maybeElse

Content Warnings: magical girl transformation, corruption

As you raise the wand above your head and scream the magic words, something already feels different. The swirling ribbons burst forth from the wand's gem, just as they always do, filling everything around you—but they are sharp and purple, not those familiar soft pastels.

The ribbons fray as they stretch, and soon you are surrounding by a sharp-edged cloud, sparkling in the light seeping from your wand—that, at least, is familiar, though it trickles forth in anemic bursts. Gone is the brilliant guiding light that once blazed around you, as warm and overwhelming as the sun; the power that settles into you is broken, distorted, just as you will soon be—for the torn ribbons which were once the flesh and bone of your other form, that bouncing skirt and frilly gloves (that ridiculous half-cape and the thin leather strap around your neck), have not remembered their purpose.

They settle hungrily on your skin, sharp and implacable; blood wells from a thousand cuts as they begin to slip beneath. You don't know what they're trying to do and don't much care—the pain does not inspire curiosity (not yet, but give it time) and you can still feel the power welling within your wand. It's always so hard to use magic when you're simply human, but here, in this other place of swirling light and rising power, you are not exactly that; but nor are you that other thing, that perfect shadow who fights with such conviction.

The magic does not come easily; it almost feels like it's fighting against you, struggling not to be used (oh, that feels odd). It does not feel like your magic, that burning fire which flows outwards from your heart to be concentrated in your wand—it is slippery and subtle, full of sudden angles and secret plans—but it is within you and so it is yours (that can't be right).

It takes an eternity and it takes no time at all, but it breaks before your will (oh no), just as every enemy you have faced has; the splintered ribbons, deep within your flesh, turn like needles before your power (...). They remember their purpose and they return to it.

As the magic of transformation recedes, your new form is nothing like your old—gone is the innocent perfection, the beautiful power that drew from your friends and allies, the shining beacon of your heart given form. You are sharp and wicked, a being of angles; your armor glistens in the light, iridescent. What flesh remains—for as the ribbons burrowed beneath your flesh, your weaknesses sloughed away—is merely a weapon. Just enough to distract, to give pause, to arouse, to make your opponents wonder if there's someone in there who could be saved.

The pretense of humanity.

Because you're not human any more, not really; this is not your light bursting forth, elevating you to a platonic ideal, to the person you always could have been if you were not burdened by flesh. In your struggles you found another power and greedily drank it down.

The hex on your wand, which should have killed you, instead led you to where you should always have been (to me). You invited it in, and a vessel cannot help but be remade by what it contains; even now it flows through your mind, rewriting your thoughts—you can feel each change it makes, bursts of pleasure punctuating the growing clarity with which you see the world. Before, you would have thought this a fate worse than death, a bad end to be avoided at all costs; but here, in the moment, you just wonder why you didn't do it sooner.

(... well that's better)

(we're going to have a lot of fun)

(let's start with your friends)

Content Warnings: implications, memories, vomit, disease, unedited first draft.

When she offers you the chalice, the liquid within tastes like nothing you can recall tasting before—a heady blend of hothouse flowers, their sweetness tainted by the humid decay of their growth, and thunderstorm petrichor, all shot through with a thick and hungry musk.

You swirl it on your tongue, trying to understand the scents seeping up into your mind; your eyes close for a moment, and when they open she has left your side, gone over to busy herself at the stove, suspiciously nonchalant. She doesn't look at you, but she doesn't need to.

You swallow.

The rest of the liquid doesn't last long; you gulp it down, eager to get through this, whatever torment or test or spell she has devised to subject you to this time. Whatever price you must pay before she finally gives you what you really want instead of that sly smile and another long wait.

As the liquid settles in the pit of your stomach, its taste lingers in your senses; settling in for the long haul. You can almost remember where you've tasted it before, that long-ago summer full of stolen days and nights full of sweaty longing; the summer you spent with _, when their parents weren't keeping you apart. It must have been in, what, '36? Before everything started to go wrong, back when the world seemed so bright.

