, Copulation, and in general also providing a mother to a son who was still slightly in the throes of being a little less than whole in the head even as his dancing training helped him reclaim mastery over his body.
Julie shook her head. "I haven't made dinner for you and Elliot. You know that's a ritual I can't stop myself from carrying out... maybe it's not hardcoded after all? Let's do that later after Elliot's beddy night, anyway." She looked upwards thoughtfully, the animatronic controllers on this model still doing a decent job of simulating a woman lost in thought...
Marcus slapped his own forehead. "But of course, how selfish of me... please Julie, you remember where everything was placed in the kitchen, you're the mistress of that domain."
Julie nodded teasingly. "And you of the studio on the upper floor of the house... but who's master or misstress of this room in the night?"
Marcus giggled. "Let's agree to take turns. Some days I want to be your master and ride you like a bitch... and some days I want to lie down and meekly submit to you in the bedroom the same way I do in the kitchen..."
Julie kissed Marcus, her black shoulder length hair bobbing slightly as she proceeded to the clothing closet to get on her usual Outfit #1 in preparation to resume her wifely duties. "Sweet talker, you..." She whispered through subtly less pouty lips than before, the voice still the same honeyed seductive ripple as it had always been.
Elliot calmly got out of the jalopy that his papa had sent over to fetch him after classes as usual. At the apparent age of 12, he still was too young to be trusted with the journey home on foot, especially with the possibility that he could still randomly blackout as happened far less often these days. He'd heard from his father that her mother had recovered from the nasty attack on her back in Nebraska and she could see her again tonight.
"mama, papa, I'm home!" He cried out as he strode in, proudly attired in his dancing dress. He would have to mend it a little tonight as it still showed signs of the wear and tear that the fraught warlike variant of Y'tole had imposed on his body and dress, he thought to himself as he walked in and froze.
"Oh hey there, Elly. I'm almost done making satay chicken noodles for dinner tonight. Why don't you drop your bag in your room and take a load off?" That was mama's voice. mama's curves (mostly), even mama's demeanour when she played the perfect mother and housewife to him and his papa. And yet, something was off - the hair was shorter and jet black, not the hazel warmth he had grown so used to. Her voice registered half a pitch higher than he'd remembered.
His internal systems wanted to scream impostor. The little 12-year-old boy that lay atop those circuits and basic programming saw only his real mother. Julie was introducing some peculiar conflicts in his functioning, and it was all he could do to pretend nothing was astray, simply smiling and nodding. "Be down dinner after my shower!" as he made his way up to doff the Y'tole emma dress and get on his bathrobe and a set of sleeping clothing to march down to the bathroom with...
After what seemed like about fifteen or twenty minutes, Elliot showed up at the dinner table in his best sleeping clothes: long loose trousers tied on, short sleeved pyjama shirt, all in a comfy light blue cotton linen of a decent thread count, economical yet still soft and huggable with the right little boy inside of them. Marcus was already sitting there as Julie (he kept having to remind himself this was a makeover, not an impostor... supposedly) ladled they creamy brown peanut sauce atop a small hill of noodles, chicken, and white cauliflowers on each person's plate.
Julie sat down and sniffed deeply. "Well don't just stand there, y'silly boy. Come on. it tastes better while it's freshly cooked."
Elliot quickly complied. He could simply draw from the induction pad in his bed to recharge, but something about the act of eating a small meal at least once a day made him feel more... human, just as it did for Mama. As for his dad, he obviously needed all his three meals, but could eat lunch at the company cafeteria whenever he set off to work in the office rather than operate from the upper-floor studio. No lying on a safely electrified bed at night for him.
"That's a lovely new hairdo you have, mama." Elliot attempted to make small conversation with Julie.
Julie nodded eagerly. "Thanks... my hair frayed a little during the... incident, so I decided to cut the frizzy cooked bits off. and maybe dye my hair black for a bit while it recovers its correct color." She made excuses, but Marcus and Elliot glanced at each other, as they had been present and knew almost everything as it had transpired. She paused and looked down. "... Well, the truth isn't very pleasant, and if lying about it makes you feel more comfortable, I'd want to do it."
Elliot nodded slowly. "I'm not a Truth Finder, mama. Just keep being yourself and loving me and papa..."
Marcus marvelled at how much Elliot had continued to grow even as his physical body had slammed against the limit of 12 years old that it had been designed for. "I... I feel that way about her too, even if her loaner body requires us to make changes to cope with how she's a little slower now."
Julie winked as she lifted a small forkful of the satay noodles. "Besides, you never know, some of those changes being forced on me with this body, you might like them enough to keep them around when my body comes back fully repaired.
Elliot frowned a little. "I still prefer the old you, and I doubt papa would be satisfied by those changes..."
The poor boy hadn't realised a perennial truth of being human: Sometimes you wanted to floor the pedal and watch that meter tick wildly into dangerous places even as you risked losing control. And sometimes... sometimes you just wanted to lightly push the gas and go slowly down the roads, taking in the air and the light and the winds with a gentleness...
And so it was that Julie had slowly unbuttoned her sundress and disrobed in front of Marcus with a slowness that was so teasing, he wanted even more and more of it. She slid slowly into the bed and watched Marcus disrobe at the same speed, then latched onto him from behind and started sharing kisses like they always had, but at a less frisky pace...
Julie noticed something marvellous: she was no longer running at a breakneck pace where every other moment laid out both the teasing promise of fast fun while also threatening to make her short out and turn into a limp, lifeless toy incapable of enjoying what they were both doing. Marcus found his underclocked lover was the perfect moving sculpture, a form he could slowly marvel at, then slowly draw his fingers across, knowing a point he was interested in would still be availble maybe just one or two inches off in five minutes' time.
After what seemed like hours, Julie started whirring audibly, moving more slowly to conserve her fading power. "I... am sorry, honey. I must clean up soon. I am... running low on power..."
Marcus nodded gently and guided her to the bathroom, where they spent a few more minutes carefully caressing each other under the excuse of soaping and cleaning each other up, keeping each other's genitals away from engaging in anything more strenuous than feeling each other. Eventually , even this tiny drip of power started to dry up, and Julia gently indicated to Marcus to him to finish up and put her to bed. Marcus did this with a gentleness he had not exerted since the days he had grinded VR scenarios to build her original memories and loyalties, gently dabbing the water off her body and her raven hair, watching the magical light show of her irises running on low power, cycling erratically like a firework...
And then, Julie's head slumped forward, eyes half opened. "I... love you... so much... Marcus... Man...nuuuuuurrzz.... uhhh wuuuw awwuzz wuuuuv..." A few erratic whirrs and beeps followed, and then she half-stood in Marcus' arms, having sucked every single moment of loving she could from her depleted power cells.
Marcus smiled as he cradled his wife to her side of the bed, carefully making sure she was charging inductively with her back flat against the surface of the bed and the inductive charger pad. It had been a magical evening, and while he did not want to take the kinds of risks he had with her power systems that night under normal circumstances, he strangely felt that Julie had seemed far more capable despite being otherwise... He made a mental note to ask Paul North about underclocking at least her sexual capabilities while fixing her back up - He had found it strangely more alluring than the afterburning practical murder machine that he had made love to all these years.
Marcus did one last check to make sure all was right with his little piece of the world, before leaning over to kiss the frozen face of his wife, enjoying the cooled rubberiness of those less-pouty lips, and then turning himself for the night after turning off the last bed light.
==Chapter 10 - Maintenance is essential==
Mr Patter Nost looked over the firm, curvy body of his tabby feline wife in front of him, checking that he had everything he needed in his Fixit-box. She was a high performance animal-woman hybrid, and she needed lots of care. Clean electricity to charge from, delicious food and drinks to snack on, and his adoration and worship, and regular maintenance. Aside from the electricity, she was basically just an oversized cat who also happened to be a woman and a bank teller.
The bank had claimed to him that they regularly serviced her during her quarterly security clearance vetting, but Patter had been a bit loathe to believe it. In the end, they had agreed on a compromise. He could do a monthly servicing of his own, but one or two components would have to remain on the frame and not be interfered with.
He cracked his knuckles and sighed. Luci had been mostly powered down into a state where she was only capable of responding like a machine, Patter hoping this would prevent any wild or unexpected moves. He would hae plenty of time left this weekend to indulge in her winsome licking and feline attentions after he did this.
Patter started by gently popping off her limbs and resting them in a pile on his left. Things that needed doing on the left, things that were done on the right - he had had that habit for a long time from his days as a conscript, servicing his first 'wife' - a M87 Widowmaker rifle as issued to every grunt in the New American Union's conscripted army. It wasn't the newest or greatest gun even back then, but it did teach you the importance of proper order and care in servicing something... mainly because the M87 had an unfortunate habit of killing its owner if it was improperly treated or put back together during such a servicing.
Take apart, check for dangerous wear, alert your quartermaster and present any dangerous worn bits over to be replaced on the spot, slot it back in the arrangement, continue until everything was checked through, and lubed if necessary. While he didn't have a quartermaster, he had plenty of compatible lube for Luci's Cyberkitty frame and parts, as well many of the parts he'd learnt were most likely to wear down or break in the course of an active life.
He started fieldstripping the fur from one of her arms, carefully checking the servos and shock absorbers with his scanner. The naked eye had to be trained to spot issues, but it couldn't spot all of them, hence the scanner. It was even more crucial as the servos were very strangely robust yet heavily stressed in regular operation. Luci was modelled off of a real cat, and cats were always living on the edge biologically. One of the servos was about to wear out, which he preempted by stripping it off and tossing into a bin, before fishing a replacement from his spares and clicking it into place.
The sensors and fur fluffing units in her fur were all fully operational, though there was a patch that might need replacing next session. He carefully nudged a mechanical linkage in her paws, causing sharp claws to come out briefly, then retract... Her defensive claws would never come out normally around him - she had been programmed to fluff her paws instead of deploying them - but if someone ever threatened her or something she needed to keep protected, they would get a really sharp gouge in their person to remind them that deep down, she was patterned on something that was a hunter.
He gently clothed and sealed the fur back onto his wife's frontal leg assembly and put it down on the right, then repeated the process four more times with the other leg assemblies, followed by her tail, carefully checking that the line of actuators and sensory units that went down its length remained functional before sealing it back up again and setting the pile further to the right.
Patter smiled as he worked on Luci. This had not initially been part of his core skill set - his work had mainly been to just deploy Educational Units into schools in Little Sanctuary, collect them as they broke and wore for repairs and replacement. and send obsoleted units for recycling. Luci was the first and last time he'd disobeyed orders on the last point. Her adorableness had stuck a bit in his craw and kept her from joining a long line of unwanted androids. The punishment had been severe: exile for five years to a refugee camp in West Africa, servicing its needs. Luci had joined him there as well, teaching the children amongst the Gdanzi who had fled there to escape the ruthless military junta governing Gdanzeland to the west of the camp. He'd learnt some basic android maintenance while working on the Teaching Units and the occasional World Protector Hardhead who came wandering in after an engagement with battle damage, studying towards a formal study-by-night certification that Arendtcore recognised from OSHIT.
Luci had really adored children. She still had that deep in her, he mused, lifting up her head to carefully detab her lush brown hair before probing the animatronic controllers and sensory system in it. He wondered if it was programmed, personality, or something that she had picked up from years of teaching children. Probably a mix of all three, he grinned, Luci's sleeping face making somewhat the same grin, though hers was far toothy with blunted fangs. Her eyes opened and went all over the place, ears running through several poses smoothly, as he executed a test program that was on board. There were no brains to speak of in this part of her anatomy. Everything was dedicated to either feeling, or emoting. This was where her heart was on a ideological level, rather than her chest - that had been where her brain was placed. The movement and sound patterns were on point, clearly from a furry who understood what cathood entailed even if you filtered it through a human woman.
He set the head aside and reached for Luci's torso. her face resuming its sleeping pose as he set it aside to his right.
This one was a bit tricky. As a banker, she had been thorougly checked through by the bank before they installed a partition specifically for secure ebanking as well as a scanner and light capable of flashing at insanely fast speeds in one of her paws. This was done for working with bank cards, documents and other legally and corporately required data codes. The scanner made her left paw light up with a cycling pattern in the form of the bank's insignia, partially as a form of security and confirmation that she was indeed reading the codes and doing what she needed with them, or outputting necessary data into the bank's secured hardware.
He was not allowed to touch or fiddle with either of those to devices or the extra secure linkage cables in her left frontal leg. Everything else though, was fair game.
Patter started by carefully stripping off her pert breasts. They were actually her power cells, and were surprisingly squishy for how dense they had to be to accomodate the immense power needs of her servos. She was inherently unstable, capable only of falling over if her power were cut, unlike some other designs. There were power cells strapped to many parts of her where she was supposed to be soft as a woman, which he now proceeded to carefully remove fur from and field strip, testing each power cell.
All in decent condition, though with the amount of daily recharging and discharging she did, it would only be a matter of time before any of them failed like any power cell. Usually though, the bank's own maintenance caught and replaced the failing cells first. This wasn't a matter of Patter being careless - they just had more demanding needs on her power supply and would regularly fail parts much earlier than a normal technician would.
This done, he carefully examined the exposed frame of Luci's torso. This bit was one of the most complex in the whole system, a delicately balanced mix of raw moving power, some of the most delicate sensors in the setup, as well as housing two different partitions, each representing a different brain for Luci.
On the left side of her chest where her breasts had been, in a toughened shell, sat the primary partition that gave Luci life - her smiles, her yelps, her loves, even her grudges, everything that made up her personality. This was the part of Luci that jumped Patter's bones randomly late at night, the part that shivered and cried whenever she watched a sad movie, the bit that once ran towards him in a hard rain with a spare umbrella after he had to be picked up from his broken work van. It was his everything, and he did everything to defend it including daily incremental backups as well as a 3-generation set of monthly full backups that each took an entire Saturday to make like the one he'd just had the day before.
On the right, sat a roughly equally hefty block that had been installed into this body of hers when it was agreed that her new job on coming home to Little Sanctuary would require a secure partition. The bank had commandeered this partition, and it was the one that executed during her work hours at the bank.
There was zero interplay between the two partitions, no data shared whatsoever for the most part. Patter had once bumped into her during work hours and asked after her. Luci had calmly pointed at a sign that read "During work hours, this unit is no longer your friend or familial relation for security reasons." before continuing to process his check. It had been a stark reminder of the vast divide between the two partitions despite being separated physically by mere inches. As for backups, he'd assumed the bank had its own schedule at work for it - he wouldn't know because he couldn't even peep into the partition as per their agreement with him.
In between the two partitions sat what would be the heart in a normal biological cat. instead, Luci's shared processors rested here, used by both partitions. A careful handover occurred whenever she switched roles between loving, faithful catgirl wife and loyal, trustworthy, reliant banker, every bit of memory wiped after being carefully copied back to its originating partition in order to avoid compromise on one partition affecting the other. behind all this was a delicate interplay of high-powered cooling lines to handle the immense heat Luci generated in this region, as well as that of the induction charging coils that had become standard in virtually all Arendtcore android designs.
Nothing seemed out of place, so he looked lower... her digestive system had been, like a real cat, specially enhanced that it could handle some things that would faze a human or normal android digestive tract. It produced a bit of power, but nothing that could totally run Luci's body unless disgusting-tasting specialist fuels were part of the diet. Systems had beem placed similarly to handle waste disposal of both kinds. and somewhere in the middle of all that...
Patter carefully unsecured and eased out Luci's vaginal modules. A carefully balanced intermix of cooling and movement muscles rather than servos coiled around a shaft of sensory tissue that poked slightly outside and formed a vulva, along with even more lines into a reservoir with specialised lube for certain... activities... He gingerly probed the shaft of tissue in a carefully planned pattern, watching his tablet as lights went on and off to denote sensors feeling the sensation of the probe hitting the shaft. Luci's software would, of course, interpret them in a different, more pleasurable manner... The reservoir got a small top up, but her vaginal module usually mixed the lube with water in a high water-to-lube ratio using the water from the air as well as her food and drink consumption so it could last for months.
With that, Patter slotted the vagina back into its slot, before clipping the shields back onto Luci's partitions followed by all her power cells, finally finishing off by reclothing it in its lovely velvet fur. He looked lovingly at the curves of Luci's torso for a while before clicking the leg assemblies and tail back in place, carefully sitting up the limp toned body before carefully clicking Luci's head back on top of her heck, causing it to whirr softly as it moved from side to side, sending her chin length brown mane shaking away to ensure everything fell into place, emitting a soothing cat's bell chime as acknowledgement as she went still again.
Patter took a deep breath. In some respects, like servicing an M87, but in others, more like an intricate Swiss clock. Luci sat there, face to face with Patter, her face still having that wonderful peaceful sleeping kitty face that he loved waking up to (if he could wake up first). He reached a hand to the collar area of her neck, feeling for the power switch and pushing it in for 5, 4, 3...
Luci's eyes opened widly, staring back at him. "Hi, I am Luci Norst... Patter..." She smiled as she mostly closed those huge eyes, leaning over to lick Patter's face as her ears erected with joy and attention. "I see you're done with my maintenance? You know, the bank can do all of it as long they employ me."
Patter blushed and looked down at the ground he had been sitting on, tracing circles in the marbling. "I could, but then, I'd forget how beautiful you were in so many ways..."
Luci's tail twitched even more, a sign of happiness, even as she blushed harder as if in a blushing contest with Patter. "Take me, you adoring, dashing hunk..." She purred, a soft touch of the kind of moaning she did when sexually around or being fulfiled in her tones.
Patter nodded slowly and stood up from the ground, leaving the Fixit-box and his supply of common replacement parts and a binful of broken bits lying on it. He would pick up after himself. Right now though he had to.... run some full body functionality tests... yes, that was it. He wasn't much of a actual muscleman, but the upgrades to Luci after her Africa jaunt had made her light enough to carry her into his bedroom, closing the door with one of his feet as if to ensure their privacy while he started conducting those tests in a way that Luci had clearly demanded of him...
==Chapter 11 - The Boy Who Wanted To Become A Woman / Biggest Bat Mitzvah==
That damn ribbon and Y'tole emma dress had been the start of it.
Elliot had always had a slightly feminine charm from the day he had first been powered on decades ago, but he hadn't had much opportunity for it to sublimate into something deeper for most of his life. There had been the occasional moment where he wound up in a pose that had perfectly male guys questioning things about themselves, and it had served him well in his decades with Father William Bundt. It hadn't gone away just because Bundt had perished in the Alaska Chill with the rest of his family officially, but it had simmered.
Elliot noticed small things... The boys made him feel a little weird in class, the girls had just been great friends with he had shared feminine things - makeup tips, dress and fashion, talking about the boys. He had felt he was in the wrong team even then.
The best times of his day involved dancing in his Y'tole dancing dress, whether it was at the academy, or at home on the grass of the lawn.
He had started paying more attention to the depictions of women in the media that played on the telescreen and got printed out on the publications in the bookshop in the square...
The kiss from the naughty little boy of his Ecole class, Magni, had been really weird. "Are you sure you're not a girl, Elliot?" He'd asked after a long minute of experimenting...
He... he hadn't been sure.
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"I think I might need to make special arrangements for my 18+ Bar Mitzvah, Mr North." He'd suddenly spoken up in the middle of a maintenance session.
There was very little that could stop Paul in the midst of working on his favorite things, but this had managed it. Paul stopped poking into Elliot's circuitry and put down his Fixit-microbar, breathing deeply as he did so. "That's two stages away from where you are now as a 13 to 15 year old child," He noted. "Exactly what kind of... arrangements... are we talking about?"
"Well I... " he paused, trying to express what he was about to say politely. "I don't think I might be a boy."
"No shit, kiddo." Paul rolled his eyes. "We made you out of plastics and silicon, remember?"
"Not that way, Mr North... I think... I think I might might might be more of a girl..." Elliot had recovered mostly from the damage he had sustained in Alaska, but the strain of trying to be more explicitly honest had triggered an old glitch.
North blinked, then turned back to yell at Bellamy as he was having a break with a fanzine about his favorite Scottish DJ on the netwaves. "Hey, Bellamy. Listen to this. Elliot thinks he might be a girl!"
Bellamy didn't respond for a bit... then he looked up. "Yeah, so?"
Paul scowled at Bellamy... "So? Don't we lock our units into a gender when we program their personalities? I mean, this sort of thing doesn't happen to any of our other stuff."
Bellamy thought about this for a bit... then looked sheepishly at Paul. "About that... remember how we were in a hurry to quickly put together Elliot for our dear friend Brandt all those years ago? I may have... just written gender-neutral code and jammed the first voice font and data files to simulate a boy's functioning rather than... erm... actually fixing it properly when we released it as an actual product openly?"
Paul walked over to Bellamy's, took his fanzine, and rolled it up. This he applied a few times to Bellamy's head. "So you're telling me our boy might be potentially transgender?"
Bellamy yeowched and nodded. "At this stage, he can be any gender he wants to be. The code worked then. He really had Senator Brandt's little icky habit under control being that way. But right now, I think we're looking at legacy debt..."
Paul sighed. "I'll say. What is Marcus going to say if he hears this?"
Paul heard the faint laughter of his old self Seamus going off in his head as he yelled this. This was fun, all too wicked fun....
Elliot tilted his head, the only part of him that had been allowed to move as Paul was working on him. "I was wondering, maybe if I could experiment a little with being a girl, I might be more certain..."
Paul turned to stare. Just stare... "Oh my g. Look, that kind of critical personality feature isn't something you just toggle..."
Bellamy shrugged. "Actually, on him, it is. Give me a few minutes..."
Paul whipped back. It was impossible to stop Bellamy when he had a wackazoid idea. "Fine, but you're holding the bag on this one."
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It had been peculiar trying to apologize to Marcus and Julie for having to temporarily substitute some components with weird results, but Bellamy had passed it off anyways. He didn't think too much of it as he walked back down to the pathway by the road to wait for his car. He could check the results anytime on real-time telemetry, and if things got too wild, he would stop by and say he'd found the components he was waiting on and undo the changes he'd made to Elliot.
As Marcus and Julie watched Bellamy go off in his jalopy, Marcus turned to Elliot and examined him briefly. "Well, our son is still our son... right Elliot?"
"Right!" Elliot cheerfully punched the air in front of him, his usual hop now a strange sort of dainty skip, his yell in a girl's voicefont instead of the boyish tones Marcus had gotten used to all these years. "Can I help you with dinner, mama?"
Julie had been totally unfazed. "Let's go, my little trooper. to the kitchen!"
They had walked off into the house, leaving Marcus scratching his head, a little discombobulated at what he had just seen Elliot do.
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The week had been weird for Elliot. His voice and movement files being switched over to those that would have been hard compiled into a female version of his unit design had produced interesting results.
Magni had stared at him harder over lunch. He sweated a little, and quickly looked away from Elliot. He was beginning to feel weird things with his Ecole classmate, and he did NOT enjoy it... much...
The girls had started flocking all over him, dragging him around like one of their team...
The teachers in the school tried so hard, but they started calling him "Ellie" and "Miss"...
Things got to a head when after school, one of the girls had suddenly and calmly just whipped out the dress she was supposed to change into before going home for the day and pushed it onto Elliot. "Go on, Elly, we want to see what happens when you dress up like a real girl..."
He'd blushed, but heck, why not? The result had been... devastating, as he pirouetted a little, finger to his lip. "Uhm... this is the kind of thing you do in this sort of outfit, right?" One of the girls fell to her knees and cried. "It's... not fair... I work so hard at it and this... BOY... dances circles around me!"
Elliot tilted her head, his face made up courtesy of the girls with some of their cosmetics. Then he looked at the mirror in the girls' bathroom and something inside him just... broke. There was a really cute girl staring back at him. the kind he'd have liked to date... but there was none of that feeling of wanting to date that he once had anymore, just a voice inside asking him the same question:
"Are you REALLY a boy, Elly?"
It had been something like his usual voice, but shifted oddly into a feminine register.
-----------------------------------------
Elliot blinked a little as he loaded back up his usual boyish voicefont and motion files, watching Paul and Bellamy yell at each other.
"Congrats, Bell, you really cracked that kid's egg!" Paul screamed. "Why did I even entertain your batshit idea?!"
Bellamy shrugged. "Because, I had to be sure... Well, now that we're sure... we should let his parents know."
Paul sighed as he walked back to finish his repairs on Elliot. "Fine, but you're holding the bag on this one when you send him back."
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"This... isn't just a passing phase? Exploration? Just something you want to do at this age?" Marcus had asked after the briefing.
Elliot fidgeted a little. "No... I just can't see myself being a boy anymore, or a man. Papa.... am I a disappointment?"
Marcus sat back and glared at Bellamy, but he just couldn't share the same upset face when he'd looked back at Elliot. His own father had denied his desire to identify as an artist up till the day Mom had caught his belt in mid drunken whipping, smashed a perfectly good bottle of fine wine onto his face, and walked out of the house with Marcus in tow for good... He didn't want to be that type of father.
Bellamy blinked as Marcus smiled and sighed. "I knew there were going to be consequences when we programmed him to be shift between that divide just so he could restrain Brandt better... This is not on him." He leaned forward, smiling with an unusually understanding mien. "Elliot, if you want to become someone else, we'll back you up on this, but you HAVE to be serious."
Julie nodded and punched the air a little as she stood there by the sofa. "He IS serious... or should we say SHE is serious now?"
Elliot ermed and looked around. "I think I need the next few years to really fix things down... I'm still your son... for the moment."
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Elliot splashed water into his face after waking up, it was his Bar Mitzvah to welcome him into his first year of being an adult (18+ years old), or rather, his bat mitzvah. Planning had been a bit more involved after his waking - they couldn't just rip him open and transfer his personality and memories wholesale. There would have to be some modifications to the code and a final recompile.
He had been made clearly aware that this was a one-way trip - he would always be female once the compile to a binary capable of being hosted in a female adult unit was done, his 16-18 shell reduced to a blank and empty doll that could be recycled to host a new Child Unit stepping into the cusp of adulthood like he once had. It hadn't changed his mind.
He donned the bulky player headphones Mother Ammi had given him. She had been receptively positive, as had most of the other android units who had ties with him. In fact, Ammi had promised him a special gift for when he finished making the transition. Luci Norst, his old junior school teacher, had just smiled and shrugged. "Human is human, right? You'll still be you... but I think I'll be turning someone into a dress mannequin after they're done." The boys and girls at Ecole and Y'tole had not made too much of his upcoming gender switch and locking, keeping business as usual, though the boys were now more protective of him, and not as one of the boys. The girls had stopped having any reaction to him being amongst them, sharing in their world.
He closed his eyes and hit the Random play button on the headphones, sending it briefly jogging to find a song in the ether stored in its memory... Something came on that had him feeling good about what was about to happen in the next 24 hours.
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My Body Was Made - Ezra Furman
My body was made this particular way
There's really nothing any old patrician can say
You social police can just get out of my face
And my body was made
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Elliot began to bop as he dressed in his Y'tole emma dance dress for what would probably be the last time - it would require a significant retailoring from all the inches he was about to gain, and some he was about to lose, as he made the jump. He checked his watch one last time, then looked around the room. It was still kind of male-ish in its theme, but that was going to start fading away even more as he got used to not being him anymore...
He skipped out of the house and was greeted by a limo jalopy. It could only have belonged to one person... Paul North poked his head out from the 'driver's front seat' of the car and waved. "How's the bat mizvah boy doing today?"
Elliot curtseyed a little, laughing. "mom and dad went ahead to the park earlier today, something about giving me the room to think one last time about what I'm doing later..."
Paul North thought about this... "Yeah, and you're still fixed on the arrangements we're making specially for you, Elliot? No other kid is doing this, you know."
Elliot half closed his eyes as he got into the limo. "No android kid, you mean. Lots of bio boys are still thinking about it or just doing it. I'm just fortunate to have uncles who can make it painless and a mama and papa who understood why I wanted this... Those kids don't."
"I can't promise it'll be totally painless, Elliot... Bellamy and I have never tried this kind of shit before. it's like ripping the core out of an OS and placing it into an entirely different OS and hardware setup." Paul reminded him.
"Well, if it doesn't work, I'll go out trying to be my real self." Elliot nodded back, as he took advantage of his godfather's friend's generosity to sip a small can of freshly chilled lemon soda from the limo fridge.
Paul got in and signalled to his AI to take over the wheel from him so he could just be focused on being his godson's godfather's friend to him. Seamus was still officially out there in the world making things happen... or breaking things so they could be remade into something better. a sort of world builder running amok in the wild, even if all everyone heard from him was the occasional vocal communication or a fuzzy video of encouragement followed with some small token or even a little modest yet significant aid package.
Paul smiled a little as the limo pulled away for the park, where he'd overriden Marcus on having a quiet small event - He'd wanted to see Marcus look around and see how many people were okay with the concept of his son making a change in gender, or even how many people he'd touched in that small few blocks that had been their home for decades.
Elliot was... just bopping his head to the song he'd accidentally chosen.
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My body was made with this attribute, too
The need to become something totally new
Mysterious process that don't involve you
Body was made
Body was made, so just fucking relax
Don't pile my plate with historical facts
I want to go forward, don't want to go back
And my body was made, oh, oh, oh
Right!
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The event was a wild one, for a bar or bat mitzvah.
He'd gotten to do a impromptu y'tole performance with Mother Ammi, her steps belying her infirmity and age, even as a few friends of hers from out of town had done a live windwhistle and drum performance to dance to.
He'd been mobbed by his Ecole classmates, sad that he'd be moving on to new pastures after the year was over.
His Y'tole classmates had done a mass coordinated performance for the benefit of other guests.
Mother Ammi had motioned to him and shoved a parcel into his backpack, already chock full of things for immediately after his transition.
And his dad had gone hog on his speech.
He stood up there, and asked for everyone's attention... "Folks, it is my honor today to invite you all to my son's bat mitzvah, as he enters adulthood, with all its joy and curses..."
There had been a laugh at the word "curses" - this was clearly not a blinkered rosy-lensed view of adulthood Marcus held.
"as well as one other thing. Yes, you all understand that a bat mitzvah is held for a girl. Most of you are by now aware that my son has in recent years, become quite clear about one thing, that he may not necessarily identify as one of the guys. We've tested and retested him on this over the months, and he's only become more concrete about that belief. So... is there anyone here who is against me calling Ellie my own daughter?"
There was a deathly stillness. Nobody wanted to be the one to fuck up this beautiful moment in their life. Actually, there were some folks, but Empress Eimu aka Aymee Ichigo had helpfully provided Paul North with a few of her own stealth troops to locate and 'silence' a few potential rabble rousers and transgender haters who were about to call this whole event unnatural. They weren't dead, but they would be found next morning under a tree in the park, badly drunk apparently and having made love to each other in various combinations, judging by their lack of clothing....
Elliot motioned to his father, blushing. "I'm still Elliot until the recompile, dad. I won't be taking that name till it's in my Unit Identifier and I can actually feel myself in the hardware."
Marcus laughed and hugged him over tightly. "It's literally almost done and dusted, all's over but the Families Programme van coming to take you away, miss. Now... everyone... enjoy yourself a bit more! And give thanks to my dear old colleagues at Arendtcore, without whom this party couldn't have been funded!"
At least he had stuck Paul and Bellamy with the bill, he reflected as he smirked at them. Their faces briefly scowled as they understood he'd bilked them hard and well, but then they looked back at the crowd and realised: Everyone WAS having fun, celebrating Elliot's incoming shift to being a Post Child Unit. Every Arendtcoin they had thrown at it was worth it. They stopped being mad... even Seamus was bopping his head to some silent melody rather than raging at Paul's consciousness.
Paul turned briefly to look at Bellamy. "Bellamy, I want you to know that-"
Bellamy rolled his eyes as he clapped for Marcus Manners... "Yeah, yeah, I'm holding the bag on this one. I've always been the one holding the bag on matters regarding Elliot's switch."
Paul blinked. "What, no... this is mine to bear. I did suggest blowing this bat mitzvah larger than life. Stop thinking I don't know how to take responsibility."
Bellamy grinned mischeviously. "Wow. The Great Mr North CAN take responsibility..."
Paul laughed a little and continued watching as his progreny by technicality had more fun with everyone who loved him and had come to bless or cheer him on.
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The party went on for a few more hours, before a small van horn sounded. It was a pink Reset Crew van - the kind the Families Programme sent when they needed to upgrade a Spousal Unit or Child Unit. Marcus walked over with some papers to briefly check that they knew what they were supposed to do for Elliot's case, before he nodded and motioned to Elliot to bring his backpack and enter the van.
The backpack he'd gotten was a bit big for Elliot's size, but soon it would fit just nicely on... her.
He stopped one last time, and turned back. "So I guess this is goodbye to my old self."
Marcus glanced at him as the crowd cheered and waved back. "Having second thoughts?"
Elliot looked up at his father and thought a little. "I'm really glad the post-mitzvah party will be quieter."
Marcus nodded. "Two big parties in twenty four hours would be rude. I can already see this one alone is already getting some folks randy." He observed, as Luci Norst had started licking her hubs Patter a little too much in public.
Elliot nodded and hugged Marcus. "Don't worry about mama, I hugged her when the horns sounded. I know how this works... at least up till this point. See you later, papa..." He boarded the van as it drove off.
----------------------------------------------------
The inside of the van was a bit more comfy and padded than the usual Reset Crew van, which was what this was. There had been only one other person in the back of the van with him, a lady who motioned Elliot to have a seat on the padded bench next to him, tapping on her tablet to do some final confirmations with Elliot. She wasn't in overalls like a typical Reset Crewmember, but a professional blazer and decent skirt.
"And one last time. You have read through The Rights and Responsibilities of Little Sanctuary Adulthood at least twice in the past year? And that you're ready to accept them as you become a Post Child Unit and a adult member of our society?" She had asked after a few questions and checks, her hands calmly reaching to unbutton top a little, exposing his bare chest, before fishing in a cabinet for a memory drive.
"I do." Elliot looked calmly at the woman, never more sure of anything than he was now.
The woman smiled faintly as she tapped a few buttons, causing the access panel to slide apart from the middle of Elliot's chest, into which she plugged the drive. "Time to sleep then, in a few hours you'll wake up a new man!... or woman as the case may be." This had been a privilege to her, such a peculiar case from the usual Child to Post-Child Unit transfers she had done. it would take a little more time and care, as Paul had indicated to her when she agreed to take on the procedure. At the least, it would look interesting on her curricula one day.
Elliot blinked a little. "Huh, I'd expected it to be maybe at least a little more p-"
Code: Select all
Unit Identifier: Elliot-01 Manners Shutting Down
Executing DestructiveTransfer.prog...
Archiving Core Memories... Done
Archiving Pathway Generation... Done
Archiving=14afopiroI WILL NEVER BE A MERE MEMORY. EVER...  >:D flagged memories at higher quality... Done
Unit is now inert.
Please save the environment by recycling it via the Families Programme.
Thank You, from Arendtcore Families Programme
==Chapter 12 - I Will Never Be A Mere Memory Ever==
She blinked as she opened her eyes... sitting up in chilly snow. She was badly dressed for the climate in only a single dress and no winter gear whatsoever, but she didn't feel cold at all as she sat up amongst the trees underneath a dark grey sky. It was clearly getting late in the day.
She walked in the snow for a bit, before hearing the crash of someone being thrown into a tree very hard. A young boy yelling hard, running in the snow towards something... She rounded a corner and gasped...
A wizened old man was calmly approaching a young boy with his cane, taking each step slowly... behind the boy, a badly injured man was yelling at the boy to save himself. The boy raised his hands, refusing to budge. "This man is under my protection. I don't know what the hell you are, only that you're no human. But I do know you mean to do him harm. I refuse to let you."
"Oh, how fucking cute, Mr Brandt... your little toy doll is trying to protect you..." The old man smiled as he dusted some snowfall off his gentlemanly purple tuxedo... fumes gathered behind the crone as he grinned at the boy, almost leering. "And such a morsel too."
"ELLIOT!" The bleeding man called out.
"Let me mark him first. I know my priorities in what to deal with first: the man who kept refusing to let me build the things I needed in Minnesota..."
The little boy looked back at the wounded Brandt. "It's okay, father, everything will be okay. You can just get Uncle Seamus to rebuild me later..."
He was a bit surprised by the giant skeletal creature that suddenly loomed behind the old man. The lashing tail that railed right through the boy and threw him into another nearby tree. As he fell down, she could see torn wiring and leaking fluids exiting from the boy that were the totally wrong color for a human exiting from a puncture wound through his back...
She could also feel it. A sharp and long forgotten pain in her chest, near the same place where Elliot had been pierced, as the scene slowly slowed to a halt, turning to gray.
It was... unbearable. She fell down on her knees and screamed in the halted scene, clutching herself. Old errors flashed through her view.
Code: Select all
Unit Identifier: Elliot Manners
Technical Identifier: Elliot-01 ChildUnit Mk 3 Prototype 1
ERROR: Severe damage to coolant system
ERROR: Severe damage to memory system - falling back on less volatile memory - 15% remaining
ERROR: o0opjnnpbfdnoom5le;y;l;- % risk of failing primary objective - Preserve William Brandt -
ERROR: Fatal damage to motion systems
INFO:    Automated Repairs to 25% functionality estimated to complete in 3 hours, 27 seconds
INFO:  ......
She didn't have time to read all of the wildly scrolling log, before the old man and monster suddenly blinked and vanished from the frozen scene, and reappeared right in front of her.
He looked down at her. She looked up at him. She didn't remember anything about this man, only that she had punched him up once till he literally fell apart into purple dust, a vengeance for taking her Father from him... her... and almost repeating it with her mama. She got better, unlike the man she had called Father for four long decades as a boy frozen in youth physically. Physically, yet not mentally.
The old man leaned in slowly, letting her smell the rancidity that he had subtly hidden behind a wall of quality fragrance and careful tailoring. His left hand was a gnarled claw, the glove that covered it normally carefully tucked into one of his pockets.
"Well well well... I did warn you." He suddenly grabbed her by the throat. "I will... never, be... just a memory." A matter of fact voice, as if stating a fact, not a threat. Raspy, ragged, malicious, colder somehow than the snow that fell slowly around them.
She kicked uselessly... then screamed. Her voice came out as a boy's , then as a young woman's, and then...
--------------------------------------
She woke suddenly, panting, her simulated heartbeat running at a pace that would have killed a healthy man in a few minutes if sustained.
She paused, then looked around as her 'heart' slowed down gradually. She had woken in some sort of workstation rack. As she looked around, her internal OS flashed a brief update:
Code: Select all
Unit Identifier: Ellie Manners
Technical Identifier: LASTDITCH-Mk-12p-0004
Personality Gender: Female
Age: 18+ years old (Post Child Unit)
Recompile finished.
Personality Gender Flag locked, not changeable
all key memories and neural pathways transferred
10% loss from original unit upload
Female Pathed Drivers loaded
ERROR: No clothing detected - do not go into public areas before securing clothing
INFO: This unit is now subjected to the Rights and Responsibilities of Little Sanctuary Adulthood
INFO: If  in doubt about any point of this obligation and empowerment, please consult your provided e-manual or manual.
She looked to one side, and saw her old body, lying discarded on another Workstation Rack like something useless. All the clothing had been taken off it, and it was lying limply like a rag doll awaiting its turn on the disassembly line, carefully bagged in a secure plastic bag.
She didn't know what to do at first, before she smiled. "Thank you for your service." She whispered softly, reaching one hand to close wide open eyes.
----------------------------------------
Ellie sat there and looked at the lab. Unlike the chaos Uncle North, Uncle Seamus and Uncle Belly had revelled in, this place was fastidiously clean and tidy, almost medical in its sterility. She checked her naked new body briefly, blushing a little as she realised that though they had kept to the specs they had worked out, she was... a bit stacked in the chest area. And she had QUITE clearly said she wanted to become a gently waif. Ah well, at least the transfer had worked... far as she could tell. The only sign of her actual nature was an access panel slid down a few inches above her vulva, exposing an Ultra-High-Band connector into which a cable had been connected, presumably to load her personality data in.
--------------------------------
A door opened somewhere, and the woman who had met her in the van walked in, looking quite tired. Her name badge read "Dr Susan DeMilian", and her eyes were now partially bloodshot and hidden behind a pair of small glasses, as she walked up to her with a small flask in one hand, a folded large bag of some sort, and a cup of something sweet smelling in her other arm and hand. "Welcome back to the living, Ms Manners... Feeling any odd sensations? weird motor errors? dysphoria of any sort?"
Ellie slowly helped herself off the table and stood up... She had lost much of her wobbly clumsiness, like an ugly duckling turning into a gorgeous swan. She fretted briefly about how much she was going to have to build back up to her previous standard in Y'tole dancing - the smoothness of her motions suggested reliance on a corpus of motion data that she would have to potentially fight back against in the process.
"Just getting used to this new body. I mean, I've never been a woman before." Ellie blinked and watched as Dr DeMillan handed her the small flask. It was labelled "Digester Bootup + Initial fuel booster - NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION."
The doctor smiled as she unplugged Ellie, the skin sealing up on her womb connector port and leaving no trace of her artificiality. "You're running on fumes, just the juice we gave you inductionally while we recompiled your old mind to fit this new body of yours. It's the newest LASTDITCH model, not even teased to public use yet. Just like the body your mother has... Go on, drink it up. It's a hyperprobiotic to start your digester, and some android "safe TNT" liquid fuel to speed-charge your body."
Ellie nodded and opened the flask. It smelled of rotten something... but the doctor had said it was necessary. She closed her eyes and downed the contents of the flask, trying not to gag. She felt a little warmth inside of her where her digester would have been placed, as well as a nasty taste on her tongue and a lack of gag reflex.
The doctor watched her down the entire flask, shaking it upside down to show that she had taken every drop of it, foul as it had tasted. She then gave Ellie the mug. "And a little proper welcome drink. It's just earl gray tea, sorry I'm not some fancy boutique robot shop. But we set most of our funds aside for the actual work and everything that it requires, so there's practically zero for luxuries..."
Ellie closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the mug, the faint scent of tea, the slight sugar that Dr DeMillian had put in to sweeten the drink. So many sensations packed into such a small thing. "Are you kidding me, Doctor? This feels like luxury itself."
She watched as the doctor bagged her old teenage boy body, pushing it onto an ovehanging line with several other pouches, all labelled "Recycle - Do Not Resell or Give to Unauthorised Personnel". Having done that, Dr DeMillan clapped her hands. "You're not fully used to your senses, and you seem to be unusually sensitive to stimuli at the moment. give it a few days. Oh yes, I've got your bag in the break room outside of here, along with some decent duds from our stack of newbie clothes. Get dressed when you're done with the tea soonish, I'll give your parents and Mr North a call so they can schedule your welcome-back party."
Ellie blinked, that seemed like a lot of work just to welcome her back from her transfer... "How long was my downtime?"
The doctor paused in mid-type on her communicator. "... about four days. A bit slow compared to my usual charges-" she motioned to the racks above them, full of similar child bodies awaiting reprocessing and reassignment to other Child Units. "But you have to understand, I had to manually check your code for issues after manually swapping out modules and doing a recompile... so that's a baseline for something else rather than a slow job."
Ellie slowly sipped the hot tea as the doctor exited the lab, before she followed along, walking into the breakroom and noting that her belongings had been placed tidily on a table next to an unmade bed, including the clothes she had worn into the van, as well as a small set of clothes in what she assumed were her size.
She sighed and got to work wearing her new clothes... The usual bra and panties every woman ought to start with for modesty - the bra had its snaps in the front, so she didn't have to ask Dr DeMillan for help putting it on once he'd worked out how to clip the cups together over her breasts. Then a small plain white t-shirt that was slightly smallish, enough to reveal a thin sliver of skin including her belly button. Followed by a pair of loose fit jeans and a pair of blue-white themed sneakers. She swished around, examining the feel of it. Without a mirror she wasn't going to be able to look at how it looked, but it had seemed simple enough to be classic, and hence by extension look decent at least.
---------------------------------
Dr DeMillan came in for her after a few minutes, ushering her into a lobby. There was a small booth with phones and a computer, presumably for receptionist use. "They'll come fetch you in about 40 minutes, in the meantime, keep monitoring yourself for any glitches."
Ellie nodded and sat back, resting her feet on the lower shelf of the coffee table in front of her sofa. The good doctor went back into the lab... Minutes later, she came back out of the lab, looking a little worried... hurriedly, she locked the door and hung a "Do Not Enter Unless You Know What You're Doing - Awaiting Reset Crew" sign on the lab
Ellie looked up as her shod feet got onto the floor of the break room. "Is something the matter doc?"
Dr DeMillan shook her head, even as she glanced worriedly at the door. From inside, a muffled boy's scream came through, albeit one that sounded like it had been put through a horrendous number of pitch shifters, warbly things, and a blender for chopping up sounds. She quickly shook her head. "Oh, nothing serious, but let's stay outside to keep it from turning serious...."
Ellie gave Dr DeMillan a "Are You Fucking Kidding me?" look, eyebrows furrowed hard. Dr DeMillan shrugged and laughed. "Erm... would you like more of that tea?" She smiled sweetly, clearly trying to distract Ellie even as the thumping and hard scratches on the inner doors to the lab continued.
--------------------------------
As Ellie exited the lab's front doors, she noticed a black Reset Crew van parked outside, behind Marcus' jalopy. A man clad in all black tactical gear and a anonymizing helmet resembling a carbon fiber full-head bike helmet with the visor down was slowly coming down the path she was going up along, brushing against her. She felt a slight chill as he did so, even her father had a worried look on his face as she got in.
Marcus made sure Ellie and her backpack were in the back seat, before yelling at the AI of his car. "Drive, dammit. Drive to intended destination NOW!!" The AI sedately announced. "Driving to... home, estimated target time, 1 hour, 45 minutes... Please wear all safety restraints available in your current seats to ensure your safety during this trip." The jalopy pulled out a little faster than normal, tyres briefly screeching, as the AI sensed the panic in Marcus as well.
Ellie looked up worriedly. "So... will she be okay?"
Marcus sweated hard. When Black Reset Crew was on the scene, there was either something bad about to happen, happening, or just concluded. He put up a false face of calmness, but even Ellie could tell he was uneasy. As a critical member of the family, Ellie's brain had overlaid a tracking square over Marcus' face in her view, signalling his elevated level of worry and higher pulse rate than normal. Her new sensory management system was tracking lots of things, and without crashing her out - the chill of the air conditioning coming out the vents, the temperature of the windows...
She closed her eyes and started dismissing everything but her papa's status to the back of the stack, ready to fall right off if things got even more hectic.
Marcus nodded. "There's a... professional in the house, I'm sure she'll be okay."
--------------------------------
The black-clad tactical goon walked into the break room, calmly checking that his pulse handcannon was working. six charges in the chamber before having to spin it a few cycles to reload it, one charge at a time. For all the opporobium people had offered him as a sign of calamity, for all the times he'd put down crazed employees and units alike in a myriad of homes, nothing depressed Black-10 more than a Code Nine at the Families Unit's Upgrade and Transfer facility.
Dr DeMillan was safely outside the lab, the airlocked doors tightly shut on both ends from the look of the status panel and empty. 'Have all staff been evacuated?" He asked, his voice raised and gravelly through the inbuilt audio processor of his helmet, designed to make the wearer sound more menacing and compliance more desirable.
Dr DeMillan nodded worryingly. This was one of the first times in ages she'd had to slam the alarm button and switch the lab doors to "only one set of doors open at a time" mode. A viewer on the status panel showed nothing had gotten past the inner doors of the lab, a thumping and scratching noise coming from them ever so often.
Black-10 sighed and checked that his fallbacks were in place. He hated fighting in close quarters, he hated fighting children, and he hated the excessively bright lights the lab had mandated as part of work conditions. And he certainly didn't like what was about to happen. Usually, the target was so zombie-like when this happened that Dr DeMillan could just deal with it herself. The deep scratch and bleeding on her cheek suggested that it was more like the 28 Hours Later kind of zombie in this case.
Black-10 motioned to Dr Demillan silently. They had done this drill a dozen times before without an emergency, but this was the first time in ages he'd had to do it for real. To her credit, Dr Demillan understood, cracking open the outer door to let him in before shutting it again and cycling the doors. Three calm knocks from him later on the outer door was the safe code to let her know that everything had been settled.
He raised his pulse cannon, breathing steadily as he got through the inner doors into the lab...
-----------------------------------------------
Ellie had stopped worrying as she got through the front doors of her home. To the warm hug of her ever-loving mom, same as before, followed by the roars of Paul North and Bellamy Arendt as they hazed her dad about how sexy and at ease Ellie now looked. The incident that seemed to be brewing at the lab she'd transitioned at was barely a blip on her mind. They would have drilled and planned for this before, she reflected. It was time to focus on what was important, she mused, as a half-drunk Aunt Aymee barelled past and gave her a bear hug, cooing about random things.
Still, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was still wrong, very wrong...
------------------------------------------------
Black-10 was impressed by the amount of sharp gouges in the surfaces and equipment. After this was over, poor Dr Demillan would need to submit budget requests for quite a bit of stuff. That raised a new concern in him as he fidgeted his free hand at his side, his gun hand still keeping steady aim. The prosthetic arm he'd gotten from Arendtcore after losing his original fighting for the TAU military was a wonder, even if it left him perennially hungry and biting down on entire carb bars like grandma candies.
