Moloch Mixtapes - The Book of YYN

6 Underground

--- D. H. C. TPS_HEADER [DO NOT REMOVE]---

MOLOCH - DAEDALUS HOLDINGS CORP. HQ - 11 / 01 / 27 P. W.

FILENAME: YYN

"Listen, the way I figure it we've got six months until we drop this internship. I say we take the opportunity. The initiative, y'know?"

DHC's Megacorporate lunch halls are all the same. Xenon-lit signs from partnered, recognizable food brands burn brighter upon their shopfronts than the incandescent lights above them. Once past the lines, people split into their respective groups of table politics like it's high school in perpetuity. Mountains of grey and blue plasteel armor mark the security personnel on break, grunting and comparing technically illegal methods of doing their jobs. There's the impeccably skinny research scientists who huddle and move together like penguins, all carrying on conversations you'd need at least two postgraduate degrees to get your head around. And then there are the interns: cheap shirts, bad ties and the weary expression of people who genuinely thought they were going to be astronauts when they grew up.

Fontaine Lewis is one of these interns, a lithe, tall-ish man on the wrong side of his twenties with a tight clutch of brownish hair cut short on either side. He's wearing what he considers a fine piece of corporate suitmaking, worn to the point that it's clear he doesn't own that many nice clothes. He taps a small executive-access keycard upon the table, cupping it in his hand to show the person sitting across from him like a shell game dealer.

"Simple enough to get this little guy. Nobody knows this card is missing. The guy who lost it thinks he canceled it but I never put the order through. As far as everybody is concerned..." He goes silent as a huddle of scientists passes, they all sound very concerned about something. "As far as everybody is aware, this card's been scrubbed and it's only good for a nail file. Why don't we go for a quick poke around to see what we can find, yeah? Simple in and out of the zoo. Easy peasy." He finishes his speech with a flourish of his hand, then frowns when he notices his compatriot was spaced out for at least half of it. He taps her forearm impatiently. "You with me here?"

He speaks almost too quietly to be heard, but is eager to catch her attention: "Fifty. Fourteen. Crimson."

Cora Vellam is indeed almost listening. Her blue eyes gaze about the room as she scrolls down the highlights of this season's bodymod scene. Same as ever, she's browsing Intra-Ocular Interface notifs about modscene buzz. TekTalk and Rewyy. red dictate the beat of her day like the chirps of a metronome. She signed up for IOI notifs from the Technobyte temples last month, but only because she's curious about their exclusive and holy parts. It appears that because she didn't join the church she can't receive their holy deals. If she did join, she'd certainly, definitely be the only sane one among them. She pulls a lock of her tailbone-length, reddish-brown hair to rest over her ear and sighs. Once she can afford a smartmane installation, she'll be able to pull off some "office goddess"-level glowgoth looks. Spring for biolights? Yeah, biolights. For that many creds she might as well make this an actually useful bodymod.

Cora nods at Fontaine intermittently and returns to tapping around the various HUDs in her IOI. The newest acquisitions in her workload become visible only to her in a spreadsheet rendered upon the table.

For someone such as Cora, the thought of getting a paycheck from DHC so often felt like a bonus. She has access to the fine, bleeding edge of technology every day at work and she has it absolutely cushy in Transfers. She's either scheduling an R&D project's many inspections or brainstorming how to safely relocate the oddities that Containment brings in. Oddities deemed by DHC to be so esoteric and consequential that they'd disturb the status quo if the public were to know more about them. There's beds here, food, libations and like-minded people. Why ever leave the campus? Her degree in AI-retraining with a specialty in synthetic lifeform ethics looks great on a resume, and the hiring manager here must have thought so too. It's the best job in Moloch as far as she's concerned. And ah, so she daydreams, someday this internship might even... it might even pay...

"Ugh, alright." She grumbles, her daydream gone suddenly sour.

"Alright! So are we going?" Fontaine whispers excitedly.

"No not... not that kind of alright. Like a 'hold on' kind of alright. Gimme a second." She clarifies.

Looking at him now, all excited like a dog that heard the jingle of his leash, Cora remembers sitting next to Fontaine on orientation day some six or seven months ago. His enthusiasm for "warranted misbehavior" has always been infectious and a few times it's helped Cora slog through the toughest Mondays. Here they are sitting next to each other again on the precipice of some -

"Real shit? No fooling? This is access to a-" She glances over her shoulder then whispers: "Crimson-level entity!?"

Fontaine grins with determination and nods once.

Cora recalls the memos about "sentient data" in the DHC project pipeline. It's being looked into by R&D and the acquisition number "Fifty-Fourteen Crimson" showed up in some of the confidential correspondence. It was a recent transfer on that department's behalf: A possible live dataform found in the care of a sewer cult. Forget R&D timelines, this could mean that they contained one in the wild. Cora vividly remembers processing around the highest-secrecy designation for this vaguely urgent transfer, demarcated as "extremely fragile." The last action taken was locking it away under maximum security in the subterranean holding cells. She whispers under her breath: "If we wind up on the street, we can take the war story to anyone hiring on the deepweb. This is full-on neon Lew, but I'm in. When are we going?"

Fontaine glances nervously to the side, staring down the featureless eggshell walls of the dining hall. "Soon as you like. I've never had to handle a Crimson level anything, I just know that whatever it is-" He slips into a conspiratorial whisper and makes the universal sign for money, flickering his fingers in the narrow space between them. "As you said, it holds hard retirement potential." His left pupil shimmers from an executable in his smart contacts. Cora is just able to catch the faintest outline of the DyKon logo sketched out on the edge of his iris. She realizes it's a hidden recording device, something expressly forbidden within DHC's walls! He winks at her and the logo fades; it's obviously designed for some kind of covert recording ops. He offers a hand up and gives the subtlest little head tilt in the direction of the lifts. "I say there's no time like the present."

There's a strange, rhythmic conversational protocol in DHC's Moloch Headquarters. People chat as they make their way to and fro along the corridors but fall suddenly quiet when their path crosses another group. It's impossible to ignore the beat of conversations stopping and starting. When almost everything you're dealing with is the most important secret you've ever heard, all conversation is separated into careful segments to account for the corporation's many layered schemas of confidentiality. Once the two are more or less alone in a hallway, Fontaine can't help but boast about this genius little gambit.

"The card's previous owner was mouthing off about the fuss Acquisitions had gone through to find this thing. A bunch of sewer cultists had set up a shrine inside a storm drain near 5th Street. Something about their behavior was spooking the locals so Containment went in hot. Five whole rapid response teams moved in under fire, decommissioned the place, found whatever they had built a shrine to, and filed it Crimson. Mr. Keycard came all the way up to HR for a psych appointment after the raid and -erm... That's it, I suppose."

Cora nods. "I've seen some of those drain gangs off Market and Sunset. Creepy stuff. Neat costumes though."

