(Rewritten) Ch. 33 – Curiosity Killed The…Cat?

"Not a lot of people can claim to have actually swallowed their tongue, huh?"

– Road Rash, after an interview with an unnamed reporter

***

Ear protection. I'd be fine without it, as I found out earlier, but why go through the pain? Thank fuck I gave Leah my helmet. She didn't have the easy fix readily available.

"Tynea, got something to protect the ears? Without damping my hearing?"

Indeed. The Combat Sonic Suppressors Mark I would cost you ten points.

Ten points… Normally I wouldn't care. Now it seemed too expensive. A fallacy. Those ten points would be no help if I couldn't hear an enemy approach because I'd blown out my eardrums again.

"Yeah, toss me a pair, please."

Purchased:

Total cost: 10Remaining points: 9

Back to where I was, huh? Oh well.

Another box, and I held two circular pads in my hands. They looked exactly like earphone foam pads, but high-tech. They also had my characteristic fuzz across them, and shimmered in that translucent white of my tail, but with just a sheen of diamond dust across them. I tilted my head as I studied them and caressed the pliable softness with gentle fingertips, feeling the glimmering grains.

Do you like them?

"I think I do. They fit with my tail and even my antennae. Did you make them look that way?"

Yes. I figured that you had mostly settled on that part of your aesthetic. I took a hint from your wing design, too, with the dusting of diamond.

"Thanks. These are actually quite beautiful."

My pleasure. A sense of warmth flowed through me at Tynea's happy tones and I had to smile.

I shifted my black hair out of the way and pressed them to my skull, and the cushions sealed themselves around my ears. They activated with a gentle ding and I heard not a single difference; it was as if I wore nothing.

"Amazing, these are really good."

Leah looked at me, and brushed across the pads. "Whoa, hella cute. New fashion style?"

"Maybe. I'm starting to have a thing for fuzz, I think. I like how it makes me feel. It's a bit of an experience, letting myself just dive right in. 'M still getting used to it. Being a woman is kinda awesome, and all sorts of other things I really can't wait to explore. Once I don't have to worry about alien tentacle monsters eating me." Then I blushed hard, realizing my words had a whole 'nother meaning to them, now that I was a woman. "Not—not in the fun way," I added in fumbled words.

Leah froze, looked at me with big eyes, then got that soft look in her eyes that I loved, and finally grabbed me and vigorously fluffed my hair until I was a mussy mess blinking up at her.

"Too cute, Tinea. Far too cute," she said with a grin, while I was still coming to terms with the joy of having been played with so gleefully. It was exactly what the little Tinea in me had always wanted so, so much. Now that she did, she was overwhelmed, sitting on her bum, trying to grapple with the thing that had shifted her entire world.

I found I really loved it, and somehow that left me feeling a bit shy, trying to hide my happy smile from a knowing Leah.

A rustling reached my senses from outside, and I spotted movement with the spy drone. Fighting down a blush, I turned to Leah, indicating silence. She nodded, patted my head one more time, and then we crept down a few steps until we could barely peek across the top of the stairs.

With a thought I initiated a call to Leah, who twitched in surprise before she accepted.

"Hey, Leah. Sorry for the jolt. I can talk silently like this. You're wearing the helmet, you should be safely muffled either way. Make sure your voice isn't being transmitted outside, though."

She nodded, and after another few instants asked, "What's up?"

"I can hear and see a single Antithesis outside," I answered, "Not very big, a model Three. Wanna try that Hummingbird?"

"Oh yeah, absolutely."

"Alright. It's coming closer. Half a minute."

Leah laid down on the stairs and slunk up until she could rest the Hummingbird in a protected shooting stance, and then we waited.

With another mental flick, I called Tynea. "Do you think I can send Leah everything I'm hearing?"

Certainly, though she lacks the correct implants and organs to actually process it. You'll want to use your Quanta to translate it into normal, boosted audio.