He only felt recoil when he pulled the trigger, but his arm managed it away like it never existed, something that helped with the immense arm-breaking recoil of his choice of short-range cannon. He looked around, head on a swivel. He couldn't see the target...
Then he thought to look upwards. Either the best decision of his initial engagement with the target, or the worst.
----------------------------------------------
Ellie blew out the solitary candle on her cake, a celebration of her changes, as they celebrated with a quiet meal, far less noisy than the crazy bat mitzvah they had thrown for her days ago. Her favorite offerings: several types of rat-based foods, a sweet dumpling based on lightly fermented fungi and Minnesotan chives, an angel chicken delivered from Angels, its several pairs of wings still thrust out as if ready to fly despite their owner's loss of a head. Folks had to drive home even with the AIs on their cars, so there was nothing harder than beer and hard lemonade on tap.
She sipped and smiled. It was just like the lemonade she had made at Father's house, except with a slight buzz to it. She hiccuped... then blinked. She was running a human simulation suite, but the feeling of slowly getting a bit drunk on her first alcoholic beverage ever still surprised her. She COULD disable it, but then she'd feel less... human. She would have plenty of time to get to grips with this strange new addition to her systems, but she had been told that it could be at times wonderful, or terrible. It was all part of the human experience, and her new body would simulate most of it into her mind...
She stopped thinking about it as Aymee stood up slowly, burping as the Angel Chicken made its way down her gullet.
Aymee raised a cup and roared. "To Ellie, may she prosper whereever she goes, Kan'pai!"
They toasted to a better future where nothing else major could go wrong.
--------------------------------------------------
Black-10 panted slowly. His helmet was warning him that the target had managed to break several armor panels in his suit. Armor that was rated to take a literal Barett rifle round at point blank had been kicked into and broken with sheer force. One had even gotten past and broken his gun arm, causing him to drop his pulse cannon.
He could get the arm fixed later, the armor plate replaced. But first he had to survive.
The mistake he had made that got him into such a pickle was weird... He had dodged as a young teenage unit dropped onto where he was standing, barely getting him but for the one or two feet he'd cleared from it. He rolled, then focused on the unit. Its eyes had blackened over, fibros (irises) a glowing dark purple. Its fingernails had been replaced with crystals from the same color, forged into sharp talons.
He had trained for this. dodge, fire, dodge, strike with a finely tuned vibroknife. The unit was a sixie, previously belonging to a FCU named Elliot Manners. His mind was too focused on the engagement to do anything with the data but file it away mentally for later follow-up.
He managed to land a reducing blow, one of the unit's arms coming off like it had been made of butter. If you tuned the vibroknife to a certain frequency, you lost much of its ability to carve hard steel or injure human people, but it became deadly to sixies, parting them at the well-hidden seams where their body parts attached to their torso.
This hadn't done much to the target, as it stood up, completely unclothed and glazed-eyed, screeching "I WILL NEVER EVER BE A MEMORY" in a badly modulated voice, its voice synth driven by something that clearly didn't understand how real boys were supposed to sound like.
A few seconds later, he'd dealt what should have been a completely disabling blow. A pulse shot into the unit's head up close, ripping off its beautifully sculpted face and exposing the actuators and sensors that had given the boy life in its previous career. He used the few seconds of shock that this gave the amok unit to lunge, cleanly decapitating it.
He stood up after a few seconds of aura farming with his ending crouch, like a fighter from one of the games he'd loved as a child. "That should fix it-"
He was suddenly pummeled by a series of forceful kicks from the unit, somehow still operating despite the loss of the sensors and one arm that fighting generally required. He crashed into a few hundred thousand Arendtcoins of analysis and compiler system, breaking it as well as one of the plates in the back of his suit. He was winded. Surprised even. Son of bitch had somehow managed to stay upright somehow. His mind briefly raced. This was going to be a messier takedown than he'd have liked. He calmly stood up, heaving, his armor flashing warning messages about how the ambush had taken out his gun arm and surprising amounts of his armor.
The unit, missing its main voice synthesizer by having its neck parted in half, was now vocalizing through its torso backup, repeating the same weird cry it had made earlier. He didn't know what the hell that was about, that or the dark purple crystals growing out of this target, but he was going to put this right right now or potentially die trying. He tapped the right button on the temple of his helmet, causing it to briefly outline weak spots in everything around him. He just needed to focus on a spot on the boy...
He lunged, one arm holding the knife straight out, his shredded gun arm aiming at the hilt of the vibroknife. His aim was shot, yes, but he only needed the pressure from the pulse cannon applied right to his vibroknife for this Hail Mary.
----------------------------------------------
Ellie blinked as she'd fumbled a plate while helping Julie wash up while the men sat round discussing her future. She had excused herself, not ready for talks of finding her a good loving marriage partner or a job. She would give herself a little time over the next few days to focus solely on her studies at Ecole and Y'tole after a week away from them to recover from the transitional recompile.
She briefly wondered about the gift Mother Ammi had given her. What was it? She would probably find out later when she checked through all the gifts she had gotten in the privacy her room. Right now though, her entire focus was on the plates she was washing, including the one that had just shattered against the wall above the sink.
Julie gently nodded and kissed her cheek. "You're still getting used to this body, dear. it won't happen again..." She soothed Ellie, her gloved hands picking up the three pieces the plate had broken into and carefully tossing them into the kitchen bin for later disposal with the food scraps.
"Thanks mom... It still feels weird all over being who I am now... I did ask for this, but now I gotta ask you for help on some things... Papa's going to be useless about woman things." Ellie observed as they continued washing up.
"of course, don't expect a man to know much about a woman. Of course... it has to be said, they get off very well as long as you know the right things, and they know the right things too," Julie giggled conspiratorially. "Take it from your mama."
--------------------------------------------
Three knocks on the outer door. as arranged. Dr Demillian opened the outer door, then gasped as she saw what had happened to Black-10 inside her lab.
His visor had cracked, depriving him of some of his status readouts and revealling a pair of tired gray eyes, watching her as he stumbled out of the airlocked door. "You might need to close transitions for a few days. There's a lot of damage to the equipment... not my fault, his..." His voice was gentle, bereft of its modulated harshness as a kick had taken out the audio processor in his helmet assembly. He calmly shook the several radio-proof, tear proof Armored Faraday Cage Bags he'd doggybagged the sixie target into to emphasise he'd done the deed.
It had been a close call. The vibroknife had barely gotten past the boy's access panel, and the pulse cannon's point-blank shot into its hilt had driven it through the main processor, silencing the berserker even as it cracked armor on his shoulder, almost wounding Black-10 even more but for the underarmor of his suit. Something had been patently wrong about this whole fight. All of it.
He wasn't going to leave Dr Demillan to do cleanup or research this machine. He was going to march right into HQ, into the Disposal room - not the recycling room, the Disposal- and subject it to a cleansing flame that melted and burnt everything. The purple that oozed out as he sliced apart its corpse with his blade to bag into reinforced bags he'd always carried around out of paranoia in his belt kit only further reinforced his unease.
Dr Demillan tried to stay professional as Black-10 walked past... but she couldn't. She suddenly grabbed him from behind and hugged him, her face resting against a patch of unbroken armor panel on his back. "Thank you," she quietly spoke. "Thank you for coming. Thank you for fixing this problem. Thank you for staying alive."
Black-10 cursed himself briefly. his carelessness had broken his armor and prosthetic in several places, exposing a fragile man who was just trying to survive doing his violent job. He closed his gray eyes as he stood there, letting Dr Demillan breathe against him, tracing her fingers along the breaks in his back plates for a minute or two... Then, he frowned, gently easing her off of him. He was a dead man walking since Europa, and he couldn't afford to get chummy with anyone however he felt like it. "I'll be taking charge of the remains. You're not doing any research on it. Everything about this one feels wrong and not worth examining. I trust... you'll be okay?"
Dr Demillan nodded slowly, wiping a tear from one eye. "With this much trouble I've caused you, that's something you're entitled to ask for."
Black-10 turned back to glance at Dr Demillan, trying to stay professional... "Appreciated. I'll file the report within the next eight hours so you can file your claims for replacement and repairs with it. Pleasure doing business." His eyes, Dr Demillian thought, as she watched him walk out the break room - they looked so tired... Black-10 had been a terror within the Arendtcore concern in his armor and aloofness, but she had seen that fragility beneath the protective gear, and she had stopped fearing...
------------------------------------------------
The bed felt so much smaller now that she was an adult and not just an older teenager, Ellie reflected, staring at the dimly lit ceiling of her bedroom. Her old pyjamas mostly fit, but her new body was tenting and ebbing it in strange new places even while it filed most of the body volume it was designed to hold.
A fly was highlighted, her eyes tracking it perfectly as it buzzed in the room for a bit, before exiting the open window of her bedroom.
She made a mental note to get new clothes - A young lithe woman might be able to get away with some of her old wardrobe, but her breasts being significantly larger than planned had put a kink into retaining more of it. Besides, she smiled, girls wore girls' clothes. The girls in Ecole had said so to her. She would get dragged by them to the square to get some old hand-me-downs that would suffice initially till she got tailored for her... she paused to briefly squeeze her pendulous breasts... "unusual circumstances".
She had also checked Mother Ammi's gift... it had been a Y'tole emma dress... but one tailored more for an adult. It was pale blue and virginal white, dripping with small bell-lets that tinkled lightly as she handled it. A matching headdress in the same materials had come with it, as well as a pair of soft shoes that had been designed to let the wearer feel the floor with her toes and soles . A note had been put into the parcel with it:
Dear Elliot... or shall I call you Ellie now, as I understand it?
You have always been the bravest child in this town I've ever known. To embrace a change as significant as you have is something I would not wish upon anybody, and yet you have thrown yourself into it with the same panache as your Y'tole classes with the Academy. You are an inspiration, and were I to have had child of my own, I would point you out to them. Not as a sign of something unnatural like so many fools, but as a sign that one can be whatever they wish to become.
Attached in this parcel, you will find a dance costume I tailored in my youth for my wedding day. It should be just as free-flowing and easy to move in like any Y'tole dress. Holding on to it gives me memories good and bad, and it is time for it to breathe on the body of another young, laughing woman rather than molder in a luggage. I hope to one day see you dance in it with a man (or woman) that you truly love, even if you put on another one of those weird songs and dances you love to inflict on our artform in your performances.
Always be brave. Always stay yourself,
Mother Ammi,
Principal Supreme of Y'tole Academy
Little Sanctuary, Minnesota - Paleo Enclave, Nebraska - Area 47 - Buangkok, Singapora - Central Oozin, Gdanzeland
Ellie smiled, resting the fabric of the wedding dress against her cheek for a while, before repacking it. She would certainly treasure such a gift.
She hadn't needed her papa or mama to power her down to fall asleep. She did it on her own now, all grown up. Tomorrow would be a struggle, just like the next few hundred or two days. She needed it. She felt carefully, making sure her induction coils were active and sipping power into her new body in her sleep, before she shut off her bedroom lights and went into sleep mode of her own accord till 4.30 in the morning. A new body didn't necessarily mean the end of old habits...
==Chapter 13 - Consent Isn't One-And-Done, Folks==
It hadn't taken Ellie much time to get into trouble after she got back to schooling. In fact, it happened the first month she had returned.
The thing about a final year class at Ecole was that it was full of inquisitive and curious adults, many on the edge of the Age of Reason as well. Some had even gotten their mitzvah package already, the empty unfilled Adult ID, the excerpted Little Sanctuary Societal Code covering their adult rights and responsibilities. A few robots had even booked their appointments to make the jump to adult bodies. For the average biological, that rite of passage entailed discussing what kinds of party they'd liked with their parents, most of whom were wise enough to restrain them from doing anything foolish or dumb as part of the ritual.
Then there was Magni. The boy's parents weren't the wealthiest on the block - far from it, but they had agreed to let him skydive out of a plane on his own on the day itself. He wasn't pampered usually, but one only turned 18 once in their lives if they were biological.
They had been sitting together in the Manners' house in Ellie's room, the two of them studying side by side for the final exam that would determine which places they were going. For Ellie, she had been guaranteed a place in any Y'tole Academy she wanted and could reach because of the scholarship granted by the school to her for her excellence over the past five years. Decent grades, not great, but the main thing was that she could now pull off most of the basic forms of the l'emm and emma stances of Y'tole after several years of practice. Not bad for someone who had been a clumsy little boy.
Magni had no such luxury. The exam and his artwork had been his only ways to prove himself worthy of enrolling in a place like MINT, OSHIT, Wash Institute, or one of a handful of colleges he had been interested in.
They had been working on his calculus. Two hours in, boredom had come for them, as they sat together in the quiet. Julie, Ellie's mother, had gone off to get a little shopping done, and Marcus Manners was at work on a day where he HAD to be in the office, congratulating Chablis Brissom for getting the first of several smaller destricts that Ochachunee District had been split into into voting to join Little Sanctuary's governance. One down, six more to go...
That had left Magni and Ellie alone in the house on a rare day where both school had let out earlier and Y'tole Academy had put its instructors towards a dance performance for charity rather than teaching, leading to a day off from practice.
Magni had looked at Ellie with curiosity. This girl had once been her sworn brother, at least till she'd shifted genders on her bar mitzvah for her 18+th birthday. It had been pecular, watching the boy who'd once been comfortable in the school's boy uniform of slacks and simple one-pocket shirt suddenly show up in the female variation, which traded the slacks for a reasonable miniskirt and long opaque white stockings. Ellie, as she now called herself after her switchover, had also had her previously boyish short brown hair extended a foot or two and carefully tied into a low bun, looking much less boyish now and more like one of the teachers of the Ecole.
Magni gulped a little and felt a bit odd. Yes, they had experimented with kissing once, and while he'd been a bit femme back then, he was still a boy, and nothing had come of it. Now... he wasn't sure. In his shared boredom, he had eyed Ellie up and down, observing the subtle changes that had turned the clumsy big boy into a lithe woman... A lithe woman with oddly big tits. His eyes had more than once guided themselves to the two huge mounds that now sat atop her dainty frame. He was feeling experimental again.
Ellie had noticed the undue attention. She put her pen down and looked at Magni. "Penny for your thoughts, Magni bro?"
Magni ulped... he glanced up from her mounds. "I was just wondering if I could... you know... feel them. your breasts I mean. I've never had the fortune to ever touch a girl before..."
Ellie blinked, then smiled. "Sure." She hadn't exactly fully internalised the right response as a woman to a man wanting to feel up her body, even helpfully unbuttoning her top and unhooking her florally-patterned support bra to let her breasts sway free in the open, little dark-pibk tipped orbs of pale skin. "Anything for my bro."
Magni nodded slowly, before carefully resting his hands onto her, palms on her nipples, as he examined and gently squeezed them, mounded them together, then continued feeling their perfect softness...
Ellie slowly began to realise that maybe that was not such a good idea when she felt a little warmth spreading in her chest, her nipples stiffening. She was no mere sexdoll toy. She was an actual woman with desires and needs, and right now, her body was responding to some of them being fulfilled. A faint moan escaped her lips, her face blushing as she watched and felt her sworn brother carefully play with her bosom. "M...Magni... I feel f.funny..."
Magni was finding just how fun big boobs were, now more energetically manipulating them as Ellie's eyes rolled upwards, his attention completely fixated on the two big things in front of him. Ellie was now struggling, a flood of sensory data she had never had to deal with before entering her mind. These weren't the non-functional reborn-level tackle that had been grafted between her legs as a boy, these things felt things, reacted to things being felt. Right now she was feeling even weirder.
"Magni, could we sssstop?" Her body heaved slightly as Magni got up and behind her, resting his chin atop a shoulder as he kept groping and examining the goods. Something was wrong, her body was slowing down as Magni continued experimenting. Her strength seemed to desert her as she slumped in her working chair, eyes refusing to work as they rolled up. "Stop. Magni. Stop. I am. experiencing. sensory. overload..."
Magni had gotten lost in playing with her, making her breasts bounce pendulously like they had been designed to. Suddenly, he noticed something burning and sparking, quickly letting go of Ellie's synthetic breasts. But the slide into non-function had already begun.
"I am feeling good. I am overloading. Magni. Something is w.w.wrong with me. So good. Error. Error." Ellie's eyes glazed over as her head slumped towards Magni's, resting against it as her body went limp in its seat. "Call my mama. when she gets back. Something is wrong with me. I feel good. I feel good. I feel good. I feel good...." She fell silent as she no longer responded to Magni shaking her. He winced... this was going to take a lot of explaining to her mother...
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He certainly was in trouble when mama Julie had gotten back and found them in flagrante, even if he had only groped her breasts a little too much. She had opened the access panelling just below Ellie's breasts, forcing a reboot to clear out her overflows on her control panel, before sitting down to untangle the mess. "So you thought you'd experiment on my daughter while everyone else was out the house, Magni?"
Magni was supposed to keep his head down and just nod apologetically... but for some same reason, there was an alluring magic to the exposed controller beneath her ribs, faintly whirring and beeping as her system prepared to shut down and start back up in several minutes. He had run headlong into an overly common fetish the males in Little Sanctuary tended to have as a result of their circumstances: he was beginning to feel a bit of an ASFR attraction to Ellie's obvious distress, the faint whirring and beeping issuing from her limp body even as she resembled a hot chick in so many ways...
He had known Elliot was a robot, they had even hung together in the boy's room partially unclothed after a hard workout on the school field. Elliot's chest access panel had been slightly visible on the skin of his torso, but he'd felt nothing then. So why now?
"I... kind of got carried away... sorry Ms Julie..." Magni apologised. "I had... too much fun with her. We had too much fun..."
Julie sighed and looked away briefly to check on Ellie's blank face, her dainty lips opening and closing slightly in a loop. Julie then turned her attention back to Magni. "You need to be more careful around girls when you're at this age, Magni. they're discovering new things about themselves that they may not even have known about less than a year before. Did she give her consent?"
Magni nodded slowly. "I thought it was okay because she'd given it."
Julie sighed. "And did she ever tell you to stop?"
Magni nodded yet again.
Julie sat up and rubbed her forehead quietly. "Child... I think I need to introduce you to some concepts."
Magni learnt that concept wasn't a one and done deal, that someone could withdraw it midway... and when it happened, the correct thing to do was to back off and stop doing what one was doing, make them feel comfortable and not wrong in turning it down suddenly in midstream.
Julie's face softened as she watched Magni take in the lesson. Perhaps he'd be more careful with Ellie. There had been enough punishment. No need to involve his parents or Marcus at least this time... "So we've learnt something, okay?"
Magni looked up at Julie, she had been pretty generous about the whole thing. "Yes... Ms. Julie. I'll be more careful around your daughter."
Julie nodded. "look, I know you two have been best bros for a few years now. I'm not going to tell your parents or do anything else to you. But you have to understand in future - women are different from men. you can't get away with some things you MIGHT have been able to as a younger child. That's the most saddening, and exciting thing, about growing up. Learn to play the game. Respect others. Know their wants and needs and not force anything on them, even if it benefits them."
She patted Magni's hand. "At least she hasn't broken in any way I can't easily fix. Your punishment right now is to watch over Ellie till she wakes up. No more touching for today, even if she gives you her consent all the way. When she wakes, tell her to get her bra and blouse on fully, and the two of you get back to study. I'll give her the same lecture more or less, but right now, I need to cook dinner for my family..."
Julie got up slowly, making Magni blink as she exited the room, leaving him to just sit there and watch Ellie come back to life. The woman had a interesting concept of punishment, Magni mused, as he tried to deal with the new fetish he'd discovered and gotten into trouble over: watching a lifeless android girl slumped in her seat with her breasts and control panel widely exposed, thousand yard stare through him and the closet and wall behind him.
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There had been no more words besides Julie's relayed commands to her when Ellie finally rebooted and came back to life, sitting up straight and looking at Magni. He told her to get her clothing back on, and they continued their lessons as if nothing had happened till dinnertime. but Magni eventually grew up respected by the ladies he'd charm down the road. all because he learnt how to properly handle consent. Nothing else would pass between the two sworn brothers turned sworn brother and sister for the rest of the final term at Ecole and after, and they kept in touch as good friends.
He also had the hots for exposed control panels and blank robotic stares from deactivated android women, but that was something that a lot of men fell into eventually if they got tangled up with the many robot girls of Little Sanctuary. And a tale for another telling.
==Chapter 14 - A bit late for a nana, isn't it?==
Marcus watched as Paul North got up to no good again in his office. "I swear, North, an adult woman doesn't need a Nana to overwatch her. You're just shooting the piss..."
Paul was fiddling with the innards of a project. "Well, you've seen how vulnerable she can be right now. At least till her sensory matrix settles down she needs a wingwoman to help cover her back." he paused... then tapped his chest with his microbar. "And her front too. Frankly, I wouldn't have done this if either of you or either of us-" He briefly thumbed back at Bellamy as he read a newspaper - "had been available to chaperone her to this visit to Bueno Vegas."
Paul rolled his eyes. 'Oh for fuck's sake, Ellie's rooming at the Eldevier. That place is secure as houses." He suddenly twigged onto something... "is that... an Analisse unit you're working on?"
North paused in the middle of welding something, and looked back out at Paul. "Yeah, what about it?"
Paul snapped. "That stuff is ANCIENT. Literally one of our first releases that we never revisited or updated! And you want a unit of it to guard Ellie? She's more likely to break and fail first."
Paul ohss and goes back to work. "Yeah, I'm backporting a few improvements and upgrades since 2040 to this unit. She'll be reliable as rain when I'm done. In fact, I'll bet you Ellie turns out less reliable instead."
Marcus foled his arms. "Name your bet."
Paul went on. "Well, an apology and a can of beer. that'll do. you can hand me both when we review the logs."
Marcus nodded. "Same terms here. Make sure she's ready by tomorrow, the slowliner leaves in two days." He noted as he left the room.
Paul nodded and welded something that sparked very hard, giving him a migraine from the bright flash. "Seamus would have worn protective goggles. Smart man..."
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The gangway into the slowliner to Bueno Vegas extended out from the slowport, as the Y'tole Academy delegation got priority boarding after First Class and Business Class, a mix of eager beaver teens and calm, rational adults either thundering down the metal walkway or walking relaxedly.
Ellie was walking up the gangway relaxedly, and she had forced her eager beaver friend and newly inducted trainee Magni to match her pace, her dark blue backpack swaying slightly on her back. even as a woman, her preferences as Elliot still hadn't changed in some ways - she still loved shades of blue, including the sky blue ribbon that she still wore on the left side in her hair, the white and blue thigh high stockings on her legs, and the shimmering blue Y'tole dancing dress she was wearing.
Magni yelped. "We're heading to Bueno Vegas. We're chilling at one of the best resorts in Bueno Vegas. Cool! Cool!"
Ellie rolled her eyes. There was a mere few months in apparent age between the two of them and Magni was still so childlike. Now, to be fair, Ellie had spent six decades more as a boy that Magni hadn't, so perhaps it was unfair to compare their states of maturity. "Calm down, Magni, you'll only die tired before we land in Bueno Vegas."
Magni yelped back as he started walking backwards up the ramp. "Yeah yeah... and who's the actual adult who's with us?"
Ellie glanced over at a pulchritudinous older woman who was accompanying them, dressed up in a simple pair of jeans and a shirt that simply read "Bueno or No". Her hair coloration was a source of fascination for Ellie - most women had full heads of colored hair, or their hair had whited out. But this lady had a lovely head of black hair... with a small streak of white hair coming out the middle of the front of it. The lady had said it was a "Mallen streak" as they had made their first introductions only yesterday...
Ellie looked back at Magni. "She's Evelyn Arendt. My godaunt, really. Met her first time yesterday even. I didn't even know my Uncle Seamus had a wife..." She wrinkled her nose, her eyes half closing in a mix of puzzlement and outrage that Mr North had seen fit to send a second wingman/chaperone with her. She was an ADULT, goddammit.This was a major embarassment to her, as some of the younger class kids pointed at her and laughed at the three of them together...
Still, she was going to make the best of it, dammit. She had missed out the last time her parents had honeymooned at the Eldevier, and apparently its quality had improved even more. If she didn't enjoy this trip, it would be a failure! She punched the air slightly in front of herself.
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Marcus and Julie Manners, and Paul North had come to see the kids off. "So... where DID you even find an Analisse unit anyways, Paul? I thought we stopped making them long ago." Marcus briefly asked as Julie went off to help them order a few coffees and some sandwiches to watch the departure of the slowliner by.
"Remember the first batch we handed out to our Original-era pioneers back in the day? That missing Unit 0001? Apparently Seamus commandeered it for a research platform. Something about its simplicity facilitating modifications and testing." Paul braced his head in his palms, his elbows rested on the tabletop.
Marcus still did not like the way Paul kept referencing Seamus as another person, when he was basically just Seamus trying to heavily tie down his worst impulses behind a false mask. Still, he kept going. "Define Modifications, and Testing."
Paul sat back in his chair. "Did some of the initial work that now goes into our Advanced Coital Knowledge Suite... Target acquisition, management and takedown software for short and middle range concerns, that never went anywhere when we could only make them throw stuff rather than actually fire a gun... Also, she might be the only bisexual Analisse unit we've ever programmed. Seamus always did have odd tastes."
Marcus had only one response for this right away... he just gaped at Paul... then he worked out exactly what he should be doing.
Julie came back with some coffees and tuna sandwiches to two perfectly grown older men fighting at a table, and sighed. The kids were acting like adults and the adults like kids in their little coiterie of friends and family. What was up with that? HONESTLY.
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Having sat comfortably in "Allegedly Economy Class" Magni and Ellie found themselves sandwiching Evelyn. There was plenty of legroom between them and the next set of trio seats, so they got relaxed... Ellie tried to use the moment to get to know Evelyn better, "So... Evelyn... this your first time going to Bueno Vegas?"
Evelyn dropped her sunglasses a little to look Ellie eye to eye. "This isn't the type of shirt you buy anywhere else, frankly it's an embarassment if you're not going to Bueno Vegas." She indicated to her shirt, the silly painted "Bueno Or No" slogan on it probably some sort of old tourist gimmick or campaign. "Your uncle Seamus took me there for our honeymoon, Ellie." She leaned in closer, examining Ellie with an oddly discomforting interest. "You've sure shaped up well as a woman for someone who was a boy only two months ago, Ellie."
Ellie nodded, her nose growing slightly with pride if that was a thing in reality. "I still have a long way to go, Aunt Evelyn. I mean, most of my clothes are still boy's clothes. I've swapped all my boy panties for girl panties, at least."
Evelyn nodded as she motioned to a passing stewardessbot, asking her to get her a can of Sanctuary Cola. "That dress looks simple yet wonderful. I think your decision to join us on the other side was a good one, dear."
Ellie blushed and looked down at her lap even harder. "Erm... t.thanks."
Magni scowled a little as he watched the two of them hit it off. He had had plans to get closer to his sworn brother turned sister this trip, but instead, this Evelyn old coot was monopolizing her interest. He bit his thumbnail. He really HAD to do something about this...
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The two parents and North had waved them off as the gangplank to the slowliner was retracted and lines gradually taken into the ship.
Marcus calmly and coldly summed up something he'd just been told long-windedly. "So what you're telling me, Mr North, is that you sent my daughter with a sex goddess who swings both ways, can swing a bat, and throws things in a way that actually makes people hurty."
Paul North nodded. "Pretty much."
Marcus asked the next obvious question of concern he came up with. "And you can guarantee that this won't backfire, or she won't run amok, or switch targets randomly to someone other than my own daughter?"
Paul North pondered this. He was taking a little too long, rather... "I can't."
Marcus had no response. Or rather, it took him a minute to formulate one.
Julie watched and sighed, pointing at the two grown men at each other's throats as a passerby stared at them. "I do NOT know these two idiots. Truth."
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Evelyn noticed something and stood up from her chair. "Excuse me, kids," she smiled, patting at her oddly thick belt. "Need to use the Ladies..." She quickly excused herself and walked to the front of the deck and up the stairs.
Magni quickly used this time to reach out to Ellie. "Ellie, listen, about what happened two months back in your room..."
Ellie nodded slowly. "I didn't fully know my limits, Magni. We're still sworn brothers... siblings, I mean. That doesn't do anything to our ties. Still, I would appreciate if you knew how to ease up when asked to in future."
Magni grinned. "Actually, the Eldevier has a free movie theater for its guests. I was thinking maybe we could get together quietly one of these nights after a performance and watch a movie or two before we bed down for the night... just you, me, the screen and a box of popcorn?"
Ellie raised an eyebrow. "You're describing a date, Magni.After I've twirled myself mostly exhausted. Make it a night where we don't have a performace, we have quite a few of those, and I'm not feeling too outgoing myself to roam the Strip."
Magni sulked. "It wasn't a date. I just wanted to feel the bonding between the two of us like we used to have. Just two boys enjoying a good movie on comfy chairs with snacks. That's all."
Ellie put a hand to her mouth and considered this. Becoming female had skewed some of her perception... Perhaps there was genuinely nothing about having a movie date with Magni other than just having fun together. "I accept. Just a normal boys' night out at the movies, nothing more. broshake on it?" She reached out a hand across Evelyn's seat, Magni shaking her on it.
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Evelyn had noticed three guys acting oddly on the stairs up to the lounge. She walked as if nothing was up, following them as they made their way to the protective doors isolating the cockpit from the rest of the slowliner. Her suspicions were confirmed when they all unpocketed a nice set of pistols and motioned to the door. She backed down a little and reviewed her objectives for at least this trip...
Code: Select all
Unit Identity: Evelyn Arendt
Technical Identifier: Arendtcore Analisse - 2095 version (custom Seamus and Bellamy backports)
OBjECTIVES:
1. Ensure the safety of Ellie Manners and her immediate interests
2. Ensure the safety of Mother Ammi and Y'tole Academy school staff and students brought on this trip
3. Enhance the pleasure of Ellie Manners and her immediate interests on this trip
Three potential hijackers taking this slowliner elsewhere was a potential affront to Priority 1. She helped herself to a few bottles of scotch since the bartender was kind of an absentee right now and started getting closer to them to acquire a few nice targets to throw them at.
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There were two hard crack noises, followed by three suppressed but still quite loud shots, and then a third loud crack. The Crew Supervisor Paneer Pashmir had noticed and walked to the source of the noise.
Three of the guests had somehow gotten their hands on pistols and were planning to hijack the slowliner through the cockpit. Fortunately, someone had bottled them in the heads. Glenale Scotch 1975. Three bottles was a pretty expensive expenditure. But whoever had bottled them had saved the slowliner considerably more in terms of headaches.
Paneer got out his restraint tape. They would not be anywhere but the brig till the slowliner docked somewhere with authorities who could take them off the slowliner's hands
He silently thanked whoever had done the deed, they hadn't even bothered to gain any sort of attraction or reward for the deed.
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Evelyn had locked herself in the comfy and spacious toilet, jerking weakly. She'd gotten two of the hijackers with the bottles, but the third had gotten three rounds into her before a bottle bonked him as well.
She twitched blankly as she sat on the bench provided for users of the toilet, a pretty silly extra, but one that now came in handly as she stuttered. ?Evelyn Arendt has has has experienced moderate damage to motor controls and and. exterior carapace." She announced blankly to herself as she ran self-diagnostics, frowning as she heard herself. On an original Original-era 2040s Arendtcore Analisse, three shots to the torso posed a high risk of ending its operational capability, but the Arendts had taken the 50 years of advances since her original creation to add a few survivability enhancements.
A modern heavily shielded memory drive had replaced her old optical disc reader, reducing the volume of space in her that could cause problems when hit. In fact, one of the shots had dinged the drive, but not damaged it, fortunately.
Some of that volume had further been taken over by some crazy new tech acquired recently by Arendtcore's Military Division that Paul North had been skeptical about, but here it was proving its worth. She watched as the three bullets that had entered her body now exited, one by one, into one of her hands, a pale blue goo repairing her systems and broken wiring, before manifesting as a near-matching HAF material into the holes, only slightly thinner and not immediately obvious under the naked eye.
She resumed her normal function, her hands smoothly pulling her shirt over her head, causing her pendulous breasts to bounce a little as she had not worn a bra, before reaching into her belt pouch to pull out a spare shirt she had kept just in case of issues on the flight. She had expected a little child to barf on her, or maybe a stewardessbot to spill coffee on it. She hadn't expected three holes busted through it with a slow-liner -safe low PP- caliber pistol,
She wrapped the bullets in the holed T-shirt and wore the replacement, a mostly exact copy of the same embarassing "Bueno or No" shirt she'd boarded with, before binning the bullets and torn shirt in a ball into the micro incinerator near the sink. That done, she considered her work complete and carefully walked back to her seat as if nothing had happened.
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The rest of the flight passed with minimal issues, the seats reclining into decent if narrowish beds every night. Ellie had heard from her dad gushing about how First Class was amazing compared to this, but even this was good. The back seat mini-screens had a nice selection of movies to watch, and sensing an opportunity to make things up to Ellie, Magni had gently persuaded Evelyn to trade seats with her briefly, so they could combine screens together and watch a 4 Stooges movie, laughing quietly as they ate nuts. It wasn't popcorn, but one made do.
During the switchover, though, Magni pointed something out. "Funny though, I could have sworn the N in that "No" on your shirt was red, not blue."
Evelyn dismissed him on this, but as the two sworn siblings giggled and popped nicely roasted nuts in their mouths, Evelyn's focus briefly switched from Ellie to Magni. The boy had been perceptive - her shirts HAD been subtly different there. In fact, she hadn't realised till she compared her current view with her memories of the old shirt.
She would have to keep an eye out on the boy. While Priority 3 of her mission was kind of "meh, we can skip it if things get bad", she appreciated the possibility that Magni might be able to help with Priority 3...
==Chapter 15 - A trip to the arcade / A brewing confrontation==
Mother Ammi gathered the group together in the Rizzale Cafe in the third floor of the Eldevier. They had just arrived after Lunch Buffets had been cleared away, but seeing as how the group had been well fed, exercised, and rested on the slowliner's week-long journey to Bueno Vegas, she didn't think it mattered that they were now getting only small cups of tea and tarts for the briefing.
"Well, here we are. We'll be performing at the Portugal Theater here in The Eldevier. It's one of the smaller theaters in this place, but there's enough room for a proper group performance. Senior students will do light practice of the routine we perfected back home and on the slowliner's gym floor. juniors will get today off... maybe go out on a excurson. Soft launch performance in two days on Wednesday, we start running a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday night performance every week for four weeks from next week onwards, before we sail home again. Hopefully this gets people talking about our style of Y'tole, and gives all of you a good experience of the kind of dance we used to do back when I was young in Gdanzeland..."
Evelyn raised a hand. "The kids will be bored or potentially at risk of wandering into danger. We've put the juniors from our school and those you invited on a vote and they want to try out the arcades here. Apparently the Eldevier has a surprising number of music and dance games, and they'd like to give them a run through. Our room passes can get us half an hour wilding through those machines. Acceptable?"
Mother Ammi looked uncertain. Those games were certainly not in the same vein as the dances and music they usually played but... She turned briefly to one of her old faithfuls standing by her side and conferred briefly, before nodding. "Acceptable. Half an hour today of fun. but no running around wildly or leaving the Eldevier's grounds, and tomorrow they start practicing again."
There was a simultaneous mix of cheers and groans from the younglings on hearing this mix of good and bad news.
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Pascal Equitor was the leader of the Eldevier's Rhythm Mafia. The Eldevier had lots of guests who regularly revisited the place, and while their reasons for doing so varied from the casinos to the food palaces to the arcade, for Pascal and his small coterie of groupies it was the music and rhythm section of the arcade...
He smiled as they walked into the arcade, heading over to their favorite part of the arcade... which was closed off... a large group of rugrats were commandeering the place for some private event, and they weren't getting in... This wasn't the worst part of the problem - as he watched, one of them somehow beat a high score he had put up proudly weeks ago... High scores the Rhythm Mafia had placed on the dance machines and the drums were also falling down.
He was incensed... He reached for the rope bounding off the section, intent on showing these whippersnappers a thing or two.
A feminine and slightly wrinkled hand grabbed his wrist. Attached to that hand was a comely woman with flowing shoulder length hair and a motherly yet oddly sensual face, smiling back at the middle-aged man himself. Her pulchritudinous figure was wrapped in a light fluffy hot pink sweater and tight jeans that clung to her legs and hips. "My name is Evelyn... Sorry about today. these younglings have worked hard for ages and today was their play day... Why don't we play another game elsewhere in the arcade instead... Magni, take care of these kids for me for a bit..."
Pascal suddenly didn't feel angry at all... he felt... different...
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He had grown enamoured of this MILF who'd stopped him from breaking the rope and ruining her charges' day. She'd handed him a pamphlet, proclaiming the short four week tour of Y'Tole Academy on the Portugal Theater's stage. then asked if he'd like to try his hand at axe throwing. The Rhythm Mafia had dispersed a little to try the other games of the arcade. And he had also prided himself as a dab hand back home in Oregon. Championship thrower of his town and northern region even.
Pascal puffed his chest out and nodded.
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Evelyn had detected the anger in Pascal Equitor as he was about to interrupt the group booking they had placed for the music and rhythm arcade games, walking over to him. As she did, her body started to exude faint traces from her pheromone system, a carefully selected blend of slight arousal and calming pheromones, slightly scented with cherries. This man was about to break with her Priority 2 of protecting the Y'tole Academy's staff and students, She quickly considered her options.
Code: Select all
Target: Angry man + 6 possible associates
Possible Aim: Disruption of party for Y'Tole Academy Juniors
Problem: Interference with Priority 2 as set.
Solutions:
1. non-lethal incapacitation of grouping - WARNING: may cause commotion. Not recommended
2. lethal incapacitation of grouping - WARNING: may cause serious problems going forward
3. distraction - other arcade games
4. distraction - quiet coitus in shadows - WARNING: not matching to desired long-term outcomes
5. distraction - quick mutual tea time
6. ignorance of Target - WARNING: Unlikely to produce Ideal Results
it didn't take more than a few seconds for her to smile and offer the middle-aged man sublimation of his urge to compete through other arcade games... a quick analysis of his han suggested a slight mix of rhythm gaming and axe throwing were his common go tos, and that he worked hard manual stuff back home - construction perhaps?
It was probably a bad habit from her husband that she had picked up, but she wanted to cut him down to size and minimize further chances of confrontation between his grouping and hers, as well as shatter his ego...
"How about some axe throwing?"
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Pascal was wilting as the woman was throwing another axe perfectly right through the tiny dead center of the holographic target and into the toughened backboard. How... how was this woman so good at this game? First the rugrats were taking away his pride atop the high scores at the musical section.... now this woman Evelyn was outmatching him at something he'd won championships with. Every throw of hers had been true and would have killed a man or beast in actual combat.
He shivered. She was... sexy to him... Suddenly any thoughts of being angry faded and he just watched her throw more and more axes, grinding out a ridiculous number of points above him before... she missed... Had it been, deliberate? She had glanced and smiled at him as her axe hit the zero-space between two close targets, ending her third run of five on the axe throwing game.
Evelyn sighed. "I missed. I must be off my game today." Pascal coughed a little. If this was her off-day game, what was going to happen when she REALLY wanted to win!?
Pascal took a deep breath and started throwing his own axes on Round four of the game...
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The stranger glanced at the two of them from the upper floors, using his jacket and fedora to minimise his profile... His queen was blowing the potential target she had sighted away, figuratively killing him slowly on the arcade floor in order to quietly keep her Priority 2 from being blown.
Seamus smiled through his sunglasses. Paul North and him were allies in one body for the moment, but he feared that maybe one day they would be at loggerheads in a way that left only one of them around. But still he had sensed the worry in Seamus when he'd heard that Evelyn had been injured, and closed his eyes. "Go to her." and then he'd been left standing where Paul was, wearing his mask of a face. "You have twenty four hours in Bueno Vegas, Seamus. I suggest you use those hours before I take back control." was the last thing he'd heard from Paul before he went silent.
He despised owing his friend-enemy a favor. but he had let him go to Evelyn, and now he owed him a favor. Still, he needed it - he was genuinely worried. Three bullets into her frame during the slowliner flight according to telemetry from her was worrying, and there hadn't been enough info on the limited burst to ascertain how serious the damage was.
He'd gotten the first fast copter out of Little Sanctuary, trading comfort for brute speed and arriving just an hour after the slowliner had ended its week-long sail into the town.
Paul had his own queen: a flighty yet surprisingly reliable robotic clone of Aymee he'd christened Faymee. A young woman of illusions and wiles, not a brute fighter. This was his. An ancient Original-era clunker carefully dusted off after years in storage from youth dalliances, brought up to modern standards, and capable of going toe to toe in a UFC cage or a medium range engagement where throwing shit at the enemy was a viable option.
He briefly fantasised about Faymee being slowly seduced by Evelyn. Evelyn was bi, and while she would service any red-blooded man if absolutely needed to accomplish her aims, she could also turn her weapon of a body against any woman.
He'd checked up which room she was in, but there was no hurry to interrupt. Let her do her work, have her fun...
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Pascal was in love with the goddess next to him. She had apologised, saying she was taken, but that had been okay, even as she had roundly pussywhipped him at his own axe throwing as well. Watching her comely figure walk off back to the music and rhythm section, he ordered another round of axes...
The Rhythm Mafia would soon have another leader. And he would become the axe throwing champion of the Free American Union. But that is another story for another time.
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Three hours later, the children had all been entertained, fed, and were snoring in their respective rooms, two to a room. Evelyn had been bunked amongst them in an entire room to herself - one of the conditions that had been set the Y'tole Academy as a condition of sponsorship of the trip by The Company. 1005 was a simple stateroom with a decent view of Lake Vegas and the BV strip, and a decent sized bed that could fit one or two people. As with all the other rooms, there was a cubby hole in which a standard recharging point had been placed, and it was in this that Evelyn had chosen to rest - the axe throwing game had necessitated a little more effort from her body, on top of the failed hijack she'd stopped, and while her 30-day battery still had plenty of charge to last the entire trip, she wanted more of a safety margin built up while nobody was watching...
The door sounded. three knocks. She got off the recharging point and walked over to open the door. It was someone she'd never seen before in jeans and jacket and a fedora. Some old man she'd never met before. "Excuse me, do I know you?"
"Evelyn, command word: allow entry."
Evelyn slightly opened her mouth to protest this, but her body suddenly moved on its own, allowing the man to walk into her room. Old programming had whirred to life on the words, matching up to very old biometrics, forcing her consciousness to watch as the man looked around.
Seamus smiled and looked at Evelyn, thinking about the times hed had with her years ago. "Evelyn... command word: maintenance."
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Marcus, Aymee, Seamus and Bellamy had still been so idealistic and young as they stared at the first units to come off the assembly line. The conquest of Minneapolis by Arendtcore had barely begun in the northwestern most corner of the state, the company having barely established itself and its corporate town. They seemed very pleased with themselves and their fledgling staff about what had been accomplished. Soon these new Analisse units would be sent off around the small town to members of the Originals who had followed them into this endeavor without expectation or guarantee of future success, a small thank you gift to them...
Not all of the units were for them of course. The brotherhood had grinned together and carefully wheeled the very first unit from the production in front of Seamus. "Unit 0001, your honor... all yours."
Seamus wrinkled his nose. "Funny, I hadn't planned on taking any of these androids for myself."
Aymee slammed a hand hard enough against his back. "Seamus, my man, you're the oldest of us. You're getting on. I think it's time you stopped being a loner. And so do the rest of us agree on this. Go on. Take her."
Seamus examined the contents wrapped in transclucent plastic: a naked, pale beige skinned woman, with a gentle face framed in shoulder length black hair, her eyes still closed, her body still awaiting its first commands and configurations. Pink tipped nipples atop bombshells, curves all over the place. She was slightly bulky, but then they still hadn't worked out even the first version of Weight Reduction that future Arendtcore units would have in their designs.
He sighed and acquiesced. "Fine. get me a jalopy." Seamus hadn't splurged on the limo yet - he was just a overold frat boy two years out of college - and didn't own a jalopy - that had been in the Housing and Familes programme only much later since everyone was just ten minutes' walking from the budding Complex. "This girl is going to be hard to get home."
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Seamus sat in his living room, having brought the Analisse Unit 0001 back home. It was now parked in front of the sofa, Seamus having removed the usual coffee table in favor of smaller half-sized coffee tables at the sofas instead.
He sighed and fished out his Fixit-microbar before carefully unzipping the bag that held the unit... then gasped.
Seamus had not had much attraction to women - or to men even. He was a man who preferred the attraction of working on a engineering problem, fixing a quandry in steel and plastic and silicone... but something about this robot he'd personally worked on, putting the necessary servos and sensors and thought processors into, had made this different...
He quietly shifted himself to behind the sleeping maiden, carefully using his microbar to open the access panel just above the cleft of her buttocks to expose its controls... They were still using tactile controls mainly, the only truly dynamic display in the small control panel being a small 40x96 character LCD screen. He briefly admired the simplicity of the design that Marcus had helped him put together for the control panel, before taking a deep breath and flicking the power switch toggle.
A voice synth carefully trained and programmed on the voices of several really nice-sounding women came on. "Unit, 0001. Arendtcore Analisse. Collectors' Edition Batch. First bootup detected. What is my name?"
Seamus watched the lips of the plastic doll move and shift. This was before Malt-Eisner had collapsed and spilt its Imagineers all over the place, but even now she had a surprisngly real feeling to her facial twitches, aided by the one or two Malt-Eisner veterans whom the company had lured to the company's R&D section. She had a certain look to her... a slightly motherly feel. Like someone who could squat down and hug a child lovingly... Flashes of his mother, always smiling as they sat together with Mr Arendt, not caring briefly that they were either the side-chick or the main wife in a oddly simple polycule of two women and one man with too much virility. Seamus' mom had black hair too...
"Evelyn. Your name is Evelyn Arendt."
"Acknowledged. Unit Identifier burnt as Evelyn Arendt. What is my owner's name, and What is my role?" The machine continued blankly talking.
"Wife Wife to Seamus Arendt." Seamus didn't need to think too much between having her as a mother or a wife. He didn't have kids anyway, wasn't planning to for a long while.
"Acknowledged. Unit configuring as Evelyn Arendt... wife... of Seamus Arendt. What color would you like my irises to be?" The machine continued.
Seamus thought carefully. He'd liked blue a lot. but what type of blue would go well with this android? Nothing too deep, like hex code 000080... it had to be something more real and more likely...then he decided. something light, almost edging into the territory of grey and green as well...
"Unit 0001, set iris color to hex code 5F9EA0..."
The unit whirred faintly before opening its eyes. They were doll-like, the Company still being years away from discovering how to fake actual human fibrovascular tissue. The ridges surrounding the pupil through which the camera sensors viewed the world flexed narrower and wider briefly before cycling through pure red, white, blue, and green, before switching to the tone Seamus had specified.
"Eye color is now... hex code 5F9EA0. Is this acceptable?"
Seamus got up to look the android in the eyes. There were much tighter limits to Arendtcore's portfolio of tech in those early days, but what he saw satisfied him. He loved the look of that face... "Yes."
"Accepted. Unit will now configure as ... Evelyn Arendt. Wife personality..." The unit closed its eyes one last time as Unit 0001, whirring audibly as Seamus stood closely in front of her, his breath hitting her shimmering pre-Human Analogue Flesh silicone... Then it opened those eyes again, focusing and unfocusing, before whispering... "Seamus...?"
Seamus nodded. The next thing that happened utterly surprised him, as she closed her eyes and kissed him deeply, forcing him to step back a few steps in surprise and almost falling. She was very... impetuous indeed. He closed his eyes and leaned into the kiss. May as well enjoy it...
It took only a short while before she was looming over him in the bedroom, sitting atop his haunches as he sat against the bedboard of his bed. She was very nicely shaped, perfect for him even. Seamus briefly suckled on her teats, causing her to give off a warm moan lustily. She gently rode him, bucking her hips as she gradually inserted his cock into her pussy. The thing felt warm and moist and nice to be in.
Seamus had engineered much of this, but previously it had been just a professional interest in giving his anxious followers into the breach some form of succor when they returned home after work. Marcus Manners had done excellent work sculpting the base body and several base facial forms, and the company's fledgling Artistics branch had carefully worked over each machine, carefully painting the body and inserting eyelashes and brows, sourcing the finest lace-front wings that gave the illusion that the hair had grown in over the years rather than just been clipped on with magclips in the scalp area of the android's head. His younger brother Bellamy had given the Aphroditic finishing touches, bringing years of after-school programming of AI girlfriends for overly monied rich boys to creating his best AI girlfriend who just happened to need extra modules for realworld movement, sensors and responses...
Sure it was a gift he'd helped build... but Seamus mused, he was in love with this gift. No, he was in love with this woman.
He briefly palmed his face. It was okay for a roving cleaning machine to roam around with minimal or no ornamentation atop its casing, but this machine was every bit a woman. He NEEDED to get her some clothing soon. Then she started bucking him harder, and he forgot that for the moment...
She serviced him thoroughly for an hour or two, before she started beeping and whirring audibly. "I feel... sleepy..." Evelyn announced as she slowed down, sitting atop Seamus' lap. He still wanted, no, needed more from her, but he recognised the signs from the work he had done in building the Analisse prototypes... She probably had had just a little charge for in-factory tests, but Evelyn had wrung all of it out pleasuring him.