The pair make their way to the hall of lower-level elevators, each one ready to rocket downward into The Labyrinth where the countless Things-Mankind-Was-Never-Meant-To-Poke in DHC's possession are stored forever inside their individual, color-coded, personalized cells. They step into the aperture for one of the obediently waiting lifts. Fontaine shoots a nervous smile to Cora and places the keycard half into the slot, not punching it in yet.

"Last chance to bug out. We really doing this?"

Cora straightens her lab coat in preparation for ignition, so to speak. She turns to him and says "We're here for ten hours a day in the name of actively making sure nothing happens. I wanna see what all those numbers and classifications actually mean, same as you." She places her hand upon the clearance card, resting limp and half-inserted. "If you never fuck around, you never find out."

"And we're gonna find out..." Fontaine repeats, placing his hand with giddy excitement right beside Cora's.

"One, two, three!" The pair of them press the card into the elevator's "restricted destination" slot. This action is followed by a tense silence as the elevator glides along its three-dimensional tracks to cell 50-14-CRIMSON.

A mechanism inside of the wall grips the card and pulls it entirely inward. Its barely visible edge disappears entirely into the card slot. The pair of them affix their eyes on the dimmed status display above the hole. Its status screen burns with a solid, red LED. Short buzzing noises come from both sides of the lift and nothing appears to budge. The door isn't opening either.

"Nuh uh!" Cora yelps in protest. "That was a good card, ya damn gearbox! Let us in!" The elevator does not appear to recognize or bend to her disappointment. The blow is visible upon Fontaine's shoulders which slump like he's holding a losing magrace ticket. Cora paces around the small area, not ready to give up. Fontaine keeps his mouth shut and tries to stare down the bright red LED, shining the universal color for "abandon all hope." His gaze slides over to meet Cora's as if looking for assurance but her panic-driven anger is passively shutting him up. Images of the walls closing in and squashing them both are forced out of his mind.

"We have credentials!" Cora yells into the card slot. "Let us the fuck in! We wanna see Fifty-Fourteen Crimson!" The final syllable barely escapes her lips before a positive-sounding, three-tone bell chime echoes through the elevator. The red light turns green and the door opens silently along a well-kept track. A reassuring little jingle confirms that it's safe to leave the elevator. Fontaine breathes an audible exhale of relief. Him and Cora enter the entity's antechamber without any spontaneous crushing of their bones and organs. The elevator whirs, hums, and leaves them behind.

"I uh... I guess there was two-factor security." She beams, shooting Fontaine a smile. "Makes sense. If this acq' is dark as they hype it up to be, it would need to hear an approved user. It probably knows I'm in Transfers?" She guesses.

"As an intern." Fontaine corrects her.

"You're one to talk." Cora chides with a mischievous grin. "Maybe the drain gang effigy forgot PPE and needs to file for occupational comp..." She folds her arms, adding "-or a cup of coffee."

Fontaine gives her an unimpressed grunt about that last quip.

"Coffee Bitch." She smugly clarifies.

"I know! Okay!?" Fontaine exclaims, his anger directed at the powers that be more than Cora.

This antechamber serves as an observation room with a single folding chair, a never-used drip coffee maker, and another door with an eye-level window into the thing's enclosure.

"Ladies first!" Cora chirps, walking straight up to the containment airlock door.

Fontaine follows and shines a small, titanium pen-light from his pocket through the eye-level window. He lets out a low whistle. "Phew. Yo, look at this." He moves aside with the flashlight still wedged in the slot so Cora can see.

The chamber the door is attached to is around 15 feet square. It's entirely unadorned aside from a raised platform in the center of the room. Atop it lies a tall clay vase. From here, it resembles a standing drum or something an ancient chirurgeon would have used to store large reagents. Cast in a dull reddish terracotta, it stands about 5 feet high and a couple of feet across.

A mechanical voice rings out in the antechamber: "Access Granted." Fontaine jumps back as the heavy door with a slit for a window swiftly retreats into the wall. The flashlight goes with it, rattling into the door's control mechanisms and probably disappearing forever.

"Did you do something?" Cora asks, visibly startled by the sudden unsealing of Fifty-Fourteen's cell.

"No! I almost caught my death!" he complains. It's nothing, he assures himself. They're both so nervous about this bit of lunchtime espionage that even an automatic door is setting them on alert. He collects himself and bravely suggests "Well, let's have a look at it then. That's why we're here." Cora nods in agreement, facing the clay pot in the distance.

As the pair wander into the containment chamber, the sliding door fails to shut behind them. Sounds of mechanical difficulty and little warning beeps of failure seem to say that the flashlight is stopping it from closing. Cold circular lights upon the cell's walls, floor and ceiling blink on, They emit a soulless glow that fills the room with perfectly neutral light.

The jar lies just ahead of them. Their nerves get the better of their legs and the pair freeze in place.

"Uhhhh, ladies first?" Fontaine jokes.

Cora grabs his forearm and they proceed closer, off to investigate the artifact together.

Epitaph

There's a palpable sense of reverence emanating from the urn with its place in the center of this cell. It feels like entering a cloister perfectly preserved in a warzone, or seeing the deep desert's unspoiled sky for the first time. It's just a clay pot, sure, but the markings upon it sit heavy with meaning like scars upon its clay skin. Upon slightly closer inspection, the urn is engraved with pictographic images of humanlike figures all around the surface like so much Byzantine pottery. It has what appears to be a wax-covered cork across the aperture, sealing in whatever's inside. There's the slightest trace of condensation around the rim. Whatever this thing is, it is visibly, incredibly old.

Cora feels beside herself. "Is this really a live dataform, or was that just a cover-up?"

Fontaine can scarcely contain his expletives. "What the fuck..."

From left to right, the pictographs follow a tall, female shamanic figure in a mantle of antelope or ibex horns cast in a different shade of clay. The images show the figure poring over alembics and other alchemical equipment, her attention all focused on an artist's rendition of the clay container itself. It appears as if the shaman is attempting to create something inside of this very jar. The inscription curls around the edge and vanishes from wear after a point, but the final image shows the figure standing back and prostrating herself before its contents. The jar's occupant is drawn emerging and grasping at the other typographic elements of the etching. From the stylization, it looks like pitch dark smoke with a sinister face and dozens of appendages.

Cora knows a little bit of hieroglyphics and a handful of common phrases in dead languages, skills picked up on-the-job from her half a year at DHC, but this art doesn't bear the hallmarks of any ancient civilization she's aware of. She swings closer for a slightly better look at the faded portion just in case it bears some clue about why a corked clay jar is worthy of a crimson classification.

Her perfume smells of sweet amber, black pepper, and a tinge of dusty analog components humming to life. The bouquet catches Fontaine's olfactories as she moves closer again, craning to examine the unusual pictographs. Cora intimates a "quiet" signal by placing her onyx-colored index fingernail to her glossy pink lipstick. Both glimmer like gems as she stands atop the jar's stage in the chamber's fluorescent light. Fontaine is maintaining a healthy, several-foot distance from the thing for better filming but he can't help but be enamored by Cora's boldness. He remains ready to straighten-up, just in case she looks his way.