"Ah, make the data stream useful to her?"

Yes.

"Thank you," I sent with a smile, and got to work on the data. It was enough to imagine myself wearing headphones that played for human ears what I was hearing with my antennae. I passed that through to Leah, just a few seconds before the Antithesis would arrive. She gave me a quick glance and a thumbs up, then focused forwards again.

We remained silent, offering no hint of our presence, as we listened to the alien follow its nose this way and that, ever closer to the doorway.

Almost there. Leah kept her micro-launcher pointed, ready to fire.

Its head peeked around the corner, sampling the air.

It wasn't anything like the model Threes I'd been fighting. It looked more…cat-like? And quite a bit larger.

Leah pulled the trigger, and four streaks of whining and humming projectiles slashed in whirling spirals towards the beast's head, arcing from below, just skimming above the floor and disturbing my nets in their passage, to burrow into its soft throat.

My antennae allowed me to differentiate between the staccato of four separate miniature warheads exploding inside the thing.

It slumped unceremoniously, its head nearly severed from its body with charred craters blown into it.

"Huh. It is a cheap weapon, I guess, but you'd think it would do more damage for having four projectiles explode themselves inside of the target. I know I can do a lot more with less expensive bullets."

Yes, the Hummingbird is not an efficient weapon. But it is extremely reliable and easy to use.

I looked at Leah, and she said, "Got six points for that." She'd received the bonus point on top of her half.

She walked around my traps and to the dead Antithesis and stubbed it with her toe. "Say, is this thing one of those new modified Threes? The B variant?"

Yes!, chirped Ypsi, they're from that big China incursion a while ago.

"Yeah, I remember reading about them all across the socials," I added. "How did these tiger thingies come from that, anyway?"

Oh! I know about that! Ypsi declared as only a polite little girl could, When the Antithesis eat all the organic stuff their units bring back to their nests, they'll look at the DNA code. And then they try random combinations of it with the models they already have! Usually what comes out is all weird and broken. They recycle those. But sometimes, like one in one hundred thousand, it's actually useful. Those they keep producing! The model Three variant B is one of those. The Antithesis went and added tiger DNA to their model Three! Now it looks like one.

It did. But also, really not. It had a feline appearance, but just like the normal canoid version, it looked weirdly squashed and not at all natural. Uncanny, monstrous.

It still had the armoring along most of its body, but it was a little bigger and had moved more stealthily. Not that they really needed that—you mostly didn't hear them coming anyway, not without the specialized senses of a samurai.

I joined Leah and took a moment to compare the thing to my memories of the previous fights. It was indeed bigger and, denser, somehow. I could tell that it must've been grown with more care than those of the horde I'd killed on my first day.

But it stank of cut grass and mold all the same. A scent that overpowered everything else, even more so with my antennae.

"Death stink's up, Leah. We're gonna have to be very careful. This corpse is going to bring many more, as soon as they catch wind of its stench."

"Yeah. Let's go, set up inside again. I'll think about my next weapon purchase."

Nodding at her, I turned back around, and we settled on the stairs once again.

I expected that we'd see a lot of activity soon, and that the aliens' aggression would scale drastically. They weren't exactly known for de-escalation.

Sneakiness though, they did quite well.

Hmm. Maybe I should do something about that?

"Tynea, I know there are some models that could attack us from underground. Do you think we'd run that kind of risk here?"

Those are mostly transporting models. From what I saw of that wave, there aren't a lot of double-digits around, yet. That will change very soon. If you intend to stay here only for the next two or three hours, you should not have to contend with subterranean intrusion. But I would recommend that you find a way to detect the tremors of digging Antithesis soon.

"Okay. Though, I can probably rely on the strings I'd set up already, can't I?"

Actually, that didn't quite sit right. I had a feeling that resting on my laurels, so to say, would come to bite me in the tush.

What should I do? …Something that won't cost me any points, preferably.

"I'll… Oh! I've got an idea!"

***