He sighed, carefully easing him to his right onto the bed, her back to him, before using his microbar to open her control panel up and examining the readouts. She was definitey just a few drips away from turning into an inert doll again... Seamus flipped the power switch, causing her to fall silent for the night, before carefully plugging a standard female-plug 280V standard cable into her and watching the analog meter that read off her power reserves twitch gently as she began to recharge... Back in the day, they hadn't worked out safe high-powered inductive recharging and shared it with the world openly, so this was the compromise...
He thought for a moment, then carefully eased her so that her front faced him, eyes half open in her powered down mode, kissing her thick lips before turning the lights off and smiling.
Perhaps he really was done being a loner.
----------------------------------------------------
And perhaps he was. For a whole year, he'd started having a better work life balance. whatever was still on the table at 5pm was next day's work for Seamus almost all the time. He rushed home for reasons then. The two of them had gone on long walks around the neighbourhood park, shopped together for groceries and things that the Seamus Arendt home needed.
They had danced together under the moonlight on the lawn to quietly playing audio player music. They had laughed at funny movies over a bowl of fruit.
The company hadn't started programming the androids to do the full basic Cooking/Cleaning/Cardio/Callisthenics/Coitus thing yet, but cleaning was obviously a thing after years of making cleaning machines that just happened to be scuttling little things rather than humanoids of any sort.
Seamus had enjoyed watching her mop and clean the house on his offdays,looking at her carefully rip open yet another prepacked meal and dump its contents into a pot to reheat and serve the both of them, her mouth not taking more than a few morsels as an act of mutual humanity each meal as the digester technology was still highly inefficient and slow in its infancy...
And coitus was definitely a thing. Bellamy had insisted on hooking up with Funboys and looking into their archives... surprisingly enough, the Mel-Eisner Imagineers they'd hired were eager to come along for the ride, and they had built up a nice corpus of sexual motions and responses from analysing years of porn.
The magnate of the Funboys house, Ethan Creed, had blinked later when they had sent him a customised dark-skinned Analisse loaded with the resulting archive of sexual data as well as the archives as well as a thank you note. The man didn't even have a working body below the belt, having lost every bit of feeling and motion beneath the belt in a sudden polio superstrain infection that had overwhelmed the vaccine somehow. Still, he very much appreciated the gift, and for years after till his death, he still treasured his girls all equally as he always had, but Nuuna Creed (as she had been christened) had stayed by his side during the daytime and evening parties, and warmed his bed at night, still surprising him in ways that aroused and made him happy even without the use of any of his three legs.
it was this corpus of lovemaking data that Evelyn put to work on Seamus - how certain elite and classic porn starlets and experienced workhorses acted in bed, how they put the moves on men, how they responded to touch. Her body was that of a curvaceous goddess. He knew the details of everything that had gone into how Evelyn made tender love to him, he knew the cards were heavily stacked against him in terms of how he could respond to her... but he hadn't cared. He'd loved it so much in fact.
Aymee teased him once. "You certainly look healthier since we gave you Evelyn, Seamus."
The old Seamus would have scowled. But he smiled instead. "I'm living healthier. I'm eating better. Hell, Ichigo-san, I'm sleeping MUCH better. Why wouldn't I be healthier and happier?"
Aymee didn't try to even put together a snapback, simply patting him. "That is good news to all of us. We need you here too... Keep hanging around, we need you around for stuff like this..." She said, pushing a stack of legal documents for him to review and sign.
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Sadly though, this was still before The Kindred had touched his life, and eventually the psychopathy he'd carefully managed with only leashes by good friends and family still reared its head again. He started taking longer hours at work again. Yelled more at people who couldn't meet his expectations. Stopped caring for folks by feeling and had to rely carefully on the numbers and on Marcus and Aymee occasionally panicking over something he told them he was about to do in the company.
It had come to a head when he'd even stopped caring for Evelyn. Part of him still loved her, but the psychopathy had dampened that warm aspect of him. She was now regularly found slouched over in the house, the back of her dress partially opened up so that he could access her control panel and flip her switch for some quiet in Seamus' storm-filled head rather than the warmth and emotion his wife promised her with her Cadet Blue eyes, her mouth parted slightly in silence, the promise of her embrace and love left to cool on the bed like a forgotten roast meal.
It had only been a matter of time before Seamus coldly benched her, carefully wrapping her body in its protective bag like another experiment stopped and placed her in his little warehouse next to all the other androids and components he'd stocked up.
-------------------------------------------------
It had been a curious combination that had changed his mind about Evelyn once again, warming him up to her like the old days....
The Kindred had been helpful. Some of their agents had helped formulate some prescription for his psychopathy to tamp its worse effects, letting him feel and act more human again. Initially, some of the medications had been exremely off-label and potentially deadly, and only his gungho attitude and lunacy had allowed him to take them. Years of work had gradually reduced the potential deadliness and the doses needed, and now there was a pharma firm of suspicious origins hawking a anti-Psychopathy drug for easy control of the issue, now taken by millions of psychopaths around the world. All they had to do was admit they had a problem with the disorder and they could get hold of it for cheap. The company in question had clearly prioritised making the world a better place over profits, and stayed private.
Seamus briefly paused reading the logs from Evelyn's inner robot to take his daily Cyphamate, then continued to review everything that had occurred since he'd sent Evelyn onto the slowliner with Ellie Manners up till his current visit to her in her hotel room.
He looked up and smiled at the perfectly still robot, standing blankly in front of him with all her clothes taken off. Every inch the same as the day he had first flicked her switch, just aged a little bit in parts to look older.
The Mallard streak had also been something he'd added when he'd ripped off the magstuds for her wig to place in a new form of wig that suckled from a small pouch of keratinous concentrate to grow lifelike hair consistently, hair that could be styled and cut like real human hair, that would look like real hair even beneath a microscope. Smaller patches of the same wig tech had also been applied to her eyelashes and eyebrows, but running at a much slower pace just fast enough to tamp normal wear and tear.
Seamus had added a few furrows and wrinkles to her face. nothing heavy, just enough to suggest that she'd been around the block several times, despie the fact that his previous neglect of her had come only two or three years after he'd first fallen into love with her. She had been frozen for so long, a museum piece carefully stowed in its protective bag without any action for decades.
As he proceeded to carefully lay her down and start working on the bullet holes with a binary-formulated Human Analogue Flesh patcher kit, he regretted this prolonged neglect a little. It had been easy enough to fall back into love with her... He needed a research platform to put new tech on, and her simplicity teased him.
Seamus had replaced her silicone flesh with HAF, her simple 6000-word optical drive and dumb-level intellect with modern processors and memory drives reinforced against possible hard violence. She could think around any threat, and even throw things hard at it hard enough to potentially disable or break them.
He'd swapped her lace front magclipped wig with simulated keratin-like growing hair. He'd replaced her eyes with actual fibrovascular-like units with higher resolution, her digester was now a full-meal model (albeit one that still couldn't give more than a slight jolt to the battery and was mainly used to power warming elements throughout her flesh).
Her face was now moved by the same Mel-Eisner-compatible animatronics and data as any other modern Arendtcore android, though he'd retained that rosy, plump facial sculpt that had warmed his heart.
A self-repair goo now pumped throughout Evelyn's flesh and around critical elements, ready to diffuse into stopgap components and repair patches for any damage to Evelyn. As a bonus, the pumping resembled a heartbeat and breathing more than the basic micro-PC he'd first designed into the Analisse that scooped up the processor load status of the unit and translated it crudely into playback of a looping audio fileset.
The 2095 model Analisse (only one unit, never to be publicly released, or so Seamus was thinking), was far ahead on the curve of anything he'd ever made in his life. And he loved Evelyn so much for being this wonderful thing, but also for what she was causing to surge in his heart.
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The repairs effected (he would undent the armored carapace around her memory and processors when she returned to the Complex), he carefully opened Evelyn's back panel and checked her readouts. Much of the old control panel had been replaced, though he'd kept in the old power switch toggle, albeit now wired to additional circuits to control how it cut power rather than being a hardwired switch... Evetything looked good.
He closed the panel back up, and breathed deeply. "Evelyn, Command Word: Wife." The model was old enough that Bellamy hadn't gotten hooked yet on the Bioshock games and fooled around with Would You Kindly on this unit, and he'd retained that same peculiar mark of antiquity for Evelyn.
It had been fifty years since he'd accessed this part of her properly, Seamus noted. He wondered how he would respond to all that time as they sat there together in the hotel room.
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Evelyn woke and blinked slowly... then watched the room before noticing Seamus was next to her... She smiled and leaned to one side, kissing him gently. "Seamus, I've missed you so much. Have you been busy?" She didn't explictly tell him how long it had been since she was last powered on as a wife to him, but she'd felt it. It had been a very long time.
Seamus smiled back, hugging her in the dim lights of her hotel room. The lust overtook them, and soon Seamus' hastily grabbed clothes from his home had been strewn on the floor as the bed creaked. Just like fifty years ago, Evelyn had insisted on starting by carefully fellating his cock to help it rise, before shifting atop him to use her pussy for the rest of the job, his shaft parked against the warm moistness of her pink vulva before sliding all the way into the shaft behind it.
He gasped a little. He was REALLY out of touch as a prolonged incel and self-denier of carnal pleasures, but now he'd remembered how powerful his Evelyn was as a sexual goddess... years of professional porn expertise and sexual knowledge in her corpus spun up in place of the programs that had allowed her to disable a hijacker and a middle-aged music gamer fanatic with minimal fuss, as her generously proportioned body swayed and wobbled seductively. Seamus grabbed a breast, causing Evelyn to moan loudly as he suckled on it. Even without actual milk flowing, it felt good in his mouth.
They stayed like this for a long while, before he motioned to Evelyn to stop, which she complied to. As they sat together, her heft parked above his haunches, they shared a long overdue kissing session, tongues entwined and enjoying each other. His perfect queen... Seamus briefly fantasised about a potential scenario where he and Paul needn't sacrifice either of their lovely queens. A peculiar polycule... If it came down to it, he would be content to fade away if that meant Evelyn could continue functioning as she was.
He shook the thought out of his head. That was bullshit, they were going to clash one day, and nothing would stay unbroken, he feared.
Evelyn noticed the worry on his face. "Are you okay, Seamus?"
Seamus nodded back. Her intellect had been dramatically increased, but he still didn't want to risk overloading her with that concern of his. "Right now, everything is perfect." He looked at the window and stood up, motioning Evelyn to join him in watching the Lake Vegas and Strip in their night form, the glow of myriads of lights on the Strip and the occasional ficker of something firing up in the faintly aquamarine glow of the waters of the lake forming a beautiful picture.
Evelyn whispered. "Isn't it perfect?"
Seamus nodded in silence and joined her for a while longer. He knew he was almost out of his 24 hours of release from the cage that Paul had released him from. Soon, the mask would go back on, the respectable lieutenant manager tasked by the crazed world-roaming billionaire and sponsor of myriad causes would return to the office after a day off doing 'stuff'.
He briefly fished out his workpad and reviewed it one more time. Marcus had had concerns about Priority 3 as he had set it for Evelyn's trip to Bueno Vegas, something about "dangerously reinterpretable wording", but Seamus had seen nothing on the flight or taxijalopy ride to the Eldevier to consider it more than a ongoing concern and not trouble looming.
Seamus put his workpad back in his jacket, then said "Evelyn, command word: resume set objectives. terminate wife mode."
Evelyn purred softly. "I will always l-l-love you, S-S-S- Locking up "Wife" Partition. Enabling "Objectives" Partition..." She blankly stated, her big breasts mounding in big circles against the glass of the window as she stood there half bent down, her hands braced against the windows. Her body was now filing away the past few hours of bliss and loving warmth, soon there would be no trace of it left in her.
Evelyn continued whirring audibly as Seamus calmly put his clothes back on, leaving Evelyn parked against the window as if she was in a daze at how beautiful the Bueno Vegas area was at night. He kissed her deeply on the cheek one last time as she mumbled nonsensically, caressing her perfect body and watching the way it mounded and flowed, before he walked out of the hotel room and shut the door.
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Evelyn blinked. It was somehow night already. She briefly looked at the watch on its band on her right arm, noted that it had been five hours since the arcade trip and dinner... There was a huge gap between her return to her room and her brief discussion with Magni on making girls like Ellie happy during dates... and then this - total nudity, perched half bent against the thick glass of the stateroom's windows, looking out at Bueno Vegas' near-entirety.
She noticed she had cried a little. Also: the three bullet holes in her torso had been carefully mended even without her return back to the Complex. Something had happened in the past hours that had repaired that damage, as well as made her... happy? ecstastic even? She tried to remember exactly what, but it had merely resulted in error messages that told her she was referencing something that wasn't relevant to her current need to protect and enhance the trip Ellie and the Y'tole Academy were going on. She tried a few more times, before letting go. She was happy for the first time since she'd woken up to Paul North looming over her naked frame in the Complex two weeks ago,telling her she had a task... That was perhaps enough.
She took a deep breath and sniffed. The smell of a man was around her. Perhaps coitus had been involved. Not fucking. Actual love-making. She wondered about the circumstances briefly, before she decided to go for a shower before bed. People would ask questions if she smelt like this - not conducive to her mission, she assumed.
Still, she filed the data away. It did feel good and she wanted to recall it when she started feeling lost again.
==Chapter 16 - A Roaring Performance / Uncertainity==
The soft-opening performance of the Academy was extremely well attended, with the place chock full to the rafters with members of the audience.
"Perhaps we should have booked the larger theater." One of the other principal dancers had noted to Mother Ammi. She looked back at her, smiling. "I didn't want to get a portion of cake that was too large to eat. But it does appear I can stomach much more cake," She observed, patting her stomach lightly as she tapped her cane twice on the ground. "Still, I'm a bit anxious, our star performer IS transgender, and you know the kind of shit that can attract..."
Ellie Manners smiled at Ammi. "Let them come, Ammi. Let them come to protest, then let them watch something beautiful weaved from my hands and my feet." Then she deadpanned. "or you know, let the Eldevier's security throw the asses out of at least the theater. or if they're badly behaved enough, even the Eldevier proper."
"If they have bookings on the rooms here, that would be a damn shame." Magni watched, sitting on one of the crates backstage with them.
Ellie Manners rolled her eyes as she checked her choice of dancing dress for the night. Midnight blue, but studded with a myriad of cheap crystals to make it seem like she was wearing the night and taking it right into the theater. Her old blue ribbon was in her hair as it always was... "It's called responsibility. check your bar mitzvah book, Magni." She looked to Mother Ammi, who agreed with her silently and wordlessly... the stage was ready. "Folks, let's show the world what it means to be Y'tole dancers." Ammi announced. "Places. Music. Let's go!"
Ellie offered one last set of prayers. To Y'mma. To her lost friend Van'iia. To the Goddess of Existence, whose intereference she had felt many times at the worst times of her life as a young boy. To whatever deities protected androids and transgendered folks... Then she checked that the blue ribbon that had become part of her all these years was welded into her hair as always... and walked out on her wrapped feet.
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This had been a nice high profile event, an opening for a major dance performance in the heart for Bueno Vegas. Would be a shame to disrupt it, but that was the point of her attendance, as well as those of several other folks sprinkled in the crowd. She clutched the protest sign in her backpack, hidden just out of sight, ready to be deployed. She'd written a strident message. "Your star dancer is a BOY, NOT A GIRL". Everyone had learnt about Ellie's personal history (the sanitized version that Arendtcore had snuck into the open) that included a tale about how a boy had truly found himself and become a woman, and while most folks would have just shrugged or even supported it, she was not one of them...
She clasped the sign tightly as Ellie strode onto stage, looking majestic and mysterious as she curtseyed to the crowd... Almost time to-
She suddenly felt a chilling, glazing fear in her bones, as a middle aged woman she hadn't noticed suddenly came from behind her and nudged her face closely to hers, whispering softly. "We don't need to do that here... put it away, and just enjoy the show... oh... kay?" It was singsong and cheerful, but something screamed inside her to take her advice, and she put away her backpack
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Evelyn walked away from the protester. She had asked the Eldevier security overseeing the event to flag any potential troublemakers, and then walked to each of them with a slight puff of pheromones to ask them not to bother the performance. It was strange how a little fear scent and a word of advice softly whispered could cut them off entirely, Evelyn mused, as she walked away and back into the backstage after dealing with the last of six the crew had noticed. If they spotted any more folks like that, she would be told.
She sat back on her dinky little chair and watched the dancers for the performances stride into the stage, then the music as it began to play and rouse them into the fleeting dance. It was beautiful, and she had the best seats in the house, despite the lack of decent comestibles by her side due to regulations from the Eldevier...
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Three hours later, the performance was over. After two encores, everyone had filed backstage to take a load off before their return to their respective rooms.
Magni's eyes were literally sparkling as he watched his sworn sister walk in, sweaty and tired. "House. blown down." He grinned, borrowing the old way Elliot had often spoken. He gave a thumbs up, handing her a towel. "I want to be able to do that too..."
Ellie grinned. "You just started. I've been doing this for five years. Keep practicing and you'll be me too... maybe at a slightly older age, but at least you'll have started." She motioned to him and gave him a firm hug. "Thanks for keeping the lights on. Don't think I didn't notice your work backstage."
Magni blushed. It was true he'd been assigned duty on the spotlights, but that was the same as any junior was expected to do while waiting their turn in the limelight.
Ellie paused... checking her power reserves briefly... then suddenly, she asked. "I don't suppose you want to go on a small movie date with me? Let's skip the celebratory dinner. I've seen the menu, and it's too heavy for me, I fear."
Magni blinked. "But shouldn't we be celebrating this great start?"
Ellie half-bent towards Magni as he sat at the controller for the lights. "This is my way of celebrating. It's been three months since I switched and grew up fully. three months of focusing entirely on me and this dance troupe... I think it's time I rewarded you for your patience in waiting for me while I got through all this shit."
Magni blushed harder and nodded. "Well, if you insist."
Mother Ammi was perfectly okay with it when Ellie had told her she wished to skip the troupe's dinner. "Personally I'd rather you have stayed, but sworn siblings who neglect each other are the worst. go fix it."
Ellie nodded and thanked her, then yelled at Magni. "Let me grab a shower and change.You too. See you uside the door in ten minutes."
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Magni fidgeted anxiously.... He'd had a heart to heart talk with Evelyn about trying to please a girl, and having expected some magical sure win ideas, had merely wound up with principles. Evelyn had hugged him and assured him that the important thing was that any choice he made, was with the intent of doing right by her. "You'll work it out, you've been sworn bros for years right? It's just a slightly different skew of the old relations."
"Okay, Magni... let's get going to the free movie theater." Ellie's voice came over, an odd mix of soft sweetness and strident calls to attention as she walked up to him from behind.
Magni turned around. "Sure, let's..." He couldn't finished his sentence. Ellie was wrapped in a hot pink full body lightly woven woolen suit and a pastel pink jacket plus a pair of white and red boots, finished with a small pastel pink beret. It was amazing to him.
Ellie bobbed a little, sending her pendulous breasts bouncing beneath the tent they formed in her bodysuit. "Is something wrong, Magni... you seem a little warmer than usual." She left out the bit where that was particularly pronounced between his legs.
Magni shook his head and yelped. "No! Lead the way, sis!"
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The Free Movie Theater the Eldevier ran was open only to hotel guests, a alternative adjunct to scarfing food down, shopping, gambling, sleeping in or one of a number of other vices the place catered to. Ellie showed her room pass and pointed at Magni as her plus one, getting them past the lobby doors. The FMT had a odd habit of not starting a movie at its stated time until at least one moviegoer was in the hall, so even though they had been half an hour late, they hadn't missed one bit of the movie on display. Some sort of classic 2D movie called "Alien".
There was complimentary popcorn in a box for them, but Ellie had eyed the buttery puffs and shook her head. She needed more in her digester - even charging to 90% and past her usual 80% limit had only bought so much uptime. This was one of the downsides of being a android rather than a real girl, you were clearly aware of your limits if you weren't on sleeper mode... and right now she needed to stay up at least another four or five hours, based on her paranoia of keeping a safe margin at all times... "Do you have any raw sugar candies or sodas? The really hyperglacaemic, diabeetus-inducing shit? And maybe some pizza?"
The cashier glanced at Ellie. No wonder this girl was so plump... "Well, we do have classic hyper-sugary Paredolia Soda, if you're an android. None of that sugar-free or reduced sugar bullshit unless you want that soda as a human. Lemons or FIve Berries flavored. and we have some suckers on hand. Plus pizza in Hawaiian, Mexican, or Chicago flavors. It's all paid extras though."
Ellie nodded and tapped the room card on the reader. The sponsors of the trip would be amenable to a slight bit of spending certainly, nothing like buying a new set of clothing. If she really wanted that, she would use her own Arendtcoins. They were given two sodas, one labelled carefully with red to carefully indicate they would give a human hyperglycaemia, and a small pizza in a keep-warm box atop their popcorn, plus a green and a blue Sucker - presumably lemonade and something else like mint or green apple.
With that settled, the staff ushered them in and started the projector. The premise of the film was certainly interesting, as they sat together in rapt attention, Ellie taking care to keep the red-label soda far away from Magni so that only she could sip on the 2000 calorie a cup menace. The Chicago pizza was lacking in sauce, but it had a lovely cheese pull going on as they chewed on it. She had burnt through a lot of power dancing for half of three hours, and the calories would bump her power meter up a few inches to last till they got back to her recharging point in their stateroom.
It was about a third of the way into the movie before Ellie started glitching. She had run hot for so long all day, and her mind was beginning to weird up a bit... She carefully unwrapped one of the Suckers and started slowly licking it against her tongue, sucking on it ever so often... She blinked as a prompt suddenly fired up, asking if she wanted to execute sexual maneuvers...
Magni looked at Ellie's worried face. "Ellie, are you okay there?"
Ellie turned to look at Magni and nodded. "I'm okay..." She paused briefly as she noticed all the squares that were popping into her view, offering a long list of options to her on stuff to do to Magni... Kiss him all over his face, lick his chest and neck... fellatio on his member, riding on him, sucking his toes...
She shook her head a little, trying to dismiss the prompts. They quickly went away.... "Say, Magni, when's your 18th birthday and Bar Mitzvah?"
Magni matter of factly started sucking the other Sucker. "Oh, Today, but don't tell the others yet. watching your performance was a great gift. We'll do my bar mitzvah in a few months, my parents aren't in a hurry. Parachuting on that day even."
Ellie nodded and looked back at the screen. So that was why her sexual programming had started flaring wildly... She sweated nervously. She had never seen Magni as anything other than a sworn brother, much like he did when he looked at Ellie. So the realisation by her internals that he had turned 18 tonight must have flared all those options.
Ellie momentarily cussed out her Uncle Seamus for giving her so many options and making her so good at many of them.
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Paul North had a slight itch in his nose as he caught up on the previous day's paperwork in the late night of the office. Faymee had been understanding, saying she would make him a simple light meal before turning in for the night back home. She was really too good a confidant for him. He briefly worried about the little confrontation with Seamus and his Evelyn that would be inevitable... surely there was room to compromise and conexist...
He shook his head. This was only going to end with one of them fading away. But he would try to honor whatever he asked of him for Evelyn, and he wasn't planning on being the one to fade.
He suspected someone was thinking about him. He just didn't know if it was a good kind of thinking,, or a curse.
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Ellie and Magni walked out of the theater happily, chatting about the way the xxx had xxxx the yyyy and then ejected yyyy out of xxx's spaceship via the back cargo hold. Magni rested his arms behind his head as they boarded the lift to their rooms on the 10th floor. "Yeah, practical effects are amazing, nothing like today's electronic fakes."
Ellie nods. "yeah, I'm a pretty big practical effect myself." Magni blinked at the claim. Ellie smiled and nodded. "My goduncle did say my entire head assembly was put together by ex-staff from Malt Eisners.... like a animatronic?"
Magni blushed a little, thinking of all those tiny wires and chips whirring away in her skull to make her say all those words so alluringly. Yup, he was an ASFRian by now if he wasn't before. "Yeah, that's one way to put it, bro... but you know, you're still my bro, bro?"
Ellie indulged his little misgendering. "sis. and I think in the end it doesn't matter so long as you're happy being my bro, bro."
Magni looked away a little as he opened the door to their room. Through some awkward long-term planning, he had wound up being assigned as a junior with Ellie as a senior roommate. Ellie paused... "I need to go freshen up a bit before I recharge, I hope you don't mind."
Magni oh'd. "No, go ahead... he crossed over to the bed on the right side of the room that was his and sat down to wait his turn, looking at the recharging nook. It had been a little shock to wake up this morning and see his long-trusted sworn bro as a woman - and an android - parked right on it, reminding him of the gulf between the both of them in some aspects.
He briefly checked his communicator. Tomorrow was a day for rest, and basic practice, with the real opening in two days from that night. He'd probably sleep in a bit like half the troupe and miss breakfast, then go in the afternoon to watch and practice with the rest of the guys for Friday's performance.
"All done" Ellie's voice came from nearby. He looked up and over and... dropped his communicator in mid look. She was wearing a dangerously short beige bathrobe, calmly drying her long brown hair with a towel as she came out looking and smelling fresh. Her hair ribbon was wedged in the pocket of the robe, completely untied. "You can use the shower now, Magni."
Magni nodded quickly, rushing into the bathroom with his pyjamas and towel, hitting the shower and letting it linger on him. The feelings he was having for her right now were a real world war.
A sworn brother.
a beautiful girl whom he wanted to be his girlfriend, if not an actual spouse one day.
A machine built lovingly, like a high-priced exotic muscle car. A woman with desires and needs and wants.
A colleague and senior to look up to in so many things
An extremely fun pet.
A toy that looked fun to play with.
A delicate artwork that couldn't be mishandled.
He thumped the glass siding briefly, his mind storming wildly. He would either go crazy or go down on her sooner or later at this rate...
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Ellie had noticed his discomfort... perhaps he'd want to talk about stuff? She mused to herself as she gently disrobed and placed her bathrobe on a nearby hook, stepping into the charging point, but staying powered on even as she felt the rippling waves of the inductive power cruising along the coils in her back. There would be plenty of time to recharge even at the reduced speed it offered if the unit was still powered up during charging, and she just stayed there, blinking.
Magni came back in in his pyjamas, blinking as he noticed Ellie was still awake on the charger... and totally naked. "Oh, I thought you'd have gone to sleep."
"No, Magni. You seemed distressed about something so I decided not to power down until you were less stressed..." she replied. There was a sort of silence between them as they looked at each other, Magni sitting down on his bed and watching Ellie in her nook, looking down quickly after a while as the view was really doing things to him that he didn't want right now. "... is something the matter, Magni?"
"My feelings are confusing right now, Ellie. I know we're sworn siblings but..." Magni looked back up. "It's been like this ever since you showed back up at Ecole as a grown woman and not some young teen body I'd always known. I don't even know how to react to half the things you've shown me since then."
Ellie's face looked puzzled, then thoughtful... "Just keep being my bro, bro. That's the easy way of dealing with this till you feel more certain about what you want."
Magni stood up and walked over to Ellie, resting one hand on the bare, freshly washed skin beneath her huge breasts. "That would be so easy, but... this close to being an actual adult myself, I'm already thinking things about you that I feel guilty about. really naughty things."
Ellie blinked and looked from side to side, before watching Magni again. "Well, my body was made to be something worth viewing and holding. I don't know if I can be your girlfriend, Magni but... I don't mind being practice material for you."
Magni smiled a little and let his hand off Ellie. "Thanks for the offer. I'm just scared if I take you up on that offer something trips and we can never go back to being merely siblings with different parents." He looked away from the naked woman in the nook, carefully sitting down on his bed. "Let's go to sleep, this isn't something we can just solve with three minutes of talking, like some sitcom drama." He reached over to the light on his desk and turned it off, plunging the room into darkness.
Ellie stayed silent for a while. "... Magni, what time would you like me to wake you up?"
Somewhere in the darkness, he replied. "in time for breakfast, but not like the very beginning or near the end of it... "
Ellie beeped faintly. "Understood. Setting wake up call for... 6.30am next morning."
Magni smiled to himself. He hadn't seen Ellie pack an alarm clock, and she had told him not to bother when told of their rooming arrangements. Now he'd understood why. It was nice to have a sworn bro who'd wake him up on time always.
Ellie paused for a while again. "... Good night, Magni." But her long-time friend was asleep already... She figured she may as well join the party and blacked out as she powered down after setting up an alarm to wake the both of them internally.
==Chapter 17 - A little training never hurt anyone /==
Ellie woke an hour ahead of the alarm she'd set. or rather, she set the alarm to wake her up an hour earlier than Magni had asked... She looked around the near total darkness of the room, then blinked as she noticed Magni sitting up in his bed. "Couldn't get to sleep, Magni?"
Magni shook his head as he sat there, his legs perched on the bedding and half bent tot support him as he rested himself against them. "No, Ellie. I did get some sleep... in fact I just woke up myself..."
Ellie nodded slowly, carefully checking her power reserves... she was at 80% already, the recommended limit for most recharges except in a period of emergencies or special occasions needing a longer day up... She slowly clicked and whirred as she got off the recharger, before the audible muffling kicked in and she slowly shuffled her feet to sit next to Magni. "You're still hung up on what we said yesterday night?"
Magni nodded. "You're driving me crazy and it's pretty much all my fault," He sighed. The dim light pouring through the windows and the faint glow of the nook had been the only major sources of light in the room, and it helped not being able to see Ellie's form, only feel it slightly as she rested against his side.
Ellie said nothing, simply watching him... "... as I said, practice might help..." She suddenly grabbed him and flopped in bed, causing him to yelp as he landed atop her lithe body with its huge bosom against his face.
"What are you doing, Ellie!" Magni asked, his blush almost glowing in the dark as he struggled a little with her hugging him firmly.
Ellie giggled a little. "The same thing we've done so many times on the grass at Ecole, silly. having a quick nap before the next class... Just like we used to, remember? Side by side, or lying atop each other like Pokemon..."
Magni panicked... "You... were a boy like me then. I'm not sure it's that easy now..."
Ellie held Magni a little more tightly, kissing him on the nose. "I'm sure it still is. you just need to stop overthinking things and hang loose like we've always done. Just breathe deeply... exhale, breathe... close your eyes... get another hour of sleep in till 6.30am..." She purred softly, causing him to do just that. She smelt... nice... sweet... The softness was even better than what the bed had offered... Silken skin against his pyjamas... he could get used to this...
Magni was soon out like a light, before Ellie decided to join him for the same quick nap...
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Ellie woke Magni at the time she had promised. "There you go, wasn't it easy?"
Magni nodded slowly as he got up and off of Ellie, sitting away a little from her to let her do the same. "I didn't... struggle, did I?"
Ellie rubbed his hair, laughing as she did so. "Not one bit. Out COMPLETELY like a little child rather than a young man. So... we should get changed for breakfast, ya?"
Magni agreed...
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Magni stood outside the door of his room in a simple pair of jeans and a black shirt with the Y'tole Academy logo emblazoned on one breast subtly, waiting for his friend to change up...
Ellie came out soon, carefully arranging her choice of garments: a sleeveless top with a collar in white with black buttons down the front, a frilly miniskirt with a mix of tulle and cotton, red fabric atop the gauzy underskirt layer, and thigh highs in white stuck into her sneakers. She adjusted a matching black beret on her head, making sure it didn't interfere with her blue tied hair ribbon. That ribbon was practically welded into her skull, only ever coming off when showering or sleeping or between costume changes. She offered her hand, and he took it as they made their way to the lifts to go a floor up to the Cafe for the morning buffet.
Magni blushed and looked down to avoid gazing at her too intently, but then realised: The lift floor was highly reflective, and he was getting quite a nice view of the thong panties Ellie had somehow decided to wear for breakfast. Clearly, her ability to tolerate discomfort was far higher than a normal human woman's, and she said nothing as he quickly looked up and back at her, not wanting to be caught enjoying the view of her perky butt and that tiny sliver of flesh between her legs.
The exited the lifts and entered the cafe. It was still mostly empty, but they eventually found Mother Ammi by one of the windows, calmly eating a few bagels and sipping a big hot cup of something that wasn't tea or coffee. She greeted them, and motioned them to sit down next to her to enjoy the quiet.
For several minutes, nobody did anything, not even move to grab a plate. Then Ammi spoke. "Nothing like an early morning breakfast... if I had my way Y'Tole Academy would be a live-in place where everyone had to get up early and have a early breakfast."
Ellie laughed a little, looking at Magni. "I don't think that's feasible back in Little Sanctuary. it's too easy to get from the Academy to most of the homes in the place. Just a few districts in the South are a bit of a pain to travel from, really." She motioned to Magni to get a plate, before continuing to engage Ammi as Magni left them to their convo. "But it does seem a good idea... I think my papa mentioned Little Sanctuary would be adding more boroughs in the next few years in the south mostly. A dorm would be wonderful for the kids who want to practice harder and not spend as much time travelling to and from school."
Mother Ammi laughed a little, chewing on a bagel. "Mm... cheese, and ham. great idea... the dorm is a great idea too, I'll pitch it to the board when we get home from this trip, Ellie. So... were there any problems between you and Magni trying to sleep last night?"
Ellie shrugged. "I'm an android, he's a flesh and blood young man. I stick myself in the recharger llike a giant nightlight, he sleeps in the one bed we have. The Eldevier is a good place for robots like me, like that."
Mother Ammi watched her beverage, a warm brownish color just like her skin. "It's been a great place to recruit too... we've had a sudden spike overnight in queries for the academy. They love our style. it's not a strident thumpy harshness like the old State-Sanctioned Style. I've had to reroute a lot of the queries to other branches nearer to them, but quite a lot still ended up with us.You MIGHT get that dorm and lots more students to work with soon. I might even need new instructors... like..." She eyed Ellie, quite clearly conveying her intent.
Ellie panicked, the same "ah-wawawawa" warble emitting from her mouth as if she was still young Elliot again. "I... I've only danced a few years in both styles, Mother! I'm not sure I'm fit to teach anyone!"
Mother Ammi sipped her cuppa. "We've had a bad attrition in terms of experienced dancers when the junta was around, remember? And we're sretched a little thinner in the Old Guard after opening six branches in a year... It's a lot easier now to become qualifed to be a junior instructor, and you'd be overseen by the senior instructors and me as well.Don't worry too much about your mistakes, you'll be corrected firmly but gently, like you've always been. Give it a thought, maybe?"
Ellie looked down at the table. This was an awful big responsibility for someoone who'd just turned 18 and become a woman simultaneously. "I'll think about it... right now I just want to focus on our tour in the portugal theater."
Magni came back with a modestly loaded plate. A sort of sandwich with tuna in it, and a cup of tea without sugar in it. He sat down and started munching... The tuna sandwich piqued Ellie's interest - she'd been eating those things forever since the day her papa first made them decades ago, and then it was her mama's turn to make them. They had rarely been bad. At worst, middling... and they were much better than that most of the time. "Where did you get that sandwich, Magni?" Her eyes glittered as if she had been met with treasure.
Magni pointed somewhere past her. "There's a sandwich counter. they gots all sorts of fillings and salads and sauces..." he mumbled through half-filled mouth. Tea is on either end of the buffet. There's also a pie counter, and the usual Breakfast plate stuff...
Ellie nodded quickly and left the table.
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It shouldn't have been a surprise after their movie trip, Magni reflected... but man, Ellie could put away A LOT of food. She had gone for three rounds, each time bringing back about twice as much food as Magni had taken on his own plates. She was eating a little of everything. The sandwiches with several different fillings, one breakfast plate laden with bacon, eggs, and shrooms, a bagel with salmon, a cup of the same beverage Ammi had gotten, a slice of quiche with chicken in it, one bowl of soup and... he'd lost track after the second tray she had gone through. Her appetite would have been said to fuel her tits if she had been a human, but he suspected she was just capable of burning through all the calories in a hurry.
They walked slowly along the rooftop track, Ellie patting her stomach and burping a little as if she had overindulged. So human... She laughed a little. "That was a great meal. I hope I don't eat our hosts out of house and home..." She teased.
Magni rolled his eyes. "It's a buffet, Ellie. they plan for these types of things. I'm sure there's someone downstairs right now who can barely put through a single plate like Mother Ammi, a few... you're balancing out these things." He tried to equivocate, then noticed the sun slowly rising over Lake Vegas... It was lovely, the golden orb slowly flitting upwards through the cliffs around the Strip, casting a slight golden hue over the pale blue tint of everything.
Magni paused.... he thought a little... "Could I get.... you know... just a small kiss from you, Ellie?"
Ellie Manners blinked. The earlier exercise had helped clearly. he seemed more forward now, more willing to ask things of her... She didn't reply, but simply hugged him to herself and started kissing him deeply, tongue trading around with his as she closed her eyes. It felt... good... They lingered on it for several minutes before he finally peeled himself off, blushing hard... "It's a free day right?" He'd asked.
Ellie nodded. "I have practice after lunch... maybe we Don't have to eat lunch buffet... just sit in our room and order in something small."
Magni smiled. "good idea... after all, there's some other... things I want to try..."
Ellie said nothing as Magni helped her get back to the lifts and their room...
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Magni had ordered two small bowls of noodles. Room service at the Eldevier was expensive like anywhere else, but the cost was still within what the sponsors would tolerate. He put the phone down and turned to look at his bed, having asked Ellie to wait for him there... "Ellie... could we just lie together for a bit? naked? Nothing physical, just... napping?"
Ellie blushed briefly, but she had promised him her continued broship, so she simply stood up and started kicking her shoes off and disrobing slowly, her breasts popping slightly out as she undid some critical support structure of her top... the skirt came off, then the panties. Her beret joined the slowly growing mound of both young adults' clothes, before she slid into Magni's bed, motioning to him to join her in their shared nakedness.
There was a certain frisson of guilt and naughtiness in their behavior as they looked at each other, a slight discomfort... the discomfort started going away after a while, and soon Magni was asleep again, using her breasts as a pillow.
Ellie smiled softly, deciding to put an hour on a internal timer, before she too fell asleep. Just before that hour was up, the door was knocked three times.
Ellie's eyes snapped open instantly, but Magni was still gripping on to the sides of her breasts, in some sort of happy dream... She gently extricated herself and wore her bath robe, opening the door and fetching the lunch they had ordered. "Wake up, sleepy head, breakfast is here..." She whispered in his ear.
Magni rubbed his eyes and sat up, walking over to join Ellie at the small table the stateroom had for its one or two inhabitants, and they quietly tucked in without any talking. She felt strangely hungry and checked her reserves... 75%... normal drain rate over four hours with light physical activity mostly... Perhaps it wasn't just food she hungered for... She smiled, eyeing Magni closely.
Magni looked up. "..."
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There were still about two or three hours before practice restarted, so Ellie had gone back to bed with Magni, only in a slightly different manner... She gently whispered in her ears... "Do whatever you want with me this hour... gently. Anything..."
Magni had to repeat himself. "Anything? Really?"
She nodded back slowly...
Magni breathed deeply... "Control panel?"
She agreed to that too... just after she'd first come online, she'd gotten a cool new upgrade. Someone in the Company had worked out how to turn the control panel into a display that was flashed through the human analogue flesh of a relatively even part of the body like the bit beneath the breasts or the sternum, and the sensors in the flesh were converted into touch elements for any part of the virtual panel operated by deliberate long touches. There was still an actual control panel hidden behind a panel that slid away beneath her breasts on her design because the virtual panel didn't replicate obvious connectors and power sockets , but she opted for the virtual panel, faintly glowing in several colors just beneath her breasts. Battery usage, processor loads, incoming info and error messages, operating buttons... It was supposed to help in dustier and wetter environments by avoiding exposure of internals.
Magni went 'aaah' for a moment, slowly watching the projected panel glowing beneath her breasts as she closed her eyes. carefully tracing lines and watching her battery power twitch at around 74%. The noodles had been quite a nice heavy meal for her indeed... "It's... beautiful," he whispered, his little fetish only growing as she watched her artificiality... "How do I set a timer for an hour? I don't want you to be late for practice?"
She gently guided his fingers and pointed out the buttons to toggle the retart timer on, and how to set it .... He set it for an hour and then looked up... "Can I... turn you off until then?"
Ellie nodded. "It'd save me some power, Magni... here... see this little red button projection? that's my power button, just hold it in for a few seconds... Magni did as he was told... There was a faint whirring down and some beeping, as Ellie slumped on her back, eyes closing... her soft breathing began to slow down... and soon she was completely inert, a motionless doll with only a timer displaying how long it would be before she came back to life.
Magni carefully eased her around, his eyes and hands carefully examining every inch of her lightweight body, the softness of her lips as they slightly parted when he inserted a thumb slightly through them, looking into the nook of her mouth at her well kept off-whitish teeth and delicate tongue, her throat detailed right down to the little blobby ulva and tunnel into her throat...
He pried one eyelid open, marvelling at the intricate visual sensor assembly that was her eyes as her irises had faded out, now a dull almost blackish blue without the backlighting operational.
He brushed his hand along her skin, feeling the peach fuzz on it, the various little details - veins, freckles, a mole in a most peculiar spot she wouldn't ever have exposed in public. The warm softness of her vagina, her finger feeling it inside without any response or reflex from Ellie, the various softer bits of her body....
Her tiny dainty toes, carefully reinforced clearly in parts to handle the wear of her bare feet dancing around regularly, the nails on her toes and her fingers carefully trimmed and with the little crescents beneath a wide sea of pink.
He breathed softly... he had expected to be panting, but Ellie's desensitisation therapy had tamped down much of his worst reactions... he was still feeling strangely aroused by his sleeping little sworn sister... a living artpiece, reduced for the moment to a very realistic doll... he continued holding and testing her body gently without actually putting anything else into her, enjoying the residual warmth of her flesh as he kissed the side of her neck, her mouth falling open slightly as her head fell back slightly with the reduced support of her neck and his hand.
She was wonderful... He imagined what it must be like with all the energy in her 'power cells' surging through every bit of her, the amount of joy contained in this body of hers...
There was a faint beep as the timer went off... Ellie's eyes opened again, refocusing, as she sat back up. Magni had respectfully spent the last few minutes making her comfy in his bed, and he sat there, in a sort of kowtow. "Thank you for letting me do this..." He whispered. "You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen or felt..."
Ellie nodded slowly. "You should get a shower, Magni... get a shower, and get dressed. You seem to have held much more back than you think." She reached for her own clothing, carefully putting it back on. "I'll meet you at the Portugal. I'll tell them you had a distraction. but try not to be too long here." She smiled as she kissed him on the lips quickly. "And maybe next time, let's do it without powering me down. take it one step at a time." She purred, as she took the trays from their lunch and brought them on her way out, closing the door and letting the lock power itself back on before she skipped off...
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The performance practice was... frankly, a disaster. everything had gone off so well at the initial practice and soft-launch, Ammi reflected, so why were all the mistakes and problems that were possible happening right now?
He carefully nursed a towel to one of the juniors who had somehow managed to trip over her own two feet, telling her to sit down and rest a bit, while she motioned for the other dancers to fill in the gap she had left for the scene she was supposed to dance in.
Ellie had taken herself off like the rest of the seniors for a break. She watched the ongoing disaster, having somehow avoided being part of it. "I think maybe we should start from the top, look at simplifying some of this stuff they're being told to do... I don't think I could have accomplished it at their level of experience."
Mother Ammi looked up. "It was worth a shot, but you're right, we should omit some of the steps, shorten the performance a minute or two. Nobody could tell without being intimately aware of the artform. But I feel like it would be cutting corners."
Ellie got up and off the crate she was leaning against. "No, Mother.... you're just doing something necessary for them to be able to do this particular dance and music combo... Remember, these are children. young children. we can't be imposing on them too much. Remember those steps you'd warned me not to try when I was younger? This is something like that for them."
Ammi nodded. "Okay, kids, take a break. I need to think about stuff..." She looked to Ellie. "And you say you're not fit to be a junior instructor, really? When you offer me advice, I think the only reason you're not a senior instructor is that you're way too young for anyone to take you seriously as one."
Ellie blushed. "I just see things, I have a decent sense of kinesthetics since I was a young child. And Van'iia is an inspiration."
Ammi paused. "We all have something to dance for, child." She raised her hand up to stroke Ellie's hair, now that she was taller than Ammi herself. Clearly no longer a child, really. "I think that's the point. We'll start practice again with the seniors. That's the group you're part of, yes. So start warming up and getting ready to go in five minutes..."
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The six hours of practice and prep and eventually gone relatively well, and everyone had parted for a small dinner at the buffet. carb loading was essential, but too much food in the belly while dancing also caused problems... They had opted for starchy stuff mainly... rice with vegetables, small soups, one or two jellies or fruits... and then parted to rest for the night before resuming practice and prep for the big night tomorrow.
Magni had opted to spend some time walking the plaza after dinner on his own. As he walked, he walked past a lingerie store... then he stopped, and backtracked a little...
In the window, a mannequinbot had been carefully frozen and posed into a sort of dancing pose,her body dripping all over with lace... a sleeveless and legless bodysuit of sheer lace with little areas where the lace had been doubled down on to hide embarassing details of the body, a kneehigh pair of stickings that had been cut to expose the toes and heels, and a pair of gloves that extended from the hands without touching the fingers all the way to just below the elbows, with a small green gem in each of them standing out from the rest of the dark blue ensemble. A small veil completed the set, a floral crown with sheer lace falling downwards from it to the sternum of the mannequinbot. As he watched, the mannequinbot stiffly assumed a different dance pose, eyes blankly watching through him as it showed off the dark blue lace set it was wearing.
Magni gulped a little... then he walked right in.
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Several minutes later, Magni was sitting at one of the fountain benches that lined the plaza,clutching his head. He'd thought it would be expensive, and that he could just laugh it off as a fantasy, but it had been surprisngly cheap, and he did have the measurements of Ellie's body from having to help her order and put together the costumes she was wearing... The parcel sat on his lap, the same ensemble the mannequinbot was wearing, but in sky blue instead, the gems had been traded out, pale red rubies rather than the green gems the display had shown off.
He was going to give it to her as a gift, he'd thought. Now he'd bought it with his own money, he'd instead wondered when he was even going to be able to. Her birthday? It was months later. Christmas? even further away. It looked a bit like a marriage thing if you could get it in white, so at least he didn't have to worry about that - there was no way she'd agree to marry him even with how forward and generous she'd been with his anxieties and fetishes.
After a bit, he stood up firmly.
--------------------------------
Ellie blinked at the parcel, then at the way Magni was standing, holding it out and looking downwards. He'd asked her to give him a little time before they went to bed after they had showered up... And then presented the parcel.
Ellie sat down on the lounging sofa, carefully opening the parcel and finding the lingerie set that Magni had gotten for her. "... it's beautiful." She purred softly, examining the gloves and the stockings before going on to the bodysuit itself... She thought for a moment, then stood up and started disrobing her sleep robe, letting it fall to the ground as she tried on the outfit in front of Magni. The outfit fitted her perfectly, as she stood in front of him in it, her eyes closed as the veil fell in front of her face.
Magni started regretting getting her the set. it wasn't that it was ugly. it was just too... bridal, even when printed off in skyblue rather than virginal white?
Ellie opened her eyes again, examining the set. she did a small twirl and a few arm gestures, one of the smaller moves she could do from Y'tole without risking breaking the furniture or making a hole from severe rug burning. Her lips parted slightly, sending a small gust that ruffled the veil... "I love this... thank you so much, Magni."
Magni nodded and grinned. "II did think it would look wonderful on you... it's not smutty, it's just a simple bodysuit and a lfew choice elements... An innocent little number for an innocent young woman..." He blinked as Ellie hugged him tightly, hearing her whisper. "My mama used to say a good boy deserves a good reward. I think you should get what you really want tonight..." She purred softly again, turning off the lights to the room.
-----------------------------------
Magni noticed his nakedness beneath the blankets of his bed when he woke. He shook his head... Ellie had gone all the way somehow the night before, and dragged his inexperienced young cock into it all... he had come a few times, Ellie taking care somehow to give him lots of cuddling and kissing as they lay there in the bed, she in her new lingerie set, he in just his under pants, and soon, not even those... There was a convenient closure set of studs in the underaread between her crotch and her butt, which she'd snapped open to let him into her innermost lovehole, warm and soft to the touch of his manhood. He had lost his virginity, but he felt so good. He'd felt warm even now.
He examined Ellie as she stood in her recharger, having carefully redone up her lingerie and tidied up after the action. She looked like a floral display, Her eyes were dully lidded, and as he watched, her head drooped to look down at him suddenly. "Did you have... fun?"
Magni nodded happily. Even if this was the only time she totally put out for her, he would be content for possibly the rest of his life... "Yes, Ellie... we good for breakfast at 6.30am?"
Ellie nodded a little as she stood stiffly in the nook. "Yes, Magni, bro... Let's just keep tonight between us, bro..."
Magni nodded quickly... "I think I'll go back to bed. It's only 1am after all...." he glanced at his watch, surprised by how long it had taken her to take all of him despite the apparent speed with which she had done so.
Ellie closed her eyes and straightened back up. "Yes, Magni... Good night."
Magni turned the bedside lamp off again, and had the soundest sleep he'd had in two months.
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Latest revision as of 00:43, 3 April 2026