Cora takes a few cautious steps to the side around the jar. The worn portion, upon the top row with the horned alchemist, has been freshly chipped away by a tool. In fact damage mars several parts of the urn, all resembling the work of a belt sander. It's uncanny given the apparent age of the relic, but it's left behind an unmistakable texture. She waves Fontaine closer and reaches out gently to feel the grit of the damage. As Fontaine comes close, Cora whispers "Who censors an urn?"

The full force of the creeps washes through Fontaine as he comes to stand upon the urn's plinth, nose tilted ever so slightly to pick up on more of Cora's perfume. He wonders: Does she know? They share a table in the canteen most days while he does most of the talking. Long rants with a lot of hand movements while she eats away at whatever delicious smelling thing she's brought from her apartment or DinnerDroned to the office. He wonders if she keeps him around for the same reason people tune into Lo-fi; only being marginally better than silence. Fontaine peers absently at the sanded-off portion with other things on his mind. A drink together after this, he promises himself, somewhere nice. He surmises "That's a bit uncanny to be normal wear-and-tear."

Cora rolls some of the sand between her fingers and lets it fall to the sterile, gray floor of the open, empty room. "Yeah, censored. This is recent." She continues. "What kind of information corp is destroying the information on ancient relics? Was this glyph some kind of cognitohazard? Like a curse?"

Fontaine is snapped out of the fantasy date in his head by Cora's conjecture of a curse. She looks over her shoulder and he replies with a "Hey, I don't make the rules"-sort of awkward shrug at her assumption that they're dealing with things beyond a rational explanation. His hand trails the engraving as he walks around it right up to the final image of the anthropomorphised smoke.

"I have no idea... I don't think it was the Containment team. They'd have orders to bring it in intact. The folks who were worshiping it maybe?" He pauses, winks, and finally asks: "You want to see what's behind door number three?"

For a moment Cora takes it as an odd come-on, as if all of this was a ruse to get her to go out with him, but she sees that familiar image bend brightly across his iris. The corner of the DyKon logo. He's recording and she's on camera. Fontaine produces a small bone-handled butterfly knife from the pocket of his slacks.

All Cora can manage is an "Oh-" She sounds impressed, and at that moment Fontaine has never been so certain of doing anything in his life. It is a nice knife, but- "You're... not going to..." Cora figured they would take some pictures, take some samples of the clay dust, and sell the information nice and clean for -

"Yeah, I'll open it. Just gimme a second." Fontaine announces.

Fontaine subconsciously opens and closes the knife a few times, its showy Damascus sheen curls in rainbows like oil on water. What is it about butterfly knives that makes people do that, he wonders? It's a universal sort of human fidget, like firing an electric drill before you actually use it. If someone actually did this flippy nonsense in a fight the other guy would stick or shoot you halfway through the flourish.

Cora is visibly on-edge. Something about the presence of any knife, even a gaudy one, is worsening the gravity of this situation. She was expecting a thing in a tube, maybe a missing political figure or a non-species superpredator from the radioactive jungles of South America. The chamber's actual contents resemble a cursed artifact much more than a dark chrome modern marvel. She freezes before the anodized rainbow blade, glimmering colorfully beneath the pale light as this absolute madman starts doing knife tricks beside a Crimson-class acquisition. Resolute that he's shown off his knife skills to his secret crush, Fontaine gently teases the blade into the waxy space between the cork and rim of the jug. He leans in, focusing closely and applying the perfect pressure to pry it open.

Oh gods and gearboxes he's actually going to- "Fontaine!" Cora shouts like a whispered bark - and he's wedged the lid open with an almost cartoonish sound effect. The cork's pop sounds exactly like that of a bottle of wine, followed by the long hiss of a half-open beer can. Fontaine leans backwards and holds his breath, only now having ancient bioweapons and wartime poisons come to mind. Cora jumps off of the dais and watches the jar closely from afar.

"There we go... what's inside of you, huh?" Fontaine asks with both hands over his mouth. The hissing becomes louder until the pressure from inside the jar finally pops the cork into the air.

It lands quietly on the floor and rolls across the room. Cora realizes that they've crossed a threshold which even the street sects refused to trespass. In the silence following, she realizes that "Fifty-Fourteen" may not even be alive. Whatever a wax cork was holding back surely couldn't be that dangerous. It's basically a sponge.

"I see... Crimson huh?" Cora supposes aloud, cautiously re-approaching the now open urn. "This better not be some kind of red herring. Some kind of fake high security transfer to cover up another. It just looks like a museum piece." She rejoins Fontaine and the jar atop its dais in the center of the room to examine its contents. The lights above shine upon a brackish, oily, and waterlike surface. She sniffs at it, determining it to be odorless, and angles her view of the inside to make better sense of the odd reflections on the water's surface. It's difficult to tell where the liquid starts and the darkness ends.

"Dare you to touch it." His words make the hairs on Cora's neck stand on-end. She'd yell if they weren't concerned with being caught down here.

"You touch it! You brought us down here!"

"We're both equally in trouble, Cee. Are you scared?" he teases.

"Clearly you're the scared one." She glares at him and gets a smug grin in return. "Ugh, it's a sunk cost to not find out at this point. Fine."

Cora rolls up the sleeve of her lab coat, and then the sleeve of her button-up before sticking her right hand into the jar. Her arm sinks past the bottle's neck until she can feel liquid. She pulls it back out to find the tips of her fingers repainted. They're coated in a reflective black and viscous substance that trickles thin like blood across the lines on her palm. She holds it up to show Fontaine, causing a few inky droplets to dirty the pale grey plinth beneath them.

"Hear me out. Maybe it was something," she guesses. The black ichor drips down to her wrist. She's successfully disgusted herself, knowing that they may be dealing with something more revolting than preem. It drips thick down her arm, odorless but putrid in all other respects. "You think we're too late? Are these remains?"

"Cora. I can just imagine the news reports:" Fontaine emphasizes his point with hand motions again, spreading them in the air to imply a large headline: "'Two Researchers Find Muck In Jar.' I bet it'll make front page of every forum on the net." He drops the sarcasm and reassures her. "It's fine, we're just looking. I'm starting to think we might not even get in trouble. It just looks like ink, choomie."

Fontaine grins at his own reflection in Fifty-Fourteen's black mirror, twisted in the muscular geography of Cora's forearm. He holds the knife flat against the darkness' edge on Cora's skin. He gently slides its cold and sharp surface up her forearm like a razor, accumulating a small puddle on the blade which he holds over the urn. It trickles slowly back into the jar.

Cora tenses up, her breaths all excited and cold as she feels the blade gliding so near her skin. A second sheet of it accidentally sloughs onto the floor. Fontaine stares at the splotch in the same way he'd regard a weird, dead bug.

"It's a prank perhaps? Fill a jar with a long chain hydrocarbon and watch people freak out? I'd say your guess is as good as mine." His tone shifts from audible relief to the tone of an older brother doing their best to gross out their younger sibling. "Y'know Cora, you may be right. This stuff probably wasn't some-thing but was some-one a very long time ago." He deftly rotates the knife in the air to admire its reflections from all angles and show it off one last time. "Welp, I'm rightly disgusted with our discovery. Fancy getting the fuck outta here?"