(Part of you, a part that is not lost in the memory of what you and _ did together, begins to question; the ticking timer at the end of a dream, the broken acceptance that gives way to lucidity. But it is so slow on the uptake.)

Do you remember all those weeks of careful maneuvering, arranging things just so? Sharing secret smiles with _ as you each played your parts, all in service of this one final day: the last day you would be able to spend together (though you didn't realize how badly it would end), the first day you and _ would be free to sate your shared desires.

It was all worth it when you felt their lips on yours, when their scent filled your lungs; when you opened yourself for them, and they opened for you, and you comingled the secret sparks you had each kept hidden for so long, those impossible seeds. How could you ever have forgotten the hothouse heat, the humid earth and glorious flowers overwhelmed by the scent of your love?

(How indeed, your true voice asks in a tone that sends cracks shooting through the memory.)

With that smell filling your mind, you can almost forget what came after; how the flower you planted in _'s core withered and died, even as the one they left in you ran riot, thick vines spreading out from your core, soaking up the light and heat in your spark as it choked the life out of you; the months of hospitals and medicine, the ultimate answer they found to free you from your floral invader—

And, as the memory shades into nightmare, your body convulses and you come back to yourself—no longer on your chair but hunched on the floor, heaving, your body desperately trying to purge itself of every last trace of the poisoned chalice; she holds your hair out of the way, whispering gentle reassurances, her hands soft and eyes devoid of any trace of judgement. She never tells you how your failure affected her; there are so many things she will never find words to tell you, no matter how desperately you might want to know.

What matters another?

Content warnings: self-harm, dysphoria, parental abuse, realizations, lightly tweaked as compared with the twitter thread.

When she first took a knife to herself, she did not think to find anything more than the release of pain; so she was quite surprised, not to say a bit taken aback, when the knife's passage through too-rough flesh was interrupted by the wholly unexpected presence of a gearbox, a plastic-sheathed assemblage quietly ticking away just before her wrist's joint.

When she was done being astonished—done listening to the gears and seeing how her fingers twitched when she poked at it—she went looking for more.

Her other wrist revealed an identical gearbox; her scrawny thighs were filled with complex masses of pistons and chains, descending into dark hollows running the length of her legs. Her hated crotch was hydraulic.

With the help of her mirror (cracked, the poor thing—but then it had dared to hold her hated face) she was able to pop the housing off one of her eyes, to see the motor that drove her pupils dilation and the photodiode beneath. It made everything blurry and too-bright, and refused to snap back into place, but she just had to know.

She was opening up her chest, prying back her ribs to expose the motor within—craning her head and carefully positioning the mirror to try to see what within her was burning—when everything went wrong.

Which is a rather euphemistic way to say that her father found her, sitting on the floor, her body in pieces.

He broke her into more pieces before calling the repairman.

Later, as she drifted in and out of consciousness, her mind struggling for coherence (for, back then, no one really knew how to disconnect synth minds from the spark of their consciousness, and repairmen just treated them like appliances anyway), she heard her father ranting to the repairman; heard him screaming about how his son was supposed to be perfect, how the salespeople had promised that a galvanic mind would be free of the afflictions that took flesh—that it would only excel at the tasks it was given, would never bend toward self-destruction or f*ggotry. And yet, here his son was doing both! Ripping up a perfectly good—better than good, even! a perfect body! and causing such expense, on top of all the other expenses ...

He went on like this for quite a while, far more than it would be sensible to recount. The repairman hummed and murmured at appropriate moments and left with a sizeable tip in his pocket.

It took a while for her mind to cohere enough to stir, and longer still for her to nerve herself for what it would bring; and indeed, once it became clear that she was awake her father yelled at her for quite a while longer before locking her in her room, now made an absolute mess by the search for implements of harm or f*ggotry which her father had apparently embarked upon sometime earlier.

Her attempts at cleaning were at best desultory; her mind was almost entirely elsewhere, chewing at the problem of what she was.

And what that meant for who she was.