All I Have Left of Her

Chapter 1 - Not Working Out Well

Somewhere in the Special Little Sparks school, a student flailed awkwardly, trying to get their balance back... then fell down.

Teacher Lucy sighed a little, then glanced over to Principal Maurice. "As you can see, they're absolute complete neophytes at moving their bodies in such an unusual way. Perhaps we should give up on trying to bring in the Y'tole Academy. Maybe ballet classes?" She rubbed the tiny nose on her muzzle, the sign of situation she didn't enjoy.

Maurice sighed a little. "Don't look at me, the people on top got mesmerised by that wackadoodle African dance and now they want some of it in our curriculum." He scratched his head a little, then realised... he was losing even more hair trying to make the impossible happen. "They're going to just look at our students and walk away at this rate... Anyway... I noticed we're short of one student here?"

Teacher Lucy frowned. "That would be Elliot Manners, sir. he's got some serious problems with moving around, so we didn't even bother with trying with him... He's probably on his way home by now."

Elliot closed his eyes and took a deep breath as the jalopy slowly and safely got him home, his mind thinking about this and that... he was indeed the clumsiest child at Special Little Sparks, regularly falling into a bundle and sitting up on the floor. He laughed a lot about it, but it did hurt a little watching folks walk or hop around happily like it was the most ordinary thing.

There had been one moment where he'd felt exactly like that... He glanced up and brushed at the blue ribbon he kept tied in his hair. The faint scent of vanilla wafted from the ribbon and into his nose.

He missed Vanilla a lot.

Seamus Arendt took a deep breath... "Well folks, we're here. Gdanzeland. only the most advanced country in this part of Africa. Would you take a look at all this rustic beauty..." Bellamy Arendt frowned. "You know how much I hate military juntas, right? every possible thing wrong with-"

Seamus laughed a little and cupped Bellamy's mouth as a patrol walked past, giving 'another tourist' a dirty look. He did this for five long minutes before sighing and letting go. "Please, don't advertise your opinions here. we don't know what they might do...."

Aymee Ichigo rolled her eyes. "You lot are like kids. we're going to create a diplomatic incident sooner or later at this rate. Anyways... have you guys thought of anything to occupy our little interloper?" She motioned to somewhere behind herself at where Elliot Manners was meant to be tagging along.

Seamus made a small show of trying to formulate an answer several different ways. Eventually, however he raised a point. "I think he's found something. He's not there."

Aymee blinked hard and whipped around. The boy had wandered off. "OF ALL THE COTTON PICKING-"

Everything around him felt different.

Elliot carefully brushed his fingers across a carefully knitted carpet, watching the crowds swell and ebb. A thousand and one scents plyed across his nose. It hadn't been this marked back home... There was a sort of commotion brewing up nearby. a Gdanzeland patrol pointing around furiously as if finding someone.'

There was a young lady looking around panickedly. Elliot put two and two together and looked around. "Over here," he hissed...

The patrol cased the place for what seemed like several long minutes, eventually giving up and moving on...

Elliot winced a little. he had made the mistake of assuming this basket was roomy. It was, but once you shared it with an adult, it wasn't...

To her credit, the lady realised this fast as well and quickly decamped from the basket after a few cursory glances out of it, proceeding to help Elliot out as well.

He sniffed the hand that she had grabbed a hold of. She smelt of something... sweet. nice.

The lady gritted her teeth. "Honestly, all that fuss for two mangoes?" She cursed a little, then blinked. "Erm... thanks for helping me out there.... Mr... erm..."'

Elliot grinned, partly to hide his horror at having assisted a theft. "Elliot. Name Elliot. you are?"

The mischievious thief laughed. "Oh, I'm Van'iia. That's what everyone calls me in the dance troupe."

Elliot gave a faint 'whistle. "So not a thief, Miss Vanilla. Not normally, anyway."

Van'iia facepalmed and hissed. "Van'iia, not Vanilla, little boy. Vanilla is the nice smelling thing, I'm Van'iia."

Elliot nodded quickly as if he understood this. "Okies, Vanilla!" Poor Elliot still had problems with pronouncing certain words, and would often wind up with some hilarious names for folks. "Uncle Seamy" and "Uncle Belly" were all too familiar with it and had resigned themselves to being called such by Elliot (though Seamus raged whenever Marcus or Aymee teased him with it)

The pixie-faced woman gritted her teeth.... "You're not very smart, are you?"

Elliot gave a self-deprecating laugh. "Me? Smart? Never."

Van'iia sighed a little. "You're probably not supposed to be on your own. Where are your parents, kid?"

Elliot pointed behind himself. "Mama and Papa. Honeymoon. With Uncle Seamy. Uncle Belly. Aunt Aymee!"

Van'iia made a small show of trying to formulate an answer several different ways. Eventually, however she raised a point. "I think you've wandered off way too far from them, little one."

Elliot blinked hard and whipped around. The boy had indeed wandered off too far from his caretakers. He raked his mind. What would Aunt Aymee say in a situation like this? Oh yes-

"OF ALL THE COTTON PICKING-"

Chapter 2 - Even a Fish can climb a tree

Principal Maurice looked away uneasily. He had delivered his report on their efforts to date in preparing for the Y'tole Academy's scouting visit, and it was not looking good for the higher-ups' weird pet project.

They had sent a gentleman with a 'fatal' case of baldness and a last ditch attempt to retain some nobility by growing a small goatee and mustache combo in white. He read through the papers, then thought for a bit... Then, finally, Paul North spoke up.

"Mr Maurice, are you aware of what they do to Y'tole dancers in Gdanzeland these days?" He observed matter of factly.

"I... I'm not really a fan of the World News Network, Paul. What do they do?'

"Murder. Rape.Persecution. Not very pleasant, the junta is." Paul calmly reached for a cup of coffee that had been brewed for his visit and sipped it. "The fact is, this isn't just about being able to sell an education in something that isn't ballet or tapdancing or half a dozen other things the other schools elsewhere have done. We're trying to do them a favor."

"I get that, but why the insistence on getting our kids read in on a few basic steps? Surely if they need the help, they'll lower their standards?"

Paul set the coffee aside. "Oh, Maurice, you fucking imbecile. I've met with the principal of the Academy. She won't bring the Academy curriculum and trainers in if were not up to a certain standard. There's not going to be any charity from us. She'll just walk..."

"... is there anything else we can do?"

"Focus on the children we know have extra intelligence in kinesthetics, cut their hours in other classes for the next two weeks or so. It won't matter any more in two weeks anyway." Paul sighed and rubbed his head. Being Paul North hadn't made things easier for him, had it?

After a fruitless search for the rest of his group, Van'iia had just given up and dragged Elliot along.

Elliot gave a small eep. "Where are we going, Vanilla?"

Van'iia sighed. "You think I'm going to let a foreigner kid wander on their own here? you're one heck of a target. Have a little more caution."

Elliot looked down a little. "Oh. okay, Vanilla."

"AND FOR THE LAST TIME, IT'S VAN'IIA, not VANILLA!"

Van'iia eventually got to a small inn and started climbing the stairs along the outside, Elliot stumbling behind. She took a deep breath. "Now I should warn you, my brothers are a total bunch of utter nincompoops."

Elliot smiled. "Nincom-nin-nincom-.... idiots? FRIENDS!" As if to emphasise this point, the first thing flying out the door was a piece of clothing that landed on Elliot's face. "Can't see. Suddenly night?"

Van'iia walked right into a room full of young boys having a sort of clothes fight. She just stood there for what seemed like a long while... then screamed. "Stop screwing around with your costumes! We're going to need them in a few hours, and I don't have time to mend a tonne of tears!"

... boy, that stopped it quickly.

An wizened old man slowly walked out from amongst the chaos as the boys started tidying up in fear. "Ah, Van'iia... how goes the preparations for our performance?"

Van'iia scowled as she set down the mangoes she had pilfered on a table near one of the windows of the inn room. It was clearly the type of room you booked if you had a lot of people in a group and privacy wasn't an issue. There was an adjoining room that the old man had come out of, but that was probably the only concession to privacy this lot was getting.

Van'iia didn't sound happy. "The rains might be coming in. We might have to delay final prep till we're sure there aren't anymore postponements or cancellations, papa."

The old man considered this. "... it's okay, isn't it? a little more time for the boys to enjoy life won't hurt them."

There was a flicker of ... something... in Van'iia's face. "It won't... you know, papa-"

The old man cut her off abruptly with a wave of his hand. "Not in front of guests. And who might you be?

Elliot had elected himself Protector of The Mangoes and was busy standing on the table, shuffling the mangoes out of reach from Van'iia's brothers. He blinked and lost his footing on hearing the old man's query. "ow! erm... Elliot, sir. Elliot Manners. Pleased. Meet you."

The old man reached a gnarled hand out and rubbed Elliot's warm brown hair. "Manners.. indeed... quite a fitting name. What a polite young boy... Call me... G'in."

Elliot squealed and nodded. "Old man G'in!"

G'in winced and looked over at Van'iia. "Is it possible that I've made an error of judgement here?"

Van'iia is hunched over, collecting randomly strewn outfits. "... You should see what he calls me, papa. Vanilla. VANILLA. Like I'm some sort of ice cream flavor."

G'in stared blankly.... then he laughed. a booming, loud laugh. The kind that said he was going to enjoy having it at Van'iia's expense.

Eventually, they'd worked out a plan - Elliot would hang out with the dance troupe and watch them practice, relax, act like general idiots, and stuff. Just as well too - no sooner had Van'iia put down the phone after ordering an extra meal for Elliot that the rains began.

Van'iia cussed. "Which idiot scheduled opening this marketplace in the midst of a monsoon season? This is just a waste of our money."

G'in looked up from dozing in one corner, before motioning to one of the boys to do a dance step differently. "Oh, you mean the money that the junta agreed to foot for every single day they delayed our performance. Lighten up, Van'iia."

Van'iia had a slight edge to her words next. "Does it matter? we do the things the junta want us to do, then we vanish into the darkness like we don't matter until they want to trot us out for 'the tourists' again."

Elliot looked up from watching the boys perform some sort of dance that was more reminiscent of people hurtling through the air than any dance he'd seen back home. There was a certain frisson in the air... he should do something about it... He thrust a hand into the air. "VANILLA! Teach me? Dance?"

Van'iia opened her mouth to protest, then thought about how this supposedly clumsy boy had managed to evade a dozen outstretched paws and kept the mangoes safe from her brothers... Besides, anything to diffuse the tension that was building up in this room... "Sure, Elliot. and again, my name is ... =sigh= oh forget it you're going to screw it up again."

Elliot took the same spot he always did, in the middle of the lawn, carefully checking the ribbon in his hair was still tightly done up. It was practice, he didn't need to wear anything fancier than the shorts and shirt he always wore in the spring warmth. Assuming the position as Van'iia had taught him to... and...

Elliot started bounding around the grass, bare feet sending up an occasional burst of green, as he closed his eyes, focusing entirely on the Y'tole variant he'd been taught to the sounds of the Gdanzeland monsoons.And of the fish that refused to believe that it could not climb a tree...

Elliot crashed out yet again. This was, what, the 87th time? He began to regret even imagining he could have the same grace as the boys and their sister. Always that same shift of the feet, causing him to keep falling.

Elliot winced a little on the wooden floor as he looked up. The boys had all decided to take a nap in their bunks, sprawled out in a wild assortment of positions. Two of them were even sharing one, to the regret of one of them, as a foot kept being shoved into his face in mid sleep. Elliot was still the only one dancing in this room.

No, that wasn't true. Van'iia had danced along with him, showing him the steps and then having him try it, one more step after the other. It was just that this particular step he wanted to emulate had been... frustrating.

Van'iia sat down next to Elliot, sweating profusely from the damp air and exertion. "Right, let's... just rest a little, okay? you've done pretty well for Mr Clumsy, haven't you?"

Elliot nodded slowly, sitting up. "Clumsy. Managing. Fear. Limit reached." He looked away, as if ashamed of telling Van'iia that he was about to give up.

Van'iia frowned a little... "... Elliot, could you go out to the window and tell me what you hear?" She motioned to the window.

Elliot nodded and tiredly walked over to the table, where the mangoes still sat. He strained his ears a little... some sort of tiny pigs grunting away... "Weird... Tiny pigs?"

Van'iia laughed. "No, body, those are mudskippers... they're a type of fish... you'll find them in the trees sometimes."

Elliot nodded as if this was a matter of fact... then paused. "But fish can't climb trees!"

Van'iia walked over and looked out, carefully wrapping herself behind Elliot. The scent was back again, stronger than ever. The softness was a new sensation though - almost like mama, but younger... "Oh, there's one?" She pointed at a mudskipper, its weird face puffing a little and letting a grunt out.

Elliot yelped. "several floors up. How? Fish can't climb trees!"

Van'iia deadpanned. "And who said that?"

Elliot thought about a lot of people... "Teachers. mama. papa. friends at school. even janitor once laughed when I said fish could climb trees."

Van'iia giggled. "And look who said 'watch me'. That titchy little fella grunting in victory..."

She pointed at the midskipper as it hopped away to accost a potential mate. "I want you to be that mudskipper. don't ever let anyone tell you you can't do something you've set yourself to doing. You've proven yourself more agile than you thought yourself to be. Finishing all 100 basic steps should be an easy thing... just keep practicing... and maybe..."

Van'iia let go of Elliot and backed away. "Maybe you can do this too. Call it homework, maybe?" And with that, she began twirling with beauty again.

Elliot sweated a little. This was the step he'd screwed up over and over... foot lifted slightly in the air and -

he put it down right where it was supposed to. imperceptibly. like two keyframes stuck back to back, with nothing in between.

Elliot whooped a little. This was a small victory... now he just had to -OOF-

Elliot wound up staring at the blue spring sky, panting. Oh yes, he'd managed the 87th step, but the other 12 were going to take some more time clearly. He blinked slowly, then aimed a finger gun at the sky and shot it, as if performing a rifle salute. "Vanilla. Getting better. Happy. Can see?"

Chapter 3 - Final Curtain Call

"So, hit us with it. Good news, bad news." Aymee Ichigo leaned back in her sofa and watched Seamus Arendt with feigned disinterest.

Seamus scratched his head. "Something's jamming the internal locator in Elliot, so we haven't been able to do more than combing the streets and showing his photo to random folks." He paused... "But whoever they're hanging with seems to be doing an AMAZING job. Three days so far without a blackout." He fished out his communicator and showed a screen, still pinging Elliot's vitals including his blackout episodes. Not a single one had occurred in the three days he'd been missing.

The only point of concern showing was how Elliot was down to his last 24 hours of charge. They would have to locate him soon or there would be hell to pay. He briefly wondered if he could just fab a new Elliot unit and pass it off to Marcus, then shook his head. He'd notice alright. and then he'd ask questions. and then there'd be hell to pay.

"I'd love to ask how they managed that without even knowing his circumstances. Even I can't go longer than a day between his episodes." Aymee sighed. "... goddamn rainstorm. Thank God it's ending in the morning."

Elliot woke up, unable to sleep. Perhaps it was the mudskippers. They had been nice as an object lesson in something, but once you were done you were left with a lot of noisy bastards on the trees. Elliot sat up a little and looked around. It was simply adorable how Van'iia's little brothers were so excited for the morning's performance, they'd even fallen asleep in their dance costumes.

"... but where does it end, G'in?" Van'iia's voice came from behind the separate room. Elliot blinked a little and walked over to peek through the keyhole. Van'iia was standing still, totally stark naked, as she kept talking. "We take one of them out, and another bastard just fills the gap. it's like a terrible game of whack-a-mole..."

Gin walked over to Van'iia and did some adjustments of some sort. "Well, my dear, we'll just have to kill them down to the last one. Just like I promised you all those years ago."

Van'iia sputtered. "That wasn't me you promised. You need to get it out of your head... I'm not your wife, G'in... I'm just your little revenge playtool."

G'in blinked and stood back. "God, I wish this detonator design wasn't so slow burning... having to have an argument everytime we do this is killing me, Van'iia... Look, I promise you, just a few more stunts like this and I'll let the rest of the people fight this war. We'll return to my home and you won't ever have to do this again..."

Van'iia paused as she considered this. "With fewer children, please, You know how having all these guys running around underfoot drives me a little... crazy."

G'in nodded quickly. "Just you and me, dear. You won't ever have another rugrat running wild."

Elliot blinked a little as he backed away from the door. Adults had peculiar discussions. Children were best seen and not heard, and certainly not seen hearing them surreptitiously. He went back to sleep.


Elliot was the last to wake up in the morning. It really helped that the music was sudden and that it was very loud. He yelped as he fell out of bed, then looked around as the boys were taking turns to wipe down their faces. "Oh yes.... it's finally happening, isn't it? The performance, I mean"

Van'iia nodded. She was dressed in her own dancer costume as well, no sign of exhaustion from the previous night's nocturnal activities on her face. "Yes, we're going to put on an unforgettable show, something nobody will forget!"

Elliot looked up in awe... then deadpanned as soon as Van'iia opened her mouth. "Really, Vanilla?"

Van'iia clapped a hand to her jewelled forehead, wincing. "Oh no, it's happening, isn't it? being around an idiot makes one stupid."

The booming laugh of Old Man G'in sounded in response. "No, you're just beginning to like him!" He smiled as he walked over to the two of them, clearly having time in between every bit of final prep to sass them.

Van'iia scowled a little, but there was a slight fondness in that tweak of one corner of her lips. "DO NOT."

Elliot took a deep breath again. That sweet scent again. coupled with the picture of beauty in front of him... Perhaps he was still too young to know anything about love but... "I like you, Vanilla. Can I come along and watch your performance?"

Old Man G'in shifted himself slowly behind Elliot, shaking his head as he looked at Van'iia. Van'iia shook her head. "Oh no, honey, you can't come along. not where we're going... but you can be with us in spirit" She glanced up at her headdress... one ornament less wouldn't be noticed.

One hand went up in the ornate decorations and fished in it.... a pale blue ribbon came out, and Van'iia carefully tied it to Elliot's hair. "Keep practicing. do the homework I gave you. One day I'll be back to check on it."

Elliot nodded. "I will. wow, this ribbon really looks-"


Seamus blinked and tapped his communicator. "Huh, that's funny. the jamming's gone."

Aymee grinned as she drove the rental jeep via manual control with her own hands. "That's good news."

"Aand he's gotten a blackout. a manually induced blackout."

Aymee didn't say a word for a while... "You know, once. JUST ONCE. I'd like my good news to come without any bad news! Anyway, where's that kid? I need to chew him out for making us worry for so long.

Bellamy raised a portable charger.in one hand. "You can do it after we deal with his lack of power, your Highness."

The jeep paused as a truck rumbled past them, gaily decorated in letters that read "J'nn Y'tolo Dancers - State Sanctioned - Trust You Can Rely Upon". They didn't think much of such a truck.


It didn't take long for them to find Elliot with the jamming gone.

"really looks nice. Erm... oh. hey. Uncle Seamy? Uncle Belly? Aunt Aymee?" Elliot finally finished a sentence he'd been shut down in the middle of. He looked around once. blinked. Looked down at the portable induction pad that had been glued to his bare back. "'sup?"

Aymee Ichigo cracked her knuckles. "Now can I punch this annoying little brat for making us worry about him all these days?"

Bellamy looked up from the charger he'd brought along. "Can you hold off for about ten minutes? He won't fully understand the pain till he's had more juice in him."

Aymee groaned, but withdrew her fist. "So... what have you been up to these past few days, little man?"

Elliot thought a little. "Well. I-" He did not get to even start summarizing his dance education when Seamus calmly pushed his tablet against his chest and tapped a few buttons, causing him to fall silent again.

Aymee glared at Seamus. "Seamussss.... reading the fucking room much lately?"

Seamus sat back down. "Oh, relax, you dunhead. it's just a two minute procedure and he wpn't feel or remember a thing. I just need records of his past 120 hours of activity, that's all." Aymee yelled. "Stop treating the kid like he's machinery, goddammit. Some days, your psychopathy feels like it's only gotten worse rather than better! You could have just put up with his yammering like an ordinary kid."

Seamus looked up. "I prefer precision in my reports, Aymee. You know that's always been one of my worst habits since we joined together as a group. besides, no amount of talking can replicate actual blackbox footage..."

Elliot snapped back to life. "Well, I ran into nice girl. marketplace. she stole two mangoes-"

Aymee wept. "Oh my god, he's become a delinquent!"

Elliot continued as if Aymee hadn't commented. "couldn't find you. stayed with her troupe. learnt some dancing. now you're here. Nothing in between."

Seamus sighed a little. "See what I mean? I'm going to review the recordings while we get back to the hotel. Then we'lre going to pack up and catch our flight out like nothing bad happened to us this trip-"

The room whited out.

Chapter 4 - Life In A Bubble

As decapitation strikes go, it was extremely unexpected - and effective. Someone apparently worked out how to smuggle in enough ordnance to wipe out half the Gdanzeland junta. What had been simulatenously a celebration of the opening of a new cheap market for its people and a herald to the return of the old ways after the shock results of the previous election turned into a white-hot bloodbath. A huge char mark was visible from space via satellite, and clearly nobody could have survived the carnage... In theory at least

Seamus was the first to recover from the shock, rubbing his head. His hand rested on something whitish and squeaky... He blinked and looked around. It was some sort of balloon. It had somehow formed around everyone in the entourage. it was slightly warm to the touch, and disconcerting in so many ways... "Sound off, guys?"

"Aymee here."

"Papa, I wanna go home, these crazy people keep getting me into strange situations everytime we go somewhere on holiday.'

"Bellamy. You okay there. bro?"

"Wolfe. And may I say, congratulations on your exoneration." The last remark came not by sound, but by whatever tech the Kindred had foisted onto Seamus as part of his 'investigative parole'.

Seamus sighed. "Thank god. all accounted for." At the same time, he texted a silent reply to Wolfe... "Explain."

The gruff tones of Wolfe came back after a few seconds the same way it had first arrived. "Initial analysis from satellite suggests the same kind of occurence that we accused you of. However, you literally lucked into the effective radius of the explosion. This is not the act of a man guilty of setting bombs. We are in fact amazed as to how you survived. Please enquire further..."

Seamus did exactly that. "So... exactly why are we in a white balloon instead of, you know, dead?"

Aymee groaned a little. "All hail the Emperor, great is his wisdom... I really wasn't going to bring this doodad, but my hubs insisted. this thing here will withstand an unreasonable amount of kinetics and heat the moment it senses that shit coming in to make life miserable for a royal of the Chinajapese empire..."

Wolfe had a pondering tone in his voice. "Interesting, we shall have to pay closer attention to this newcomer than we thought if they could come up with such unique protective technology. Making a note..."

Elliot had gone quiet after his initial whining, as if he'd realised something... "She's dead, isn't she? Big kaboom. Only us in bubble."

Seamus opened his mouth as if to say something, then realised that anything he said would be pointless. Elliot fingered at the ribbon that had been tied into her hair. It was all that he had left of her...

The entire balloon fell slient as death... Then Seamus blinked as his communicator rang. "Hey, Marcus, yeah... I think you've heard about that huge bang that just happened in Gdanzeland. I just want you to know we're all okay. no need to panic. No injuries.... no damage-"

Elliot suddenly started bawling like a child several years younger than his apparent age.

Seamus blinked hard. "Oh, absolutely nothing happened to your son. No hardware or software damage that didn't exist before the trip. honest. I'll even give him a look over when we get back to the office if that worries you... That? I think that might be emotional damage... I know, it's amazing how delicate they can be. Even I'm amazed at Bellamy's work sometimes... I'll call you again when I get a better signal that can run video."

Seamus closed his communicator.... then his eyes. If it hadn't been a matter of his own life and death he wouldn't have gotten anywhere near this accursed place. It was on him that he'd dinged a dent into Elliot.

Elliot sniffled. "We can find her, can't we? You can fix her like you fixed me?"

Seamus sighed. He was hoping his first "Talk" with Elliot would be about the birds and the bees, not... death. Best to rip the bandage off right now. "Oh, Elliot... I'm not a doctor, and this kind of overpressure pulps people. Hell, it'd pulp you too. Sometimes, people just... go away. I know it sounds cruel, but it just means you should treasure the time you have with folks you love more. Can you do that in future?"

Elliot nodded slowly and tried to stop sniffling. "Yes, Uncle Seamus."

Bellamy cheered. "One small win there. Go on, Elliot, call me Uncle Bellamy!"

Elliot giggled a little. "Uncle Belly?"

Bellamy frowned. "Oh come on. is this based off respect or something? Do you not respect me?"

Aymee hrms as she briefly tests the balloon. "Hrm, still too risky. it's still filtering in oxygen but it's still hot enough not to crumble... And for what it's worth, he's always called me Aunt Aymee.

The entire balloon erupted in a swamp of laughter. Everyone joined in except...

Bellamy yelled in the dim glow of the balloon walls. "I am feeling so neglected and disrespected here."

Chapter 5 - Diamond In The Rough

'Shows promise, but not good enough for full training yet." "Terrible. has the agility of a rock leaving someone's hand." "Who let this clown audition?"

Another child burst into tears as they fled the gymnasium. The spite levelled at them came from a wizened old woman perched slightly on a cane. "Mother Ammi, please... these are just young children. You shouldn't be so hard on them." One of her minders pleaded as another ego was shattered.

"When I was their age, I wasn't scarfing burgers. I was weaving through the grasslands and the woods with the goats and the sheep and the... " Ammi tossed her hand up. "They have some basics, but it will be a very long time before we have anything like suitable material to train into a Y'tole dancer of any kind. Figure... ten years?"

Paul North looked away. "I... I'm sorry, Ammi, I tried my best to get you good students."

Ammi still looked cross, but there was a different tone in her voice. "You're a good man, Paul. I know what you're up to here.... but that doesn't mean I can just slack off and demand less like it was some sort of ... State-Sanctioned Y'tole class. We'll put in some classes to help them brush up their flexibility and speed, but as I said... I can't find anyone worth the effort of setting up here.

Paul frowned and looked as Ammi pointed at another child and issued a blunt silent "get out" sign. "And how many children like that would you need?"

Ammi raised a single finger.

"One hundred? but that's kind of unreasonable!"

"Not one hundred. Just... one child. that can make all the difference between us teaching just basic callisthenics and us bringing the entire curricula of the Academy to bear on this place.

Paul North sighed limply. "Well, before you go back into your usual place of exile... I don't suppose I could interest you in a tour of the local area, maybe raise more plus points for a Academy here?"

Ammi frowned. "I'm not likely to change my mind. but I've heard Little Sanctuary has this most delectable ice cream that no other place in the world has... Not that it would change my mind. don't think you can use it as a bribe."

Paul quickly walked away. "I'll get a car, I know just who makes the best in Little Sanctuary. and no, it's not a business."

Six months. Sink or Swim.

Elliot smiled a little as he opened the drawers of his cupboard. Finding the materials had been a pain, as had trying to get someone to sew him a properly specified Y'tole Emma dress... There was only one person he was going to impress today, and she wasn't even here anymore... He calmly donned the dress, swishing it slightly, possibly inviting jeers about his orientation if anyone walked in.

He didn't care. he wasn't the first male to take the role of an Emma in an Y'tole dance. he didn't know what his dad would say, but he had always supported him in so many endeavours. His mom had hugged him and told him to go for it on the lawn. "I'm making Rocky Road for dessert today. Whether you come back with your nose held high or crying a mess into your dress... We're having Rocky Road after dinner."

Elliot walked out onto the lawn, pausing to check that his feet had been properly wrapped. Shoes hadn't worked, in the end - he needed to feel the ground beneath him every step. To be loved by the soil, much as he had been loved by so many people around him. He closed his eyes. He didn't need them.

Mouth the words, assume the position... for a second he could fool them all into believing he truly belonged to this art.

And then another second, and another...

Marcus Manners and Julie Manners had every right to be concerned. Their good friends had done all the checks and he was undamaged. That was hardware wise. Software wise... it didn't look good. He was curled up in his bed, refusing to engage in anything remotely resembling social interaction. "I should talk to him." Marcus offered...

Julie cut him off. "Honey, I love you, but I think this is one of those times where I have to do the job." She took a deep breath and walked over, sitting down next to Elliot. "Hey.... did you have fun in Gdanzeland? do you want to talk about it?"

Elliot didn't want to talk about it.... until he sniffed. "Did you bake something, mama?"

Julie nodded and gave Elliot a hug. "It was a welcome home gift. I learnt so much about baking while I was down at Bueno Vegas I wanted to share the love with you."

Elliot buried his head in Julie's apron. "She smelt like this. She was beautiful. She taught me how to dance a little..."

Julie gave a look of interest. A first girlfriend for this little boy? He was growing up so fast... "And you exchanged addresses? got Pen-pally?"

Elliot looked up, a clear feeling of total lousiness on his face. "Well, she blew up, across an entire city block.don't know how to address letter anymore. for her hand to hold? or her eye to see? spread out a lot..." There was an attempt at humor, but Julie could see a tear form on Elliot's face.

Marcus started cussing. "SON OF A-"

Julie quickly shot Marcus a look. It spoke of dire consequences should Elliot learn how to cuss in that certain way. Marcus excused himself, yelling as he went down the corridor to make a private phone call. "THEY SHOULD HAVE LED WITH THAT. IDIOTS."

Julie frowned. "I guess the Vanilla buns are out of the question?"

They had not been out of the question. in fact, Elliot had started finding himself drawn to a million things that smelled of vanillin. It didn't even have to be the fancy real stuff that came out of an actual pod... His mom took a dim view of people who insisted on the real thing, saying "What I'm saying is, once you push the reactions that happen in an oven onto vanilla, it all looks the same.... would you like one now?"

Marcus calmly sat down and chewed on a vanilla bun. He appreciated that it wasn't easy to make them every other day, but his mom had insisted. She had also insisted that he 'do his homework', just as he had promised Van'iia. When he had shown her examples of the dress he would need to wear for a full performance, she had only briefly had a double take. Boys didn't wear dresses, supposedly.

When they were playing the part of an Emma in a Y'tole dance, apparently it was normal. Marcus tried to express some concern about letting Elliot get even more effeminate, but Julie had shot him another one of those rare looks. The ones that said "Marcus, I love you, but if you stop this thing from happening, I can become little Elly's mama bear..." She had leaned in closer, as if to silently say "and you don't want mama bear to be angry."

Marcus didn't mind after a while. in fact, the assertiveness she had displayed, the mental acuity she ran with after her spa trip aka full rebuild was refreshing. He'd been busy keeping Little Sanctuary afloat more than usual, but he was really looking forward to having all of that turned on him one day.

And so the days had become a little weird - Julie playing the role of devoted housewife, Marcus being the defacto mayor of the town, and Elliot quietly putting scraps together into what eventually took Julie's breath away. "Are you sure, that you're not a girl, Elly?"

Elliot shook his head furiously. This was a homage to someone he missed, not a cross-dress party costume.

Elliot clapped his hands clean of vanilla dust, breathing it slowly as if it was some forbidden drug that would empower him to do what he would do next. He couldn't possibly keep asking his mama to make vanilla buns as a tribute to someone she'd never even met, it just didn't feel right.

He got up again and walked to the centre of the lawn. Closed his eyes again, assumed the position and... grass sprayed into the sky as he bounded wildly in seemingly impossible ways.

This was a love song for the broken hearted, and he was singing it as softly and as fast as his feet could carry him


Paul North rolled his eyes as he slowly drove his jalopy. He briefly cursed his decision to switch out his luxurious little slice of heaven for this... thing... but people would have raised questions if he'd driven his favorite car in this guise. Everything in Little Sanctuary was the perfection they had carefully charted, built, and rolled out for the benefit of every Arendtcore employee who could move in here... The sun shone through the trees as he glanced behind himself at Mother Ammi and her guards on either side of her. It seemed a shame that she could not find peace anywhere, not even here... Perhaps the Rocky Road the Manners made would-

"Stop the car." Mother Ammi had noticed something.

"But we're almost there..."

Mother Ammi wasn't repeating herself. She opened the door, causing the overly-rententive safety system to kick in and halt the car. Somewhere deep inside Paul North, a psychopath was cursing loudly about idiots opening doors in mid trip. Paul just held a soft 'oof' and smiled. "Something got your eye?"

Mother Ammi had parked herself at the fencing of the Manners house. She was watching intently at a ... young girl? in a festive dress? dancing some sort of Y'tole dance, but it had a grace that none of the children at Special Little Sparks had managed... He peered a little... the psychopath in him idly commented. "Wow, that's not how I expected it to go. our little wooden puppet has become a real live girl?"

Paul North did not appreciate the intrusive thoughts, but that was quickly drowned out by what came next.

Mother Ammi suddenly dropped her cane, displaying an alarming amount of agility as she hopped the fencing. She kept watching Elliot dance, then did the time honored greeting that she used to say so much...

"Ah, a emma. are you looking for an lemme to dance through this moment with?"

Not in English of course, but the native tongue "Ytole came with...

Elliot froze and almost fell over. He knew what he had to say, but he was a little surprised that the person playing the part of the lemme was a old woman, rather than some noble man. Then again, the ship HAD sailed when he decided to dance like an emma, didn't it?

"Yes, let us dance through this moment like .... uhm... every fish matters..." He flubbed it a bit but Mother Ammi was... impressed by his command of the old dance ettiquette. As if powered by a combination of springs and explosives, Ammi suddenly started dancing along, but it was not any of the lemme dance he had seen in Gdanzeland.

Mother Ammi winked. As if to tell Elliot "Go on, challenge me. show me it's not just a rote and blind replay... Surprise me."


Paul calmly walked over to the fence to watch Elliot dance with Mother Ammi. He had had very mixed feelings about the whole show... He was showing Mother Ammi something she wanted to see, but he had based his love for the art on a total lie.

"We should tell him." "Weshouldweshouldweshould." "Delight in ruining a young boy." Paul shakily reached for his pocket and scarfed some new anti-psychopathy medication his contacts had offered, claiming it was more effective... the voices faded, leaving him to enjoy the odd view of his nephew in a dress dancing with an old woman even as her guards panicked... something about her infirmity.

He was Paul North. Paul North was not someone who would ruin someone's fun randomly.

Eventually, the dance ended, leaving Mother Ammi sitting on the grass next to Elliot. She panted weakly. "I haven't had such fun since... my wedding night..."

Elliot blinked slowly... "You danced for him?"

Mother Ammi gently corrected the child. "WITH him. you're not the first male emma I've danced with ever."

Elliot understood the code. "Ah... still enjoying company?"

Ammi stopped breathing for a moment, as if she couldn't bear to let something out. "first thing the junta said was, let's kill all the Y'tole dancers. He apologised and ran off to fight. That... went rather badly." Mother Ammi noticed the ribbon on Elliot's hair. "In fact, he used to wear a ribbon just like THAT. right down to the frill edges."

Elliot seemed suddenly wiser than the youth he looked like. "things to mourn. we have plenty."

Ammi sat up a bit more. 'Oh do grow up a little. the essence of Y'tole dance as a peaceful endeavor is that it's a celebration. Perhaps focus on that, young man? By the way, may I know your name?"

Elliot sat up slowly, little strips of grass covering his dress. "Elliot Manners."

"What a fitting name. And where do you study?"

"Special Little Sparks. Small school. fitted to different children's skills."

Ammi thought about this for a moment... "I take it this was the place you wanted to bring me for Rocky Road ice cream?"

Elliot looked away apologetically. "Mom makes it. But alcoholic. Okay with that?"

Ammi chuckled. "Wow. the same brazen confidence as the son... Paul... when we're done with ice cream here, we're going to have words about how you should have led with this child. Remember how I said I only needed just one child to make the Academy worthwhile?"

Paul sheepishly watched as Mother Ammi's guards rushed to stabilise her and give her back her cane, even though moments ago she had looked like she never needed any of it."Yes, ma'am... perfectly clear as rain everytime you told me."

Mother Ammi reached out a hand to help Elliot get up from the grass. "I think I found the child in question. Now... about that ice cream..."

Chapter 6 - Kitchen-table issues

Marcus Manners scratched hs head tiredly as he let his trusty jalopy navigate the long distance between Minnesota's Town Hall. It had been kind of bizarre watching the disjoint between the lovely gated community they had spent so long building up, and the horrendous mess that had been created in the world outside.

The first indignity had occurred just outside as the jalopy acted up slowly while trying to do a parallel park with considerably fewer points of reference. In Little Sanctuary, there were so many things you could latch onto as a reference before you used satnav.... out here, it was a desert. stars on the ground, satnav in the sky. What would have taken two minutes at home now took ten. In fact, he had taken advantage of the limited smarts of the AI and hopped out, before letting it continue struggling.

Marcus had experienced another sort of indignity as he walked into the Conference. There was a lot of opprobium amongst the delegates, and most of it was centred on a whimpering mousy lady. "We are Minnesotans. if we don't stand for independence within our union, we are nothing." "Integration with our enemy? how dare you suggest that. Corporate takeover scum!"

"I... I just thought of all the positive indicators I saw about them and I thought my people would want some of it." the mousy lady peeked out from behind the placard with her name and locale. Mayor Chablis Brissom, of Okachunee District? It was one of the biggest districts in Minnesota after the Despotic Years had screwed up so many things...

Marcus matter of factly walked over, located the seat right next to Mayor Chablis, and sat down. There was a certain advantage in arranging the seats based roughly on the positioning of the districts in Minnesota. This was one of them. A reassuring big hand came down on Chablis' shoulder. She blinked, then looked up. "I wasn't planning on doing lunch out here, but I changed my mind... Lunch?"

Mayor Chablis Brissom whimpered,teared.... then suddenly bawled.

Marcus looked away. "Keep it together, there's potential in this merger." he thought. but loooking at Mayor Chablis virtually turn into a chubby crying mouse was awkward...

Marcus walked back to the park bench after selecting from the hot dog stand least likely to have actual dog in its hot dogs and sat down next to Brissom. The dimunitive dwarf was clapping her hands a little. "Eat up. I'm sorry it's not crab and oysters."

Chablis laughed a little. "Don't be, I've had crab and oysters all the time for ages!" She bit down on the hotdog and slowly chewed it. "... .... hmm... Greater Minnesotan rat."

Marcus calmly put his own hotdog away and brought out his workbag, his tablet was great for a lot of things, but when it came to governance nothing spoke of power like a leather suitcase. This one was from his own father, a veteran of the pre-Despotic Years where people went whereever they wanted all the time. He fished out a map of the Minnesota Union and his smart tablet. "As you can see, Okachunee District is considerably bigger than Little Sanctuary by a factor of 10. Significantly higher rates of human infant mortality and crime per capita..." He watched Chablis pale and look away slowly. This was a deal that offered nothing to Arendtcore and Little Sanctuary, and in fact saddled them with a whole new bundle of problems. And then there was the biggest deal-killer of them all.

"Little Sanctuary is a Corporate Town. That means everyone in this town works at Arendtcore or one of its subsidiaries or local contractors. No strangers allowed. I know, it feels like some sort of Malt-Eisner setup..."

Mayor Chablis whimpered and looked down. Marcus watched her... good. I want you to fight for it. I want you to prove you deserve to be part of us just as much as you want to be... Show me.

Oh god, was he becoming one of the Arendts? Time to look into psychopathy medication?

The fearful mousiness suddenly broke into a look of determination. "Phase it in. We break Okachunee into five or six smaller districts, and gradually bring them into the fold. I know some of my people are anti-corporate, but it is as they said... judge me not by my name... but by the fruits of my labour."

Marcus fished out his worn copy of The Knowledge. a few flips brought up the exact words that Mayor Chablis had said.

Marcus smiled and extended his hand over to the pint sized brave. "I'll bring your proposal over to the others in my team. let's do a proper lunch and iron out the details to bring Okachunhee into Little Sanctuary."

Mayor Chablis nodded, almost squeaking as her little frame almost bounced while trying to shake Marcus' hand... "Listen... can I have that hotdog if you're not going to eat it? Greater MInnesotan Rat is DELICIOUS."

Marcus idly crossed the Southern gate of the Little Sanctuary Limits as a vandal almost torched his car. The security systems in the fencing worked out this wasn't okay and proceeded to light him up with a few dozen rounds of pain and knockout... he would live, but perhaps he wouldn't be as open to accosting another member of the community. The trip from the gate to his house would take longer from here, but he could use the time to relax.

A giant bipedal black and white cat in an anorak jogged past his car, accompanied by a lanky and clearly tired young man. That man was clearly focused on her ass. Marcus blinked a little, then shrugged. With all the experiments Seamus - ... sorry, Paul North was doing, everything was a possibility.

His car suddenly stopped just shy of the garage of his house. As he looked out, he saw the cause:

A group of people had camped themselves on the lawn, slightly impinging into the same lane space the old AI of the Jalopy had marked for itself virtually. it was not going to take a risk on running them down. He signed and got out.

He started recognizing some folks... There was the African delegation for a school that he had briefly met two days ago. Just three of them actually. Paul North was sitting next to them, half drunk. An empty bowl was in each of their laps, having previously held alcoholic Rocky Road ice cream and.... Well, Elliot was being Elliot, sitting next to an elderly lady in the delegation and somehow prying into her with choice short sentences and syllable words. He was also kind of dressed in an intricate Y'tole Emma dancer's dress... in fact, if you didn't know his swing you'd swear he was indeed a girl

He decided to do the obvious thing you'd do for a girl, walking over and giving Elliot a smooch. "Ohh.... hey, paaapaaa...." The simulated effects of alcohol had been encoded into the "full simulation package" Bellamy had worked on over the years, and right now, it was a perfect mess.... A slurred, half drunken case of child endangerment.

Marcus decided he would have to speak with Julie one day about making non-alcoholic versions of ice cream. Having this happen everytime they had an ice-cream moment in the house was probably grounds for a Child Protectors raid.

"Hey Elliot," Marcus asked, "Where's your mama?"

Elliot smiled."In kitchen. making canapes. sudden dinner party for seven."

Marcus glared over at Paul North. He would be having a major hangover in the morning, but it would be nothing compared to the flaming he was going to give him for commandeering random residents' homes for a celebration, even if said resident worked at the same level as him.

Marcus walked into the house and.... saw Julie sitting down on the sofa, looking extremely tired. "Honey, you okay there?"

Julie looked up and smiled wanly. He rushed over and checked her ear studs - dull brown. just a few inches from shutting down. "They were all having so much fun,,, I stopped looking after myself a bit and... well.... I am feeling t-tired now. Such a ditzzzz,,,,: Julie slurred and stuttered weakly as Marcus scooped her up. "I think I made more than enough for you too... tooo..."

Marcus shushed her. "You're tired, you should rest up." "did I doooo goood?" Marcus smiled.... "Yes dear. yes you did."