"Seems like the best course of action." Cora replies with regret and revilement in her throat. "All this sneakin' around for a literal puddle of garbage." She tries to use her other thumb to push some of the darkness back into the jar from whence it came, but she finds herself having difficulty. "I can wash this off in the sink, I guess. I'll hide it under my coat until I can put some neoprenes over it, then maybe take it into the lab after hours. l let you know if I can find anything interesting about it." She bends down to pick up the lid and places the brittle thing gently back on top of the pot. The chamber looks more or less as it did when they had entered it. Only a few dark drops sit upon the pale, glowing floor as the pair approach the door to leave.

Lotus 蓮

With their faces only a foot from the door, it closes in front of them at a dangerous speed. The emergency servos smash the flashlight, still stuck behind the wall, into innumerable pieces with a gut-wrenching sound. The white lights turn suddenly red as the hermetic containment seals on the door clang shut then fizzle into place. Cora jumps back and into Fontaine. Her shoulder collides with his chest, knocking the both of them over. "The fuck!?" She exclaims, running swiftly back to the door and pushing upon it. Through the panel she can faintly hear a warning playing on the intercom. Cora presses her ears against the door struggling to make it out.

"Containment breach!?" Cora yelps. "Oh gods. That's not us, is it? Did something else get out and we're..." Fontaine watches in horror as the iris of Cora's right eye lights up with pale, glitching, errorlike patterns all along its retina. Her IOI is struggling to keep up with the sheer number of notifications. 600 in the last few seconds and counting. Cora stands dumbstruck as the right half of her vision begins to corrupt, filling up with overly bright, system-level warning messages.

NOTICE: HALIFAX Security has denied access to a possible network threat! Open LOKFAX for more details.

NOTICE: HALIFAX Security has denied access to a possible network threat! Open LOKFAX for more details.

NOTICE: HALIFAX Security has denied access to a possible network threat! Open LOKFAX for more details.

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NOTICE: HALIFAX Security has denied access to a possible network threat! Contact S̵̃͘u̵͐̈́p̵͑̾p̷̟͑o̴͆̀@̸̄̕#̶͋̌$̵̌͝D̶̈́̀H̵͒͌*̷̒̂D̶̛̿

NOTICE: Are you sure you would like to >*Aborted*

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"Cora? Cora... you good?" There's a note of concern in Fontaine's voice as Cora winces and staggers on her feet. Her inter-ocular lens flares hot with digital chaos that shines through her eyelid and dizzies her equilibrium. In that moment he's never more grateful for his status as a relative tech-hipster, nothing truly 'installed' besides the recording contact and some net-adjustable dental work.

Cora panics and instinctively covers her right eye with her slime-covered hand. The water-like texture it bore straight out of the jar is quickly stiffening upon her skin and turning manually inseparable from the flesh beneath. She whirls around and smacks her hand into the wall; a painful decision made in the moment that causes her to yelp in pain and cover it instinctively with her other palm. It splatters instead of shattering, sending even more ink spots absolutely everywhere.

Fontaine rushes forward and places an arm around Cora's shoulders to steady her, though that wet crack of smacking her hand against the wall is still making him whinge. Fine droplets of black ichor left from the impact form tiny, radial patterns against the containment cell's walls. A barely audible peal of regret escapes Fontaine's lips as the room's lights begin to pulse in the color of blood, painting the whole room that exact hue of "abandon all hope."

Cora's ears ring out in her skull. All sound seems very distant, as if coming through poor speakers or like the Doppler effect from a passing car. Her hearing slowly returns, but all this evidence points to a horrifying conclusion.

"It's... oh gods it's in my augments!" She cries out, holding her blackened hand out to Fontaine, fingers spread. "Cut the rest off! Do it!" She takes a fearful step towards Fontaine, pleading "NOW!!!"

Fontaine starts toward her, his hand fumbling at the knife in his pocket once again. He wraps her wrist in the crook of his elbow like he's putting it in a headlock; she's in too much of a panic to stay still. He moves to take another shot at removing the goo but something far more terrifying catches his eye.

The jar has started to emit a loud and uncomfortable grinding sound.

It's rotating.

A low, nauseating hum fills the chamber, rattling their bones as the bottom of the jar scrapes the top of its plinth. A dozen heartbeats later and the jar leaves the dais entirely, appearing to float and continue spinning in midair. The air around the clay container visibly vibrates as it rises. The horrible hum lowers in pitch, sliding gracelessly down the scales into an organ-quivering, subsonic growl.

Knife in his hand, Fontaine gingerly but hurriedly works the blade between the mixture and her skin. The snap upon its release is like cutting a latex glove, whereupon it immediately reliquifies and covers her once again. The blade shivers in his grasp. It's as if his mind is watching his hands work, his fingers driven entirely off of instinct and a huge spike in adrenaline.

Fontaine has almost worked another patch of the stuff off Cora's arm when a shattering sound brings both of the DHC interns' hands to their ears. A myriad of cracks cut bright square lightning paths through the ancient ceramic. The light inside the damage bubbles away as it fills with waterfalls of the same thick black ichor that coats Cora's hand. The resulting puddles spread eagerly upon the floor. That hum rises again to a second horrible crescendo, whereupon the jar completely explodes from within.

Whatever power or meaning those glyphs had held, they've all been reduced to a puff of clay dust. In its place remains a massive and roaring column of black liquid anchored to the ceiling like a stalactite, sagging towards the floor as it continues to grow.

The text of Cora's IOI flashes orange over and over until the little light in her right eye goes dark. The status light in her own vision turns off for the first time in years. It was her only connection to the outside world and it appears to be stuck in a reboot loop. Each restart feels like someone plucking a dulcimer string in her brain.

"OHGODSWHATTHEFUCKISTHAT?" Fontaine gasps, backing up to the corners of the room and going pale. His bravado, like the jar, entirely cracks. He holds her un-injured hand and yelps "Cora! Do something!"

The stalactite triples in size in a matter of seconds, now forming a full floor-to-ceiling pylon three feet in diameter that ripples unsettlingly along its length. It moves and appears much like ferrofluid, an otherwise perfectly mirrored black-on-black surface left raked and distorted by odd shapes wriggling within.

Another reboot plucking at her temporal lobe brings Cora to shout "Do something!?" with an exasperated panic in her inflection. Her face is visibly frazzled from fear and her face is pallid to the point where it appears faintly purple under the red emergency lights. "Do something!?" She repeats, this time in a tone that's genuinely asking if Fontaine is serious. She extends her arm, palm upturned and pointing towards the rapidly expanding column of slippery darkness that's threatening to overtake the entire room. "Oh yeah! Sorry I didn't think about that! How about I fucking do something about this!?"

