(Rewritten) Ch. 76 – Xenocide Act VI; Tease

"A well-timed tease can turn an ordinary moment into a memory etched in laughter.

A good tease is like a dance, a rhythm of love and jest.

A bad tease leaves a sour note, shatters the dance and corrupts a relationship."

– Excerpt from A Treatise On Social Graces, 2028

***

Leah's eyes danced with mirth. She'd caught on. Again.

Blushing heavily, I squinted at her. She was going to say something very compromising.

So, I suddenly removed my hands, and just when she was about to speak, sprayed her with water from my tail and left her spluttering.

While she was coughing and trying to recover, I quickly spun a fist-sized ball of loose silk and soaked it in water, until it swelled to the size of my head. Then I waited.

It didn't take very long. Leah pointed her squirt-gun finger at me, trying to track me through cough-induced tears. I dodged easily, and threw the absolutely soggy ball at her face. She blocked it by reflex where it exploded against her hand like a water bomb.

The resulting deluge hit us both, and I finally broke down in laughter with most of the awkward blushing behind me, even if the tingle at the base of my antennae was still echoing.

Then I sighed a little. "Leah?"

She calmed down and wiped the water from her face, before she looked at me.

"Yeah?"

"This time it was all accidental and I get that. But as I've said before, please quit teasing me so much? Not if you don't want the consequences. I don't mind the little stuff, the cuddles, sharing warmth, the soothing and petting. That's all different. But if we go past the limits, then, well, we stay there."

Her expressions shifted for a little while. There was confusion, a realization, a tiny bit of guilt or shame, and an apology.

Then she spoke again, "Yeah. I'm sorry. I didn't quite realize what I was doing. Thanks for, um, making me aware, I guess?"

The uncertainty of whether we were on the page pushed at me uncomfortably, wanted me to resolve it. I tilted my head, Leah-style. "Aware of what?"

Leah looked down with some embarrassment.

"Well, I was testing you, wasn't I? If you'd keep your word and stay, uh, decent. Even if I poked at it."

I nodded. We were on the same page after all. I breathed a little easier.

"And the thing is, Tinea, I wouldn't even do it if I wasn't attracted to you," she said with a bit of a blush.

I hugged her from the side. My turn to go all Aww.

Leah giggled at me and squeezed me back. The physical contact warmed me and a smile curled my lips. I just really appreciated being a girl.

"But yes. I'll tone it down. It isn't really a nice thing to keep testing you…to imply that you aren't trustworthy," she almost whispered.

I gave Leah another squeeze and stretched up to kiss her on the eyebrow. "Thank you. And if you want to tease me, know that I'm fine with that," I said, with a flushed glance to the side. I didn't mind a little bit of…dominance from her. Then my eyes met hers again, with a challenge. "But expect that I'm going to take it as an invitation, alright? And I'll absolutely return the favor."

A tiny red tinge highlighted her cheekbones, and she replied with just a little of that same heat I'd exposed earlier. "I'll keep that in mind."

The hidden promise in her voice went straight to my core and made me shift hotly. I jumped up with a sudden need to move. Tease! Tease!

Although this was the fun-future kind, not the kind daring me to have a go right this moment.

But I required revenge, indeed I did!

I looked around myself while bouncing on my toes, until my eyes zeroed in on the cannon's transport ring at the end of its hitch.

The hitch on which Leah was still sitting, laughing at me.

I hopped to it, and before Leah could react, I'd lifted it hip-high in a single move, and she half-tumbled-half-catapulted off of it.

She didn't go very far, but she sure made a nice splash with her bum.

The mud just slid off of her suit as she climbed to her feet, and even the prosthetics were hydrophobic.

She arched an eyebrow at me, and I answered with a gentle shower from my spinneret, to wash the specks of dirt from her face. She was sputtering. Again.

Laughing, I said, "There. All clean now, Leah."

That was apparently a little too much, and she jumped at me with tickling hands. Giggling, I tried to return the favor, and surprisingly, her suit didn't kill the sensations!

Leah let out some very hiccupy sounds and moved away with big eyes, hands covering her flanks.

"What?" I asked, a little confused at the reaction.

"Uh, like, way too sensitive…? Like, it's more sensitive than my actual skin? Even though your poking didn't do anything at all earlier?"

Ypsi's voice answered her. Yeah! It's different from just getting poked, which doesn't move across the receptors in your skin. That's what, um, 'amplified signal-delta' means! It can feel way tiny changes from a moving touch!

"Or;" I said with an evil smirk and grasping hands, "it's ticklish."

Leah stared at me for a moment, and when I started moving towards her, she very quickly hopped into the crash couch behind her. The robot arms removed and stowed her limbs in less than a second, and the egg snapped shut, cutting me and my ticklers off.