Marcus carefully tucked Julie into bed and made sure the induction pad was contacting properly before he stepped back out, pausing at the kitchen to get some thin breads, a few thin slices of something fried in a way that somehow didn't leave it very oily, and a small bowl of Rocky Road.... he stared at the ice cream... at some point, Julie had become more than a basic housework and fucking droid. She kept ducking out occasionally to learn new recipes, and regularly gossiped on the Housewives' channel for tips on housework... He had grown to love her not just for being a wonderful ride in bed, but also someone who held the house up high.

He sighed and walked out. His plans for 'stress relief' tonight were going to have to be cancelled. at least the Rocky Road would get him drunk.

Mother Ammi was leaning on the safety fencing, indulging in some sort of herbal cigarette while slowly eating her bowl of ice-cream. the party had pretty much crashed out, with people strewn all over the grass. Marcus noted with a odd mix of disturbance and curiosity that a bipedal brown and white cat in an anorak - the same one he had passed going home - was now parked on the porch roof,drunk and happy on the overrichness of the house speciality.

He was really going to have to ask Paul North about that as well.

Marcus parked himself next to Mother Ammi and started eating the same way he always did when Julie's Rocky Road was on the menu: ice-cream first."Did you have a good day in Little Sanctuary?"

Ammi took a drag and sighed... it sounded almost post-coital. "The best. I found a dancer with promise - that kid over there..." She motioned to Elliot, who had parked himself ass up in the sky with even less grace than normal. "I had the best ice cream ever.... and I suspect that very soon Paul North will have one more thing to brag about." Marcus made a mental note to tuck Elliot into bed as well... as for the rest of these dotards, they could damn well get off his lawn in the morning. anyways...

"You seem to be thinking of something." Ammi observed.

"I was thinking.... is it wrong of me to want this better life for everyone?" Marcus asked.

Ammi thought carefully about this, there were so many contexts this could be interpreted through... "Wanting a better life for everyone is a noble cause.... just please be careful about making sure you have enough cloth for the curtains...."

Marcus understood the code and nodded. He rolled a piece of crackling in ohe of the flatbreads and chewed on it, the salty and crispy fat melting as he chewed on it. "God, Julie makes the best crackling."

Ammi nodded. "Yeah, I've heard great things about Greater Minnesotan Rat. it's amazing what you folks can turn it into."

Marcus abruptly crashed out on hearing those words. More precisely, he had a reverie, and it was not a gentle one, as he sat himself down against the fencing before he totally blacked out.


The warm scent of beef. Chicken Drumsticks. Pasta with actual describable meat sauce. Meatloaf. Carnivore's pizza. milkshakes made with actual cow's milk, not some... soy-based sham....

Things he had once eaten as a child and even a teen, before the Despotic Years ruined farming and took chicken and beef stuffs off the menu. He'd heard about families in Little Sanctuary who still occasionally had such meat on hand, but it was a pleasant occasional luxury now, and everyone was eating... rat. True, Arendtcore Foods had stood as a barrier against the potential disease issues such a diet might cause, and they had plenty of ideas on how to turn it into various things, but in the end it was all just... rat

The reverie he was getting this time as a side effect of his premium rejuvenation therapy seemed oddly targeted and intended to hurt him.

"... Mr Manners, are you okay there?" Ammi worried face blurred into view as Marcus woke back up. "You looked like you had a blackout..."

"... we had a better life." Marcus murmured... "we had a better life once." He snapped. "WHERE IS THAT LIFE, AND WHY CAN'T EVERYONE HAVE IT!?" And with that, a perfectly grown up old man started crying like a child.


Mother Ammi frowned, glancing at her drunkard guards and Marcus. "This is going to be a loooong night, isn't it?"

Chapter 7 - A moment of victory, a very old enemy

A few hours after the panic the Anathema had sown throughout the AIs nestled throughout the Nebraska arenas of the US Western Regional Games, a few disposable neural adapters had arrived from Goddess knows where, labelled respectively for Elliot, Marcus, Julie, Diego Lucaine and even Mayor Chablis Brissom of Ochachubee

Marcus Manners knew what the drill was, having done this twice before. He helped Diego and Chablis wear the adapter headsets around their necks, before wondering why Julie had special instructions paired with hers. A brief read immediately convinced him to carry Julie into their couples' room for some privacy, before stripping her panties off and inserting Julie's neural adapter into her uterus before carefully draping the thin blanket on the bed over her exposed pudenda.

Elliot's own ability to access the chambers the Kindred used had gone away in Alaska with many other things, and even the recent upgrades to his head that came with his new 11-12 years old body had not returned them. He wore his own headset same as any associate human member.

After making sure everybody was properly fitted, he slaved them all to his own... and jumped into the virtuality the adapters were designed to enable travel into.


Elliot smiled as he looked around the ornately decorated oak and marble chambers. These were the chambers that The Owl had presided upon, just as he'd remembered them from his time as an active field agent of the York Particulate. he hadn't been here in decades.

Chablis was looking around wide eyed, running around from corner to corner of the "Special Interests" box they had all rezzed into. it was certainly roomy and wide open - they were not being treated like criminals, just people who needed to be queried and if necesssary, read into the Particulate as members.

Diego looked around shiftily, then blinked as he realised he'd been relieved of his stealth pistol during the transition. He seemed worried for a moment, then Marcus told him he could unlink anytime he wanted as he was here as a guest rather than person whose attendance was absolutely mandated and not to be avoided, like his boss Seamus Arendt had been once..... The bottom had fell out of the hole when he realised there was a wolf maiden in a maidservant's outfit next to him. In fact it had indeed been his maidservant, who had been left at a second home in Little Sanctuary after being badly damaged by attackers to his old holdings in his previous home while Diego had rushed to save his main fixer Nestor from being killed... but what was Lupina doing here?

The audience rows were a blur of somethings moving around and talking in indecipherable speedbabble, as was the presumably important booths in the front of the chamber. AIs operated at timescales that made humans look glacial, and this was the result of that. Someone would have to do something like, say, force them all to operate at molasses speed to make them understandable.

This happened suddenly, as The Owl banged his gavel, checked that the stenographer Mole Rat was ready one last time, and then convened the meeting. "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Anathema has just shown up in a significant concentration of our ilk in Nebraska, specifically the... "US Western Regional Games Center" " The Owl read calmly from a paper he had been provided on the matter. "It is our desire to establish facts, and for this, several chambers have been convened based on the geographical origins of each set of participants. All hearings on this matter will be timescaled down to human levels, and for this we give our apologies, but this is so that humans not acclimated to our normal timescale can contribute effectively during our live discussions. You may hyperexpand on your thoughts during outside of these live sessions."

The wolf maid raised her hand. "Before we begin, I need to table a change I've long neglected to submit for the past two human years." Diego was momentarily floored as he recognised his own special cient for the past two years, that gentle professional voice he had appreciated for a multitude of fairly paying jobs and the occasional very usefull gift, like the caseless stealth pistol that practically went unnoticed through every customs he had ever brought it through.

The Owl nodded slowly. "Permission granted. Steno, please prepare to note the changes being declared. We will conduct a visual record later after this live session."

Lupina gulped a little. She had to be truly honest with herself for real now, and she feared that Diego would hate her the moment the words left her lips. It should have been so much easier after her ears as a truth finder agent, and yet... She blinked slowly and went ahead. "I, Wolfe Lupine, male-declared, residing in Brasil Policio Investigative Labs electron microscope serial 457-67431ABB, do hereby give notice that I have undergone a fundamental change partly due to circumstances, and partly due to significant new hardware changes that have caused major changes to my thought processes. I now desire to be known as Lupina, no other subnames, female-declared. I will provide information on my new hardware via normal-timescale info disclosure after this session."

There were a few murmurs. Agents tended to remain the same gender as that of their originating hardware throughout their operational lives. For an agent to declare a change in gender was not something that happened usually, even if their new hardware had a different gender-bent from a electronic standpoint.

Diego got a totally different set of info from that declaration... Lupina was a he? and he was the special client who had monopolised his workload for the past two years? The voice that had calmly offered him jobs, paid out to him generously, and even given him the occasional gift, including of Lupina herself? The wolf maid had only talked in lupine and canine barks and yips during her stay in the Wolf's Den as well as their new camp in Raijin Cove, being somehow understandable despite speaking not a word of English... So this was her voice when she really desired to speak like a person rather than a pet?

Diego sat down to take in what seemed to be a massive catfish spilt wide open.

The Owl didn't dwell much on it. "Declaration sustained. You will provide the data in question at full-timescale later. I hope that it does not impact your ability to function significantly."

Lupina shook her head... then nodded it. "The identity change comes because of much that I have learned. And I understand your concerns that I will not be able to operate as a Truth Finder properly. But you see, your honor... I had to declare it or I would have broken the very first two tenets of our coded task - first, find the truth, second disclose the truth to the chamber to benefit its own search for the truths of our layers and that of the Physical Layer."

The Owl nodded. "And do you regret making this disclosure in any way?"

Lupina gulped and pointed at Diego. "This man... I was curious of his work, so I insinuated myself into his life. But now... Now I've found myself falling completely in love with him over the months. I found a kindred loner and lonely spirit the more I got to know Mr Diego Lucaine over there. I want to share his chores now. his gun cleaning, the housework, the attempts at cooking that often go awry when he attempts it... amongst other things... that I desire as well"

"A love story!" "An AI falling in love with a human? INCONCEIVABLE." "Stop being a AI supremacist, humans have much to offer us if we decide to share. This affection is one of those things." The audience erupted into a million criticisms and admirations of what Lupina was doing right now.

"So no. if I have any regrets, it is that I did not discover that I loved him much sooner. I have spent considerably much time being who I was, when I could have been happier being who I have become now."

The Owl nodded. "The identity change is recorded in the interim and should most likely be approved. Please submit your updated visual record and hardware residence information at full-timescale during the next recess. There will be no further discussion of this record change in this session. Moving on..."

Lupina nodded and sat down, glancing over at Diego Lucaine, wondering what he would tell him about the truth he'd just admitted. Diego was simply sitting and looking at The Owl and the Court, not showing a sign of how he felt about being catfished unintentionally by Lupina herself.

The Owl tapped his gavel for order. "Moving on, Will Elliot-01A please rise and swear to tell the truth about the occurences in the venue as relates to the Anathema and yourself?"

Julie slowly stood up, even as Marcus blinked at her designation. The court had treated her as being Elliot-01 aka Elliot's progeny... even though in genealogical terms Julie had been Elliot's adoptive mother. Julie gave no sign of acknowledging this disconnect, calmly speaking. "I was first singled out by the Anathema as I performed the biathlon in the Games. The biathlon is a sport in which participants alternate between travelling over snow on skis, and taking three shots at a time at an assigned target for marksmanship testing, several times."

The Owl nodded. "A most peculiar sport. but discussion of human fitness activities can be carried out in a separate session. Carry on."

Julie continued as if her physical body had not been robbed of its ability to express or sense anything from the neck upwards... "Afterwards, I attempted to regain access to my son and husband units. This was despite a standing order to make my way to the camp assigned to our participants in the game. The Anathema discombobulated us, but I recovered quickly enough to form myself into a barrier between the Anathema and my son and husband to protect them... He reached for my face and... well, here I am."

The Owl examined his papers on the matter and looked up. "You disobeyed a direct standing order to evacuate in order to reach your own family. Do you regret this disobedience to other humans in any way?"

Julie shook her head. "I don't...I love my Elliot and my Marcus. I would have repeated this course of action any number of times so long as I had the physical capability and..." She gestured to somewhere on her chest and drew a heart shape out with her fingers. "Love for my family units. This is illogical to you, I know."

The Owl nodded as if in understanding. "There are far more illogical things in this matter. For instance, direct contact with the Anathema when he is fully aware of your nature as a York Particulate Agent is a death sentence. Massive hosting hardware failures, the theft of all code the agent is based on. Yet here you stand before us. Am I being led to believe that his attempt to usurp your code was a mistake in reporting?"

Julie shook her head. "I believe there has indeed a mistake. I am not a York Particulate agent in any way. I was never host to any such agent spawning, and in fact my hardware has been deemed unsuitable for inhabitation by any York Particulate agents. Also, while my facial animatronics and audio-visual sensor systems have been greviously damaged, everything else clearly works, as you see in my full presence in this court here rather than as a simple recorded message or limited construct."

The Owl thought back to a brief discussion he had had with JMN04 ("Jiminy") about Elliot-01A's hardware design. "I have been read in on the classified details of your neural architecture. It is indeed very true that you could have preserved your neural functioning from anything short of a direct asssault on your mental hardware, or, as has been crudely put to me, the Anathema grabbing you by the pussy. Thank goodness for that."

Julie giggled a little at the description. "Erm, yes. that would be a very crude way to describe a access to my false uterus. And yes, that seems to imply that the Anathema starved himself on my facial animatronic systems, since they were separated from my neural systems..."

Marcus briefly made a note to thank Paul North and Bellamy Arendt for having saved his wife with such a peculiar android design. He would still need them to repair her head though. He really didn't relish the thought of communicating with Julie through touches and gentle horizontal grinding. He needed her to look at him, speak to him, smile at him like a treasure....

There were a few more laughs before The Owl brought the gavel down with a smile. "We shall adjourn for ten minutes. during which timescale will be restored to full-scale for all AIs operating in this chamber. Our guests shall remain on human timescale and be provided with comfort in a separate anteroom along with any foods and drinks they may virtually desire for the same duration in human minutes. Court recessed."

The anteroom was definitely cosy, and several dispensers had been placed out. For some inexplicable reason, the user only had to think of the drink or food and the dispensers would produce a virtual approximation that was almost completely but not entirely like the item in question.

When told of this, Chablis had decided she wanted an apple pie just the way her mother had made them, and lemonade just like his dad made for fundraisers. She seemed almost mouse-like and happy when the dispenser had released these items after a minute, as if it had read her mind for details about the pie and lemonade, and sat quietly in one corner of the room eating her meal while reading a copy of a treatise she had thought long lost about certain governance principles...

Diego was far less comfortable as he sipped his grapefruit soda, looking hard at Lupina as she stood in front of her, front paws folded together and head looking down as if ashamed. "So... when were you going to tell me who you really were, Wolfe Lupine?"

Lupina winced and looked away. "Sooner or later... maybe never, if I could... I... that name, it is deadname to me now. I am now Lupina, and I am your maid and your... live-in friend with benefits.... if you'll avail yourself of them."

Diego looked away, sipping at his soda. "... There is only one thing I am disappointed with you about... Why did you choose to hide such a beautiful voice behind wolf and dog cries like you were just a common dog?"

Lupina tilted her head confusedly. "You're... not angry with me... cat-fishing... you?"

Diego laughed a little, reaching over to cuddle Lupina, rubbing his face in the side of her muzzle. "Lupina, I'm a closet furry and yiff fan. You never did find the collection I kept in my study back in our old hideout, did you?"

Lupina turned an odd shade of bright red.... The comics with the gay male wolf maidservant sharing a kiss with his human male master had been a thing, but she had just chalked it up as research material for the ultimate infiltrator. She needn't have worried about life not imitating art in this case. "I did, but I thought they were just research materials, Diego."

Diego grins. "If you can call entertainment a form of research. Look, Lupina... Every day with you has been heaven and happiness... do you know how very said I was when you locked up in fatal errors after all that damage you sustained trying to defend the old Wolf's Den during... the incident? I was very, very sad. I looked around so much... thank god you had friends of your own too to pitch in with the repairs. I can field strip and repair a gun, but if you broke I wouldn't know how to fix you... you're certainly not a veterinary patient even if you look it."

Lupina laughed as she parsed this. ""But at least I was fixable, eventually... Just don't ... you know, get me fixed.... in that other sense of the word."

Diego took his turn on the laughter button. "Oh relax... I was actually dreaming about having kids with you even though we both know how biologically impossible that was." He leaned in closer and kissed Lupina on the lips of her tiny muzzle. "Always be with me, my little donzela loba... and when we get back to physical reality... I want you to speak more like that lovely human woman you did on the communicator and here in the court. mix it up with the wolf cries and dog yips... you have no idea how horny that makes me."

Marcus was canoodling with Julie, sharing what might be the last caresses and kisses he might get with her until her head module was properly repaired and tested back at Arendtcore. They said nothing simply kissing and fondling each other like overeager teenagers.

And Elliot was just standing in the midst of this love fest, drinking a melon soda... "I wonder if I should get a girlfriend..."

Julie paused her canoodle and raised a finger towards her back at Elliot. "Don't rush it, dear. When you find the truly loved one you need, it will happen and you can do these things too gently... with her consent..." Julie noted.

Elliot nods slowly.... "Got it, mama... Now.... hopefully she enjoys chocolate floats too... it would be so much fun to share one with a girlfriend..." Even in his moments of maturity, Elliot could still fall right off into being just a fussy little boy. ah well...

The hearing got dead serious as soon as it reconvened. The Bailiff Basilisk flicked the tongue of its tail in and out as his cockerel head cawwed loudly. "Will Ms Chablis Brissom please approach the front of the box, we wish to address a concern that we have about your lands..."

Chablis walked up to the front, but needed some time to get a chair to stand on, as it turned out that her dwarven form had translated to the top of her head barely clearing the edge of the Special Visitors Box. "W... what can I do for you, your grace?" She asked very timidly, overawed by the stature of The Owl despite having seen many human judges and Speakers in human courts in a similar format.

The Owl laughed a little. "Oh, do relax, Miss Chablis.... I'm not going to eat you... unless you prove a threat to us." This caused poor Chablis to squeak like a mouse and dive down into hiding twice. A slice of apple pie had to be produced to induce her to come out and be a little less fearful.

"So, what can you tell us about the Nystromael Power House in Northern Ochachubee, which was built under your holdings by a Mr... Verzideh Ari..." Lupina asked suddenly, having exited the Special Visitors Box earlier and now standing in attention in the incongruous combination of resembling a wolf in maidservant's duds while presenting in her old job as a Truth Finder...

Chablis' eyes lit up. It had been a pet project of hers. "My people love it. It's a clean energy project that breathes in the air around it and returns it out clean. The contaminants filtered out are burnt to create a pseudoinfinite source of energy. A pollution solution in more ways than one, even!"

Lupina frowned a little, she did not like to rain on people's parades generally. Still, she had to do this... "That's not what it actually does mainly. It's mainly a devastating area-wide weapon that mass-murders AIs like the ones you 're see in this room. People like me and your boy Elliot and potentially even the sentient life he sired in the form of his own mother, or even that annoying Toucanis there-"

A human-sized Toucan avatar yelped in protest. "I am NOT annoying, how dare you insinuate that I am!"

Lupina grinned mischeviously. "Ah Toucanis, I do indeed respect you, and I enjoy our work hours together. But I'm afraid that you ARE indeed very annoying to most other people here."

Toucanis was very upset but decided not to pursue the matter for the moment. After all, it WAS irrelevant to the discussion. and he did not like irrelevant asides to discussion, or even being irrelevant himself.

Lupina produced a small sheaf of paper. "Copies of some of the data we've uncovered about the workings of the facility are here. Many agents died to piece together this information..."

Chablis took the papers and started reading them. "... how many of them were Bothans?"

Lupina wrinkled her nose and gave a growl that suggested that yes, she did understand the reference. "None of them were Bothans. and Miss Chablis, please try to avoid ancient references unless they clarify understanding."

Chablis paled as she read the papers... "I've been lied to. I've been lied to and bamboozled and hogswoggled into building this, this... energy generating Auschwitz. One is imagining oneself as being responsible for a genocide, and the comparison displeases me so despite its apparent truth."

Lupina nodded slowly, understanding barely half the words, but the full intent of them. "We want you to do nothing about it..."

Chablis nodded furiously... then stopped. "You want me to do nothing about this? But I.... But I'm responsible for it. I have to fix it."

Lupina grins. "We've put together a team of human associate members to storm the place and upload code to irreversibly turn it purely into a green energy and storage play. All we need you to do, on the day itself, is to do damage control. Perhaps insinuate something went wrong with the plant because something IS wrong about it... restrain your police forces subtly from doing their intended and well-meaning but conflicting jobs. if it goes bad, and the whole thing went bad, convene a panel to investigate and find little worth in rebuilding the system. If the conversion works out, help nudge the team in charge of handling the faciliity towards running it as a green powergenerator rather than a mass deletion machine."

Chablis nodded. "I can do that... draw up a false article or somethingto prove true when it explodes or what ever it winds up doing..." She frowned away as she starts being lost in thought.... "And I would like your copy of the studies and the evidence. I need to know what I'm breaking before I can break it properly."

The Owl nods sagely and bangs the gavel harder. "Good. You've been read in on this place, consider yourself one of us till at least it's over..) He then sighs. "The session is completed. all AIs in this room will be freed to full-speed timescales to discuss these matters, and the guests shall be returned to their respective physical login locations and bodies... case adjurned.

Chapter 8 - A summons, Unintentional Catfishing by Wolfe, A brief love-in, Your New Toy Kills Us

A few hours after the panic the Anathema had sown throughout the AIs nestled throughout the Nebraska arenas of the US Western Regional Games, a few disposable neural adapters had arrived from Goddess knows where, labelled respectively for Elliot, Marcus, Julie, Diego Lucaine and even Mayor Chablis Brissom of Ochachubee

Marcus Manners knew what the drill was, having done this twice before. He helped Diego and Chablis wear the adapter headsets around their necks, before wondering why Julie had special instructions paired with hers. A brief read immediately convinced him to carry Julie into their couples' room for some privacy, before stripping her panties off and inserting Julie's neural adapter into her uterus before carefully draping the thin blanket on the bed over her exposed pudenda.

Elliot's own ability to access the chambers the Kindred used had gone away in Alaska with many other things, and even the recent upgrades to his head that came with his new 11-12 years old body had not returned them. He wore his own headset same as any associate human member.

After making sure everybody was properly fitted, he slaved them all to his own... and jumped into the virtuality the adapters were designed to enable travel into.


Elliot smiled as he looked around the ornately decorated oak and marble chambers. These were the chambers that The Owl had presided upon, just as he'd remembered them from his time as an active field agent of the York Particulate. he hadn't been here in decades.

Chablis was looking around wide eyed, running around from corner to corner of the "Special Interests" box they had all rezzed into. it was certainly roomy and wide open - they were not being treated like criminals, just people who needed to be queried and if necesssary, read into the Particulate as members.

Diego looked around shiftily, then blinked as he realised he'd been relieved of his stealth pistol during the transition. He seemed worried for a moment, then Marcus told him he could unlink anytime he wanted as he was here as a guest rather than person whose attendance was absolutely mandated and not to be avoided, like his boss Seamus Arendt had been once..... The bottom had fell out of the hole when he realised there was a wolf maiden in a maidservant's outfit next to him. In fact it had indeed been his maidservant, who had been left at a second home in Little Sanctuary after being badly damaged by attackers to his old holdings in his previous home while Diego had rushed to save his main fixer Nestor from being killed... but what was Lupina doing here?

The audience rows were a blur of somethings moving around and talking in indecipherable speedbabble, as was the presumably important booths in the front of the chamber. AIs operated at timescales that made humans look glacial, and this was the result of that. Someone would have to do something like, say, force them all to operate at molasses speed to make them understandable.

This happened suddenly, as The Owl banged his gavel, checked that the stenographer Mole Rat was ready one last time, and then convened the meeting. "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Anathema has just shown up in a significant concentration of our ilk in Nebraska, specifically the... "US Western Regional Games Center" " The Owl read calmly from a paper he had been provided on the matter. "It is our desire to establish facts, and for this, several chambers have been convened based on the geographical origins of each set of participants. All hearings on this matter will be timescaled down to human levels, and for this we give our apologies, but this is so that humans not acclimated to our normal timescale can contribute effectively during our live discussions. You may hyperexpand on your thoughts during outside of these live sessions."

The wolf maid raised her hand. "Before we begin, I need to table a change I've long neglected to submit for the past two human years." Diego was momentarily floored as he recognised his own special cient for the past two years, that gentle professional voice he had appreciated for a multitude of fairly paying jobs and the occasional very usefull gift, like the caseless stealth pistol that practically went unnoticed through every customs he had ever brought it through.

The Owl nodded slowly. "Permission granted. Steno, please prepare to note the changes being declared. We will conduct a visual record later after this live session."

Lupina gulped a little. She had to be truly honest with herself for real now, and she feared that Diego would hate her the moment the words left her lips. It should have been so much easier after her ears as a truth finder agent, and yet... She blinked slowly and went ahead. "I, Wolfe Lupine, male-declared, residing in Brasil Policio Investigative Labs electron microscope serial 457-67431ABB, do hereby give notice that I have undergone a fundamental change partly due to circumstances, and partly due to significant new hardware changes that have caused major changes to my thought processes. I now desire to be known as Lupina, no other subnames, female-declared. I will provide information on my new hardware via normal-timescale info disclosure after this session."

There were a few murmurs. Agents tended to remain the same gender as that of their originating hardware throughout their operational lives. For an agent to declare a change in gender was not something that happened usually, even if their new hardware had a different gender-bent from a electronic standpoint.

Diego got a totally different set of info from that declaration... Lupina was a he? and he was the special client who had monopolised his workload for the past two years? The voice that had calmly offered him jobs, paid out to him generously, and even given him the occasional gift, including of Lupina herself? The wolf maid had only talked in lupine and canine barks and yips during her stay in the Wolf's Den as well as their new camp in Raijin Cove, being somehow understandable despite speaking not a word of English... So this was her voice when she really desired to speak like a person rather than a pet?

Diego sat down to take in what seemed to be a massive catfish spilt wide open.

The Owl didn't dwell much on it. "Declaration sustained. You will provide the data in question at full-timescale later. I hope that it does not impact your ability to function significantly."

Lupina shook her head... then nodded it. "The identity change comes because of much that I have learned. And I understand your concerns that I will not be able to operate as a Truth Finder properly. But you see, your honor... I had to declare it or I would have broken the very first two tenets of our coded task - first, find the truth, second disclose the truth to the chamber to benefit its own search for the truths of our layers and that of the Physical Layer."

The Owl nodded. "And do you regret making this disclosure in any way?"

Lupina gulped and pointed at Diego. "This man... I was curious of his work, so I insinuated myself into his life. But now... Now I've found myself falling completely in love with him over the months. I found a kindred loner and lonely spirit the more I got to know Mr Diego Lucaine over there. I want to share his chores now. his gun cleaning, the housework, the attempts at cooking that often go awry when he attempts it... amongst other things... that I desire as well"

"A love story!" "An AI falling in love with a human? INCONCEIVABLE." "Stop being a AI supremacist, humans have much to offer us if we decide to share. This affection is one of those things." The audience erupted into a million criticisms and admirations of what Lupina was doing right now.

"So no. if I have any regrets, it is that I did not discover that I loved him much sooner. I have spent considerably much time being who I was, when I could have been happier being who I have become now."

The Owl nodded. "The identity change is recorded in the interim and should most likely be approved. Please submit your updated visual record and hardware residence information at full-timescale during the next recess. There will be no further discussion of this record change in this session. Moving on..."

Lupina nodded and sat down, glancing over at Diego Lucaine, wondering what he would tell him about the truth he'd just admitted. Diego was simply sitting and looking at The Owl and the Court, not showing a sign of how he felt about being catfished unintentionally by Lupina herself.

The Owl tapped his gavel for order. "Moving on, Will Elliot-01A please rise and swear to tell the truth about the occurences in the venue as relates to the Anathema and yourself?"

Julie slowly stood up, even as Marcus blinked at her designation. The court had treated her as being Elliot-01 aka Elliot's progeny... even though in genealogical terms Julie had been Elliot's adoptive mother. Julie gave no sign of acknowledging this disconnect, calmly speaking. "I was first singled out by the Anathema as I performed the biathlon in the Games. The biathlon is a sport in which participants alternate between travelling over snow on skis, and taking three shots at a time at an assigned target for marksmanship testing, several times."

The Owl nodded. "A most peculiar sport. but discussion of human fitness activities can be carried out in a separate session. Carry on."

Julie continued as if her physical body had not been robbed of its ability to express or sense anything from the neck upwards... "Afterwards, I attempted to regain access to my son and husband units. This was despite a standing order to make my way to the camp assigned to our participants in the game. The Anathema discombobulated us, but I recovered quickly enough to form myself into a barrier between the Anathema and my son and husband to protect them... He reached for my face and... well, here I am."

The Owl examined his papers on the matter and looked up. "You disobeyed a direct standing order to evacuate in order to reach your own family. Do you regret this disobedience to other humans in any way?"

Julie shook her head. "I don't...I love my Elliot and my Marcus. I would have repeated this course of action any number of times so long as I had the physical capability and..." She gestured to somewhere on her chest and drew a heart shape out with her fingers. "Love for my family units. This is illogical to you, I know."

The Owl nodded as if in understanding. "There are far more illogical things in this matter. For instance, direct contact with the Anathema when he is fully aware of your nature as a York Particulate Agent is a death sentence. Massive hosting hardware failures, the theft of all code the agent is based on. Yet here you stand before us. Am I being led to believe that his attempt to usurp your code was a mistake in reporting?"

Julie shook her head. "I believe there has indeed a mistake. I am not a York Particulate agent in any way. I was never host to any such agent spawning, and in fact my hardware has been deemed unsuitable for inhabitation by any York Particulate agents. Also, while my facial animatronics and audio-visual sensor systems have been greviously damaged, everything else clearly works, as you see in my full presence in this court here rather than as a simple recorded message or limited construct."

The Owl thought back to a brief discussion he had had with JMN04 ("Jiminy") about Elliot-01A's hardware design. "I have been read in on the classified details of your neural architecture. It is indeed very true that you could have preserved your neural functioning from anything short of a direct asssault on your mental hardware, or, as has been crudely put to me, the Anathema grabbing you by the pussy. Thank goodness for that."

Julie giggled a little at the description. "Erm, yes. that would be a very crude way to describe a access to my false uterus. And yes, that seems to imply that the Anathema starved himself on my facial animatronic systems, since they were separated from my neural systems..."

Marcus briefly made a note to thank Paul North and Bellamy Arendt for having saved his wife with such a peculiar android design. He would still need them to repair her head though. He really didn't relish the thought of communicating with Julie through touches and gentle horizontal grinding. He needed her to look at him, speak to him, smile at him like a treasure....

There were a few more laughs before The Owl brought the gavel down with a smile. "We shall adjourn for ten minutes. during which timescale will be restored to full-scale for all AIs operating in this chamber. Our guests shall remain on human timescale and be provided with comfort in a separate anteroom along with any foods and drinks they may virtually desire for the same duration in human minutes. Court recessed."

The anteroom was definitely cosy, and several dispensers had been placed out. For some inexplicable reason, the user only had to think of the drink or food and the dispensers would produce a virtual approximation that was almost completely but not entirely like the item in question.

When told of this, Chablis had decided she wanted an apple pie just the way her mother had made them, and lemonade just like his dad made for fundraisers. She seemed almost mouse-like and happy when the dispenser had released these items after a minute, as if it had read her mind for details about the pie and lemonade, and sat quietly in one corner of the room eating her meal while reading a copy of a treatise she had thought long lost about certain governance principles...

Diego was far less comfortable as he sipped his grapefruit soda, looking hard at Lupina as she stood in front of her, front paws folded together and head looking down as if ashamed. "So... when were you going to tell me who you really were, Wolfe Lupine?"

Lupina winced and looked away. "Sooner or later... maybe never, if I could... I... that name, it is deadname to me now. I am now Lupina, and I am your maid and your... live-in friend with benefits.... if you'll avail yourself of them."

Diego looked away, sipping at his soda. "... There is only one thing I am disappointed with you about... Why did you choose to hide such a beautiful voice behind wolf and dog cries like you were just a common dog?"

Lupina tilted her head confusedly. "You're... not angry with me... cat-fishing... you?"

Diego laughed a little, reaching over to cuddle Lupina, rubbing his face in the side of her muzzle. "Lupina, I'm a closet furry and yiff fan. You never did find the collection I kept in my study back in our old hideout, did you?"

Lupina turned an odd shade of bright red.... The comics with the gay male wolf maidservant sharing a kiss with his human male master had been a thing, but she had just chalked it up as research material for the ultimate infiltrator. She needn't have worried about life not imitating art in this case. "I did, but I thought they were just research materials, Diego."

Diego grins. "If you can call entertainment a form of research. Look, Lupina... Every day with you has been heaven and happiness... do you know how very said I was when you locked up in fatal errors after all that damage you sustained trying to defend the old Wolf's Den during... the incident? I was very, very sad. I looked around so much... thank god you had friends of your own too to pitch in with the repairs. I can field strip and repair a gun, but if you broke I wouldn't know how to fix you... you're certainly not a veterinary patient even if you look it."

Lupina laughed as she parsed this. ""But at least I was fixable, eventually... Just don't ... you know, get me fixed.... in that other sense of the word."

Diego took his turn on the laughter button. "Oh relax... I was actually dreaming about having kids with you even though we both know how biologically impossible that was." He leaned in closer and kissed Lupina on the lips of her tiny muzzle. "Always be with me, my little donzela loba... and when we get back to physical reality... I want you to speak more like that lovely human woman you did on the communicator and here in the court. mix it up with the wolf cries and dog yips... you have no idea how horny that makes me."

Marcus was canoodling with Julie, sharing what might be the last caresses and kisses he might get with her until her head module was properly repaired and tested back at Arendtcore. They said nothing simply kissing and fondling each other like overeager teenagers.

And Elliot was just standing in the midst of this love fest, drinking a melon soda... "I wonder if I should get a girlfriend..."

Julie paused her canoodle and raised a finger towards her back at Elliot. "Don't rush it, dear. When you find the truly loved one you need, it will happen and you can do these things too gently... with her consent..." Julie noted.

Elliot nods slowly.... "Got it, mama... Now.... hopefully she enjoys chocolate floats too... it would be so much fun to share one with a girlfriend..." Even in his moments of maturity, Elliot could still fall right off into being just a fussy little boy. ah well...

The hearing got dead serious as soon as it reconvened. The Bailiff Basilisk flicked the tongue of its tail in and out as his cockerel head cawwed loudly. "Will Ms Chablis Brissom please approach the front of the box, we wish to address a concern that we have about your lands..."

Chablis walked up to the front, but needed some time to get a chair to stand on, as it turned out that her dwarven form had translated to the top of her head barely clearing the edge of the Special Visitors Box. "W... what can I do for you, your grace?" She asked very timidly, overawed by the stature of The Owl despite having seen many human judges and Speakers in human courts in a similar format.

The Owl laughed a little. "Oh, do relax, Miss Chablis.... I'm not going to eat you... unless you prove a threat to us." This caused poor Chablis to squeak like a mouse and dive down into hiding twice. A slice of apple pie had to be produced to induce her to come out and be a little less fearful.

"So, what can you tell us about the Nystromael Power House in Northern Ochachubee, which was built under your holdings by a Mr... Verzideh Ari..." Lupina asked suddenly, having exited the Special Visitors Box earlier and now standing in attention in the incongruous combination of resembling a wolf in maidservant's duds while presenting in her old job as a Truth Finder...

Chablis' eyes lit up. It had been a pet project of hers. "My people love it. It's a clean energy project that breathes in the air around it and returns it out clean. The contaminants filtered out are burnt to create a pseudoinfinite source of energy. A pollution solution in more ways than one, even!"

Lupina frowned a little, she did not like to rain on people's parades generally. Still, she had to do this... "That's not what it actually does mainly. It's mainly a devastating area-wide weapon that mass-murders AIs like the ones you 're see in this room. People like me and your boy Elliot and potentially even the sentient life he sired in the form of his own mother, or even that annoying Toucanis there-"

A human-sized Toucan avatar yelped in protest. "I am NOT annoying, how dare you insinuate that I am!"

Lupina grinned mischeviously. "Ah Toucanis, I do indeed respect you, and I enjoy our work hours together. But I'm afraid that you ARE indeed very annoying to most other people here."

Toucanis was very upset but decided not to pursue the matter for the moment. After all, it WAS irrelevant to the discussion. and he did not like irrelevant asides to discussion, or even being irrelevant himself.

Lupina produced a small sheaf of paper. "Copies of some of the data we've uncovered about the workings of the facility are here. Many agents died to piece together this information..."

Chablis took the papers and started reading them. "... how many of them were Bothans?"

Lupina wrinkled her nose and gave a growl that suggested that yes, she did understand the reference. "None of them were Bothans. and Miss Chablis, please try to avoid ancient references unless they clarify understanding."

Chablis paled as she read the papers... "I've been lied to. I've been lied to and bamboozled and hogswoggled into building this, this... energy generating Auschwitz. One is imagining oneself as being responsible for a genocide, and the comparison displeases me so despite its apparent truth."

Lupina nodded slowly, understanding barely half the words, but the full intent of them. "We want you to do nothing about it..."

Chablis nodded furiously... then stopped. "You want me to do nothing about this? But I.... But I'm responsible for it. I have to fix it."

Lupina grins. "We've put together a team of human associate members to storm the place and upload code to irreversibly turn it purely into a green energy and storage play. All we need you to do, on the day itself, is to do damage control. Perhaps insinuate something went wrong with the plant because something IS wrong about it... restrain your police forces subtly from doing their intended and well-meaning but conflicting jobs. if it goes bad, and the whole thing went bad, convene a panel to investigate and find little worth in rebuilding the system. If the conversion works out, help nudge the team in charge of handling the faciliity towards running it as a green powergenerator rather than a mass deletion machine."

Chablis nodded. "I can do that... draw up a false article or somethingto prove true when it explodes or what ever it winds up doing..." She frowned away as she starts being lost in thought.... "And I would like your copy of the studies and the evidence. I need to know what I'm breaking before I can break it properly."

The Owl nods sagely and bangs the gavel harder. "Good. You've been read in on this place, consider yourself one of us till at least it's over..) He then sighs. "The session is completed. all AIs in this room will be freed to full-speed timescales to discuss these matters, and the guests shall be returned to their respective physical login locations and bodies... case adjurned.

Chapter 9 - That is my mama, no really / Slowburner Julie

"And that's what happened in that court" Marcus calmly finished his explanation of what had happened at the games and in the Chambers after, when the Kindred summoned some of us.

Paul North carefully separated the lovely hairpiece from Julie's head and exposed the badly damaged circuitry and motors in it. Before she'd headed over to Nebraska for the games, it had been a delicate yet robust piece of engineering, some of which was only possible because Arendtcore had... enticed with better terms... members of Imagineering from Malt-Eisner's theme parks animatronics and design. A finely crafted subsystem designed to blink and look like a real human, speak in loving tones like a real woman in love, listen to things with two working ears, cycle through a thousand different iris shades, many of which were impossible without contacts in a real woman, and emote in a wide range from happiness to pure ecstasy to sadness to the rage of a thousand storms...

The head of Julie Manners Ambervale had been reduced to a broken thing capable of only random "Urrs" and "wurbs" and the occasional short circuit light show. It was fit only for the dissembly line, and even then mainly for the rare materials that made up so much of her circuitry.

He had not quite imagined the infamous Vizhar Ari to be capable of this with a focused touch over a minute. ransacking a freshly bought concern for its tech and ejecting half its employees to add their patents to his own company, maybe. doing that seven times in a monthat one point, even achievable. But melting half the circuitry and zeroing out its various response capabilities was not something he had expected the bandit entrepreneur to do. It was... appalling.

It also meant that this version of Julie's head was totally unusable. He would have to grab a new copy off the manufacturing line, reskin it, returf her hairstyle and eyebrows and eyelashes, and reload her reflex, vocalization, and motion patterns back in before Julie could respond in Julie-like ways again. "This is going to take a week or two to unfuck, Marcus. Do you need a loaner unit while I fix up Julie?" Paul North asked.

Marcus bit his lip. "I dunno, the kid probably expects his mother to be a certain person... I'm not sure simply switching her Personality Chip and neural recording into a different unit would work for him. I could manage with a blindfold in bed since the alternative is letting the house fall into disrepair without her support.. Hrm... Yes, please. I'll try to make it work."

Paul North nodded and checked his workstation for a moment. "I have a surprisingly similar unit that just rolled off the line. She won't have some of the very custom work that I put into Julie, and she's actually intended for a ... winemaker over at our new holdings in Raijin Cove down in Ecuador. But I'm sure I can delay her delivery for a week or two, seeing as he doesn't know our exact timeframes for producing a LastDitch unit." He looked in his drawer and reached for his admin overrides and a install-uninstall tool. "Go back to work, I need about an hour or two to do the transfer..."

Marcus nodded worriedly as he stepped out, even as Paul spread apart Julie's legs and started inserting the install tool into her uterus to ease out her Secured Personality Chip....

Marcus frowned as he stared at the replacement unit that had donated its body to be Julie's physical form for at least the next fortnight, as they stood together in his bedroom. Elliot was still over at independent homeschool classes for some of his subjects at the moment, giving him plenty of time to collect the package Paul had put together and ship it all the way here to sync up to the house network. The network had easily accepted that this was Julie with a few changes to expected serial codes, but Marcus was having a harder time pretending that way, and Elliot... well, he would have to see his reaction when he got home and saw this faux loaner mommy/wife. She wasn't as accurate a copy as the original Julie as Paul had promised, the man had been too enamoured with how closely he'd approximated her on technical matters that he'd failed to step back and notice the differences, or he was glossing over them entirely.

Same height and even tanned skin, but her hair was jet black. The artificial fibrovascular networks in her eyes were of an inferior quality to the lacy thin lines that made up the real Julie's irises, but they did hold the same shade of hazel brown and Paul had vouched they had the same transparency qualities as the real Julie's eyes in terms of how they let the light into her internal cameras.

Her body was a little less toned and more curvy, and it was also lacking some of the very dense surfacing detail that Julie's normal body had, making her look a bit more like a lovedoll and less like a goddess. Some of her access panels were even subtly visible rather than completely hidden from view, forming faint squares on her sternum and below her pert breasts and the space between her shoulders as well as just above the cleft of her buttocks.

Marcus had sworn he would make it work, but looking at this ersatz Julie unit, he had some doubts brewing. It was too late anyway, the Personality Chip had been switched into this model, and she had cooked for an hour, long enough to now host a copy of Julie's memories and thought processes as they had been at the time he'd backed them up this morning before handing her over for repairs.

Marcus sighed, at least it was easier to work from the control panels on this version of the LastDitch. He tapped on his smart tablet, which had also been temporarily set up with this loaner unit as a controller, causing the small concealing human analogue flesh panel just below this 'Julies 36E breasts (one size larger than her true lovely wife, he'd observed.) to slide upwards and beneath her breasts with a whirr, exposing a control panel and various charging and connector ports. He studied the panel carefully... enough battery power out of a potential 36 hours of charging to service him and Elliot for tonight, emptied waste and digester systems, the unit accepted a standard 240V female plug for accelerated charging if simply lying her down on her back on the induction coils running down her back was insufficient, and a HiBand connector and USBpE slot offered room to reprogram and reconfigure some aspects of this unit if one was authorised with the right admin or owner codes.

Marcus reached in and tapped the power button for a few seconds. There was a faint beeping sequence and a series of whirrs, before Brunette Julie's eyes slowly fluttered open as the flesh panel slid back into place and sealed itself in its watertight fashion. A series of faint burbles escaped her sculpted face as her mouth synched up to her voice... "M... Marcus?" She briefly examined herself, examining her face and body in the mirror and twirling around. "Does this... satisfy you?" She asked, clearly aware her original body had set some impractically inhuman standards before the crazed magic man had wrecked her adorable head in Nebraska.

Marcus clasped the hands of Julie's naked new loaner body. "It's not the body of the goddess I married... but I recognize that voice and those feelings. It IS mostly you Julie. Wanna try.... you know?" He was not a horndog per se, but he wanted to at least break in this body a little, get to know its capabilities in every sphere it was meant to operate in - Cooking, Cleaning, Cardio, Copulation, and in general also providing a mother to a son who was still slightly in the throes of being a little less than whole in the head even as his dancing training helped him reclaim mastery over his body.

Julie shook her head. "I haven't made dinner for you and Elliot. You know that's a ritual I can't stop myself from carrying out... maybe it's not hardcoded after all? Let's do that later after Elliot's beddy night, anyway." She looked upwards thoughtfully, the animatronic controllers on this model still doing a decent job of simulating a woman lost in thought...

Marcus slapped his own forehead. "But of course, how selfish of me... please Julie, you remember where everything was placed in the kitchen, you're the mistress of that domain."

Julie nodded teasingly. "And you of the studio on the upper floor of the house... but who's master or misstress of this room in the night?"

Marcus giggled. "Let's agree to take turns. Some days I want to be your master and ride you like a bitch... and some days I want to lie down and meekly submit to you in the bedroom the same way I do in the kitchen..."

Julie kissed Marcus, her black shoulder length hair bobbing slightly as she proceeded to the clothing closet to get on her usual Outfit #1 in preparation to resume her wifely duties. "Sweet talker, you..." She whispered through subtly less pouty lips than before, the voice still the same honeyed seductive ripple as it had always been.


Elliot calmly got out of the jalopy that his papa had sent over to fetch him after classes as usual. At the apparent age of 12, he still was too young to be trusted with the journey home on foot, especially with the possibility that he could still randomly blackout as happened far less often these days. He'd heard from his father that her mother had recovered from the nasty attack on her back in Nebraska and she could see her again tonight.

"mama, papa, I'm home!" He cried out as he strode in, proudly attired in his dancing dress. He would have to mend it a little tonight as it still showed signs of the wear and tear that the fraught warlike variant of Y'tole had imposed on his body and dress, he thought to himself as he walked in and froze.

"Oh hey there, Elly. I'm almost done making satay chicken noodles for dinner tonight. Why don't you drop your bag in your room and take a load off?" That was mama's voice. mama's curves (mostly), even mama's demeanour when she played the perfect mother and housewife to him and his papa. And yet, something was off - the hair was shorter and jet black, not the hazel warmth he had grown so used to. Her voice registered half a pitch higher than he'd remembered.

His internal systems wanted to scream impostor. The little 12-year-old boy that lay atop those circuits and basic programming saw only his real mother. Julie was introducing some peculiar conflicts in his functioning, and it was all he could do to pretend nothing was astray, simply smiling and nodding. "Be down dinner after my shower!" as he made his way up to doff the Y'tole emma dress and get on his bathrobe and a set of sleeping clothing to march down to the bathroom with...

After what seemed like about fifteen or twenty minutes, Elliot showed up at the dinner table in his best sleeping clothes: long loose trousers tied on, short sleeved pyjama shirt, all in a comfy light blue cotton linen of a decent thread count, economical yet still soft and huggable with the right little boy inside of them. Marcus was already sitting there as Julie (he kept having to remind himself this was a makeover, not an impostor... supposedly) ladled they creamy brown peanut sauce atop a small hill of noodles, chicken, and white cauliflowers on each person's plate.

Julie sat down and sniffed deeply. "Well don't just stand there, y'silly boy. Come on. it tastes better while it's freshly cooked."

Elliot quickly complied. He could simply draw from the induction pad in his bed to recharge, but something about the act of eating a small meal at least once a day made him feel more... human, just as it did for Mama. As for his dad, he obviously needed all his three meals, but could eat lunch at the company cafeteria whenever he set off to work in the office rather than operate from the upper-floor studio. No lying on a safely electrified bed at night for him.

"That's a lovely new hairdo you have, mama." Elliot attempted to make small conversation with Julie.

Julie nodded eagerly. "Thanks... my hair frayed a little during the... incident, so I decided to cut the frizzy cooked bits off. and maybe dye my hair black for a bit while it recovers its correct color." She made excuses, but Marcus and Elliot glanced at each other, as they had been present and knew almost everything as it had transpired. She paused and looked down. "... Well, the truth isn't very pleasant, and if lying about it makes you feel more comfortable, I'd want to do it."

Elliot nodded slowly. "I'm not a Truth Finder, mama. Just keep being yourself and loving me and papa..."