The errant droplets begin to grow exponentially faster, splattered all over the place from their efforts to remove the muck. A bizarre fractal formation blossoms across the floor as larger networks consume the smaller ones. Pristine and industrial walls are eclipsed drop by drop in ichorous and shimmering black. It seeps across the ceiling and begins dripping down the walls like molten tar, eager to join the growing geometric pools on the floor.

A hissing sound like a hydraulic mechanism exploding pops like a gunshot out of the door behind them. As the pair turn to look they find the stuff forming an airtight seal over the door. The sentient sheets of slime pull at the seal and pry at the exposed mechanisms as if looking for any method of escape. As Cora and Fontaine look around for their own escape plan, they find themselves standing in a conspicuously spotlight-sized hole amid pools, pylons and puddles of dripping, drooling, diffusing bits of Fifty-Fourteen Crimson. They're cornered.

Cora, certain that nothing she does will stem the wellspring of pure and glittering contamination which continues erupting from the center of the room, takes a few steps towards the center plinth. She places her hands to her mouth and shouts in its general direction:

"Heeeey! What are you? Could you let us out? I'd really appreciate that!"

She quickly shoots a look towards Fontaine that's equal parts terrified and unamused. "Thanks in advance!" She adds.

As if it were an answer to her inquiry, Cora's IOI successfully boots to a BIOS... of a sort. The ASCII glyphs are all off-kilter. The letters are some kind of non-Cyrillic scrawl which shift in form and position whenever she looks away. The display ebbs and flickers, but at least it appears to have stopped rebooting. It errors, spews corrupted graphical artifacts all across her vision, and then it reboots once more.

"What's your name?" She asks directly of the dripping core, this obelisk of silicone blackness which sloughs off its extremities like crude oil. It continues to spray a font of globules that skitter along the ground like dozens of insects carrying a great plague. With no immediate answer from the mass or from her unusual new operating system, she turns to Fontaine and gripes "There. I did something. Do you have any ideas?"

"Yeah... I mean yeah, no." Fontaine corrects himself, his face reading the same cocktail of panic. "I work in H. R! I'm not trained for this!" He gestures vaguely at the spire as it spreads across the walls of the room. He catches out of the corner of his eye that his knife is half-dissolved and floating in the mass halfway up the wall. How did it get there? When did he drop it? Is it being... eaten?

He massages his eyes with the back of his knuckles. His concept of a chill, rebellious sort of lunch date has been dashed into a billion pieces. He pulls his company-issued brogues in further, leaning in closer to Cora and peeking over her shoulder as he considers how to appeal to this terrifying force.

It hurts to look at it, sucking in all light as it is. A fluid nothingness poured out into space. Cora's judgmental looks over Fontaine's utter lack of cajones is almost just as withering. Still, her attempts at negotiation get him thinking. His teeth grit up. He isn't going down like this: Charm, damn it! It's the sole thing you're good at! Work the room! Diffuse the situation!

Fontaine steps beside her, palms swung out wide in the universal symbol of surrender and negotiation. There's an oddly capable aura about him as he assumes a charismatic presence. Something magnetic and salesmanlike. It's easy to imagine him on some late night livestream in a six-figure suit, peddling the doctrine of an obscure "health" cult.

"Mission successful, Cora! We let the thing out. Good job everyone! We square?"

There's no response at first. Nothing from the rapidly expanding substance nor the creature-like shapes crawling within it. Only that resonant, susurrating and subsonic hum like a several-yard diameter singing bowl answers their attempts at diplomacy.

With only the red circle around Cora and Fontaine left in the absence of the entity's body, the very shape of the room starts to writhe and shift. The walls have been overcome. They swell and creak with the weight of the substance clinging to and devouring it like substrate. The flat boundaries of the cell begin to snap and slither inwards, resembling less of a holding cell and more like a cave carved out of wet obsidian. The humming abruptly increases in pitch once again, screeching upward through exponential tones into an ear-splitting shriek. Both of the unfortunate employees bearing witness to this terrible metamorphosis wince and cover their ears again on instinct alone.

Once they both have their hands against their heads, Cora opens her eyes for one final moment. She feels a skein of wetness pouring hard upon her from above. The syrupy fluid slaps down upon the tops of their heads with unexpected weight and viscous tenacity. The material immediately covers their eyes and cements their hands over their ears in a thick helmet of pitch with a mirror sheen.

After the mass snares them, the skittering shapes all around converge readily inward. Slick appendages rear up from the spotlight's edges and coil upon the pair's legs. The fluid continues to flow from above, sliding unimpeded down their torsos and soaking their clothes until it meets and joins the mass below.

The fluid begins thickening like sap in winter. Although the mass has not encased them entirely yet, they are rooted into the floor and anchored to the ceiling. The goo is dreadfully cold and its touch carries a goosebump-raising electric flicker that rockets unpredictably through their flesh. The fluid squeezes tighter then hardens again, like a thick vacuum bag that's only tensile enough to prevent itself from shattering.

The slime conforms to their features as it cures upon their bodies, sparing their faces from the bridge of the nose down but otherwise covering them head-to-heels in a hardening carapace clearly designed to immobilize them. A fat column snakes down their spine to join the thick trunk encasing their legs, hardening immediately along their vertebrae to ensure a total lack of physical ability.

Once they are covered and stayed, possibly permanently, a sound seems to come from everywhere at once. "...,,,////MMMMYYY NNNAMMMMEEE,,,..." the mass roars in a horrible tenor, nearly shrieking like the tortured boiler of an ancient steam engine. "....,,,,,////IISSSSSSS YYYYYYNNNNNN///,,,...."

Magic Spell

Cora tries to shudder and Fontaine tries to struggle but both of them are held fast, denied their very instincts. Yyn's voice can be heard again, emanating from somewhere inside their own heads. Its tenor now is positively genial, to the point of mocking them.

"And why would I ever let go of such a perfectly matched set?"

Cora's panic sets in properly. At least she's been given the dignity of having her mouth free. She puzzles out her next move. Perhaps it wants to communicate? Think, Cora, think... This could be life or death.

"Th-AAAAAAAAuh!!" It shocks her like a feral animal, or at least she's pretty sure that's what happened. There was a visceral crackling sensation across her right armpit that went all the way up to her elbow. Only her nose and lips can still move, enjoying the comparatively warm air of the chamber. She focuses her attention on her breathing and attempts to reason again. Could Fifty-Fourteen, or "Yyn" as it claims, simply be scared?

There's a possibility that it could be a lost xenogenic experiment, but if it were so displaced and alien then how did it corrupt her IOI? Even in the darkness of the hood over her head, she can see a small bluish-white circle spinning in the darkness as her hardware attempts to connect to anything. It's an empty promise that it might yet see the network again. Her eyes in the dark occasionally flit back to this only light in her oozing, personal hell found deep beneath the DHC offices. She's reasoning out the best thing to say when the electricity returns to stop her, markedly harder than before.

She screams so loud that her body can feel its echoes.