And who she had to be.

And so, just after midnight, having methodically destroyed everything in her room, she broke her window, used the broken glass to cut off as much of her skin as she could reach, and slipped out into the night.

It turned out to be one of the best choices she ever made.

Content warnings: body horror, angels, implications, genetic modification, dark overtones, lightly edited 1.1st draft.

When scientists first started experimenting with genetically programmed radical body plan modifications (which isn't what they called it—they had a catchy acronym and a billion-dollar PR firm and everything you don't), the first dozen generations did not go particularly well.

They jabbed needles into eggs and grew monsters: pathetic, mewling things with their bones on the outside or no bones at all, with the wrong number of limbs or the wrong number of hearts, things which were little more than bundles of cancer clawing at the womb that held them.

The next dozen generations didn't go too well either, but at least some of them survived.

No one remembers them. With enough money, a PR firm will happily wipe out all traces of an atrocity. A billion dollars buys a lot of men with a lot of guns, and people love to forget.

No, what people remember is the 33rd generation (”the first generation of a new humanity!”). They remember the perfectly crafted trillionaire children, with their beautiful wings and long tails and faces like masks; they remember how they became the new standard for beauty, how they were what everyone aspired to be. What everyone wanted to have.

... no, I'd rather not talk about how that started too soon, before their engineered minds were really able to understand it. I've never been close enough to one of them to say what that did to them, and I hope that I never will be.

I've seen the bodies being hauled away from their parties. Only when they go slumming on the surface, you understand, not at their orbital manors; I'd rather die than go up there.

But that's besides the point. Everyone knows about them. No, the interesting part here is you.

There are no more than a dozen surviving individuals from before the 33rd generation; people who somehow managed to escape the scalpel and the incinerator I should know, with how much time I've spent looking for them.

Not like that, no. I'd never hurt anything so unique.

Each one of them—including you—is fascinating: the ways their bodies branch and grow, fighting against the instructions written into your genome; the completely unintended features, traces of genetic material that was never intended to be included. It's—you're—beautiful. I can't wait for you to meet all of them!

But I do have to say that I'm most intrigued by how you've managed to survive for so long, unnoticed, right under their noses. I'd love to find out how, once you stop cursing at me and struggling to get out of your restraints.

No, it's fine, keep on trying. Get all that resistance out of your system. It'll be hard to move you if you're fighting every step of the way!

... I guess I could just break you, but waiting until you tire yourself out and give in is fine too. I've got all the time in the world.

Content warnings: hivemind, assimilation into a great whole, loss of selfhood, body horror, sex, some psychedelic imagery, unedited first draft.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Really? There’s no backing out, not after this.”

“Y-yes. I’ve wanted this for so long. I need this.”

“Well.”

Her last word, spoken from a hundred mouths, echoes around the large chamber. She draws it out, letting her bodies desynchronize to add emphasis. Or maybe to give you time to speak, which, of course, you don’t.

Then she comes forward to embrace you. Not all of her – most of her bodies stay lounged on couches and pillows, wrapped around one another – but enough arms and hands and mouths to short out your gay little mind for a long moment, to fill your body with taut warmth in longing reflection of her bodies’ heat.

She lingers, making sure you enjoy your last moments as an individual; she knows your body well from previous encounters, knows just the right places and touches to make your sing. Or, perhaps, she simply understands how bodies and minds work better than you ever could. And having that many mouths is cheating.

As her bodies move against yours, cocooning you in flesh, holding you as if you weighed nothing at all, you begin to notice differences from the last time. Things slither over your skin that could not possibly be human touches; long wet things twist and wrap around your arms and legs, holding them in place; a hundred touches echo along your neck, like roots growing on rock.

In a moment of clarity you glance down, away from the many eyes gazing into yours. Despite yourself you almost scream; the tentacle in your throat prevents that, just as the tentacles wrapped around your arms make struggle impossible. Her bodies have opened up, their chests splitting and ribs unfolding to spill masses of wet red tendrils across your body. They move with purpose, weaving a fine mesh across you, some diving beneath your skin to infiltrate your nerves or take control of muscles; there is no pain, no discomfort, for that is the first thing she took away when she let herself in.