Her face popped up on the shell, and she stuck her tongue at me.

Hmm. I wonder if there was a way to hack somebody's body and make them feel like you were tickling them?

Um. Probably yes. Samurai shit. But maybe…better not. That struck me as a little invasive. Yeah.

So, smiling, I returned to something a little more business-oriented.

"Hey Leah, can your egg tow the cannon?"

She nodded at me, letting the fun spill away a little. "Easily, in fact. It's meant to be strong, climb in difficult terrain. It can even walk upside down along ceilings, and stuff. Strength was more important than speed to the designers, apparently. Easier to strap some travel package on, than to give it extra power aftermarket, I think?"

Ah, that did actually make sense. I could see jumpjet upgrades and that kinda stuff. But you wouldn't need it if the pod could just walk anywhere you had to go, no matter what. Slow, but reliable and cheap.

"And I was thinking we could probably attach the cannon with your silk? Except now we have a lot more points, so actually I think I should get that robot gantry."

"What can it do?"

"Well, it basically replaces the crew. It's a smallish robot that can load, aim, and fire the cannon, and it can pack itself up to be used as an attachment point at the rear of my pod to hitch the cannon to."

That did sound useful. Especially if Leah was going to get that under-belly cannon. "How much does it cost?"

Six hundred points! But almost half of that is a catalog for robots.

"Seems fine to me. Leah?" I questioned.

She nodded again. "Yeah, I'm thinking I'm going to need it no matter what, right? Well, if I want to use the cannon again. It'd be stupid to leave this pod in battle."

At least without additional armor, yeah. "Wanna buy it, then? Along with your other cannon?"

Leah nodded and climbed back out of her pod. She knelt in front of it as it lifted itself higher, so she could get a look at its bottom. I was tempted to tickle her again, but before I could decide whether or not I should—and probably come to the conclusion that the moment had passed, Leah asked about my talk with Tynea.

"Well," I answered, kind of overwhelmed. "It was…a lot?"

She twisted around on her haunches to look up at me and smiled wryly. "Tends to be, doesn't it?"

I just nodded, returning the wry smile. The gears were turning behind her eyes as she studied my face and worked out what question she wanted to offer me.

To help me.

That thought almost made me cry with happiness, so unused was I to such care.

"What…" Leah started, still absorbed in formulating, "did you figure out about Tynea's reasons? Those between the lines."

"Uh. How do you mean?"

"There's answers she gave you, right?" Leah returned and continued wryly, "And lots of explanations, if I know my AIs well enough."

"Yeah…" She smiled at me to soften my rising, exhausted annoyance with Tynea, and it sure worked.

"And if I know my AIs even better, the explanations Tynea gave you weren't…quite straightforward. They were designed to make you think and challenge her."

"Mm," I nodded. She wasn't wrong. "I think so. She wanted to…fix our conflict more than she saw a need to answer me. The answers I got were just…tools towards that end, maybe. Like, she didn't need to answer, but she did because doing so was useful?"

"That tinged the whole conversation, didn't it?"

"Yes."

"If you remove that tinge, all the extraneous stuff that turned the argument into a conversation, what's the singular reason you arrive at? What's the thing she did-but-didn't say, because it  wasn't an answer she had to give?"

Holy fuck what a mind twister. Leah was…so fucking smart it genuinely surprised me. But I sat with the question she'd asked, while she patiently waited.

Eventually, by relying on public knowledge of samurai as much as Tynea's explanations, I did succeed in distilling everything down to a simple statement that…probably made a lot of sense in that impersonal way that felt really accurate.

"We Vanguard…become less and less human as we grow stronger, don't we?"

"Yep."

"It's inevitable, really. The human body just doesn't cut it."

"It doesn't."

"And cyber dysmorphia is a thing."

"It is, and with the catalogs we can unlock, there are a lot more ways in which we risk becoming disordered."

I nodded. "Sick rejection of one's altered self might be a lot worse for samurai than it'll ever be for normal humans. 'Cause we stop being human entirely."

"Yeah. If we want to keep getting stronger."

"Resilience to dysmorphia is one of the biggest criteria for Vanguard selection, isn't it?"

Leah chuckled. "I strongly suspect so, but that's the kind of thing Ypsi won't answer."

Nor will I, said Tynea.

Sighing, I replied, "Probably for the best. Fewer fools will survive the results of forced selection experiments if they can't predict those results."

Indeed.

I continued, "Resilience doesn't equate willingness, though. The trait goes completely wasted unless the AI can…tickle it out of somebody."

"Yesss…"

"So they manipulate us into realizing we're resilient, so that we'll be more open to further transformation into…inhumanity. Want it even, enjoy it."

"I believe that's the most broadly successful strategy they've found," Leah added. Then got up and hugged me when she noticed how dejected I was.