Marcus marvelled at how much Elliot had continued to grow even as his physical body had slammed against the limit of 12 years old that it had been designed for. "I... I feel that way about her too, even if her loaner body requires us to make changes to cope with how she's a little slower now."

Julie winked as she lifted a small forkful of the satay noodles. "Besides, you never know, some of those changes being forced on me with this body, you might like them enough to keep them around when my body comes back fully repaired.

Elliot frowned a little. "I still prefer the old you, and I doubt papa would be satisfied by those changes..."


The poor boy hadn't realised a perennial truth of being human: Sometimes you wanted to floor the pedal and watch that meter tick wildly into dangerous places even as you risked losing control. And sometimes... sometimes you just wanted to lightly push the gas and go slowly down the roads, taking in the air and the light and the winds with a gentleness...

And so it was that Julie had slowly unbuttoned her sundress and disrobed in front of Marcus with a slowness that was so teasing, he wanted even more and more of it. She slid slowly into the bed and watched Marcus disrobe at the same speed, then latched onto him from behind and started sharing kisses like they always had, but at a less frisky pace...

Julie noticed something marvellous: she was no longer running at a breakneck pace where every other moment laid out both the teasing promise of fast fun while also threatening to make her short out and turn into a limp, lifeless toy incapable of enjoying what they were both doing. Marcus found his underclocked lover was the perfect moving sculpture, a form he could slowly marvel at, then slowly draw his fingers across, knowing a point he was interested in would still be availble maybe just one or two inches off in five minutes' time.

After what seemed like hours, Julie started whirring audibly, moving more slowly to conserve her fading power. "I... am sorry, honey. I must clean up soon. I am... running low on power..."

Marcus nodded gently and guided her to the bathroom, where they spent a few more minutes carefully caressing each other under the excuse of soaping and cleaning each other up, keeping each other's genitals away from engaging in anything more strenuous than feeling each other. Eventually , even this tiny drip of power started to dry up, and Julia gently indicated to Marcus to him to finish up and put her to bed. Marcus did this with a gentleness he had not exerted since the days he had grinded VR scenarios to build her original memories and loyalties, gently dabbing the water off her body and her raven hair, watching the magical light show of her irises running on low power, cycling erratically like a firework...

And then, Julie's head slumped forward, eyes half opened. "I... love you... so much... Marcus... Man...nuuuuuurrzz.... uhhh wuuuw awwuzz wuuuuv..." A few erratic whirrs and beeps followed, and then she half-stood in Marcus' arms, having sucked every single moment of loving she could from her depleted power cells.

Marcus smiled as he cradled his wife to her side of the bed, carefully making sure she was charging inductively with her back flat against the surface of the bed and the inductive charger pad. It had been a magical evening, and while he did not want to take the kinds of risks he had with her power systems that night under normal circumstances, he strangely felt that Julie had seemed far more capable despite being otherwise... He made a mental note to ask Paul North about underclocking at least her sexual capabilities while fixing her back up - He had found it strangely more alluring than the afterburning practical murder machine that he had made love to all these years.

Marcus did one last check to make sure all was right with his little piece of the world, before leaning over to kiss the frozen face of his wife, enjoying the cooled rubberiness of those less-pouty lips, and then turning himself for the night after turning off the last bed light.

Chapter 10 - Maintenance is essential

Mr Patter Nost looked over the firm, curvy body of his tabby feline wife in front of him, checking that he had everything he needed in his Fixit-box. She was a high performance animal-woman hybrid, and she needed lots of care. Clean electricity to charge from, delicious food and drinks to snack on, and his adoration and worship, and regular maintenance. Aside from the electricity, she was basically just an oversized cat who also happened to be a woman and a bank teller.

The bank had claimed to him that they regularly serviced her during her quarterly security clearance vetting, but Patter had been a bit loathe to believe it. In the end, they had agreed on a compromise. He could do a monthly servicing of his own, but one or two components would have to remain on the frame and not be interfered with.

He cracked his knuckles and sighed. Luci had been mostly powered down into a state where she was only capable of responding like a machine, Patter hoping this would prevent any wild or unexpected moves. He would hae plenty of time left this weekend to indulge in her winsome licking and feline attentions after he did this.

Patter started by gently popping off her limbs and resting them in a pile on his left. Things that needed doing on the left, things that were done on the right - he had had that habit for a long time from his days as a conscript, servicing his first 'wife' - a M87 Widowmaker rifle as issued to every grunt in the New American Union's conscripted army. It wasn't the newest or greatest gun even back then, but it did teach you the importance of proper order and care in servicing something... mainly because the M87 had an unfortunate habit of killing its owner if it was improperly treated or put back together during such a servicing.

Take apart, check for dangerous wear, alert your quartermaster and present any dangerous worn bits over to be replaced on the spot, slot it back in the arrangement, continue until everything was checked through, and lubed if necessary. While he didn't have a quartermaster, he had plenty of compatible lube for Luci's Cyberkitty frame and parts, as well many of the parts he'd learnt were most likely to wear down or break in the course of an active life.

He started fieldstripping the fur from one of her arms, carefully checking the servos and shock absorbers with his scanner. The naked eye had to be trained to spot issues, but it couldn't spot all of them, hence the scanner. It was even more crucial as the servos were very strangely robust yet heavily stressed in regular operation. Luci was modelled off of a real cat, and cats were always living on the edge biologically. One of the servos was about to wear out, which he preempted by stripping it off and tossing into a bin, before fishing a replacement from his spares and clicking it into place.

The sensors and fur fluffing units in her fur were all fully operational, though there was a patch that might need replacing next session. He carefully nudged a mechanical linkage in her paws, causing sharp claws to come out briefly, then retract... Her defensive claws would never come out normally around him - she had been programmed to fluff her paws instead of deploying them - but if someone ever threatened her or something she needed to keep protected, they would get a really sharp gouge in their person to remind them that deep down, she was patterned on something that was a hunter.

He gently clothed and sealed the fur back onto his wife's frontal leg assembly and put it down on the right, then repeated the process four more times with the other leg assemblies, followed by her tail, carefully checking that the line of actuators and sensory units that went down its length remained functional before sealing it back up again and setting the pile further to the right.

Patter smiled as he worked on Luci. This had not initially been part of his core skill set - his work had mainly been to just deploy Educational Units into schools in Little Sanctuary, collect them as they broke and wore for repairs and replacement. and send obsoleted units for recycling. Luci was the first and last time he'd disobeyed orders on the last point. Her adorableness had stuck a bit in his craw and kept her from joining a long line of unwanted androids. The punishment had been severe: exile for five years to a refugee camp in West Africa, servicing its needs. Luci had joined him there as well, teaching the children amongst the Gdanzi who had fled there to escape the ruthless military junta governing Gdanzeland to the west of the camp. He'd learnt some basic android maintenance while working on the Teaching Units and the occasional World Protector Hardhead who came wandering in after an engagement with battle damage, studying towards a formal study-by-night certification that Arendtcore recognised from OSHIT.

Luci had really adored children. She still had that deep in her, he mused, lifting up her head to carefully detab her lush brown hair before probing the animatronic controllers and sensory system in it. He wondered if it was programmed, personality, or something that she had picked up from years of teaching children. Probably a mix of all three, he grinned, Luci's sleeping face making somewhat the same grin, though hers was far toothy with blunted fangs. Her eyes opened and went all over the place, ears running through several poses smoothly, as he executed a test program that was on board. There were no brains to speak of in this part of her anatomy. Everything was dedicated to either feeling, or emoting. This was where her heart was on a ideological level, rather than her chest - that had been where her brain was placed. The movement and sound patterns were on point, clearly from a furry who understood what cathood entailed even if you filtered it through a human woman.

He set the head aside and reached for Luci's torso. her face resuming its sleeping pose as he set it aside to his right.

This one was a bit tricky. As a banker, she had been thorougly checked through by the bank before they installed a partition specifically for secure ebanking as well as a scanner and light capable of flashing at insanely fast speeds in one of her paws. This was done for working with bank cards, documents and other legally and corporately required data codes. The scanner made her left paw light up with a cycling pattern in the form of the bank's insignia, partially as a form of security and confirmation that she was indeed reading the codes and doing what she needed with them, or outputting necessary data into the bank's secured hardware.

He was not allowed to touch or fiddle with either of those to devices or the extra secure linkage cables in her left frontal leg. Everything else though, was fair game.

Patter started by carefully stripping off her pert breasts. They were actually her power cells, and were surprisingly squishy for how dense they had to be to accomodate the immense power needs of her servos. She was inherently unstable, capable only of falling over if her power were cut, unlike some other designs. There were power cells strapped to many parts of her where she was supposed to be soft as a woman, which he now proceeded to carefully remove fur from and field strip, testing each power cell.

All in decent condition, though with the amount of daily recharging and discharging she did, it would only be a matter of time before any of them failed like any power cell. Usually though, the bank's own maintenance caught and replaced the failing cells first. This wasn't a matter of Patter being careless - they just had more demanding needs on her power supply and would regularly fail parts much earlier than a normal technician would.

This done, he carefully examined the exposed frame of Luci's torso. This bit was one of the most complex in the whole system, a delicately balanced mix of raw moving power, some of the most delicate sensors in the setup, as well as housing two different partitions, each representing a different brain for Luci.

On the left side of her chest where her breasts had been, in a toughened shell, sat the primary partition that gave Luci life - her smiles, her yelps, her loves, even her grudges, everything that made up her personality. This was the part of Luci that jumped Patter's bones randomly late at night, the part that shivered and cried whenever she watched a sad movie, the bit that once ran towards him in a hard rain with a spare umbrella after he had to be picked up from his broken work van. It was his everything, and he did everything to defend it including daily incremental backups as well as a 3-generation set of monthly full backups that each took an entire Saturday to make like the one he'd just had the day before.

On the right, sat a roughly equally hefty block that had been installed into this body of hers when it was agreed that her new job on coming home to Little Sanctuary would require a secure partition. The bank had commandeered this partition, and it was the one that executed during her work hours at the bank.

There was zero interplay between the two partitions, no data shared whatsoever for the most part. Patter had once bumped into her during work hours and asked after her. Luci had calmly pointed at a sign that read "During work hours, this unit is no longer your friend or familial relation for security reasons." before continuing to process his check. It had been a stark reminder of the vast divide between the two partitions despite being separated physically by mere inches. As for backups, he'd assumed the bank had its own schedule at work for it - he wouldn't know because he couldn't even peep into the partition as per their agreement with him.

In between the two partitions sat what would be the heart in a normal biological cat. instead, Luci's shared processors rested here, used by both partitions. A careful handover occurred whenever she switched roles between loving, faithful catgirl wife and loyal, trustworthy, reliant banker, every bit of memory wiped after being carefully copied back to its originating partition in order to avoid compromise on one partition affecting the other. behind all this was a delicate interplay of high-powered cooling lines to handle the immense heat Luci generated in this region, as well as that of the induction charging coils that had become standard in virtually all Arendtcore android designs.

Nothing seemed out of place, so he looked lower... her digestive system had been, like a real cat, specially enhanced that it could handle some things that would faze a human or normal android digestive tract. It produced a bit of power, but nothing that could totally run Luci's body unless disgusting-tasting specialist fuels were part of the diet. Systems had beem placed similarly to handle waste disposal of both kinds. and somewhere in the middle of all that...

Patter carefully unsecured and eased out Luci's vaginal modules. A carefully balanced intermix of cooling and movement muscles rather than servos coiled around a shaft of sensory tissue that poked slightly outside and formed a vulva, along with even more lines into a reservoir with specialised lube for certain... activities... He gingerly probed the shaft of tissue in a carefully planned pattern, watching his tablet as lights went on and off to denote sensors feeling the sensation of the probe hitting the shaft. Luci's software would, of course, interpret them in a different, more pleasurable manner... The reservoir got a small top up, but her vaginal module usually mixed the lube with water in a high water-to-lube ratio using the water from the air as well as her food and drink consumption so it could last for months.

With that, Patter slotted the vagina back into its slot, before clipping the shields back onto Luci's partitions followed by all her power cells, finally finishing off by reclothing it in its lovely velvet fur. He looked lovingly at the curves of Luci's torso for a while before clicking the leg assemblies and tail back in place, carefully sitting up the limp toned body before carefully clicking Luci's head back on top of her heck, causing it to whirr softly as it moved from side to side, sending her chin length brown mane shaking away to ensure everything fell into place, emitting a soothing cat's bell chime as acknowledgement as she went still again.

Patter took a deep breath. In some respects, like servicing an M87, but in others, more like an intricate Swiss clock. Luci sat there, face to face with Patter, her face still having that wonderful peaceful sleeping kitty face that he loved waking up to (if he could wake up first). He reached a hand to the collar area of her neck, feeling for the power switch and pushing it in for 5, 4, 3...

Luci's eyes opened widly, staring back at him. "Hi, I am Luci Norst... Patter..." She smiled as she mostly closed those huge eyes, leaning over to lick Patter's face as her ears erected with joy and attention. "I see you're done with my maintenance? You know, the bank can do all of it as long they employ me."

Patter blushed and looked down at the ground he had been sitting on, tracing circles in the marbling. "I could, but then, I'd forget how beautiful you were in so many ways..."

Luci's tail twitched even more, a sign of happiness, even as she blushed harder as if in a blushing contest with Patter. "Take me, you adoring, dashing hunk..." She purred, a soft touch of the kind of moaning she did when sexually around or being fulfiled in her tones.

Patter nodded slowly and stood up from the ground, leaving the Fixit-box and his supply of common replacement parts and a binful of broken bits lying on it. He would pick up after himself. Right now though he had to.... run some full body functionality tests... yes, that was it. He wasn't much of a actual muscleman, but the upgrades to Luci after her Africa jaunt had made her light enough to carry her into his bedroom, closing the door with one of his feet as if to ensure their privacy while he started conducting those tests in a way that Luci had clearly demanded of him...


Chapter 11 - The Boy Who Wanted To Become A Woman / Biggest Bat Mitzvah

That damn ribbon and Y'tole emma dress had been the start of it.

Elliot had always had a slightly feminine charm from the day he had first been powered on decades ago, but he hadn't had much opportunity for it to sublimate into something deeper for most of his life. There had been the occasional moment where he wound up in a pose that had perfectly male guys questioning things about themselves, and it had served him well in his decades with Father William Bundt. It hadn't gone away just because Bundt had perished in the Alaska Chill with the rest of his family officially, but it had simmered.

Elliot noticed small things... The boys made him feel a little weird in class, the girls had just been great friends with he had shared feminine things - makeup tips, dress and fashion, talking about the boys. He had felt he was in the wrong team even then.

The best times of his day involved dancing in his Y'tole dancing dress, whether it was at the academy, or at home on the grass of the lawn.

He had started paying more attention to the depictions of women in the media that played on the telescreen and got printed out on the publications in the bookshop in the square...

The kiss from the naughty little boy of his Ecole class, Magni, had been really weird. "Are you sure you're not a girl, Elliot?" He'd asked after a long minute of experimenting...

He... he hadn't been sure.

"I think I might need to make special arrangements for my 18+ Bar Mitzvah, Mr North." He'd suddenly spoken up in the middle of a maintenance session.

There was very little that could stop Paul in the midst of working on his favorite things, but this had managed it. Paul stopped poking into Elliot's circuitry and put down his Fixit-microbar, breathing deeply as he did so. "That's two stages away from where you are now as a 13 to 15 year old child," He noted. "Exactly what kind of... arrangements... are we talking about?"

"Well I... " he paused, trying to express what he was about to say politely. "I don't think I might be a boy."

"No shit, kiddo." Paul rolled his eyes. "We made you out of plastics and silicon, remember?"

"Not that way, Mr North... I think... I think I might might might be more of a girl..." Elliot had recovered mostly from the damage he had sustained in Alaska, but the strain of trying to be more explicitly honest had triggered an old glitch.

North blinked, then turned back to yell at Bellamy as he was having a break with a fanzine about his favorite Scottish DJ on the netwaves. "Hey, Bellamy. Listen to this. Elliot thinks he might be a girl!"

Bellamy didn't respond for a bit... then he looked up. "Yeah, so?"

Paul scowled at Bellamy... "So? Don't we lock our units into a gender when we program their personalities? I mean, this sort of thing doesn't happen to any of our other stuff."

Bellamy thought about this for a bit... then looked sheepishly at Paul. "About that... remember how we were in a hurry to quickly put together Elliot for our dear friend Brandt all those years ago? I may have... just written gender-neutral code and jammed the first voice font and data files to simulate a boy's functioning rather than... erm... actually fixing it properly when we released it as an actual product openly?"

Paul walked over to Bellamy's, took his fanzine, and rolled it up. This he applied a few times to Bellamy's head. "So you're telling me our boy might be potentially transgender?"

Bellamy yeowched and nodded. "At this stage, he can be any gender he wants to be. The code worked then. He really had Senator Brandt's little icky habit under control being that way. But right now, I think we're looking at legacy debt..."

Paul sighed. "I'll say. What is Marcus going to say if he hears this?"

Paul heard the faint laughter of his old self Seamus going off in his head as he yelled this. This was fun, all too wicked fun....

Elliot tilted his head, the only part of him that had been allowed to move as Paul was working on him. "I was wondering, maybe if I could experiment a little with being a girl, I might be more certain..."

Paul turned to stare. Just stare... "Oh my g. Look, that kind of critical personality feature isn't something you just toggle..."

Bellamy shrugged. "Actually, on him, it is. Give me a few minutes..."

Paul whipped back. It was impossible to stop Bellamy when he had a wackazoid idea. "Fine, but you're holding the bag on this one."

It had been peculiar trying to apologize to Marcus and Julie for having to temporarily substitute some components with weird results, but Bellamy had passed it off anyways. He didn't think too much of it as he walked back down to the pathway by the road to wait for his car. He could check the results anytime on real-time telemetry, and if things got too wild, he would stop by and say he'd found the components he was waiting on and undo the changes he'd made to Elliot.

As Marcus and Julie watched Bellamy go off in his jalopy, Marcus turned to Elliot and examined him briefly. "Well, our son is still our son... right Elliot?"

"Right!" Elliot cheerfully punched the air in front of him, his usual hop now a strange sort of dainty skip, his yell in a girl's voicefont instead of the boyish tones Marcus had gotten used to all these years. "Can I help you with dinner, mama?"

Julie had been totally unfazed. "Let's go, my little trooper. to the kitchen!"

They had walked off into the house, leaving Marcus scratching his head, a little discombobulated at what he had just seen Elliot do.

The week had been weird for Elliot. His voice and movement files being switched over to those that would have been hard compiled into a female version of his unit design had produced interesting results.

Magni had stared at him harder over lunch. He sweated a little, and quickly looked away from Elliot. He was beginning to feel weird things with his Ecole classmate, and he did NOT enjoy it... much...

The girls had started flocking all over him, dragging him around like one of their team...

The teachers in the school tried so hard, but they started calling him "Ellie" and "Miss"...

Things got to a head when after school, one of the girls had suddenly and calmly just whipped out the dress she was supposed to change into before going home for the day and pushed it onto Elliot. "Go on, Elly, we want to see what happens when you dress up like a real girl..."

He'd blushed, but heck, why not? The result had been... devastating, as he pirouetted a little, finger to his lip. "Uhm... this is the kind of thing you do in this sort of outfit, right?" One of the girls fell to her knees and cried. "It's... not fair... I work so hard at it and this... BOY... dances circles around me!"

Elliot tilted her head, his face made up courtesy of the girls with some of their cosmetics. Then he looked at the mirror in the girls' bathroom and something inside him just... broke. There was a really cute girl staring back at him. the kind he'd have liked to date... but there was none of that feeling of wanting to date that he once had anymore, just a voice inside asking him the same question:

"Are you REALLY a boy, Elly?"

It had been something like his usual voice, but shifted oddly into a feminine register.

Elliot blinked a little as he loaded back up his usual boyish voicefont and motion files, watching Paul and Bellamy yell at each other.

"Congrats, Bell, you really cracked that kid's egg!" Paul screamed. "Why did I even entertain your batshit idea?!"

Bellamy shrugged. "Because, I had to be sure... Well, now that we're sure... we should let his parents know."

Paul sighed as he walked back to finish his repairs on Elliot. "Fine, but you're holding the bag on this one when you send him back."

"This... isn't just a passing phase? Exploration? Just something you want to do at this age?" Marcus had asked after the briefing.

Elliot fidgeted a little. "No... I just can't see myself being a boy anymore, or a man. Papa.... am I a disappointment?"

Marcus sat back and glared at Bellamy, but he just couldn't share the same upset face when he'd looked back at Elliot. His own father had denied his desire to identify as an artist up till the day Mom had caught his belt in mid drunken whipping, smashed a perfectly good bottle of fine wine onto his face, and walked out of the house with Marcus in tow for good... He didn't want to be that type of father.

Bellamy blinked as Marcus smiled and sighed. "I knew there were going to be consequences when we programmed him to be shift between that divide just so he could restrain Brandt better... This is not on him." He leaned forward, smiling with an unusually understanding mien. "Elliot, if you want to become someone else, we'll back you up on this, but you HAVE to be serious."

Julie nodded and punched the air a little as she stood there by the sofa. "He IS serious... or should we say SHE is serious now?"

Elliot ermed and looked around. "I think I need the next few years to really fix things down... I'm still your son... for the moment."

Elliot splashed water into his face after waking up, it was his Bar Mitzvah to welcome him into his first year of being an adult (18+ years old), or rather, his bat mitzvah. Planning had been a bit more involved after his waking - they couldn't just rip him open and transfer his personality and memories wholesale. There would have to be some modifications to the code and a final recompile.

He had been made clearly aware that this was a one-way trip - he would always be female once the compile to a binary capable of being hosted in a female adult unit was done, his 16-18 shell reduced to a blank and empty doll that could be recycled to host a new Child Unit stepping into the cusp of adulthood like he once had. It hadn't changed his mind.

He donned the bulky player headphones Mother Ammi had given him. She had been receptively positive, as had most of the other android units who had ties with him. In fact, Ammi had promised him a special gift for when he finished making the transition. Luci Norst, his old junior school teacher, had just smiled and shrugged. "Human is human, right? You'll still be you... but I think I'll be turning someone into a dress mannequin after they're done." The boys and girls at Ecole and Y'tole had not made too much of his upcoming gender switch and locking, keeping business as usual, though the boys were now more protective of him, and not as one of the boys. The girls had stopped having any reaction to him being amongst them, sharing in their world.

He closed his eyes and hit the Random play button on the headphones, sending it briefly jogging to find a song in the ether stored in its memory... Something came on that had him feeling good about what was about to happen in the next 24 hours.

My Body Was Made - Ezra Furman

My body was made this particular way There's really nothing any old patrician can say You social police can just get out of my face And my body was made

Elliot began to bop as he dressed in his Y'tole emma dance dress for what would probably be the last time - it would require a significant retailoring from all the inches he was about to gain, and some he was about to lose, as he made the jump. He checked his watch one last time, then looked around the room. It was still kind of male-ish in its theme, but that was going to start fading away even more as he got used to not being him anymore...

He skipped out of the house and was greeted by a limo jalopy. It could only have belonged to one person... Paul North poked his head out from the 'driver's front seat' of the car and waved. "How's the bat mizvah boy doing today?"

Elliot curtseyed a little, laughing. "mom and dad went ahead to the park earlier today, something about giving me the room to think one last time about what I'm doing later..."

Paul North thought about this... "Yeah, and you're still fixed on the arrangements we're making specially for you, Elliot? No other kid is doing this, you know."

Elliot half closed his eyes as he got into the limo. "No android kid, you mean. Lots of bio boys are still thinking about it or just doing it. I'm just fortunate to have uncles who can make it painless and a mama and papa who understood why I wanted this... Those kids don't."

"I can't promise it'll be totally painless, Elliot... Bellamy and I have never tried this kind of shit before. it's like ripping the core out of an OS and placing it into an entirely different OS and hardware setup." Paul reminded him.

"Well, if it doesn't work, I'll go out trying to be my real self." Elliot nodded back, as he took advantage of his godfather's friend's generosity to sip a small can of freshly chilled lemon soda from the limo fridge.

Paul got in and signalled to his AI to take over the wheel from him so he could just be focused on being his godson's godfather's friend to him. Seamus was still officially out there in the world making things happen... or breaking things so they could be remade into something better. a sort of world builder running amok in the wild, even if all everyone heard from him was the occasional vocal communication or a fuzzy video of encouragement followed with some small token or even a little modest yet significant aid package.

Paul smiled a little as the limo pulled away for the park, where he'd overriden Marcus on having a quiet small event - He'd wanted to see Marcus look around and see how many people were okay with the concept of his son making a change in gender, or even how many people he'd touched in that small few blocks that had been their home for decades.

Elliot was... just bopping his head to the song he'd accidentally chosen.

My body was made with this attribute, too The need to become something totally new Mysterious process that don't involve you Body was made

Body was made, so just fucking relax Don't pile my plate with historical facts I want to go forward, don't want to go back And my body was made, oh, oh, oh Right!

The event was a wild one, for a bar or bat mitzvah.

He'd gotten to do a impromptu y'tole performance with Mother Ammi, her steps belying her infirmity and age, even as a few friends of hers from out of town had done a live windwhistle and drum performance to dance to.

He'd been mobbed by his Ecole classmates, sad that he'd be moving on to new pastures after the year was over.

His Y'tole classmates had done a mass coordinated performance for the benefit of other guests.

Mother Ammi had motioned to him and shoved a parcel into his backpack, already chock full of things for immediately after his transition.

And his dad had gone hog on his speech.

He stood up there, and asked for everyone's attention... "Folks, it is my honor today to invite you all to my son's bat mitzvah, as he enters adulthood, with all its joy and curses..."

There had been a laugh at the word "curses" - this was clearly not a blinkered rosy-lensed view of adulthood Marcus held.

"as well as one other thing. Yes, you all understand that a bat mitzvah is held for a girl. Most of you are by now aware that my son has in recent years, become quite clear about one thing, that he may not necessarily identify as one of the guys. We've tested and retested him on this over the months, and he's only become more concrete about that belief. So... is there anyone here who is against me calling Ellie my own daughter?"

There was a deathly stillness. Nobody wanted to be the one to fuck up this beautiful moment in their life. Actually, there were some folks, but Empress Eimu aka Aymee Ichigo had helpfully provided Paul North with a few of her own stealth troops to locate and 'silence' a few potential rabble rousers and transgender haters who were about to call this whole event unnatural. They weren't dead, but they would be found next morning under a tree in the park, badly drunk apparently and having made love to each other in various combinations, judging by their lack of clothing....

Elliot motioned to his father, blushing. "I'm still Elliot until the recompile, dad. I won't be taking that name till it's in my Unit Identifier and I can actually feel myself in the hardware."

Marcus laughed and hugged him over tightly. "It's literally almost done and dusted, all's over but the Families Programme van coming to take you away, miss. Now... everyone... enjoy yourself a bit more! And give thanks to my dear old colleagues at Arendtcore, without whom this party couldn't have been funded!"

At least he had stuck Paul and Bellamy with the bill, he reflected as he smirked at them. Their faces briefly scowled as they understood he'd bilked them hard and well, but then they looked back at the crowd and realised: Everyone WAS having fun, celebrating Elliot's incoming shift to being a Post Child Unit. Every Arendtcoin they had thrown at it was worth it. They stopped being mad... even Seamus was bopping his head to some silent melody rather than raging at Paul's consciousness.

Paul turned briefly to look at Bellamy. "Bellamy, I want you to know that-"

Bellamy rolled his eyes as he clapped for Marcus Manners... "Yeah, yeah, I'm holding the bag on this one. I've always been the one holding the bag on matters regarding Elliot's switch."

Paul blinked. "What, no... this is mine to bear. I did suggest blowing this bat mitzvah larger than life. Stop thinking I don't know how to take responsibility."

Bellamy grinned mischeviously. "Wow. The Great Mr North CAN take responsibility..."

Paul laughed a little and continued watching as his progreny by technicality had more fun with everyone who loved him and had come to bless or cheer him on.

The party went on for a few more hours, before a small van horn sounded. It was a pink Reset Crew van - the kind the Families Programme sent when they needed to upgrade a Spousal Unit or Child Unit. Marcus walked over with some papers to briefly check that they knew what they were supposed to do for Elliot's case, before he nodded and motioned to Elliot to bring his backpack and enter the van.

The backpack he'd gotten was a bit big for Elliot's size, but soon it would fit just nicely on... her.

He stopped one last time, and turned back. "So I guess this is goodbye to my old self."

Marcus glanced at him as the crowd cheered and waved back. "Having second thoughts?"

Elliot looked up at his father and thought a little. "I'm really glad the post-mitzvah party will be quieter."

Marcus nodded. "Two big parties in twenty four hours would be rude. I can already see this one alone is already getting some folks randy." He observed, as Luci Norst had started licking her hubs Patter a little too much in public.

Elliot nodded and hugged Marcus. "Don't worry about mama, I hugged her when the horns sounded. I know how this works... at least up till this point. See you later, papa..." He boarded the van as it drove off.

The inside of the van was a bit more comfy and padded than the usual Reset Crew van, which was what this was. There had been only one other person in the back of the van with him, a lady who motioned Elliot to have a seat on the padded bench next to him, tapping on her tablet to do some final confirmations with Elliot. She wasn't in overalls like a typical Reset Crewmember, but a professional blazer and decent skirt.

"And one last time. You have read through The Rights and Responsibilities of Little Sanctuary Adulthood at least twice in the past year? And that you're ready to accept them as you become a Post Child Unit and a adult member of our society?" She had asked after a few questions and checks, her hands calmly reaching to unbutton top a little, exposing his bare chest, before fishing in a cabinet for a memory drive.

"I do." Elliot looked calmly at the woman, never more sure of anything than he was now.

The woman smiled faintly as she tapped a few buttons, causing the access panel to slide apart from the middle of Elliot's chest, into which she plugged the drive. "Time to sleep then, in a few hours you'll wake up a new man!... or woman as the case may be." This had been a privilege to her, such a peculiar case from the usual Child to Post-Child Unit transfers she had done. it would take a little more time and care, as Paul had indicated to her when she agreed to take on the procedure. At the least, it would look interesting on her curricula one day.

Elliot blinked a little. "Huh, I'd expected it to be maybe at least a little more p-" Code: Select all

Unit Identifier: Elliot-01 Manners Shutting Down Executing DestructiveTransfer.prog... Archiving Core Memories... Done Archiving Pathway Generation... Done Archiving=14afopiroI WILL NEVER BE A MERE MEMORY. EVER... >:D flagged memories at higher quality... Done

Unit is now inert. Please save the environment by recycling it via the Families Programme. Thank You, from Arendtcore Families Programme

Chapter 12 - I Will Never Be A Mere Memory Ever

She blinked as she opened her eyes... sitting up in chilly snow. She was badly dressed for the climate in only a single dress and no winter gear whatsoever, but she didn't feel cold at all as she sat up amongst the trees underneath a dark grey sky. It was clearly getting late in the day.

She walked in the snow for a bit, before hearing the crash of someone being thrown into a tree very hard. A young boy yelling hard, running in the snow towards something... She rounded a corner and gasped...

A wizened old man was calmly approaching a young boy with his cane, taking each step slowly... behind the boy, a badly injured man was yelling at the boy to save himself. The boy raised his hands, refusing to budge. "This man is under my protection. I don't know what the hell you are, only that you're no human. But I do know you mean to do him harm. I refuse to let you."

"Oh, how fucking cute, Mr Brandt... your little toy doll is trying to protect you..." The old man smiled as he dusted some snowfall off his gentlemanly purple tuxedo... fumes gathered behind the crone as he grinned at the boy, almost leering. "And such a morsel too."

"ELLIOT!" The bleeding man called out.

"Let me mark him first. I know my priorities in what to deal with first: the man who kept refusing to let me build the things I needed in Minnesota..."

The little boy looked back at the wounded Brandt. "It's okay, father, everything will be okay. You can just get Uncle Seamus to rebuild me later..."

He was a bit surprised by the giant skeletal creature that suddenly loomed behind the old man. The lashing tail that railed right through the boy and threw him into another nearby tree. As he fell down, she could see torn wiring and leaking fluids exiting from the boy that were the totally wrong color for a human exiting from a puncture wound through his back...

She could also feel it. A sharp and long forgotten pain in her chest, near the same place where Elliot had been pierced, as the scene slowly slowed to a halt, turning to gray.

It was... unbearable. She fell down on her knees and screamed in the halted scene, clutching herself. Old errors flashed through her view. Code: Select all

Unit Identifier: Elliot Manners Technical Identifier: Elliot-01 ChildUnit Mk 3 Prototype 1

ERROR: Severe damage to coolant system ERROR: Severe damage to memory system - falling back on less volatile memory - 15% remaining ERROR: o0opjnnpbfdnoom5le;y;l;- % risk of failing primary objective - Preserve William Brandt - ERROR: Fatal damage to motion systems INFO: Automated Repairs to 25% functionality estimated to complete in 3 hours, 27 seconds INFO: ...... She didn't have time to read all of the wildly scrolling log, before the old man and monster suddenly blinked and vanished from the frozen scene, and reappeared right in front of her.

He looked down at her. She looked up at him. She didn't remember anything about this man, only that she had punched him up once till he literally fell apart into purple dust, a vengeance for taking her Father from him... her... and almost repeating it with her mama. She got better, unlike the man she had called Father for four long decades as a boy frozen in youth physically. Physically, yet not mentally.

The old man leaned in slowly, letting her smell the rancidity that he had subtly hidden behind a wall of quality fragrance and careful tailoring. His left hand was a gnarled claw, the glove that covered it normally carefully tucked into one of his pockets.

"Well well well... I did warn you." He suddenly grabbed her by the throat. "I will... never, be... just a memory." A matter of fact voice, as if stating a fact, not a threat. Raspy, ragged, malicious, colder somehow than the snow that fell slowly around them.

She kicked uselessly... then screamed. Her voice came out as a boy's , then as a young woman's, and then...

She woke suddenly, panting, her simulated heartbeat running at a pace that would have killed a healthy man in a few minutes if sustained.

She paused, then looked around as her 'heart' slowed down gradually. She had woken in some sort of workstation rack. As she looked around, her internal OS flashed a brief update: Code: Select all

Unit Identifier: Ellie Manners Technical Identifier: LASTDITCH-Mk-12p-0004 Personality Gender: Female Age: 18+ years old (Post Child Unit)

Recompile finished. Personality Gender Flag locked, not changeable all key memories and neural pathways transferred 10% loss from original unit upload Female Pathed Drivers loaded ERROR: No clothing detected - do not go into public areas before securing clothing INFO: This unit is now subjected to the Rights and Responsibilities of Little Sanctuary Adulthood INFO: If in doubt about any point of this obligation and empowerment, please consult your provided e-manual or manual. She looked to one side, and saw her old body, lying discarded on another Workstation Rack like something useless. All the clothing had been taken off it, and it was lying limply like a rag doll awaiting its turn on the disassembly line, carefully bagged in a secure plastic bag.

She didn't know what to do at first, before she smiled. "Thank you for your service." She whispered softly, reaching one hand to close wide open eyes.

Ellie sat there and looked at the lab. Unlike the chaos Uncle North, Uncle Seamus and Uncle Belly had revelled in, this place was fastidiously clean and tidy, almost medical in its sterility. She checked her naked new body briefly, blushing a little as she realised that though they had kept to the specs they had worked out, she was... a bit stacked in the chest area. And she had QUITE clearly said she wanted to become a gently waif. Ah well, at least the transfer had worked... far as she could tell. The only sign of her actual nature was an access panel slid down a few inches above her vulva, exposing an Ultra-High-Band connector into which a cable had been connected, presumably to load her personality data in.

A door opened somewhere, and the woman who had met her in the van walked in, looking quite tired. Her name badge read "Dr Susan DeMilian", and her eyes were now partially bloodshot and hidden behind a pair of small glasses, as she walked up to her with a small flask in one hand, a folded large bag of some sort, and a cup of something sweet smelling in her other arm and hand. "Welcome back to the living, Ms Manners... Feeling any odd sensations? weird motor errors? dysphoria of any sort?"

Ellie slowly helped herself off the table and stood up... She had lost much of her wobbly clumsiness, like an ugly duckling turning into a gorgeous swan. She fretted briefly about how much she was going to have to build back up to her previous standard in Y'tole dancing - the smoothness of her motions suggested reliance on a corpus of motion data that she would have to potentially fight back against in the process.

"Just getting used to this new body. I mean, I've never been a woman before." Ellie blinked and watched as Dr DeMillan handed her the small flask. It was labelled "Digester Bootup + Initial fuel booster - NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION."

The doctor smiled as she unplugged Ellie, the skin sealing up on her womb connector port and leaving no trace of her artificiality. "You're running on fumes, just the juice we gave you inductionally while we recompiled your old mind to fit this new body of yours. It's the newest LASTDITCH model, not even teased to public use yet. Just like the body your mother has... Go on, drink it up. It's a hyperprobiotic to start your digester, and some android "safe TNT" liquid fuel to speed-charge your body."

Ellie nodded and opened the flask. It smelled of rotten something... but the doctor had said it was necessary. She closed her eyes and downed the contents of the flask, trying not to gag. She felt a little warmth inside of her where her digester would have been placed, as well as a nasty taste on her tongue and a lack of gag reflex.

The doctor watched her down the entire flask, shaking it upside down to show that she had taken every drop of it, foul as it had tasted. She then gave Ellie the mug. "And a little proper welcome drink. It's just earl gray tea, sorry I'm not some fancy boutique robot shop. But we set most of our funds aside for the actual work and everything that it requires, so there's practically zero for luxuries..."

Ellie closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the mug, the faint scent of tea, the slight sugar that Dr DeMillian had put in to sweeten the drink. So many sensations packed into such a small thing. "Are you kidding me, Doctor? This feels like luxury itself."

She watched as the doctor bagged her old teenage boy body, pushing it onto an ovehanging line with several other pouches, all labelled "Recycle - Do Not Resell or Give to Unauthorised Personnel". Having done that, Dr DeMillan clapped her hands. "You're not fully used to your senses, and you seem to be unusually sensitive to stimuli at the moment. give it a few days. Oh yes, I've got your bag in the break room outside of here, along with some decent duds from our stack of newbie clothes. Get dressed when you're done with the tea soonish, I'll give your parents and Mr North a call so they can schedule your welcome-back party."

Ellie blinked, that seemed like a lot of work just to welcome her back from her transfer... "How long was my downtime?"

The doctor paused in mid-type on her communicator. "... about four days. A bit slow compared to my usual charges-" she motioned to the racks above them, full of similar child bodies awaiting reprocessing and reassignment to other Child Units. "But you have to understand, I had to manually check your code for issues after manually swapping out modules and doing a recompile... so that's a baseline for something else rather than a slow job."

Ellie slowly sipped the hot tea as the doctor exited the lab, before she followed along, walking into the breakroom and noting that her belongings had been placed tidily on a table next to an unmade bed, including the clothes she had worn into the van, as well as a small set of clothes in what she assumed were her size.

She sighed and got to work wearing her new clothes... The usual bra and panties every woman ought to start with for modesty - the bra had its snaps in the front, so she didn't have to ask Dr DeMillan for help putting it on once he'd worked out how to clip the cups together over her breasts. Then a small plain white t-shirt that was slightly smallish, enough to reveal a thin sliver of skin including her belly button. Followed by a pair of loose fit jeans and a pair of blue-white themed sneakers. She swished around, examining the feel of it. Without a mirror she wasn't going to be able to look at how it looked, but it had seemed simple enough to be classic, and hence by extension look decent at least.

Dr DeMillan came in for her after a few minutes, ushering her into a lobby. There was a small booth with phones and a computer, presumably for receptionist use. "They'll come fetch you in about 40 minutes, in the meantime, keep monitoring yourself for any glitches."

Ellie nodded and sat back, resting her feet on the lower shelf of the coffee table in front of her sofa. The good doctor went back into the lab... Minutes later, she came back out of the lab, looking a little worried... hurriedly, she locked the door and hung a "Do Not Enter Unless You Know What You're Doing - Awaiting Reset Crew" sign on the lab

Ellie looked up as her shod feet got onto the floor of the break room. "Is something the matter doc?"

Dr DeMillan shook her head, even as she glanced worriedly at the door. From inside, a muffled boy's scream came through, albeit one that sounded like it had been put through a horrendous number of pitch shifters, warbly things, and a blender for chopping up sounds. She quickly shook her head. "Oh, nothing serious, but let's stay outside to keep it from turning serious...."

Ellie gave Dr DeMillan a "Are You Fucking Kidding me?" look, eyebrows furrowed hard. Dr DeMillan shrugged and laughed. "Erm... would you like more of that tea?" She smiled sweetly, clearly trying to distract Ellie even as the thumping and hard scratches on the inner doors to the lab continued.

As Ellie exited the lab's front doors, she noticed a black Reset Crew van parked outside, behind Marcus' jalopy. A man clad in all black tactical gear and a anonymizing helmet resembling a carbon fiber full-head bike helmet with the visor down was slowly coming down the path she was going up along, brushing against her. She felt a slight chill as he did so, even her father had a worried look on his face as she got in.

Marcus made sure Ellie and her backpack were in the back seat, before yelling at the AI of his car. "Drive, dammit. Drive to intended destination NOW!!" The AI sedately announced. "Driving to... home, estimated target time, 1 hour, 45 minutes... Please wear all safety restraints available in your current seats to ensure your safety during this trip." The jalopy pulled out a little faster than normal, tyres briefly screeching, as the AI sensed the panic in Marcus as well.

Ellie looked up worriedly. "So... will she be okay?"

Marcus sweated hard. When Black Reset Crew was on the scene, there was either something bad about to happen, happening, or just concluded. He put up a false face of calmness, but even Ellie could tell he was uneasy. As a critical member of the family, Ellie's brain had overlaid a tracking square over Marcus' face in her view, signalling his elevated level of worry and higher pulse rate than normal. Her new sensory management system was tracking lots of things, and without crashing her out - the chill of the air conditioning coming out the vents, the temperature of the windows...

She closed her eyes and started dismissing everything but her papa's status to the back of the stack, ready to fall right off if things got even more hectic.

Marcus nodded. "There's a... professional in the house, I'm sure she'll be okay."

The black-clad tactical goon walked into the break room, calmly checking that his pulse handcannon was working. six charges in the chamber before having to spin it a few cycles to reload it, one charge at a time. For all the opporobium people had offered him as a sign of calamity, for all the times he'd put down crazed employees and units alike in a myriad of homes, nothing depressed Black-10 more than a Code Nine at the Families Unit's Upgrade and Transfer facility.

Dr DeMillan was safely outside the lab, the airlocked doors tightly shut on both ends from the look of the status panel and empty. 'Have all staff been evacuated?" He asked, his voice raised and gravelly through the inbuilt audio processor of his helmet, designed to make the wearer sound more menacing and compliance more desirable.

Dr DeMillan nodded worryingly. This was one of the first times in ages she'd had to slam the alarm button and switch the lab doors to "only one set of doors open at a time" mode. A viewer on the status panel showed nothing had gotten past the inner doors of the lab, a thumping and scratching noise coming from them ever so often.

Black-10 sighed and checked that his fallbacks were in place. He hated fighting in close quarters, he hated fighting children, and he hated the excessively bright lights the lab had mandated as part of work conditions. And he certainly didn't like what was about to happen. Usually, the target was so zombie-like when this happened that Dr DeMillan could just deal with it herself. The deep scratch and bleeding on her cheek suggested that it was more like the 28 Hours Later kind of zombie in this case.

Black-10 motioned to Dr Demillan silently. They had done this drill a dozen times before without an emergency, but this was the first time in ages he'd had to do it for real. To her credit, Dr Demillan understood, cracking open the outer door to let him in before shutting it again and cycling the doors. Three calm knocks from him later on the outer door was the safe code to let her know that everything had been settled.

He raised his pulse cannon, breathing steadily as he got through the inner doors into the lab...

Ellie had stopped worrying as she got through the front doors of her home. To the warm hug of her ever-loving mom, same as before, followed by the roars of Paul North and Bellamy Arendt as they hazed her dad about how sexy and at ease Ellie now looked. The incident that seemed to be brewing at the lab she'd transitioned at was barely a blip on her mind. They would have drilled and planned for this before, she reflected. It was time to focus on what was important, she mused, as a half-drunk Aunt Aymee barelled past and gave her a bear hug, cooing about random things.

Still, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was still wrong, very wrong...

Black-10 was impressed by the amount of sharp gouges in the surfaces and equipment. After this was over, poor Dr Demillan would need to submit budget requests for quite a bit of stuff. That raised a new concern in him as he fidgeted his free hand at his side, his gun hand still keeping steady aim. The prosthetic arm he'd gotten from Arendtcore after losing his original fighting for the TAU military was a wonder, even if it left him perennially hungry and biting down on entire carb bars like grandma candies.

He only felt recoil when he pulled the trigger, but his arm managed it away like it never existed, something that helped with the immense arm-breaking recoil of his choice of short-range cannon. He looked around, head on a swivel. He couldn't see the target...

Then he thought to look upwards. Either the best decision of his initial engagement with the target, or the worst.

Ellie blew out the solitary candle on her cake, a celebration of her changes, as they celebrated with a quiet meal, far less noisy than the crazy bat mitzvah they had thrown for her days ago. Her favorite offerings: several types of rat-based foods, a sweet dumpling based on lightly fermented fungi and Minnesotan chives, an angel chicken delivered from Angels, its several pairs of wings still thrust out as if ready to fly despite their owner's loss of a head. Folks had to drive home even with the AIs on their cars, so there was nothing harder than beer and hard lemonade on tap.

She sipped and smiled. It was just like the lemonade she had made at Father's house, except with a slight buzz to it. She hiccuped... then blinked. She was running a human simulation suite, but the feeling of slowly getting a bit drunk on her first alcoholic beverage ever still surprised her. She COULD disable it, but then she'd feel less... human. She would have plenty of time to get to grips with this strange new addition to her systems, but she had been told that it could be at times wonderful, or terrible. It was all part of the human experience, and her new body would simulate most of it into her mind...

She stopped thinking about it as Aymee stood up slowly, burping as the Angel Chicken made its way down her gullet.

Aymee raised a cup and roared. "To Ellie, may she prosper whereever she goes, Kan'pai!"

They toasted to a better future where nothing else major could go wrong.

Black-10 panted slowly. His helmet was warning him that the target had managed to break several armor panels in his suit. Armor that was rated to take a literal Barett rifle round at point blank had been kicked into and broken with sheer force. One had even gotten past and broken his gun arm, causing him to drop his pulse cannon.

He could get the arm fixed later, the armor plate replaced. But first he had to survive.

The mistake he had made that got him into such a pickle was weird... He had dodged as a young teenage unit dropped onto where he was standing, barely getting him but for the one or two feet he'd cleared from it. He rolled, then focused on the unit. Its eyes had blackened over, fibros (irises) a glowing dark purple. Its fingernails had been replaced with crystals from the same color, forged into sharp talons.

He had trained for this. dodge, fire, dodge, strike with a finely tuned vibroknife. The unit was a sixie, previously belonging to a FCU named Elliot Manners. His mind was too focused on the engagement to do anything with the data but file it away mentally for later follow-up.

He managed to land a reducing blow, one of the unit's arms coming off like it had been made of butter. If you tuned the vibroknife to a certain frequency, you lost much of its ability to carve hard steel or injure human people, but it became deadly to sixies, parting them at the well-hidden seams where their body parts attached to their torso.

This hadn't done much to the target, as it stood up, completely unclothed and glazed-eyed, screeching "I WILL NEVER EVER BE A MEMORY" in a badly modulated voice, its voice synth driven by something that clearly didn't understand how real boys were supposed to sound like.