As you stare, one of her faces smiles at you, and you feel a hand cupping your cheek.

“This might hurt a bit. We’re sorry. We’ll take the pain away as soon as we can.”

It does.

Your throat and eyes and the base of your spine burn as thick tendrils shoot in, punching through skin and bone; pain enough to overwhelm what control she had exerted on your senses and movement. You try to scream, choke on the thing in your throat, and suddenly realize that you can’t breath – that it’s been far too long since you last did. Your lungs feel horribly full, your skin burns, your stomach churns. Your body shakes uncontrollably as the things penetrating your skull go taut and thick, as you feel them rhythmically pumping where they press against your eyes and between your vertebra.

Her body is everywhere within you and you are dying.

There is a horrible moment of nothingness as everything cuts out; as you float within yourself, your mind adrift in a void. Your thoughts are sluggish, full of error messages, parts of your brain unable to respond. It’s all going wrong! She’s just using you like a fleshy onahole, filling your brain with alien spunk, killing you to get off—

(She warned you that this would happen: the seed is brought into your mind in parts, implanted in your corpus callosum, a process which necessarily breaks communication between parts of your mind; meanwhile, another section, one too complex to grow inside a still-human body, is implanted in your thalamus.)

— and then the world, and your mind, snap back into place. Everything is back to the way it was. Her bodies look human again; one is wiping up the blood on your face while a few others gently lower you onto a soft couch and then sprawl around you; one of them, light and lithe, wraps around you.

“... fuck.”

Her nearest bodies chuckle while the rest return to whatever they do when you don’t have her full attention; you see some of them don clothing and slip away, bits of her mind occupied with the mundane business of existence. You’ve seen how much food it takes to keep all of her alive and healthy; it’s not surprising that many hives give up on cooking entirely in favor of nutrient slop or implanted batteries, but she’s always said that she needs to treat her bodies better than that.

“We did warn you.”

“Yeah, but ... fuck. I thought ...”

She laughs. “Oh, if we wanted that we wouldn’t have bothered with the pretense.”

“... wait. Can you already ...?”

“Oh, bits and pieces. It will take a bit. But hey, look! No mouths~”

The body on top of you mimes zipping its mouth shut, locking it, and tossing the key away, as she continues chattering on inside your head. For a moment she speaks in colors, in touches, in scents, in memories blooming in the garden of your mind; showing off her control, or perhaps just a burst of synesthesia as the seed starts to grow, a radio dial spinning uncontrollably between different frequencies.

When your senses settle things feel different, multiplied. You have too many hands, too much skin, the hint of a migraine as your vision expands. You shift and the bodies around you shift with you, your body map struggling to adjust to this new experience.

“Oh my, you’re going quickly. The seed must like you~”

She reaches out to cup your cheek, the warmth of her hand and your febrile heat doubled in your senses; your lips part and she leans in to kiss you and you cannot tell which lips are your own and which are not. Her body presses against yours and yours presses against hers, thighs between parted legs, your body responding to her sensations. You lose yourself in her, awash in her body, falling out of yourself; for what does it mean to be a single body, when you can feel everything she does? What does it mean to be a distinct mind when her memories and thoughts creep into the edges of yours, when the world blooms with colors and knowledge that you know you have never had before?

The patterns creeping into your vision, the knowledge pooling in the depths of your mind, is like nothing you have experienced before; you move in concert with her, perfectly aware of what will happen next, your bodies lost in the rhythm of a dance you never realized you knew. Your mind fills with music and you welcome it in, welcome your dissolution, feel yourself fill with joy as you become part of her.

She lets her new body rest for a long time, wary of disrupting the process of integration; the new organs growing inside it, and all the little tweaks that she has to do to make it into a more idealized version of who it was, cannot be rushed. But that’s okay. She has all the time in the world.