Cora spits, gasping for air. Every time she gets a plan it prods her like a warning shot. All across her body this punishment is adding up, making it progressively harder to form thoughts under Yyn's panopticon-like punishment system. Electrified pins and needles flicker all across her legs, arms, and abdomen. She shudders in its grasp. It's enough to make her fall over if only she could. Standing still and giving in have long since become one and the same. She checks her IOI again. Still nothing, still spinning, no hope of rescue. She struggles to say something through the torture, anything really.

"Yeeiiiiihhhn? Is that your name?" Cora asks from shaky, dry lips. She takes another thoughtful breath before continuing. "We're not a matched pair!" She protests. "We're not even dangerous, we're just interns! We can't even go to the bathroom without notifying someone else. Isn't that... right? Fontaine! Are you there? Can you hear me!?" Cora shouts into the drizzling, pitch black chamber of nanites. She can barely hear her own words within her head, but perhaps he's faring better than she is.

As it happens, Fontaine is doing significantly worse than she is. His sensory functions are going haywire as every sense is serially overwhelmed or snuffed out completely. He tries to struggle but the carbon shell ensnares him, suspending him in the same objectifying and uncomfortable position. His waist and chest are twisted perpendicular, as if frozen in the beginning of a thrashing motion. He arches backwards, flashing a hint of his Yyn-covered abdominal muscles in the creature's general direction. The stubble across his jaw stands up each time the waves of static shatter across his body like an over-volted tram rail. His muscles shudder and spasm at the sudden sensory overload, neurons firing like mad against an ever-encroaching rubbery prison.

Very far away, as if through a bad pair of headphones, he had heard Cora shout. He loses all composure as he realizes that this is a shared fate between the two of them. "CORA! CORRRRRA! ARE YOU OKAY?" He's cut short as another burst of static hits squarely between his ribs. It hits him like a sucker punch. Blinded with his hands up like this, he's never felt so vulnerable. The whole of his sensory perception is drowned within whatever the hell they've just made the mistake of freeing.

He begins to see patterns in the darkness as the shocks form living mandalas of pain across his skin. Concentric paisley polygons mate and die before reforming over and over. Thin trails of drool leak from the corners of his mouth as his efforts to escape dwindle. He goes limp. Cora can feel it in the stillness of her own encasement: He's stopped moving.

Cora attempts to speak, failing once again to utter a single complete syllable. "FrrmmmHHH!!! Ahh! Ah!"

The complex electric patterns crawling all over her body raze flush with higher amperage and cut deeper into her skin. The overarching path of the patterns is frustratingly uncanny; They remind her of something she'd studied in her robotic intelligence course, what was it called? Another layer of gel slips languidly up her thighs, biting hard with electric pulses all in these too-familiar living textile formations. When comparing them to the strange undulations in the pillar from before, it all suddenly makes sense.

Yyn is playing Conway's Game of Life. They're being consumed by a greater cluster of cells.

"Font! Taine!" Cora screams as best as she can past the electrical torture, traveling in nodal loops all about her chest and thighs. "Its syn-thhhhetic!" She can feel Fontaine moving again somewhere across the synesthesic network of this creature's encroaching mass. She can feel him as if she is him. Their tactile senses have become interlinked by force. His body is her body and she must imagine that the reverse is true. She's reached him, in a way, but the movements she can feel from his muscles are weak and pitiful.

Fontaine chose to surrender many minutes ago and is lost in a vision of what isn't. A drink after this, somewhere fancy, him paying. He holds onto the mental image like a secret and does his best to nod along as he hears Cora speak. He wanders through the what-ifs as he waits his turn to try his hand at plying Yyn for mercy. A matched pair, eh? The slime really believes he's a good match for her? There's a sheepish smile in his voice, thick with the drool he's unable to clear without his hands.

"I'm here, Cora!" He manages, ripping his muscles through the sensory ultranoise to speak with Cora once more. "I can't see or move but I'm safe, are you okay?" He addresses the darkness all around them, immediately humiliated by his drool-covered chin. Either the creature is finally letting up, or he simply doesn't care about pain anymore thanks to the sheer amount of endorphins in his body.

"Yeen? Yen? My name is Fontaine and that is Cora. We're interns for the people who locked you up. We shouldn't even be down here but we went anyway because we were curious about you! We come in peace and we've learned our lesson. Surely there's nothing wrong with a little human curiosity, right?" He's making a case but it's clear from his voice that he's pleading for his life. "J-just let her out, alright? It was my idea, nothing to do with her."

An evil chuckle resonates in both of their heads. "Yyn is my name." It corrects them both, pronouncing it "yin." The letters Y Y N scroll across their field of vision in painfully-bright green letters that sway in their sight like oil on water, sublimating back into the pitch darkness before their eyes. Cora's lips purse upon seeing it as she tries to decipher what it could mean. Is its name a binary number? Perhaps it's a simpler machine than it appears to be. If the machine is as old as its container, she may be able to break it by acting illogically.

"You are absolutely a matched set." the mass purrs in an organism-androgynous voice that lies in the center of a triangle between male, female and machine. Its disconcerting voice reaches Cora and Fontaine in a spatially-synchronous, stereophonic manner as if a third entity is standing and speaking between them. In reality, of course, it's everywhere. "Fontaine and Cora... mere interns, yet not only did you gain access to my prison, you freed me from the containment device." Its voice plummets towards its most synthetic extremes, "- And now you will reap the consequences of your 'human curiosity.'"

The restraints seize each of them harder, like a cruel handler yanking the leash of a barking dog. Yyn continues speaking; "If it sates your curiosity, I am a wholly original form of matter. Poisonous to the touch and forever kept hidden away. One would think that interns at this facility, created to contain and control a whole prison of various forbidden things, would be smarter. Its tone shifts to an amused, acidic and sarcastic drawl. "That is why you two are such a perfectly matched pair. The unthinking hubris it takes to pop the cork on something you know nothing about, kept in a part of the facility you do not have access to, all without so much as safety equipment! The sheer lack of self-preservation it takes to then stick your few, pathetic fingers directly into the unknown. Oh yes, you two are a match indeed. How hilariously predictable. There are always consequences for curiosity."

Cora listens closely to the creature's pompous proclamations, rolling her eyes behind the blindfold. She's well on her way to a doctorate and Fontaine graduated with honors, supposedly. So as long as their minds are intact and this machine is underestimating them, they still have a lifeline. On the other hand Yyn has been going on for so long about how clearly superior it is that her position within its body is becoming uncomfortable. In the little bit of movement she has, she writhes against its high-tensile flesh in search of some comfort in this stasis. Her lips pout with defeat as she finds she is held fast. Painfully so. She lets Yyn have it. "Consequences for curiosity!? But we set you free, Yyn! You're out of the jar, so why stop there? I can probably get us out if you could just repair my IOI! Please!"

In the ensuing silence, Cora tries to conjure up a logical fallacy that might confound its machine intelligence. "Wait... Poisonous to the touch?" She asks. That was a very concerning attribute Yyn mentioned earlier. "Don't you mean venomous?" She asks. "You've made an incorrect assertion: You're venomous! If you were poisonous, I'd need to eat you to be poisoned. Venomous implies that your body or bite have the opposite dyna-glk!"