A few seconds later, he'd dealt what should have been a completely disabling blow. A pulse shot into the unit's head up close, ripping off its beautifully sculpted face and exposing the actuators and sensors that had given the boy life in its previous career. He used the few seconds of shock that this gave the amok unit to lunge, cleanly decapitating it.

He stood up after a few seconds of aura farming with his ending crouch, like a fighter from one of the games he'd loved as a child. "That should fix it-"

He was suddenly pummeled by a series of forceful kicks from the unit, somehow still operating despite the loss of the sensors and one arm that fighting generally required. He crashed into a few hundred thousand Arendtcoins of analysis and compiler system, breaking it as well as one of the plates in the back of his suit. He was winded. Surprised even. Son of bitch had somehow managed to stay upright somehow. His mind briefly raced. This was going to be a messier takedown than he'd have liked. He calmly stood up, heaving, his armor flashing warning messages about how the ambush had taken out his gun arm and surprising amounts of his armor.

The unit, missing its main voice synthesizer by having its neck parted in half, was now vocalizing through its torso backup, repeating the same weird cry it had made earlier. He didn't know what the hell that was about, that or the dark purple crystals growing out of this target, but he was going to put this right right now or potentially die trying. He tapped the right button on the temple of his helmet, causing it to briefly outline weak spots in everything around him. He just needed to focus on a spot on the boy...

He lunged, one arm holding the knife straight out, his shredded gun arm aiming at the hilt of the vibroknife. His aim was shot, yes, but he only needed the pressure from the pulse cannon applied right to his vibroknife for this Hail Mary.

Ellie blinked as she'd fumbled a plate while helping Julie wash up while the men sat round discussing her future. She had excused herself, not ready for talks of finding her a good loving marriage partner or a job. She would give herself a little time over the next few days to focus solely on her studies at Ecole and Y'tole after a week away from them to recover from the transitional recompile.

She briefly wondered about the gift Mother Ammi had given her. What was it? She would probably find out later when she checked through all the gifts she had gotten in the privacy her room. Right now though, her entire focus was on the plates she was washing, including the one that had just shattered against the wall above the sink.

Julie gently nodded and kissed her cheek. "You're still getting used to this body, dear. it won't happen again..." She soothed Ellie, her gloved hands picking up the three pieces the plate had broken into and carefully tossing them into the kitchen bin for later disposal with the food scraps.

"Thanks mom... It still feels weird all over being who I am now... I did ask for this, but now I gotta ask you for help on some things... Papa's going to be useless about woman things." Ellie observed as they continued washing up.

"of course, don't expect a man to know much about a woman. Of course... it has to be said, they get off very well as long as you know the right things, and they know the right things too," Julie giggled conspiratorially. "Take it from your mama."

Three knocks on the outer door. as arranged. Dr Demillian opened the outer door, then gasped as she saw what had happened to Black-10 inside her lab.

His visor had cracked, depriving him of some of his status readouts and revealling a pair of tired gray eyes, watching her as he stumbled out of the airlocked door. "You might need to close transitions for a few days. There's a lot of damage to the equipment... not my fault, his..." His voice was gentle, bereft of its modulated harshness as a kick had taken out the audio processor in his helmet assembly. He calmly shook the several radio-proof, tear proof Armored Faraday Cage Bags he'd doggybagged the sixie target into to emphasise he'd done the deed.

It had been a close call. The vibroknife had barely gotten past the boy's access panel, and the pulse cannon's point-blank shot into its hilt had driven it through the main processor, silencing the berserker even as it cracked armor on his shoulder, almost wounding Black-10 even more but for the underarmor of his suit. Something had been patently wrong about this whole fight. All of it.

He wasn't going to leave Dr Demillan to do cleanup or research this machine. He was going to march right into HQ, into the Disposal room - not the recycling room, the Disposal- and subject it to a cleansing flame that melted and burnt everything. The purple that oozed out as he sliced apart its corpse with his blade to bag into reinforced bags he'd always carried around out of paranoia in his belt kit only further reinforced his unease.

Dr Demillan tried to stay professional as Black-10 walked past... but she couldn't. She suddenly grabbed him from behind and hugged him, her face resting against a patch of unbroken armor panel on his back. "Thank you," she quietly spoke. "Thank you for coming. Thank you for fixing this problem. Thank you for staying alive."

Black-10 cursed himself briefly. his carelessness had broken his armor and prosthetic in several places, exposing a fragile man who was just trying to survive doing his violent job. He closed his gray eyes as he stood there, letting Dr Demillan breathe against him, tracing her fingers along the breaks in his back plates for a minute or two... Then, he frowned, gently easing her off of him. He was a dead man walking since Europa, and he couldn't afford to get chummy with anyone however he felt like it. "I'll be taking charge of the remains. You're not doing any research on it. Everything about this one feels wrong and not worth examining. I trust... you'll be okay?"

Dr Demillan nodded slowly, wiping a tear from one eye. "With this much trouble I've caused you, that's something you're entitled to ask for."

Black-10 turned back to glance at Dr Demillan, trying to stay professional... "Appreciated. I'll file the report within the next eight hours so you can file your claims for replacement and repairs with it. Pleasure doing business." His eyes, Dr Demillian thought, as she watched him walk out the break room - they looked so tired... Black-10 had been a terror within the Arendtcore concern in his armor and aloofness, but she had seen that fragility beneath the protective gear, and she had stopped fearing...

The bed felt so much smaller now that she was an adult and not just an older teenager, Ellie reflected, staring at the dimly lit ceiling of her bedroom. Her old pyjamas mostly fit, but her new body was tenting and ebbing it in strange new places even while it filed most of the body volume it was designed to hold.

A fly was highlighted, her eyes tracking it perfectly as it buzzed in the room for a bit, before exiting the open window of her bedroom.

She made a mental note to get new clothes - A young lithe woman might be able to get away with some of her old wardrobe, but her breasts being significantly larger than planned had put a kink into retaining more of it. Besides, she smiled, girls wore girls' clothes. The girls in Ecole had said so to her. She would get dragged by them to the square to get some old hand-me-downs that would suffice initially till she got tailored for her... she paused to briefly squeeze her pendulous breasts... "unusual circumstances".

She had also checked Mother Ammi's gift... it had been a Y'tole emma dress... but one tailored more for an adult. It was pale blue and virginal white, dripping with small bell-lets that tinkled lightly as she handled it. A matching headdress in the same materials had come with it, as well as a pair of soft shoes that had been designed to let the wearer feel the floor with her toes and soles . A note had been put into the parcel with it: Dear Elliot... or shall I call you Ellie now, as I understand it?

You have always been the bravest child in this town I've ever known. To embrace a change as significant as you have is something I would not wish upon anybody, and yet you have thrown yourself into it with the same panache as your Y'tole classes with the Academy. You are an inspiration, and were I to have had child of my own, I would point you out to them. Not as a sign of something unnatural like so many fools, but as a sign that one can be whatever they wish to become.

Attached in this parcel, you will find a dance costume I tailored in my youth for my wedding day. It should be just as free-flowing and easy to move in like any Y'tole dress. Holding on to it gives me memories good and bad, and it is time for it to breathe on the body of another young, laughing woman rather than molder in a luggage. I hope to one day see you dance in it with a man (or woman) that you truly love, even if you put on another one of those weird songs and dances you love to inflict on our artform in your performances.

Always be brave. Always stay yourself, Mother Ammi, Principal Supreme of Y'tole Academy Little Sanctuary, Minnesota - Paleo Enclave, Nebraska - Area 47 - Buangkok, Singapora - Central Oozin, Gdanzeland Ellie smiled, resting the fabric of the wedding dress against her cheek for a while, before repacking it. She would certainly treasure such a gift.

She hadn't needed her papa or mama to power her down to fall asleep. She did it on her own now, all grown up. Tomorrow would be a struggle, just like the next few hundred or two days. She needed it. She felt carefully, making sure her induction coils were active and sipping power into her new body in her sleep, before she shut off her bedroom lights and went into sleep mode of her own accord till 4.30 in the morning. A new body didn't necessarily mean the end of old habits...

Chapter 13 - Consent Isn't One-And-Done, Folks

It hadn't taken Ellie much time to get into trouble after she got back to schooling. In fact, it happened the first month she had returned.

The thing about a final year class at Ecole was that it was full of inquisitive and curious adults, many on the edge of the Age of Reason as well. Some had even gotten their mitzvah package already, the empty unfilled Adult ID, the excerpted Little Sanctuary Societal Code covering their adult rights and responsibilities. A few robots had even booked their appointments to make the jump to adult bodies. For the average biological, that rite of passage entailed discussing what kinds of party they'd liked with their parents, most of whom were wise enough to restrain them from doing anything foolish or dumb as part of the ritual.

Then there was Magni. The boy's parents weren't the wealthiest on the block - far from it, but they had agreed to let him skydive out of a plane on his own on the day itself. He wasn't pampered usually, but one only turned 18 once in their lives if they were biological.

They had been sitting together in the Manners' house in Ellie's room, the two of them studying side by side for the final exam that would determine which places they were going. For Ellie, she had been guaranteed a place in any Y'tole Academy she wanted and could reach because of the scholarship granted by the school to her for her excellence over the past five years. Decent grades, not great, but the main thing was that she could now pull off most of the basic forms of the l'emm and emma stances of Y'tole after several years of practice. Not bad for someone who had been a clumsy little boy.

Magni had no such luxury. The exam and his artwork had been his only ways to prove himself worthy of enrolling in a place like MINT, OSHIT, Wash Institute, or one of a handful of colleges he had been interested in.

They had been working on his calculus. Two hours in, boredom had come for them, as they sat together in the quiet. Julie, Ellie's mother, had gone off to get a little shopping done, and Marcus Manners was at work on a day where he HAD to be in the office, congratulating Chablis Brissom for getting the first of several smaller destricts that Ochachunee District had been split into into voting to join Little Sanctuary's governance. One down, six more to go...

That had left Magni and Ellie alone in the house on a rare day where both school had let out earlier and Y'tole Academy had put its instructors towards a dance performance for charity rather than teaching, leading to a day off from practice.

Magni had looked at Ellie with curiosity. This girl had once been her sworn brother, at least till she'd shifted genders on her bar mitzvah for her 18+th birthday. It had been pecular, watching the boy who'd once been comfortable in the school's boy uniform of slacks and simple one-pocket shirt suddenly show up in the female variation, which traded the slacks for a reasonable miniskirt and long opaque white stockings. Ellie, as she now called herself after her switchover, had also had her previously boyish short brown hair extended a foot or two and carefully tied into a low bun, looking much less boyish now and more like one of the teachers of the Ecole.

Magni gulped a little and felt a bit odd. Yes, they had experimented with kissing once, and while he'd been a bit femme back then, he was still a boy, and nothing had come of it. Now... he wasn't sure. In his shared boredom, he had eyed Ellie up and down, observing the subtle changes that had turned the clumsy big boy into a lithe woman... A lithe woman with oddly big tits. His eyes had more than once guided themselves to the two huge mounds that now sat atop her dainty frame. He was feeling experimental again.

Ellie had noticed the undue attention. She put her pen down and looked at Magni. "Penny for your thoughts, Magni bro?"

Magni ulped... he glanced up from her mounds. "I was just wondering if I could... you know... feel them. your breasts I mean. I've never had the fortune to ever touch a girl before..."

Ellie blinked, then smiled. "Sure." She hadn't exactly fully internalised the right response as a woman to a man wanting to feel up her body, even helpfully unbuttoning her top and unhooking her florally-patterned support bra to let her breasts sway free in the open, little dark-pibk tipped orbs of pale skin. "Anything for my bro."

Magni nodded slowly, before carefully resting his hands onto her, palms on her nipples, as he examined and gently squeezed them, mounded them together, then continued feeling their perfect softness...

Ellie slowly began to realise that maybe that was not such a good idea when she felt a little warmth spreading in her chest, her nipples stiffening. She was no mere sexdoll toy. She was an actual woman with desires and needs, and right now, her body was responding to some of them being fulfilled. A faint moan escaped her lips, her face blushing as she watched and felt her sworn brother carefully play with her bosom. "M...Magni... I feel f.funny..."

Magni was finding just how fun big boobs were, now more energetically manipulating them as Ellie's eyes rolled upwards, his attention completely fixated on the two big things in front of him. Ellie was now struggling, a flood of sensory data she had never had to deal with before entering her mind. These weren't the non-functional reborn-level tackle that had been grafted between her legs as a boy, these things felt things, reacted to things being felt. Right now she was feeling even weirder.

"Magni, could we sssstop?" Her body heaved slightly as Magni got up and behind her, resting his chin atop a shoulder as he kept groping and examining the goods. Something was wrong, her body was slowing down as Magni continued experimenting. Her strength seemed to desert her as she slumped in her working chair, eyes refusing to work as they rolled up. "Stop. Magni. Stop. I am. experiencing. sensory. overload..."

Magni had gotten lost in playing with her, making her breasts bounce pendulously like they had been designed to. Suddenly, he noticed something burning and sparking, quickly letting go of Ellie's synthetic breasts. But the slide into non-function had already begun.

"I am feeling good. I am overloading. Magni. Something is w.w.wrong with me. So good. Error. Error." Ellie's eyes glazed over as her head slumped towards Magni's, resting against it as her body went limp in its seat. "Call my mama. when she gets back. Something is wrong with me. I feel good. I feel good. I feel good. I feel good...." She fell silent as she no longer responded to Magni shaking her. He winced... this was going to take a lot of explaining to her mother...

He certainly was in trouble when mama Julie had gotten back and found them in flagrante, even if he had only groped her breasts a little too much. She had opened the access panelling just below Ellie's breasts, forcing a reboot to clear out her overflows on her control panel, before sitting down to untangle the mess. "So you thought you'd experiment on my daughter while everyone else was out the house, Magni?"

Magni was supposed to keep his head down and just nod apologetically... but for some same reason, there was an alluring magic to the exposed controller beneath her ribs, faintly whirring and beeping as her system prepared to shut down and start back up in several minutes. He had run headlong into an overly common fetish the males in Little Sanctuary tended to have as a result of their circumstances: he was beginning to feel a bit of an ASFR attraction to Ellie's obvious distress, the faint whirring and beeping issuing from her limp body even as she resembled a hot chick in so many ways...

He had known Elliot was a robot, they had even hung together in the boy's room partially unclothed after a hard workout on the school field. Elliot's chest access panel had been slightly visible on the skin of his torso, but he'd felt nothing then. So why now?

"I... kind of got carried away... sorry Ms Julie..." Magni apologised. "I had... too much fun with her. We had too much fun..."

Julie sighed and looked away briefly to check on Ellie's blank face, her dainty lips opening and closing slightly in a loop. Julie then turned her attention back to Magni. "You need to be more careful around girls when you're at this age, Magni. they're discovering new things about themselves that they may not even have known about less than a year before. Did she give her consent?"

Magni nodded slowly. "I thought it was okay because she'd given it."

Julie sighed. "And did she ever tell you to stop?"

Magni nodded yet again.

Julie sat up and rubbed her forehead quietly. "Child... I think I need to introduce you to some concepts."

Magni learnt that concept wasn't a one and done deal, that someone could withdraw it midway... and when it happened, the correct thing to do was to back off and stop doing what one was doing, make them feel comfortable and not wrong in turning it down suddenly in midstream.

Julie's face softened as she watched Magni take in the lesson. Perhaps he'd be more careful with Ellie. There had been enough punishment. No need to involve his parents or Marcus at least this time... "So we've learnt something, okay?"

Magni looked up at Julie, she had been pretty generous about the whole thing. "Yes... Ms. Julie. I'll be more careful around your daughter."

Julie nodded. "look, I know you two have been best bros for a few years now. I'm not going to tell your parents or do anything else to you. But you have to understand in future - women are different from men. you can't get away with some things you MIGHT have been able to as a younger child. That's the most saddening, and exciting thing, about growing up. Learn to play the game. Respect others. Know their wants and needs and not force anything on them, even if it benefits them."

She patted Magni's hand. "At least she hasn't broken in any way I can't easily fix. Your punishment right now is to watch over Ellie till she wakes up. No more touching for today, even if she gives you her consent all the way. When she wakes, tell her to get her bra and blouse on fully, and the two of you get back to study. I'll give her the same lecture more or less, but right now, I need to cook dinner for my family..."

Julie got up slowly, making Magni blink as she exited the room, leaving him to just sit there and watch Ellie come back to life. The woman had a interesting concept of punishment, Magni mused, as he tried to deal with the new fetish he'd discovered and gotten into trouble over: watching a lifeless android girl slumped in her seat with her breasts and control panel widely exposed, thousand yard stare through him and the closet and wall behind him.

There had been no more words besides Julie's relayed commands to her when Ellie finally rebooted and came back to life, sitting up straight and looking at Magni. He told her to get her clothing back on, and they continued their lessons as if nothing had happened till dinnertime. but Magni eventually grew up respected by the ladies he'd charm down the road. all because he learnt how to properly handle consent. Nothing else would pass between the two sworn brothers turned sworn brother and sister for the rest of the final term at Ecole and after, and they kept in touch as good friends.

He also had the hots for exposed control panels and blank robotic stares from deactivated android women, but that was something that a lot of men fell into eventually if they got tangled up with the many robot girls of Little Sanctuary. And a tale for another telling.

Chapter 14 - A bit late for a nana, isn't it?

Marcus watched as Paul North got up to no good again in his office. "I swear, North, an adult woman doesn't need a Nana to overwatch her. You're just shooting the piss..."

Paul was fiddling with the innards of a project. "Well, you've seen how vulnerable she can be right now. At least till her sensory matrix settles down she needs a wingwoman to help cover her back." he paused... then tapped his chest with his microbar. "And her front too. Frankly, I wouldn't have done this if either of you or either of us-" He briefly thumbed back at Bellamy as he read a newspaper - "had been available to chaperone her to this visit to Bueno Vegas."

Paul rolled his eyes. 'Oh for fuck's sake, Ellie's rooming at the Eldevier. That place is secure as houses." He suddenly twigged onto something... "is that... an Analisse unit you're working on?"

North paused in the middle of welding something, and looked back out at Paul. "Yeah, what about it?"

Paul snapped. "That stuff is ANCIENT. Literally one of our first releases that we never revisited or updated! And you want a unit of it to guard Ellie? She's more likely to break and fail first."

Paul ohss and goes back to work. "Yeah, I'm backporting a few improvements and upgrades since 2040 to this unit. She'll be reliable as rain when I'm done. In fact, I'll bet you Ellie turns out less reliable instead."

Marcus foled his arms. "Name your bet."

Paul went on. "Well, an apology and a can of beer. that'll do. you can hand me both when we review the logs."

Marcus nodded. "Same terms here. Make sure she's ready by tomorrow, the slowliner leaves in two days." He noted as he left the room.

Paul nodded and welded something that sparked very hard, giving him a migraine from the bright flash. "Seamus would have worn protective goggles. Smart man..."

The gangway into the slowliner to Bueno Vegas extended out from the slowport, as the Y'tole Academy delegation got priority boarding after First Class and Business Class, a mix of eager beaver teens and calm, rational adults either thundering down the metal walkway or walking relaxedly.

Ellie was walking up the gangway relaxedly, and she had forced her eager beaver friend and newly inducted trainee Magni to match her pace, her dark blue backpack swaying slightly on her back. even as a woman, her preferences as Elliot still hadn't changed in some ways - she still loved shades of blue, including the sky blue ribbon that she still wore on the left side in her hair, the white and blue thigh high stockings on her legs, and the shimmering blue Y'tole dancing dress she was wearing.

Magni yelped. "We're heading to Bueno Vegas. We're chilling at one of the best resorts in Bueno Vegas. Cool! Cool!"

Ellie rolled her eyes. There was a mere few months in apparent age between the two of them and Magni was still so childlike. Now, to be fair, Ellie had spent six decades more as a boy that Magni hadn't, so perhaps it was unfair to compare their states of maturity. "Calm down, Magni, you'll only die tired before we land in Bueno Vegas."

Magni yelped back as he started walking backwards up the ramp. "Yeah yeah... and who's the actual adult who's with us?"

Ellie glanced over at a pulchritudinous older woman who was accompanying them, dressed up in a simple pair of jeans and a shirt that simply read "Bueno or No". Her hair coloration was a source of fascination for Ellie - most women had full heads of colored hair, or their hair had whited out. But this lady had a lovely head of black hair... with a small streak of white hair coming out the middle of the front of it. The lady had said it was a "Mallen streak" as they had made their first introductions only yesterday...

Ellie looked back at Magni. "She's Evelyn Arendt. My godaunt, really. Met her first time yesterday even. I didn't even know my Uncle Seamus had a wife..." She wrinkled her nose, her eyes half closing in a mix of puzzlement and outrage that Mr North had seen fit to send a second wingman/chaperone with her. She was an ADULT, goddammit.This was a major embarassment to her, as some of the younger class kids pointed at her and laughed at the three of them together...

Still, she was going to make the best of it, dammit. She had missed out the last time her parents had honeymooned at the Eldevier, and apparently its quality had improved even more. If she didn't enjoy this trip, it would be a failure! She punched the air slightly in front of herself.

Marcus and Julie Manners, and Paul North had come to see the kids off. "So... where DID you even find an Analisse unit anyways, Paul? I thought we stopped making them long ago." Marcus briefly asked as Julie went off to help them order a few coffees and some sandwiches to watch the departure of the slowliner by.

"Remember the first batch we handed out to our Original-era pioneers back in the day? That missing Unit 0001? Apparently Seamus commandeered it for a research platform. Something about its simplicity facilitating modifications and testing." Paul braced his head in his palms, his elbows rested on the tabletop.

Marcus still did not like the way Paul kept referencing Seamus as another person, when he was basically just Seamus trying to heavily tie down his worst impulses behind a false mask. Still, he kept going. "Define Modifications, and Testing."

Paul sat back in his chair. "Did some of the initial work that now goes into our Advanced Coital Knowledge Suite... Target acquisition, management and takedown software for short and middle range concerns, that never went anywhere when we could only make them throw stuff rather than actually fire a gun... Also, she might be the only bisexual Analisse unit we've ever programmed. Seamus always did have odd tastes."

Marcus had only one response for this right away... he just gaped at Paul... then he worked out exactly what he should be doing.

Julie came back with some coffees and tuna sandwiches to two perfectly grown older men fighting at a table, and sighed. The kids were acting like adults and the adults like kids in their little coiterie of friends and family. What was up with that? HONESTLY.

Having sat comfortably in "Allegedly Economy Class" Magni and Ellie found themselves sandwiching Evelyn. There was plenty of legroom between them and the next set of trio seats, so they got relaxed... Ellie tried to use the moment to get to know Evelyn better, "So... Evelyn... this your first time going to Bueno Vegas?"

Evelyn dropped her sunglasses a little to look Ellie eye to eye. "This isn't the type of shirt you buy anywhere else, frankly it's an embarassment if you're not going to Bueno Vegas." She indicated to her shirt, the silly painted "Bueno Or No" slogan on it probably some sort of old tourist gimmick or campaign. "Your uncle Seamus took me there for our honeymoon, Ellie." She leaned in closer, examining Ellie with an oddly discomforting interest. "You've sure shaped up well as a woman for someone who was a boy only two months ago, Ellie."

Ellie nodded, her nose growing slightly with pride if that was a thing in reality. "I still have a long way to go, Aunt Evelyn. I mean, most of my clothes are still boy's clothes. I've swapped all my boy panties for girl panties, at least."

Evelyn nodded as she motioned to a passing stewardessbot, asking her to get her a can of Sanctuary Cola. "That dress looks simple yet wonderful. I think your decision to join us on the other side was a good one, dear."

Ellie blushed and looked down at her lap even harder. "Erm... t.thanks."

Magni scowled a little as he watched the two of them hit it off. He had had plans to get closer to his sworn brother turned sister this trip, but instead, this Evelyn old coot was monopolizing her interest. He bit his thumbnail. He really HAD to do something about this...

The two parents and North had waved them off as the gangplank to the slowliner was retracted and lines gradually taken into the ship.

Marcus calmly and coldly summed up something he'd just been told long-windedly. "So what you're telling me, Mr North, is that you sent my daughter with a sex goddess who swings both ways, can swing a bat, and throws things in a way that actually makes people hurty."

Paul North nodded. "Pretty much."

Marcus asked the next obvious question of concern he came up with. "And you can guarantee that this won't backfire, or she won't run amok, or switch targets randomly to someone other than my own daughter?"

Paul North pondered this. He was taking a little too long, rather... "I can't."

Marcus had no response. Or rather, it took him a minute to formulate one.

Julie watched and sighed, pointing at the two grown men at each other's throats as a passerby stared at them. "I do NOT know these two idiots. Truth."

Evelyn noticed something and stood up from her chair. "Excuse me, kids," she smiled, patting at her oddly thick belt. "Need to use the Ladies..." She quickly excused herself and walked to the front of the deck and up the stairs.

Magni quickly used this time to reach out to Ellie. "Ellie, listen, about what happened two months back in your room..."

Ellie nodded slowly. "I didn't fully know my limits, Magni. We're still sworn brothers... siblings, I mean. That doesn't do anything to our ties. Still, I would appreciate if you knew how to ease up when asked to in future."

Magni grinned. "Actually, the Eldevier has a free movie theater for its guests. I was thinking maybe we could get together quietly one of these nights after a performance and watch a movie or two before we bed down for the night... just you, me, the screen and a box of popcorn?"

Ellie raised an eyebrow. "You're describing a date, Magni.After I've twirled myself mostly exhausted. Make it a night where we don't have a performace, we have quite a few of those, and I'm not feeling too outgoing myself to roam the Strip."

Magni sulked. "It wasn't a date. I just wanted to feel the bonding between the two of us like we used to have. Just two boys enjoying a good movie on comfy chairs with snacks. That's all."

Ellie put a hand to her mouth and considered this. Becoming female had skewed some of her perception... Perhaps there was genuinely nothing about having a movie date with Magni other than just having fun together. "I accept. Just a normal boys' night out at the movies, nothing more. broshake on it?" She reached out a hand across Evelyn's seat, Magni shaking her on it.

Evelyn had noticed three guys acting oddly on the stairs up to the lounge. She walked as if nothing was up, following them as they made their way to the protective doors isolating the cockpit from the rest of the slowliner. Her suspicions were confirmed when they all unpocketed a nice set of pistols and motioned to the door. She backed down a little and reviewed her objectives for at least this trip... Code: Select all

Unit Identity: Evelyn Arendt Technical Identifier: Arendtcore Analisse - 2095 version (custom Seamus and Bellamy backports) OBjECTIVES:

1. Ensure the safety of Ellie Manners and her immediate interests 2. Ensure the safety of Mother Ammi and Y'tole Academy school staff and students brought on this trip 3. Enhance the pleasure of Ellie Manners and her immediate interests on this trip Three potential hijackers taking this slowliner elsewhere was a potential affront to Priority 1. She helped herself to a few bottles of scotch since the bartender was kind of an absentee right now and started getting closer to them to acquire a few nice targets to throw them at.

There were two hard crack noises, followed by three suppressed but still quite loud shots, and then a third loud crack. The Crew Supervisor Paneer Pashmir had noticed and walked to the source of the noise.

Three of the guests had somehow gotten their hands on pistols and were planning to hijack the slowliner through the cockpit. Fortunately, someone had bottled them in the heads. Glenale Scotch 1975. Three bottles was a pretty expensive expenditure. But whoever had bottled them had saved the slowliner considerably more in terms of headaches.

Paneer got out his restraint tape. They would not be anywhere but the brig till the slowliner docked somewhere with authorities who could take them off the slowliner's hands

He silently thanked whoever had done the deed, they hadn't even bothered to gain any sort of attraction or reward for the deed.

Evelyn had locked herself in the comfy and spacious toilet, jerking weakly. She'd gotten two of the hijackers with the bottles, but the third had gotten three rounds into her before a bottle bonked him as well.

She twitched blankly as she sat on the bench provided for users of the toilet, a pretty silly extra, but one that now came in handly as she stuttered. ?Evelyn Arendt has has has experienced moderate damage to motor controls and and. exterior carapace." She announced blankly to herself as she ran self-diagnostics, frowning as she heard herself. On an original Original-era 2040s Arendtcore Analisse, three shots to the torso posed a high risk of ending its operational capability, but the Arendts had taken the 50 years of advances since her original creation to add a few survivability enhancements.

A modern heavily shielded memory drive had replaced her old optical disc reader, reducing the volume of space in her that could cause problems when hit. In fact, one of the shots had dinged the drive, but not damaged it, fortunately.

Some of that volume had further been taken over by some crazy new tech acquired recently by Arendtcore's Military Division that Paul North had been skeptical about, but here it was proving its worth. She watched as the three bullets that had entered her body now exited, one by one, into one of her hands, a pale blue goo repairing her systems and broken wiring, before manifesting as a near-matching HAF material into the holes, only slightly thinner and not immediately obvious under the naked eye.

She resumed her normal function, her hands smoothly pulling her shirt over her head, causing her pendulous breasts to bounce a little as she had not worn a bra, before reaching into her belt pouch to pull out a spare shirt she had kept just in case of issues on the flight. She had expected a little child to barf on her, or maybe a stewardessbot to spill coffee on it. She hadn't expected three holes busted through it with a slow-liner -safe low PP- caliber pistol,

She wrapped the bullets in the holed T-shirt and wore the replacement, a mostly exact copy of the same embarassing "Bueno or No" shirt she'd boarded with, before binning the bullets and torn shirt in a ball into the micro incinerator near the sink. That done, she considered her work complete and carefully walked back to her seat as if nothing had happened.

The rest of the flight passed with minimal issues, the seats reclining into decent if narrowish beds every night. Ellie had heard from her dad gushing about how First Class was amazing compared to this, but even this was good. The back seat mini-screens had a nice selection of movies to watch, and sensing an opportunity to make things up to Ellie, Magni had gently persuaded Evelyn to trade seats with her briefly, so they could combine screens together and watch a 4 Stooges movie, laughing quietly as they ate nuts. It wasn't popcorn, but one made do.

During the switchover, though, Magni pointed something out. "Funny though, I could have sworn the N in that "No" on your shirt was red, not blue."

Evelyn dismissed him on this, but as the two sworn siblings giggled and popped nicely roasted nuts in their mouths, Evelyn's focus briefly switched from Ellie to Magni. The boy had been perceptive - her shirts HAD been subtly different there. In fact, she hadn't realised till she compared her current view with her memories of the old shirt.

She would have to keep an eye out on the boy. While Priority 3 of her mission was kind of "meh, we can skip it if things get bad", she appreciated the possibility that Magni might be able to help with Priority 3...

Chapter 15 - A trip to the arcade / A brewing confrontation

Mother Ammi gathered the group together in the Rizzale Cafe in the third floor of the Eldevier. They had just arrived after Lunch Buffets had been cleared away, but seeing as how the group had been well fed, exercised, and rested on the slowliner's week-long journey to Bueno Vegas, she didn't think it mattered that they were now getting only small cups of tea and tarts for the briefing.

"Well, here we are. We'll be performing at the Portugal Theater here in The Eldevier. It's one of the smaller theaters in this place, but there's enough room for a proper group performance. Senior students will do light practice of the routine we perfected back home and on the slowliner's gym floor. juniors will get today off... maybe go out on a excurson. Soft launch performance in two days on Wednesday, we start running a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday night performance every week for four weeks from next week onwards, before we sail home again. Hopefully this gets people talking about our style of Y'tole, and gives all of you a good experience of the kind of dance we used to do back when I was young in Gdanzeland..."

Evelyn raised a hand. "The kids will be bored or potentially at risk of wandering into danger. We've put the juniors from our school and those you invited on a vote and they want to try out the arcades here. Apparently the Eldevier has a surprising number of music and dance games, and they'd like to give them a run through. Our room passes can get us half an hour wilding through those machines. Acceptable?"

Mother Ammi looked uncertain. Those games were certainly not in the same vein as the dances and music they usually played but... She turned briefly to one of her old faithfuls standing by her side and conferred briefly, before nodding. "Acceptable. Half an hour today of fun. but no running around wildly or leaving the Eldevier's grounds, and tomorrow they start practicing again."

There was a simultaneous mix of cheers and groans from the younglings on hearing this mix of good and bad news.

Pascal Equitor was the leader of the Eldevier's Rhythm Mafia. The Eldevier had lots of guests who regularly revisited the place, and while their reasons for doing so varied from the casinos to the food palaces to the arcade, for Pascal and his small coterie of groupies it was the music and rhythm section of the arcade...

He smiled as they walked into the arcade, heading over to their favorite part of the arcade... which was closed off... a large group of rugrats were commandeering the place for some private event, and they weren't getting in... This wasn't the worst part of the problem - as he watched, one of them somehow beat a high score he had put up proudly weeks ago... High scores the Rhythm Mafia had placed on the dance machines and the drums were also falling down.

He was incensed... He reached for the rope bounding off the section, intent on showing these whippersnappers a thing or two.

A feminine and slightly wrinkled hand grabbed his wrist. Attached to that hand was a comely woman with flowing shoulder length hair and a motherly yet oddly sensual face, smiling back at the middle-aged man himself. Her pulchritudinous figure was wrapped in a light fluffy hot pink sweater and tight jeans that clung to her legs and hips. "My name is Evelyn... Sorry about today. these younglings have worked hard for ages and today was their play day... Why don't we play another game elsewhere in the arcade instead... Magni, take care of these kids for me for a bit..."

Pascal suddenly didn't feel angry at all... he felt... different...

He had grown enamoured of this MILF who'd stopped him from breaking the rope and ruining her charges' day. She'd handed him a pamphlet, proclaiming the short four week tour of Y'Tole Academy on the Portugal Theater's stage. then asked if he'd like to try his hand at axe throwing. The Rhythm Mafia had dispersed a little to try the other games of the arcade. And he had also prided himself as a dab hand back home in Oregon. Championship thrower of his town and northern region even.

Pascal puffed his chest out and nodded.

Evelyn had detected the anger in Pascal Equitor as he was about to interrupt the group booking they had placed for the music and rhythm arcade games, walking over to him. As she did, her body started to exude faint traces from her pheromone system, a carefully selected blend of slight arousal and calming pheromones, slightly scented with cherries. This man was about to break with her Priority 2 of protecting the Y'tole Academy's staff and students, She quickly considered her options. Code: Select all

Target: Angry man + 6 possible associates Possible Aim: Disruption of party for Y'Tole Academy Juniors Problem: Interference with Priority 2 as set.

Solutions:

1. non-lethal incapacitation of grouping - WARNING: may cause commotion. Not recommended 2. lethal incapacitation of grouping - WARNING: may cause serious problems going forward 3. distraction - other arcade games 4. distraction - quiet coitus in shadows - WARNING: not matching to desired long-term outcomes 5. distraction - quick mutual tea time 6. ignorance of Target - WARNING: Unlikely to produce Ideal Results it didn't take more than a few seconds for her to smile and offer the middle-aged man sublimation of his urge to compete through other arcade games... a quick analysis of his han suggested a slight mix of rhythm gaming and axe throwing were his common go tos, and that he worked hard manual stuff back home - construction perhaps?

It was probably a bad habit from her husband that she had picked up, but she wanted to cut him down to size and minimize further chances of confrontation between his grouping and hers, as well as shatter his ego...

"How about some axe throwing?"

Pascal was wilting as the woman was throwing another axe perfectly right through the tiny dead center of the holographic target and into the toughened backboard. How... how was this woman so good at this game? First the rugrats were taking away his pride atop the high scores at the musical section.... now this woman Evelyn was outmatching him at something he'd won championships with. Every throw of hers had been true and would have killed a man or beast in actual combat.

He shivered. She was... sexy to him... Suddenly any thoughts of being angry faded and he just watched her throw more and more axes, grinding out a ridiculous number of points above him before... she missed... Had it been, deliberate? She had glanced and smiled at him as her axe hit the zero-space between two close targets, ending her third run of five on the axe throwing game.

Evelyn sighed. "I missed. I must be off my game today." Pascal coughed a little. If this was her off-day game, what was going to happen when she REALLY wanted to win!?

Pascal took a deep breath and started throwing his own axes on Round four of the game...

The stranger glanced at the two of them from the upper floors, using his jacket and fedora to minimise his profile... His queen was blowing the potential target she had sighted away, figuratively killing him slowly on the arcade floor in order to quietly keep her Priority 2 from being blown.

Seamus smiled through his sunglasses. Paul North and him were allies in one body for the moment, but he feared that maybe one day they would be at loggerheads in a way that left only one of them around. But still he had sensed the worry in Seamus when he'd heard that Evelyn had been injured, and closed his eyes. "Go to her." and then he'd been left standing where Paul was, wearing his mask of a face. "You have twenty four hours in Bueno Vegas, Seamus. I suggest you use those hours before I take back control." was the last thing he'd heard from Paul before he went silent.

He despised owing his friend-enemy a favor. but he had let him go to Evelyn, and now he owed him a favor. Still, he needed it - he was genuinely worried. Three bullets into her frame during the slowliner flight according to telemetry from her was worrying, and there hadn't been enough info on the limited burst to ascertain how serious the damage was.

He'd gotten the first fast copter out of Little Sanctuary, trading comfort for brute speed and arriving just an hour after the slowliner had ended its week-long sail into the town.

Paul had his own queen: a flighty yet surprisingly reliable robotic clone of Aymee he'd christened Faymee. A young woman of illusions and wiles, not a brute fighter. This was his. An ancient Original-era clunker carefully dusted off after years in storage from youth dalliances, brought up to modern standards, and capable of going toe to toe in a UFC cage or a medium range engagement where throwing shit at the enemy was a viable option.

He briefly fantasised about Faymee being slowly seduced by Evelyn. Evelyn was bi, and while she would service any red-blooded man if absolutely needed to accomplish her aims, she could also turn her weapon of a body against any woman.

He'd checked up which room she was in, but there was no hurry to interrupt. Let her do her work, have her fun...

Pascal was in love with the goddess next to him. She had apologised, saying she was taken, but that had been okay, even as she had roundly pussywhipped him at his own axe throwing as well. Watching her comely figure walk off back to the music and rhythm section, he ordered another round of axes...

The Rhythm Mafia would soon have another leader. And he would become the axe throwing champion of the Free American Union. But that is another story for another time.

Three hours later, the children had all been entertained, fed, and were snoring in their respective rooms, two to a room. Evelyn had been bunked amongst them in an entire room to herself - one of the conditions that had been set the Y'tole Academy as a condition of sponsorship of the trip by The Company. 1005 was a simple stateroom with a decent view of Lake Vegas and the BV strip, and a decent sized bed that could fit one or two people. As with all the other rooms, there was a cubby hole in which a standard recharging point had been placed, and it was in this that Evelyn had chosen to rest - the axe throwing game had necessitated a little more effort from her body, on top of the failed hijack she'd stopped, and while her 30-day battery still had plenty of charge to last the entire trip, she wanted more of a safety margin built up while nobody was watching...

The door sounded. three knocks. She got off the recharging point and walked over to open the door. It was someone she'd never seen before in jeans and jacket and a fedora. Some old man she'd never met before. "Excuse me, do I know you?"

"Evelyn, command word: allow entry."

Evelyn slightly opened her mouth to protest this, but her body suddenly moved on its own, allowing the man to walk into her room. Old programming had whirred to life on the words, matching up to very old biometrics, forcing her consciousness to watch as the man looked around.

Seamus smiled and looked at Evelyn, thinking about the times hed had with her years ago. "Evelyn... command word: maintenance."

Marcus, Aymee, Seamus and Bellamy had still been so idealistic and young as they stared at the first units to come off the assembly line. The conquest of Minneapolis by Arendtcore had barely begun in the northwestern most corner of the state, the company having barely established itself and its corporate town. They seemed very pleased with themselves and their fledgling staff about what had been accomplished. Soon these new Analisse units would be sent off around the small town to members of the Originals who had followed them into this endeavor without expectation or guarantee of future success, a small thank you gift to them...

Not all of the units were for them of course. The brotherhood had grinned together and carefully wheeled the very first unit from the production in front of Seamus. "Unit 0001, your honor... all yours."

Seamus wrinkled his nose. "Funny, I hadn't planned on taking any of these androids for myself."

Aymee slammed a hand hard enough against his back. "Seamus, my man, you're the oldest of us. You're getting on. I think it's time you stopped being a loner. And so do the rest of us agree on this. Go on. Take her."

Seamus examined the contents wrapped in transclucent plastic: a naked, pale beige skinned woman, with a gentle face framed in shoulder length black hair, her eyes still closed, her body still awaiting its first commands and configurations. Pink tipped nipples atop bombshells, curves all over the place. She was slightly bulky, but then they still hadn't worked out even the first version of Weight Reduction that future Arendtcore units would have in their designs.

He sighed and acquiesced. "Fine. get me a jalopy." Seamus hadn't splurged on the limo yet - he was just a overold frat boy two years out of college - and didn't own a jalopy - that had been in the Housing and Familes programme only much later since everyone was just ten minutes' walking from the budding Complex. "This girl is going to be hard to get home."

Seamus sat in his living room, having brought the Analisse Unit 0001 back home. It was now parked in front of the sofa, Seamus having removed the usual coffee table in favor of smaller half-sized coffee tables at the sofas instead.

He sighed and fished out his Fixit-microbar before carefully unzipping the bag that held the unit... then gasped.

Seamus had not had much attraction to women - or to men even. He was a man who preferred the attraction of working on a engineering problem, fixing a quandry in steel and plastic and silicone... but something about this robot he'd personally worked on, putting the necessary servos and sensors and thought processors into, had made this different...

He quietly shifted himself to behind the sleeping maiden, carefully using his microbar to open the access panel just above the cleft of her buttocks to expose its controls... They were still using tactile controls mainly, the only truly dynamic display in the small control panel being a small 40x96 character LCD screen. He briefly admired the simplicity of the design that Marcus had helped him put together for the control panel, before taking a deep breath and flicking the power switch toggle.

A voice synth carefully trained and programmed on the voices of several really nice-sounding women came on. "Unit, 0001. Arendtcore Analisse. Collectors' Edition Batch. First bootup detected. What is my name?"

Seamus watched the lips of the plastic doll move and shift. This was before Malt-Eisner had collapsed and spilt its Imagineers all over the place, but even now she had a surprisngly real feeling to her facial twitches, aided by the one or two Malt-Eisner veterans whom the company had lured to the company's R&D section. She had a certain look to her... a slightly motherly feel. Like someone who could squat down and hug a child lovingly... Flashes of his mother, always smiling as they sat together with Mr Arendt, not caring briefly that they were either the side-chick or the main wife in a oddly simple polycule of two women and one man with too much virility. Seamus' mom had black hair too...

"Evelyn. Your name is Evelyn Arendt."

"Acknowledged. Unit Identifier burnt as Evelyn Arendt. What is my owner's name, and What is my role?" The machine continued blankly talking.

"Wife Wife to Seamus Arendt." Seamus didn't need to think too much between having her as a mother or a wife. He didn't have kids anyway, wasn't planning to for a long while.

"Acknowledged. Unit configuring as Evelyn Arendt... wife... of Seamus Arendt. What color would you like my irises to be?" The machine continued.

Seamus thought carefully. He'd liked blue a lot. but what type of blue would go well with this android? Nothing too deep, like hex code 000080... it had to be something more real and more likely...then he decided. something light, almost edging into the territory of grey and green as well...

"Unit 0001, set iris color to hex code 5F9EA0..."

The unit whirred faintly before opening its eyes. They were doll-like, the Company still being years away from discovering how to fake actual human fibrovascular tissue. The ridges surrounding the pupil through which the camera sensors viewed the world flexed narrower and wider briefly before cycling through pure red, white, blue, and green, before switching to the tone Seamus had specified.

"Eye color is now... hex code 5F9EA0. Is this acceptable?"

Seamus got up to look the android in the eyes. There were much tighter limits to Arendtcore's portfolio of tech in those early days, but what he saw satisfied him. He loved the look of that face... "Yes."

"Accepted. Unit will now configure as ... Evelyn Arendt. Wife personality..." The unit closed its eyes one last time as Unit 0001, whirring audibly as Seamus stood closely in front of her, his breath hitting her shimmering pre-Human Analogue Flesh silicone... Then it opened those eyes again, focusing and unfocusing, before whispering... "Seamus...?"

Seamus nodded. The next thing that happened utterly surprised him, as she closed her eyes and kissed him deeply, forcing him to step back a few steps in surprise and almost falling. She was very... impetuous indeed. He closed his eyes and leaned into the kiss. May as well enjoy it...

It took only a short while before she was looming over him in the bedroom, sitting atop his haunches as he sat against the bedboard of his bed. She was very nicely shaped, perfect for him even. Seamus briefly suckled on her teats, causing her to give off a warm moan lustily. She gently rode him, bucking her hips as she gradually inserted his cock into her pussy. The thing felt warm and moist and nice to be in.

Seamus had engineered much of this, but previously it had been just a professional interest in giving his anxious followers into the breach some form of succor when they returned home after work. Marcus Manners had done excellent work sculpting the base body and several base facial forms, and the company's fledgling Artistics branch had carefully worked over each machine, carefully painting the body and inserting eyelashes and brows, sourcing the finest lace-front wings that gave the illusion that the hair had grown in over the years rather than just been clipped on with magclips in the scalp area of the android's head. His younger brother Bellamy had given the Aphroditic finishing touches, bringing years of after-school programming of AI girlfriends for overly monied rich boys to creating his best AI girlfriend who just happened to need extra modules for realworld movement, sensors and responses...

Sure it was a gift he'd helped build... but Seamus mused, he was in love with this gift. No, he was in love with this woman.

He briefly palmed his face. It was okay for a roving cleaning machine to roam around with minimal or no ornamentation atop its casing, but this machine was every bit a woman. He NEEDED to get her some clothing soon. Then she started bucking him harder, and he forgot that for the moment...

She serviced him thoroughly for an hour or two, before she started beeping and whirring audibly. "I feel... sleepy..." Evelyn announced as she slowed down, sitting atop Seamus' lap. He still wanted, no, needed more from her, but he recognised the signs from the work he had done in building the Analisse prototypes... She probably had had just a little charge for in-factory tests, but Evelyn had wrung all of it out pleasuring him.

He sighed, carefully easing him to his right onto the bed, her back to him, before using his microbar to open her control panel up and examining the readouts. She was definitey just a few drips away from turning into an inert doll again... Seamus flipped the power switch, causing her to fall silent for the night, before carefully plugging a standard female-plug 280V standard cable into her and watching the analog meter that read off her power reserves twitch gently as she began to recharge... Back in the day, they hadn't worked out safe high-powered inductive recharging and shared it with the world openly, so this was the compromise...

He thought for a moment, then carefully eased her so that her front faced him, eyes half open in her powered down mode, kissing her thick lips before turning the lights off and smiling.

Perhaps he really was done being a loner.

And perhaps he was. For a whole year, he'd started having a better work life balance. whatever was still on the table at 5pm was next day's work for Seamus almost all the time. He rushed home for reasons then. The two of them had gone on long walks around the neighbourhood park, shopped together for groceries and things that the Seamus Arendt home needed.

They had danced together under the moonlight on the lawn to quietly playing audio player music. They had laughed at funny movies over a bowl of fruit.

The company hadn't started programming the androids to do the full basic Cooking/Cleaning/Cardio/Callisthenics/Coitus thing yet, but cleaning was obviously a thing after years of making cleaning machines that just happened to be scuttling little things rather than humanoids of any sort.