I didn't want manipulation in my world. I'd put my life on the line decades ago, to escape it. I hadn't, it turned out. That hurt. Leah held me and softly swayed me back and forth while I silently cried.

I'd…never really come to terms with the fact that freedom from my father didn't necessarily include freedom from the perpetually lying, eternally painful existence that was being…human.

Oh. Suddenly all my tears dried up and I had to laugh at myself. Well, that changes things, doesn't it?

As I grappled with the rollercoaster of implications of, well, no longer being entirely human, the warm, red-headed wonder hugging me tilted my head up and wiped the tears from my cheeks with her thumbs and smiled gently.

"All good now?" she asked.

"Yep," I giggled wetly. "Sorry about that."

"Don't be, Tinea."

"Mm."

"Time to get to work, again?"

Smiling, I nodded, extracted myself from her arms, turned her around, and nudged her towards her pod so she'd get back to up-arming it. Meanwhile, still absorbing everything I'd just put together, I went and grabbed the cannon by the ring again.

Pushing or pulling it was easy this time; the new spines growing from my soles really made a huge difference. Even more, I could feel each single one individually as it sank past the mud and dug into the earth. Only a few snagged on something solid, but they pulled uncomfortably.

Not enough to cause pain, but…I couldn't just ignore it. If I really sprinted, I would absolutely rip my feet open around corners and stuff.

I lifted a foot and studied its underside. I had slightly stubby spines growing from it. They were about half a centimeter long and quite thick for bristles. But they weren't really proper spikes like those in running shoes—I'd need an upgrade to manage structures as large, wouldn't I?

"Tynea, is there a way to support these setae? Anchor them somehow?" I asked, rubbing my nose from all the clogginess.

You could buy a genome library for claws and the like. Those will have the sheaths and anchors you are looking for.

"Ah. I guess the battle skin has nothing?"

No. It was meant to be a device to continuously dispense and regenerate material. It's already a little special in the sense that it can reabsorb grown chitin structures. But that feature was added to improve its capacity to serve in missions—even minimal stealth is difficult when you have to shed every time you wish to reconfigure your appearance.

Appearance, huh? I let my hair run through my fingers. The thought of freely playing around with my style made me smile. Later.

"Alright. What does that genetic upgrade cost? And that armor thing where I combine grown scales above my skin?"

I'll tabulate it for you:

To Unlock:

Subtotal Unlocks: 350 pts

To Purchase:

Subtotal Libraries and Upgrades: 1570

AND

Option Cheap (+20 pts):

OR

Option Future Oriented (650 pts):

WITH

Slow (+10 pts):

OR

Fast (+300 pts):

"Fastbake gland? What's that?"

An organ that allows you to build viruses and bacteria from any library you own. This one is particularly good at manufacturing large quantities of any design saved to memory cells within the gland itself. Aside from crafting your own viruses for genetic upgrades, it also allows you to craft microscopic weapons—such as bacteria that can serve as enzyme factories.

That was…interesting. Enzyme-crafting bacteria. Enzymes could be venoms. I could inject the venom-making bacteria into stuff I wanted to convert into being poisonous! Like corpses getting dragged to Antithesis feeding pools.

"Or prep Antithesis corpses with designed bait to be left in a certain facility to fool certain kidnapping corporations into revealing themselves. Yup."

That is why I would suggest the point-wasting combat graft for the Iterator, instead of cheaper injections for everything and letting it grow naturally.

And though genomic libraries are generally expensive, this organ can iterate on those you already have, designing new versions through targeted mutation. It's quite slow due to the iterative approach, but some of the best-selling blueprints were made just like that.

But, two thousand points… That'd be fair, though. Most of that were immediate upgrades to my combat capabilities, and the Iterator would pay for itself even with the graft. And Leah was getting expensive upgrades, too. Yeah.

I looked over the list again. Hmm. I could choose between the injections and the natural growth, or I could combat-graft the Iterator and have it print the viral editors I needed for the other upgrades.

"How long would the organ take to grow naturally?"

Two days, and you'd need dense nutrition, of course.

Days…we wanted to be gone much earlier than that. We wanted to be gone in a few hours at most.

"How long will the skin upgrades take, once the Iterator can manufacture those editors?"

Not long at all. A few seconds for the viruses to reach every cell. I'll use your bionites for faster distribution. Then a few minutes for the edits, and your skin will have the ability to create growths above, in, and below itself.

"Alright. I'll take the Iterator, and with the combat graft." I sighed at the waste. Meh. I'd consider it the cost for baiting assholes. "Can I leave the design of the bacteria for the enzymes and such to you?"

There's not enough time to iterate for the correct ones before you need them. May I also purchase the blueprint for the pulvinophages I mentioned before? I can iterate on that blueprint for future use.

"...Alright. Go for it."

***