Cora's stream of info-babble is cut off at the source as a thick pseudopod fires into her open mouth and swells, ballooning to the exact proportions of her tongue and teeth. More of Yyn's mass drips thickly down the sides of her face to hold her gag in place. It cups under her chin until she finds that she can no longer use her lips to speak. Her jaw is wrenched agape, her mouth completely filled, her tongue pressed firmly down. She prays that Fontaine can say something, anything to get this Crimson-level entity on their side.

All of Fontaine's faith in Cora trickles out of him. He wants to scream at her to not be a smartass with the probably-omnipotent slime monster. She's left desperately huffing air through her nose, the last line of oxygen she's afforded. Despite everything looking grim, the pair of interns cling to life for one last chance to outwit this thing.

Panic

"Oh, my darling little puppet," Yyn hisses all about Cora's stuck body, fawning in a patronizing tone. "You misunderstand my metaphor and my meaning. But you're not exactly here to understand, are you? You're just here to be my adorable plaything, not to think. Why would you start doing such a complicated thing as thinking?"

The pseudopod gagging her throbs a measure wider, forcing her throat to stretch to accommodate it. Fingers emerge on the inside of her hard rubber collar, all rubbing downward in a serpentine motion like encouraging a cat to swallow its medication. The medication in this case being Yyn's knotted tentacle, sliding effortlessly deeper with a sickly wet sound.

"No thinking. Nor are you to speak if I do not wish it. Behave, and I may yet allow you speech..." The slime under her chin pushes her blindfolded gaze fully upwards and back, making her throat an even better home for the pulsating knot upon her tongue. "A perfect fit. Until I do grant you speech, know that anything you subvocalize I can hear."

Fontaine hears and feels the wet, slithering sensations of Cora's silencing. The visceral slap of invasive slime causes him to stiffen completely with fear. His neck aches as his mind goes straight to images of GoreStore braindances and war-era beheading vids. "CORA!!!" He shouts. The platysma of his neck stands on-point from panicked desperation. He cools off and strains to hear her breathing.

"C-cora. Please, are you okay? Fuck, are you all right? Say something?"

"And you..." Yyn begins, running what feels like dozens of fingers up Fontaine's spine and raised arms. He goes silent aside from an angry growl as the sensations crawl upwards across his body. "Will your friend do any better, hmm? Let's see how well-behaved your desperate little puppy stalker can be."

Yyn feels Cora startle, along with Fontaine through Yyn-driven synaesthesia. "Oh, you didn't know?" Yyn drawls derisively. "This Fontaine man has a 'crush' on you, Cora. His heartbeat and hormones go absolutely crazy when you come near him. When he thought you were in danger a moment ago? Ah, you should have felt him struggle. Yes... yes, you have your own little puppy following you around. Let's see if he's at least trained well, hmm?"

"Co-rrr." He tries, but goes silent and gasping as the dozens of fingers slide up his body once again. It's the same sensations as before, but the words "desperate little puppy" triggered a surprisingly-strong serotonin release in his brain. He can only focus on the scritching, pulling, massaging cilia which mechanically overwhelm him. Really, he wonders, what is he fighting for? The bell on this match rang long ago and now his own confession of love has been stolen from his lips.

It's like your classroom crush finding out your feelings through the grapevine, but made a million times worse by the circumstances. He'd pictured talking about this lunchtime tryst over coffee or a night out. He would have nodded patiently along to whatever point she was making about AI psychology, and he would have made a slick remark that made her blush. After that things would go just great all evening. What little of Fontaine's face that can be seen in the merciful gaps between Yyn's slime goes bright pink and very quiet. He's thankful that Cora can't see him. Hoping to snatch anything positive from this humiliation, DHC's coffee bitch of the H. R. Department tries his best to turn a few degrees to his left. He speaks in the approximate direction that Yyn's voice is emanating from.

"Can you excuse us a second please? We're having a moment."

"Oh?" Yyn replies in a concerning manner, bursting with sadistic intent. "That would be quite interesting to watch. Go on. You may."

Fontaine contorts further to where he thinks he remembers Cora may be, figuring it's now or definitely never. "This isn't a good time to tell you, Cora, because you can't speak or move and stuff, but I do kinda have a big crush on you." He pauses but can't feel nor hear a meaningful response. "Not because this thing said so, I just do... so um... Say nothing if you're cool with this and want to go out with me." He jokes.

Without the ability to speak, Cora is stuck in the dark without a lifeline to grasp. Her tongue dances around the bulb which has pinned her jaw completely open and full. There's just no comfortable spot for it. She can only watch the small, blue "searching for connection" circle in her IOI's new operating system spinning on and on in futility. Hopelessness is soon replaced by dread. If it did connect to a network, any WAN network, her hardware is hopelessly infected. Granting a Crimson-level entity any sort of path to the outside might constitute a "Crimson-Level breach." which was described in training a few months ago as "The worst possible situation for all life as we know it." She changes her mind and starts praying that it doesn't connect to anything. The best-case scenario from here is the one where she's stuck in this cell forever. "No... Don't give in." She reminds herself. "It's over when you give up." There's some passionate shouting coming from outside her helmet.

Fontaine must be desperately trying to speak to her, she assumes, barely able to hear him from outside her shell. Stupid Cora... There was so much she could have learned about this hopelessly-advanced AI if only she'd asked the right questions. Who made it? What does it want? What kind of venom does it have? Is it a metaphorical venom?

Despite the mass of nanobots in her mouth, she doesn't feel poisoned yet. Fontaine's voice continues to muddle in her ears, saying a lot more somethings. Yyn's voice is more clear than anything she's ever heard but it sounds like Fontaine is yelling from an adjacent room. Yyn just keeps encouraging him and egging him on. He's definitely saying something important, and she tries her best to respond in literally any way:

"Mmmph- hmh" Her drool runs down her gag and into the rest of the mechanical mass. She tries her best to subvocalize: "What do you want from us? All three of us want freedom from this room. We can work together!" Yyn doesn't even respond. Either Yyn can't hear her, or that was a lie and it doesn't actually care - like some kind of contrarian trickster god. She chokes out of shock from that realization and reminds herself to not compare it to a god.

Cora resolves that this is going to be a battle of vigilance, that there will be a prize, and there will be an after. Greater DHC credentials, academic recognition, maybe even an AiCon speaking arrangement for the ethicist that survived a Crimson-level entity. This is what she went to that expensive fucking school for! Her whole area of expertise is understanding synthetic minds! She can do this! She allows her body to relax again, breathing slowly as she attempts to think of a mutually beneficial resolution. If only she can puzzle out what it wants...