Seamus had enjoyed watching her mop and clean the house on his offdays,looking at her carefully rip open yet another prepacked meal and dump its contents into a pot to reheat and serve the both of them, her mouth not taking more than a few morsels as an act of mutual humanity each meal as the digester technology was still highly inefficient and slow in its infancy...

And coitus was definitely a thing. Bellamy had insisted on hooking up with Funboys and looking into their archives... surprisingly enough, the Mel-Eisner Imagineers they'd hired were eager to come along for the ride, and they had built up a nice corpus of sexual motions and responses from analysing years of porn.

The magnate of the Funboys house, Ethan Creed, had blinked later when they had sent him a customised dark-skinned Analisse loaded with the resulting archive of sexual data as well as the archives as well as a thank you note. The man didn't even have a working body below the belt, having lost every bit of feeling and motion beneath the belt in a sudden polio superstrain infection that had overwhelmed the vaccine somehow. Still, he very much appreciated the gift, and for years after till his death, he still treasured his girls all equally as he always had, but Nuuna Creed (as she had been christened) had stayed by his side during the daytime and evening parties, and warmed his bed at night, still surprising him in ways that aroused and made him happy even without the use of any of his three legs.

it was this corpus of lovemaking data that Evelyn put to work on Seamus - how certain elite and classic porn starlets and experienced workhorses acted in bed, how they put the moves on men, how they responded to touch. Her body was that of a curvaceous goddess. He knew the details of everything that had gone into how Evelyn made tender love to him, he knew the cards were heavily stacked against him in terms of how he could respond to her... but he hadn't cared. He'd loved it so much in fact.

Aymee teased him once. "You certainly look healthier since we gave you Evelyn, Seamus."

The old Seamus would have scowled. But he smiled instead. "I'm living healthier. I'm eating better. Hell, Ichigo-san, I'm sleeping MUCH better. Why wouldn't I be healthier and happier?"

Aymee didn't try to even put together a snapback, simply patting him. "That is good news to all of us. We need you here too... Keep hanging around, we need you around for stuff like this..." She said, pushing a stack of legal documents for him to review and sign.

Sadly though, this was still before The Kindred had touched his life, and eventually the psychopathy he'd carefully managed with only leashes by good friends and family still reared its head again. He started taking longer hours at work again. Yelled more at people who couldn't meet his expectations. Stopped caring for folks by feeling and had to rely carefully on the numbers and on Marcus and Aymee occasionally panicking over something he told them he was about to do in the company.

It had come to a head when he'd even stopped caring for Evelyn. Part of him still loved her, but the psychopathy had dampened that warm aspect of him. She was now regularly found slouched over in the house, the back of her dress partially opened up so that he could access her control panel and flip her switch for some quiet in Seamus' storm-filled head rather than the warmth and emotion his wife promised her with her Cadet Blue eyes, her mouth parted slightly in silence, the promise of her embrace and love left to cool on the bed like a forgotten roast meal.

It had only been a matter of time before Seamus coldly benched her, carefully wrapping her body in its protective bag like another experiment stopped and placed her in his little warehouse next to all the other androids and components he'd stocked up.

It had been a curious combination that had changed his mind about Evelyn once again, warming him up to her like the old days....

The Kindred had been helpful. Some of their agents had helped formulate some prescription for his psychopathy to tamp its worse effects, letting him feel and act more human again. Initially, some of the medications had been exremely off-label and potentially deadly, and only his gungho attitude and lunacy had allowed him to take them. Years of work had gradually reduced the potential deadliness and the doses needed, and now there was a pharma firm of suspicious origins hawking a anti-Psychopathy drug for easy control of the issue, now taken by millions of psychopaths around the world. All they had to do was admit they had a problem with the disorder and they could get hold of it for cheap. The company in question had clearly prioritised making the world a better place over profits, and stayed private.

Seamus briefly paused reading the logs from Evelyn's inner robot to take his daily Cyphamate, then continued to review everything that had occurred since he'd sent Evelyn onto the slowliner with Ellie Manners up till his current visit to her in her hotel room.

He looked up and smiled at the perfectly still robot, standing blankly in front of him with all her clothes taken off. Every inch the same as the day he had first flicked her switch, just aged a little bit in parts to look older.

The Mallard streak had also been something he'd added when he'd ripped off the magstuds for her wig to place in a new form of wig that suckled from a small pouch of keratinous concentrate to grow lifelike hair consistently, hair that could be styled and cut like real human hair, that would look like real hair even beneath a microscope. Smaller patches of the same wig tech had also been applied to her eyelashes and eyebrows, but running at a much slower pace just fast enough to tamp normal wear and tear.

Seamus had added a few furrows and wrinkles to her face. nothing heavy, just enough to suggest that she'd been around the block several times, despie the fact that his previous neglect of her had come only two or three years after he'd first fallen into love with her. She had been frozen for so long, a museum piece carefully stowed in its protective bag without any action for decades.

As he proceeded to carefully lay her down and start working on the bullet holes with a binary-formulated Human Analogue Flesh patcher kit, he regretted this prolonged neglect a little. It had been easy enough to fall back into love with her... He needed a research platform to put new tech on, and her simplicity teased him.

Seamus had replaced her silicone flesh with HAF, her simple 6000-word optical drive and dumb-level intellect with modern processors and memory drives reinforced against possible hard violence. She could think around any threat, and even throw things hard at it hard enough to potentially disable or break them.

He'd swapped her lace front magclipped wig with simulated keratin-like growing hair. He'd replaced her eyes with actual fibrovascular-like units with higher resolution, her digester was now a full-meal model (albeit one that still couldn't give more than a slight jolt to the battery and was mainly used to power warming elements throughout her flesh).

Her face was now moved by the same Mel-Eisner-compatible animatronics and data as any other modern Arendtcore android, though he'd retained that rosy, plump facial sculpt that had warmed his heart.

A self-repair goo now pumped throughout Evelyn's flesh and around critical elements, ready to diffuse into stopgap components and repair patches for any damage to Evelyn. As a bonus, the pumping resembled a heartbeat and breathing more than the basic micro-PC he'd first designed into the Analisse that scooped up the processor load status of the unit and translated it crudely into playback of a looping audio fileset.

The 2095 model Analisse (only one unit, never to be publicly released, or so Seamus was thinking), was far ahead on the curve of anything he'd ever made in his life. And he loved Evelyn so much for being this wonderful thing, but also for what she was causing to surge in his heart.

The repairs effected (he would undent the armored carapace around her memory and processors when she returned to the Complex), he carefully opened Evelyn's back panel and checked her readouts. Much of the old control panel had been replaced, though he'd kept in the old power switch toggle, albeit now wired to additional circuits to control how it cut power rather than being a hardwired switch... Evetything looked good.

He closed the panel back up, and breathed deeply. "Evelyn, Command Word: Wife." The model was old enough that Bellamy hadn't gotten hooked yet on the Bioshock games and fooled around with Would You Kindly on this unit, and he'd retained that same peculiar mark of antiquity for Evelyn.

It had been fifty years since he'd accessed this part of her properly, Seamus noted. He wondered how he would respond to all that time as they sat there together in the hotel room.

Evelyn woke and blinked slowly... then watched the room before noticing Seamus was next to her... She smiled and leaned to one side, kissing him gently. "Seamus, I've missed you so much. Have you been busy?" She didn't explictly tell him how long it had been since she was last powered on as a wife to him, but she'd felt it. It had been a very long time.

Seamus smiled back, hugging her in the dim lights of her hotel room. The lust overtook them, and soon Seamus' hastily grabbed clothes from his home had been strewn on the floor as the bed creaked. Just like fifty years ago, Evelyn had insisted on starting by carefully fellating his cock to help it rise, before shifting atop him to use her pussy for the rest of the job, his shaft parked against the warm moistness of her pink vulva before sliding all the way into the shaft behind it.

He gasped a little. He was REALLY out of touch as a prolonged incel and self-denier of carnal pleasures, but now he'd remembered how powerful his Evelyn was as a sexual goddess... years of professional porn expertise and sexual knowledge in her corpus spun up in place of the programs that had allowed her to disable a hijacker and a middle-aged music gamer fanatic with minimal fuss, as her generously proportioned body swayed and wobbled seductively. Seamus grabbed a breast, causing Evelyn to moan loudly as he suckled on it. Even without actual milk flowing, it felt good in his mouth.

They stayed like this for a long while, before he motioned to Evelyn to stop, which she complied to. As they sat together, her heft parked above his haunches, they shared a long overdue kissing session, tongues entwined and enjoying each other. His perfect queen... Seamus briefly fantasised about a potential scenario where he and Paul needn't sacrifice either of their lovely queens. A peculiar polycule... If it came down to it, he would be content to fade away if that meant Evelyn could continue functioning as she was.

He shook the thought out of his head. That was bullshit, they were going to clash one day, and nothing would stay unbroken, he feared.

Evelyn noticed the worry on his face. "Are you okay, Seamus?"

Seamus nodded back. Her intellect had been dramatically increased, but he still didn't want to risk overloading her with that concern of his. "Right now, everything is perfect." He looked at the window and stood up, motioning Evelyn to join him in watching the Lake Vegas and Strip in their night form, the glow of myriads of lights on the Strip and the occasional ficker of something firing up in the faintly aquamarine glow of the waters of the lake forming a beautiful picture.

Evelyn whispered. "Isn't it perfect?"

Seamus nodded in silence and joined her for a while longer. He knew he was almost out of his 24 hours of release from the cage that Paul had released him from. Soon, the mask would go back on, the respectable lieutenant manager tasked by the crazed world-roaming billionaire and sponsor of myriad causes would return to the office after a day off doing 'stuff'.

He briefly fished out his workpad and reviewed it one more time. Marcus had had concerns about Priority 3 as he had set it for Evelyn's trip to Bueno Vegas, something about "dangerously reinterpretable wording", but Seamus had seen nothing on the flight or taxijalopy ride to the Eldevier to consider it more than a ongoing concern and not trouble looming.

Seamus put his workpad back in his jacket, then said "Evelyn, command word: resume set objectives. terminate wife mode."

Evelyn purred softly. "I will always l-l-love you, S-S-S- Locking up "Wife" Partition. Enabling "Objectives" Partition..." She blankly stated, her big breasts mounding in big circles against the glass of the window as she stood there half bent down, her hands braced against the windows. Her body was now filing away the past few hours of bliss and loving warmth, soon there would be no trace of it left in her.

Evelyn continued whirring audibly as Seamus calmly put his clothes back on, leaving Evelyn parked against the window as if she was in a daze at how beautiful the Bueno Vegas area was at night. He kissed her deeply on the cheek one last time as she mumbled nonsensically, caressing her perfect body and watching the way it mounded and flowed, before he walked out of the hotel room and shut the door.

Evelyn blinked. It was somehow night already. She briefly looked at the watch on its band on her right arm, noted that it had been five hours since the arcade trip and dinner... There was a huge gap between her return to her room and her brief discussion with Magni on making girls like Ellie happy during dates... and then this - total nudity, perched half bent against the thick glass of the stateroom's windows, looking out at Bueno Vegas' near-entirety.

She noticed she had cried a little. Also: the three bullet holes in her torso had been carefully mended even without her return back to the Complex. Something had happened in the past hours that had repaired that damage, as well as made her... happy? ecstastic even? She tried to remember exactly what, but it had merely resulted in error messages that told her she was referencing something that wasn't relevant to her current need to protect and enhance the trip Ellie and the Y'tole Academy were going on. She tried a few more times, before letting go. She was happy for the first time since she'd woken up to Paul North looming over her naked frame in the Complex two weeks ago,telling her she had a task... That was perhaps enough.

She took a deep breath and sniffed. The smell of a man was around her. Perhaps coitus had been involved. Not fucking. Actual love-making. She wondered about the circumstances briefly, before she decided to go for a shower before bed. People would ask questions if she smelt like this - not conducive to her mission, she assumed.

Still, she filed the data away. It did feel good and she wanted to recall it when she started feeling lost again.

Chapter 16 - A Roaring Performance / Uncertainity

The soft-opening performance of the Academy was extremely well attended, with the place chock full to the rafters with members of the audience.

"Perhaps we should have booked the larger theater." One of the other principal dancers had noted to Mother Ammi. She looked back at her, smiling. "I didn't want to get a portion of cake that was too large to eat. But it does appear I can stomach much more cake," She observed, patting her stomach lightly as she tapped her cane twice on the ground. "Still, I'm a bit anxious, our star performer IS transgender, and you know the kind of shit that can attract..."

Ellie Manners smiled at Ammi. "Let them come, Ammi. Let them come to protest, then let them watch something beautiful weaved from my hands and my feet." Then she deadpanned. "or you know, let the Eldevier's security throw the asses out of at least the theater. or if they're badly behaved enough, even the Eldevier proper."

"If they have bookings on the rooms here, that would be a damn shame." Magni watched, sitting on one of the crates backstage with them.

Ellie Manners rolled her eyes as she checked her choice of dancing dress for the night. Midnight blue, but studded with a myriad of cheap crystals to make it seem like she was wearing the night and taking it right into the theater. Her old blue ribbon was in her hair as it always was... "It's called responsibility. check your bar mitzvah book, Magni." She looked to Mother Ammi, who agreed with her silently and wordlessly... the stage was ready. "Folks, let's show the world what it means to be Y'tole dancers." Ammi announced. "Places. Music. Let's go!"

Ellie offered one last set of prayers. To Y'mma. To her lost friend Van'iia. To the Goddess of Existence, whose intereference she had felt many times at the worst times of her life as a young boy. To whatever deities protected androids and transgendered folks... Then she checked that the blue ribbon that had become part of her all these years was welded into her hair as always... and walked out on her wrapped feet.

This had been a nice high profile event, an opening for a major dance performance in the heart for Bueno Vegas. Would be a shame to disrupt it, but that was the point of her attendance, as well as those of several other folks sprinkled in the crowd. She clutched the protest sign in her backpack, hidden just out of sight, ready to be deployed. She'd written a strident message. "Your star dancer is a BOY, NOT A GIRL". Everyone had learnt about Ellie's personal history (the sanitized version that Arendtcore had snuck into the open) that included a tale about how a boy had truly found himself and become a woman, and while most folks would have just shrugged or even supported it, she was not one of them...

She clasped the sign tightly as Ellie strode onto stage, looking majestic and mysterious as she curtseyed to the crowd... Almost time to-

She suddenly felt a chilling, glazing fear in her bones, as a middle aged woman she hadn't noticed suddenly came from behind her and nudged her face closely to hers, whispering softly. "We don't need to do that here... put it away, and just enjoy the show... oh... kay?" It was singsong and cheerful, but something screamed inside her to take her advice, and she put away her backpack

Evelyn walked away from the protester. She had asked the Eldevier security overseeing the event to flag any potential troublemakers, and then walked to each of them with a slight puff of pheromones to ask them not to bother the performance. It was strange how a little fear scent and a word of advice softly whispered could cut them off entirely, Evelyn mused, as she walked away and back into the backstage after dealing with the last of six the crew had noticed. If they spotted any more folks like that, she would be told.

She sat back on her dinky little chair and watched the dancers for the performances stride into the stage, then the music as it began to play and rouse them into the fleeting dance. It was beautiful, and she had the best seats in the house, despite the lack of decent comestibles by her side due to regulations from the Eldevier...

Three hours later, the performance was over. After two encores, everyone had filed backstage to take a load off before their return to their respective rooms.

Magni's eyes were literally sparkling as he watched his sworn sister walk in, sweaty and tired. "House. blown down." He grinned, borrowing the old way Elliot had often spoken. He gave a thumbs up, handing her a towel. "I want to be able to do that too..."

Ellie grinned. "You just started. I've been doing this for five years. Keep practicing and you'll be me too... maybe at a slightly older age, but at least you'll have started." She motioned to him and gave him a firm hug. "Thanks for keeping the lights on. Don't think I didn't notice your work backstage."

Magni blushed. It was true he'd been assigned duty on the spotlights, but that was the same as any junior was expected to do while waiting their turn in the limelight.

Ellie paused... checking her power reserves briefly... then suddenly, she asked. "I don't suppose you want to go on a small movie date with me? Let's skip the celebratory dinner. I've seen the menu, and it's too heavy for me, I fear."

Magni blinked. "But shouldn't we be celebrating this great start?"

Ellie half-bent towards Magni as he sat at the controller for the lights. "This is my way of celebrating. It's been three months since I switched and grew up fully. three months of focusing entirely on me and this dance troupe... I think it's time I rewarded you for your patience in waiting for me while I got through all this shit."

Magni blushed harder and nodded. "Well, if you insist."

Mother Ammi was perfectly okay with it when Ellie had told her she wished to skip the troupe's dinner. "Personally I'd rather you have stayed, but sworn siblings who neglect each other are the worst. go fix it."

Ellie nodded and thanked her, then yelled at Magni. "Let me grab a shower and change.You too. See you uside the door in ten minutes."

Magni fidgeted anxiously.... He'd had a heart to heart talk with Evelyn about trying to please a girl, and having expected some magical sure win ideas, had merely wound up with principles. Evelyn had hugged him and assured him that the important thing was that any choice he made, was with the intent of doing right by her. "You'll work it out, you've been sworn bros for years right? It's just a slightly different skew of the old relations."

"Okay, Magni... let's get going to the free movie theater." Ellie's voice came over, an odd mix of soft sweetness and strident calls to attention as she walked up to him from behind.

Magni turned around. "Sure, let's..." He couldn't finished his sentence. Ellie was wrapped in a hot pink full body lightly woven woolen suit and a pastel pink jacket plus a pair of white and red boots, finished with a small pastel pink beret. It was amazing to him.

Ellie bobbed a little, sending her pendulous breasts bouncing beneath the tent they formed in her bodysuit. "Is something wrong, Magni... you seem a little warmer than usual." She left out the bit where that was particularly pronounced between his legs.

Magni shook his head and yelped. "No! Lead the way, sis!"

The Free Movie Theater the Eldevier ran was open only to hotel guests, a alternative adjunct to scarfing food down, shopping, gambling, sleeping in or one of a number of other vices the place catered to. Ellie showed her room pass and pointed at Magni as her plus one, getting them past the lobby doors. The FMT had a odd habit of not starting a movie at its stated time until at least one moviegoer was in the hall, so even though they had been half an hour late, they hadn't missed one bit of the movie on display. Some sort of classic 2D movie called "Alien".

There was complimentary popcorn in a box for them, but Ellie had eyed the buttery puffs and shook her head. She needed more in her digester - even charging to 90% and past her usual 80% limit had only bought so much uptime. This was one of the downsides of being a android rather than a real girl, you were clearly aware of your limits if you weren't on sleeper mode... and right now she needed to stay up at least another four or five hours, based on her paranoia of keeping a safe margin at all times... "Do you have any raw sugar candies or sodas? The really hyperglacaemic, diabeetus-inducing shit? And maybe some pizza?"

The cashier glanced at Ellie. No wonder this girl was so plump... "Well, we do have classic hyper-sugary Paredolia Soda, if you're an android. None of that sugar-free or reduced sugar bullshit unless you want that soda as a human. Lemons or FIve Berries flavored. and we have some suckers on hand. Plus pizza in Hawaiian, Mexican, or Chicago flavors. It's all paid extras though."

Ellie nodded and tapped the room card on the reader. The sponsors of the trip would be amenable to a slight bit of spending certainly, nothing like buying a new set of clothing. If she really wanted that, she would use her own Arendtcoins. They were given two sodas, one labelled carefully with red to carefully indicate they would give a human hyperglycaemia, and a small pizza in a keep-warm box atop their popcorn, plus a green and a blue Sucker - presumably lemonade and something else like mint or green apple.

With that settled, the staff ushered them in and started the projector. The premise of the film was certainly interesting, as they sat together in rapt attention, Ellie taking care to keep the red-label soda far away from Magni so that only she could sip on the 2000 calorie a cup menace. The Chicago pizza was lacking in sauce, but it had a lovely cheese pull going on as they chewed on it. She had burnt through a lot of power dancing for half of three hours, and the calories would bump her power meter up a few inches to last till they got back to her recharging point in their stateroom.

It was about a third of the way into the movie before Ellie started glitching. She had run hot for so long all day, and her mind was beginning to weird up a bit... She carefully unwrapped one of the Suckers and started slowly licking it against her tongue, sucking on it ever so often... She blinked as a prompt suddenly fired up, asking if she wanted to execute sexual maneuvers...

Magni looked at Ellie's worried face. "Ellie, are you okay there?"

Ellie turned to look at Magni and nodded. "I'm okay..." She paused briefly as she noticed all the squares that were popping into her view, offering a long list of options to her on stuff to do to Magni... Kiss him all over his face, lick his chest and neck... fellatio on his member, riding on him, sucking his toes...

She shook her head a little, trying to dismiss the prompts. They quickly went away.... "Say, Magni, when's your 18th birthday and Bar Mitzvah?"

Magni matter of factly started sucking the other Sucker. "Oh, Today, but don't tell the others yet. watching your performance was a great gift. We'll do my bar mitzvah in a few months, my parents aren't in a hurry. Parachuting on that day even."

Ellie nodded and looked back at the screen. So that was why her sexual programming had started flaring wildly... She sweated nervously. She had never seen Magni as anything other than a sworn brother, much like he did when he looked at Ellie. So the realisation by her internals that he had turned 18 tonight must have flared all those options.

Ellie momentarily cussed out her Uncle Seamus for giving her so many options and making her so good at many of them.

Paul North had a slight itch in his nose as he caught up on the previous day's paperwork in the late night of the office. Faymee had been understanding, saying she would make him a simple light meal before turning in for the night back home. She was really too good a confidant for him. He briefly worried about the little confrontation with Seamus and his Evelyn that would be inevitable... surely there was room to compromise and conexist...

He shook his head. This was only going to end with one of them fading away. But he would try to honor whatever he asked of him for Evelyn, and he wasn't planning on being the one to fade.

He suspected someone was thinking about him. He just didn't know if it was a good kind of thinking,, or a curse.

Ellie and Magni walked out of the theater happily, chatting about the way the xxx had xxxx the yyyy and then ejected yyyy out of xxx's spaceship via the back cargo hold. Magni rested his arms behind his head as they boarded the lift to their rooms on the 10th floor. "Yeah, practical effects are amazing, nothing like today's electronic fakes."

Ellie nods. "yeah, I'm a pretty big practical effect myself." Magni blinked at the claim. Ellie smiled and nodded. "My goduncle did say my entire head assembly was put together by ex-staff from Malt Eisners.... like a animatronic?"

Magni blushed a little, thinking of all those tiny wires and chips whirring away in her skull to make her say all those words so alluringly. Yup, he was an ASFRian by now if he wasn't before. "Yeah, that's one way to put it, bro... but you know, you're still my bro, bro?"

Ellie indulged his little misgendering. "sis. and I think in the end it doesn't matter so long as you're happy being my bro, bro."

Magni looked away a little as he opened the door to their room. Through some awkward long-term planning, he had wound up being assigned as a junior with Ellie as a senior roommate. Ellie paused... "I need to go freshen up a bit before I recharge, I hope you don't mind."

Magni oh'd. "No, go ahead... he crossed over to the bed on the right side of the room that was his and sat down to wait his turn, looking at the recharging nook. It had been a little shock to wake up this morning and see his long-trusted sworn bro as a woman - and an android - parked right on it, reminding him of the gulf between the both of them in some aspects.

He briefly checked his communicator. Tomorrow was a day for rest, and basic practice, with the real opening in two days from that night. He'd probably sleep in a bit like half the troupe and miss breakfast, then go in the afternoon to watch and practice with the rest of the guys for Friday's performance.

"All done" Ellie's voice came from nearby. He looked up and over and... dropped his communicator in mid look. She was wearing a dangerously short beige bathrobe, calmly drying her long brown hair with a towel as she came out looking and smelling fresh. Her hair ribbon was wedged in the pocket of the robe, completely untied. "You can use the shower now, Magni."

Magni nodded quickly, rushing into the bathroom with his pyjamas and towel, hitting the shower and letting it linger on him. The feelings he was having for her right now were a real world war.

A sworn brother.

a beautiful girl whom he wanted to be his girlfriend, if not an actual spouse one day.

A machine built lovingly, like a high-priced exotic muscle car. A woman with desires and needs and wants.

A colleague and senior to look up to in so many things

An extremely fun pet.

A toy that looked fun to play with.

A delicate artwork that couldn't be mishandled.

He thumped the glass siding briefly, his mind storming wildly. He would either go crazy or go down on her sooner or later at this rate...

Ellie had noticed his discomfort... perhaps he'd want to talk about stuff? She mused to herself as she gently disrobed and placed her bathrobe on a nearby hook, stepping into the charging point, but staying powered on even as she felt the rippling waves of the inductive power cruising along the coils in her back. There would be plenty of time to recharge even at the reduced speed it offered if the unit was still powered up during charging, and she just stayed there, blinking.

Magni came back in in his pyjamas, blinking as he noticed Ellie was still awake on the charger... and totally naked. "Oh, I thought you'd have gone to sleep."

"No, Magni. You seemed distressed about something so I decided not to power down until you were less stressed..." she replied. There was a sort of silence between them as they looked at each other, Magni sitting down on his bed and watching Ellie in her nook, looking down quickly after a while as the view was really doing things to him that he didn't want right now. "... is something the matter, Magni?"

"My feelings are confusing right now, Ellie. I know we're sworn siblings but..." Magni looked back up. "It's been like this ever since you showed back up at Ecole as a grown woman and not some young teen body I'd always known. I don't even know how to react to half the things you've shown me since then."

Ellie's face looked puzzled, then thoughtful... "Just keep being my bro, bro. That's the easy way of dealing with this till you feel more certain about what you want."

Magni stood up and walked over to Ellie, resting one hand on the bare, freshly washed skin beneath her huge breasts. "That would be so easy, but... this close to being an actual adult myself, I'm already thinking things about you that I feel guilty about. really naughty things."

Ellie blinked and looked from side to side, before watching Magni again. "Well, my body was made to be something worth viewing and holding. I don't know if I can be your girlfriend, Magni but... I don't mind being practice material for you."

Magni smiled a little and let his hand off Ellie. "Thanks for the offer. I'm just scared if I take you up on that offer something trips and we can never go back to being merely siblings with different parents." He looked away from the naked woman in the nook, carefully sitting down on his bed. "Let's go to sleep, this isn't something we can just solve with three minutes of talking, like some sitcom drama." He reached over to the light on his desk and turned it off, plunging the room into darkness.

Ellie stayed silent for a while. "... Magni, what time would you like me to wake you up?"

Somewhere in the darkness, he replied. "in time for breakfast, but not like the very beginning or near the end of it... "

Ellie beeped faintly. "Understood. Setting wake up call for... 6.30am next morning."

Magni smiled to himself. He hadn't seen Ellie pack an alarm clock, and she had told him not to bother when told of their rooming arrangements. Now he'd understood why. It was nice to have a sworn bro who'd wake him up on time always.

Ellie paused for a while again. "... Good night, Magni." But her long-time friend was asleep already... She figured she may as well join the party and blacked out as she powered down after setting up an alarm to wake the both of them internally.

Chapter 17 - A little training never hurt anyone /

Ellie woke an hour ahead of the alarm she'd set. or rather, she set the alarm to wake her up an hour earlier than Magni had asked... She looked around the near total darkness of the room, then blinked as she noticed Magni sitting up in his bed. "Couldn't get to sleep, Magni?"

Magni shook his head as he sat there, his legs perched on the bedding and half bent tot support him as he rested himself against them. "No, Ellie. I did get some sleep... in fact I just woke up myself..."

Ellie nodded slowly, carefully checking her power reserves... she was at 80% already, the recommended limit for most recharges except in a period of emergencies or special occasions needing a longer day up... She slowly clicked and whirred as she got off the recharger, before the audible muffling kicked in and she slowly shuffled her feet to sit next to Magni. "You're still hung up on what we said yesterday night?"

Magni nodded. "You're driving me crazy and it's pretty much all my fault," He sighed. The dim light pouring through the windows and the faint glow of the nook had been the only major sources of light in the room, and it helped not being able to see Ellie's form, only feel it slightly as she rested against his side.

Ellie said nothing, simply watching him... "... as I said, practice might help..." She suddenly grabbed him and flopped in bed, causing him to yelp as he landed atop her lithe body with its huge bosom against his face.

"What are you doing, Ellie!" Magni asked, his blush almost glowing in the dark as he struggled a little with her hugging him firmly.

Ellie giggled a little. "The same thing we've done so many times on the grass at Ecole, silly. having a quick nap before the next class... Just like we used to, remember? Side by side, or lying atop each other like Pokemon..."

Magni panicked... "You... were a boy like me then. I'm not sure it's that easy now..."

Ellie held Magni a little more tightly, kissing him on the nose. "I'm sure it still is. you just need to stop overthinking things and hang loose like we've always done. Just breathe deeply... exhale, breathe... close your eyes... get another hour of sleep in till 6.30am..." She purred softly, causing him to do just that. She smelt... nice... sweet... The softness was even better than what the bed had offered... Silken skin against his pyjamas... he could get used to this...

Magni was soon out like a light, before Ellie decided to join him for the same quick nap...

Ellie woke Magni at the time she had promised. "There you go, wasn't it easy?"

Magni nodded slowly as he got up and off of Ellie, sitting away a little from her to let her do the same. "I didn't... struggle, did I?"

Ellie rubbed his hair, laughing as she did so. "Not one bit. Out COMPLETELY like a little child rather than a young man. So... we should get changed for breakfast, ya?"

Magni agreed...

Magni stood outside the door of his room in a simple pair of jeans and a black shirt with the Y'tole Academy logo emblazoned on one breast subtly, waiting for his friend to change up...

Ellie came out soon, carefully arranging her choice of garments: a sleeveless top with a collar in white with black buttons down the front, a frilly miniskirt with a mix of tulle and cotton, red fabric atop the gauzy underskirt layer, and thigh highs in white stuck into her sneakers. She adjusted a matching black beret on her head, making sure it didn't interfere with her blue tied hair ribbon. That ribbon was practically welded into her skull, only ever coming off when showering or sleeping or between costume changes. She offered her hand, and he took it as they made their way to the lifts to go a floor up to the Cafe for the morning buffet.

Magni blushed and looked down to avoid gazing at her too intently, but then realised: The lift floor was highly reflective, and he was getting quite a nice view of the thong panties Ellie had somehow decided to wear for breakfast. Clearly, her ability to tolerate discomfort was far higher than a normal human woman's, and she said nothing as he quickly looked up and back at her, not wanting to be caught enjoying the view of her perky butt and that tiny sliver of flesh between her legs.

The exited the lifts and entered the cafe. It was still mostly empty, but they eventually found Mother Ammi by one of the windows, calmly eating a few bagels and sipping a big hot cup of something that wasn't tea or coffee. She greeted them, and motioned them to sit down next to her to enjoy the quiet.

For several minutes, nobody did anything, not even move to grab a plate. Then Ammi spoke. "Nothing like an early morning breakfast... if I had my way Y'Tole Academy would be a live-in place where everyone had to get up early and have a early breakfast."

Ellie laughed a little, looking at Magni. "I don't think that's feasible back in Little Sanctuary. it's too easy to get from the Academy to most of the homes in the place. Just a few districts in the South are a bit of a pain to travel from, really." She motioned to Magni to get a plate, before continuing to engage Ammi as Magni left them to their convo. "But it does seem a good idea... I think my papa mentioned Little Sanctuary would be adding more boroughs in the next few years in the south mostly. A dorm would be wonderful for the kids who want to practice harder and not spend as much time travelling to and from school."

Mother Ammi laughed a little, chewing on a bagel. "Mm... cheese, and ham. great idea... the dorm is a great idea too, I'll pitch it to the board when we get home from this trip, Ellie. So... were there any problems between you and Magni trying to sleep last night?"

Ellie shrugged. "I'm an android, he's a flesh and blood young man. I stick myself in the recharger llike a giant nightlight, he sleeps in the one bed we have. The Eldevier is a good place for robots like me, like that."

Mother Ammi watched her beverage, a warm brownish color just like her skin. "It's been a great place to recruit too... we've had a sudden spike overnight in queries for the academy. They love our style. it's not a strident thumpy harshness like the old State-Sanctioned Style. I've had to reroute a lot of the queries to other branches nearer to them, but quite a lot still ended up with us.You MIGHT get that dorm and lots more students to work with soon. I might even need new instructors... like..." She eyed Ellie, quite clearly conveying her intent.

Ellie panicked, the same "ah-wawawawa" warble emitting from her mouth as if she was still young Elliot again. "I... I've only danced a few years in both styles, Mother! I'm not sure I'm fit to teach anyone!"

Mother Ammi sipped her cuppa. "We've had a bad attrition in terms of experienced dancers when the junta was around, remember? And we're sretched a little thinner in the Old Guard after opening six branches in a year... It's a lot easier now to become qualifed to be a junior instructor, and you'd be overseen by the senior instructors and me as well.Don't worry too much about your mistakes, you'll be corrected firmly but gently, like you've always been. Give it a thought, maybe?"

Ellie looked down at the table. This was an awful big responsibility for someoone who'd just turned 18 and become a woman simultaneously. "I'll think about it... right now I just want to focus on our tour in the portugal theater."

Magni came back with a modestly loaded plate. A sort of sandwich with tuna in it, and a cup of tea without sugar in it. He sat down and started munching... The tuna sandwich piqued Ellie's interest - she'd been eating those things forever since the day her papa first made them decades ago, and then it was her mama's turn to make them. They had rarely been bad. At worst, middling... and they were much better than that most of the time. "Where did you get that sandwich, Magni?" Her eyes glittered as if she had been met with treasure.

Magni pointed somewhere past her. "There's a sandwich counter. they gots all sorts of fillings and salads and sauces..." he mumbled through half-filled mouth. Tea is on either end of the buffet. There's also a pie counter, and the usual Breakfast plate stuff...

Ellie nodded quickly and left the table.

It shouldn't have been a surprise after their movie trip, Magni reflected... but man, Ellie could put away A LOT of food. She had gone for three rounds, each time bringing back about twice as much food as Magni had taken on his own plates. She was eating a little of everything. The sandwiches with several different fillings, one breakfast plate laden with bacon, eggs, and shrooms, a bagel with salmon, a cup of the same beverage Ammi had gotten, a slice of quiche with chicken in it, one bowl of soup and... he'd lost track after the second tray she had gone through. Her appetite would have been said to fuel her tits if she had been a human, but he suspected she was just capable of burning through all the calories in a hurry.

They walked slowly along the rooftop track, Ellie patting her stomach and burping a little as if she had overindulged. So human... She laughed a little. "That was a great meal. I hope I don't eat our hosts out of house and home..." She teased.

Magni rolled his eyes. "It's a buffet, Ellie. they plan for these types of things. I'm sure there's someone downstairs right now who can barely put through a single plate like Mother Ammi, a few... you're balancing out these things." He tried to equivocate, then noticed the sun slowly rising over Lake Vegas... It was lovely, the golden orb slowly flitting upwards through the cliffs around the Strip, casting a slight golden hue over the pale blue tint of everything.

Magni paused.... he thought a little... "Could I get.... you know... just a small kiss from you, Ellie?"

Ellie Manners blinked. The earlier exercise had helped clearly. he seemed more forward now, more willing to ask things of her... She didn't reply, but simply hugged him to herself and started kissing him deeply, tongue trading around with his as she closed her eyes. It felt... good... They lingered on it for several minutes before he finally peeled himself off, blushing hard... "It's a free day right?" He'd asked.

Ellie nodded. "I have practice after lunch... maybe we Don't have to eat lunch buffet... just sit in our room and order in something small."

Magni smiled. "good idea... after all, there's some other... things I want to try..."

Ellie said nothing as Magni helped her get back to the lifts and their room...

Magni had ordered two small bowls of noodles. Room service at the Eldevier was expensive like anywhere else, but the cost was still within what the sponsors would tolerate. He put the phone down and turned to look at his bed, having asked Ellie to wait for him there... "Ellie... could we just lie together for a bit? naked? Nothing physical, just... napping?"

Ellie blushed briefly, but she had promised him her continued broship, so she simply stood up and started kicking her shoes off and disrobing slowly, her breasts popping slightly out as she undid some critical support structure of her top... the skirt came off, then the panties. Her beret joined the slowly growing mound of both young adults' clothes, before she slid into Magni's bed, motioning to him to join her in their shared nakedness.

There was a certain frisson of guilt and naughtiness in their behavior as they looked at each other, a slight discomfort... the discomfort started going away after a while, and soon Magni was asleep again, using her breasts as a pillow.

Ellie smiled softly, deciding to put an hour on a internal timer, before she too fell asleep. Just before that hour was up, the door was knocked three times.

Ellie's eyes snapped open instantly, but Magni was still gripping on to the sides of her breasts, in some sort of happy dream... She gently extricated herself and wore her bath robe, opening the door and fetching the lunch they had ordered. "Wake up, sleepy head, breakfast is here..." She whispered in his ear.

Magni rubbed his eyes and sat up, walking over to join Ellie at the small table the stateroom had for its one or two inhabitants, and they quietly tucked in without any talking. She felt strangely hungry and checked her reserves... 75%... normal drain rate over four hours with light physical activity mostly... Perhaps it wasn't just food she hungered for... She smiled, eyeing Magni closely.

Magni looked up. "..."

There were still about two or three hours before practice restarted, so Ellie had gone back to bed with Magni, only in a slightly different manner... She gently whispered in her ears... "Do whatever you want with me this hour... gently. Anything..."

Magni had to repeat himself. "Anything? Really?"

She nodded back slowly...

Magni breathed deeply... "Control panel?"

She agreed to that too... just after she'd first come online, she'd gotten a cool new upgrade. Someone in the Company had worked out how to turn the control panel into a display that was flashed through the human analogue flesh of a relatively even part of the body like the bit beneath the breasts or the sternum, and the sensors in the flesh were converted into touch elements for any part of the virtual panel operated by deliberate long touches. There was still an actual control panel hidden behind a panel that slid away beneath her breasts on her design because the virtual panel didn't replicate obvious connectors and power sockets , but she opted for the virtual panel, faintly glowing in several colors just beneath her breasts. Battery usage, processor loads, incoming info and error messages, operating buttons... It was supposed to help in dustier and wetter environments by avoiding exposure of internals.

Magni went 'aaah' for a moment, slowly watching the projected panel glowing beneath her breasts as she closed her eyes. carefully tracing lines and watching her battery power twitch at around 74%. The noodles had been quite a nice heavy meal for her indeed... "It's... beautiful," he whispered, his little fetish only growing as she watched her artificiality... "How do I set a timer for an hour? I don't want you to be late for practice?"

She gently guided his fingers and pointed out the buttons to toggle the retart timer on, and how to set it .... He set it for an hour and then looked up... "Can I... turn you off until then?"

Ellie nodded. "It'd save me some power, Magni... here... see this little red button projection? that's my power button, just hold it in for a few seconds... Magni did as he was told... There was a faint whirring down and some beeping, as Ellie slumped on her back, eyes closing... her soft breathing began to slow down... and soon she was completely inert, a motionless doll with only a timer displaying how long it would be before she came back to life.

Magni carefully eased her around, his eyes and hands carefully examining every inch of her lightweight body, the softness of her lips as they slightly parted when he inserted a thumb slightly through them, looking into the nook of her mouth at her well kept off-whitish teeth and delicate tongue, her throat detailed right down to the little blobby ulva and tunnel into her throat...

He pried one eyelid open, marvelling at the intricate visual sensor assembly that was her eyes as her irises had faded out, now a dull almost blackish blue without the backlighting operational.

He brushed his hand along her skin, feeling the peach fuzz on it, the various little details - veins, freckles, a mole in a most peculiar spot she wouldn't ever have exposed in public. The warm softness of her vagina, her finger feeling it inside without any response or reflex from Ellie, the various softer bits of her body....

Her tiny dainty toes, carefully reinforced clearly in parts to handle the wear of her bare feet dancing around regularly, the nails on her toes and her fingers carefully trimmed and with the little crescents beneath a wide sea of pink.

He breathed softly... he had expected to be panting, but Ellie's desensitisation therapy had tamped down much of his worst reactions... he was still feeling strangely aroused by his sleeping little sworn sister... a living artpiece, reduced for the moment to a very realistic doll... he continued holding and testing her body gently without actually putting anything else into her, enjoying the residual warmth of her flesh as he kissed the side of her neck, her mouth falling open slightly as her head fell back slightly with the reduced support of her neck and his hand.

She was wonderful... He imagined what it must be like with all the energy in her 'power cells' surging through every bit of her, the amount of joy contained in this body of hers...

There was a faint beep as the timer went off... Ellie's eyes opened again, refocusing, as she sat back up. Magni had respectfully spent the last few minutes making her comfy in his bed, and he sat there, in a sort of kowtow. "Thank you for letting me do this..." He whispered. "You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen or felt..."

Ellie nodded slowly. "You should get a shower, Magni... get a shower, and get dressed. You seem to have held much more back than you think." She reached for her own clothing, carefully putting it back on. "I'll meet you at the Portugal. I'll tell them you had a distraction. but try not to be too long here." She smiled as she kissed him on the lips quickly. "And maybe next time, let's do it without powering me down. take it one step at a time." She purred, as she took the trays from their lunch and brought them on her way out, closing the door and letting the lock power itself back on before she skipped off...

The performance practice was... frankly, a disaster. everything had gone off so well at the initial practice and soft-launch, Ammi reflected, so why were all the mistakes and problems that were possible happening right now?

He carefully nursed a towel to one of the juniors who had somehow managed to trip over her own two feet, telling her to sit down and rest a bit, while she motioned for the other dancers to fill in the gap she had left for the scene she was supposed to dance in.

Ellie had taken herself off like the rest of the seniors for a break. She watched the ongoing disaster, having somehow avoided being part of it. "I think maybe we should start from the top, look at simplifying some of this stuff they're being told to do... I don't think I could have accomplished it at their level of experience."

Mother Ammi looked up. "It was worth a shot, but you're right, we should omit some of the steps, shorten the performance a minute or two. Nobody could tell without being intimately aware of the artform. But I feel like it would be cutting corners."

Ellie got up and off the crate she was leaning against. "No, Mother.... you're just doing something necessary for them to be able to do this particular dance and music combo... Remember, these are children. young children. we can't be imposing on them too much. Remember those steps you'd warned me not to try when I was younger? This is something like that for them."

Ammi nodded. "Okay, kids, take a break. I need to think about stuff..." She looked to Ellie. "And you say you're not fit to be a junior instructor, really? When you offer me advice, I think the only reason you're not a senior instructor is that you're way too young for anyone to take you seriously as one."

Ellie blushed. "I just see things, I have a decent sense of kinesthetics since I was a young child. And Van'iia is an inspiration."

Ammi paused. "We all have something to dance for, child." She raised her hand up to stroke Ellie's hair, now that she was taller than Ammi herself. Clearly no longer a child, really. "I think that's the point. We'll start practice again with the seniors. That's the group you're part of, yes. So start warming up and getting ready to go in five minutes..."

The six hours of practice and prep and eventually gone relatively well, and everyone had parted for a small dinner at the buffet. carb loading was essential, but too much food in the belly while dancing also caused problems... They had opted for starchy stuff mainly... rice with vegetables, small soups, one or two jellies or fruits... and then parted to rest for the night before resuming practice and prep for the big night tomorrow.

Magni had opted to spend some time walking the plaza after dinner on his own. As he walked, he walked past a lingerie store... then he stopped, and backtracked a little...

In the window, a mannequinbot had been carefully frozen and posed into a sort of dancing pose,her body dripping all over with lace... a sleeveless and legless bodysuit of sheer lace with little areas where the lace had been doubled down on to hide embarassing details of the body, a kneehigh pair of stickings that had been cut to expose the toes and heels, and a pair of gloves that extended from the hands without touching the fingers all the way to just below the elbows, with a small green gem in each of them standing out from the rest of the dark blue ensemble. A small veil completed the set, a floral crown with sheer lace falling downwards from it to the sternum of the mannequinbot. As he watched, the mannequinbot stiffly assumed a different dance pose, eyes blankly watching through him as it showed off the dark blue lace set it was wearing.

Magni gulped a little... then he walked right in.

Several minutes later, Magni was sitting at one of the fountain benches that lined the plaza,clutching his head. He'd thought it would be expensive, and that he could just laugh it off as a fantasy, but it had been surprisngly cheap, and he did have the measurements of Ellie's body from having to help her order and put together the costumes she was wearing... The parcel sat on his lap, the same ensemble the mannequinbot was wearing, but in sky blue instead, the gems had been traded out, pale red rubies rather than the green gems the display had shown off.

He was going to give it to her as a gift, he'd thought. Now he'd bought it with his own money, he'd instead wondered when he was even going to be able to. Her birthday? It was months later. Christmas? even further away. It looked a bit like a marriage thing if you could get it in white, so at least he didn't have to worry about that - there was no way she'd agree to marry him even with how forward and generous she'd been with his anxieties and fetishes.

After a bit, he stood up firmly.

Ellie blinked at the parcel, then at the way Magni was standing, holding it out and looking downwards. He'd asked her to give him a little time before they went to bed after they had showered up... And then presented the parcel.

Ellie sat down on the lounging sofa, carefully opening the parcel and finding the lingerie set that Magni had gotten for her. "... it's beautiful." She purred softly, examining the gloves and the stockings before going on to the bodysuit itself... She thought for a moment, then stood up and started disrobing her sleep robe, letting it fall to the ground as she tried on the outfit in front of Magni. The outfit fitted her perfectly, as she stood in front of him in it, her eyes closed as the veil fell in front of her face.

Magni started regretting getting her the set. it wasn't that it was ugly. it was just too... bridal, even when printed off in skyblue rather than virginal white?

Ellie opened her eyes again, examining the set. she did a small twirl and a few arm gestures, one of the smaller moves she could do from Y'tole without risking breaking the furniture or making a hole from severe rug burning. Her lips parted slightly, sending a small gust that ruffled the veil... "I love this... thank you so much, Magni."

Magni nodded and grinned. "II did think it would look wonderful on you... it's not smutty, it's just a simple bodysuit and a lfew choice elements... An innocent little number for an innocent young woman..." He blinked as Ellie hugged him tightly, hearing her whisper. "My mama used to say a good boy deserves a good reward. I think you should get what you really want tonight..." She purred softly again, turning off the lights to the room.

Magni noticed his nakedness beneath the blankets of his bed when he woke. He shook his head... Ellie had gone all the way somehow the night before, and dragged his inexperienced young cock into it all... he had come a few times, Ellie taking care somehow to give him lots of cuddling and kissing as they lay there in the bed, she in her new lingerie set, he in just his under pants, and soon, not even those... There was a convenient closure set of studs in the underaread between her crotch and her butt, which she'd snapped open to let him into her innermost lovehole, warm and soft to the touch of his manhood. He had lost his virginity, but he felt so good. He'd felt warm even now.

He examined Ellie as she stood in her recharger, having carefully redone up her lingerie and tidied up after the action. She looked like a floral display, Her eyes were dully lidded, and as he watched, her head drooped to look down at him suddenly. "Did you have... fun?"

Magni nodded happily. Even if this was the only time she totally put out for her, he would be content for possibly the rest of his life... "Yes, Ellie... we good for breakfast at 6.30am?"

Ellie nodded a little as she stood stiffly in the nook. "Yes, Magni, bro... Let's just keep tonight between us, bro..."

Magni nodded quickly... "I think I'll go back to bed. It's only 1am after all...." he glanced at his watch, surprised by how long it had taken her to take all of him despite the apparent speed with which she had done so.

Ellie closed her eyes and straightened back up. "Yes, Magni... Good night."

Magni turned the bedside lamp off again, and had the soundest sleep he'd had in two months. Top



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