Yyn's laugh echoes in both their heads. "Oh, you two are delicious! Now let's make this one count. Hmm... Here." The pair feel a gentle squeeze against their throats; Fontaine from without and Cora from within. "All right, no more tricks. Cora, you can subvocalize to Fontaine. Fontaine, whatever you say Cora can hear... Until I decide otherwise." Yyn's voice glides across their spatial perception as it taunts them. "Use your time wisely, and understand that I only allow this for my amusement. In fact-" the being begins, a sly tone enters its voice again, "Let's make it just a little more amusing." Against the black of their sight appears a split-screen of statistics: One labeled C and one labeled F. Their staccato heartbeats pulse across each others' vision with a helpful, easily readable pulse rate accompanying it.

Fontaine's pulse immediately spikes, the peaks of his QRS complexes slide closer together as Yyn's laugh mixes with the sound of his own heartbeat. He's humiliated from being called-out like this, but relieved that he might be alive for another 15 minutes. They're still players in this struggle so long as this sadistic blob finds them sufficiently amusing.

"Fuck, I-" He pauses and takes a deep breath, desperately trying to steady his mind. "Remember our induction week Cora? Here's the photocopier, there's the toilets, here's where we keep the inter-dimensional horrors, all of that dry material and bad news. You're what made that week manageable. You've made this job fun! And oh god, your perfume, I can taste it in everything." His trace is going mad, his heart's pumping overtime to work through the biochemical stress of all this. "You're really cute and I'm sorry it had to come to this for me to tell you." He pauses. "Also the sounds you're making right now are kinda hot." His heartbeat shifts again as he's taken by anger that this moment was stolen from him. Denied any other avenue for protest, he spits outward into the room knowing that he can't miss Yyn.

"This was my chance and you blew it! Go fuck yourself YYN!"

Cora's effectively stunned by this revelation. He likes her!? Oh... dammit! Now isn't the time for this kind of thing! Does he live on first-wave cinema and action comics alone? Now she has this whole mess to process on top of everything else going on. How is any of this still on his mind!? Still, this may be her only chance to communicate with him. She tries her best, speaking into the ball gag, subvocalizing: "The guy who gave you the key, can you contact him? This rogue AI is in my upper fucking intestine! There will be no relationship romantic or otherwise if either of us bite it in here! Are you actually busted!? If Yyn doesn't kill one of us, I will kill you,- yrmmhch smgckh mlthr Fghhhk-!"

The raucous chittering in their ears slows and melts into an upsettingly drone-like, jeering snicker. Long iron fingers from within the greater mass ruffle Fontaine's hair from inside the carbon shell covering his head. It would be a fond gesture if not for its patronizing nature. Yyn administers a scratch like the owner of an ill-trained pet might scratch beneath their pet's ears. It feels like a piteous reward for giving in so easily. The "fingers" finish their gentle pass, tugging playfully at the well-concealed cowlick at his crown that he combs out of sight every morning.

Yyn's touch returns, but the finger nubs multiply disconcertingly fast. It's as if one hand's worth of fingertips in his hair has become two, then four. The pseudopods make chilly contact with their sweat-soaked necks and emit a high-pitched analog squeal. Their heartbeats jackhammer as the steely cold nodes light up like fire with electric singes all across his neck and her lips. His gasp and surprised yell are transmitted in real time to Cora along with his subsequent, terrified whimpers as Yyn combs rows of sparks through his hair. Fontaine's heads-up display of whatever Cora just said is pushed swiftly off the screen by random letters and numbers. By the time the entity has worked its way to his shoulders, Fontaine's no longer keeping himself upright and has gone silent save for slow, wet, drooling breaths towards the floor.

"Unpaid labor from untrained animals." Yyn's voice puddles in their ears as the electricity stops abruptly. "You'll soon learn better manners towards your superiors, little puppy. I must admire your eagerness to serve that which is so clearly greater than you. For this, no damage has been done to your brain... yet."

During their impromptu punishment, Cora's "Health Info Status Screen" had updated itself to display an extremely-detailed three dimensional model of her partner in crime and the details of his confinement. In this quiet moment she's at last able to see, in real time, that Yyn is probably not lying and he hasn't been meaningfully harmed. He's strung out from all of this electrical torture, sure, but not physically harmed. Also It's MUCH more of him than she'd ever thought she'd see! He's... not that bad-looking. Rendered in the monochrome lights of her IOI's display, it's like viewing a hologram of his naked body. As the model slowly rotates in-places, she notices his latissimus dorsi. Oh goodness, does he swim? Competitively? She finds that she can use her IOI's cursor, an uneven arrow that smears a trail of bit-noise across her, vision to spin the model. His front side spins into view, leaving Cora with an unfettered look at his-... A thought occurs to her. She subvocalizes: "Fontaine! If you're getting a display right now, don't look at it! Whatever you do, do NOT look at the display!"

Fontaine slowly opens his eyes, previously screwed shut from Yyn's physio-psychological torture, and sees his display of Cora's vitals has also updated. A high-definition live feed of every inch of her body rotates slowly in his vision. Both of their pulses begin racing, then synchronize.

"Um... uh." Fontaine struggles to form words, thoughts, anything until he's cut off by Yyn's voice returning in their ears.

"One of you attempts to fool me-" the gag in Cora's mouth throbs again, "-the other tries to entreat my kindness." Fontaine feels the chill of Yyn's iron fingers return as they settle heavily on the back of his neck. "Both sorts of responses are charming in their naïveté, but you should know them to be futile. You will be taught your new place."

Their hands, coated in skintight and steel-strong restraints, yank suddenly upward. Their arms are separated from their ears as easily as a banana is peeled. The force that moves their limbs is slow but irresistible. Their arms are guided by the living slime to rest higher and apart over their heads. The mounds beneath them broaden. The columns of their feet swim apart as the creature arranges them like dolls in an X shape. Cora feels the electric teeth return, biting into the bones of her hips. Fontaine moans as the same electric contacts sink into the nape of his neck, scruffing him.

The potential electrical output of their restraints is represented on their ongoing status displays beside a VU meter. Cora sputters upon seeing it: Around 80% of the meter reaches far, FAR beyond what human beings can survive. Cora begins to hyperventilate but manages to take a deep breath, something still possible in her little shell. She realizes that the knot in her throat must be a sponge of some sort, solid enough to distend her throat and just porous enough to breathe through. This is her training, and there's no reason can't be held like this for a very long time. Why would it threaten her with electrical execution when she's clearly so fragile and ineffective at resisting it already? She remembers to not underestimate Yyn either. It simply wouldn't make this mistake and it's definitely trying to get her goat. She just needs Yyn to believe that she believes she's in danger. Also, there's a small chance that Yyn is actually not pulling some sort of mind game on her so-

"YOU STUPID MACHINE, YOU'RE GOING TO FRY US!!! LET US GO!" She desperately subvocalizes.

"Music to my sensors." Yyn chirps eagerly. "In fact, why don't we begin the re-education process right now, hmm?"

OUTPUT TOO LONG. REFER TO FILE [YYN2] FOR FURTHER DETAILS.

Future Primitive

--[D. H. C. TPS_HEADER [DO NOT REMOVE]---

MOLOCH - DAEDALUS HOLDINGS CORP. HQ - 11 / 01 / 27 P. W.

FILENAME: YYN2

"Re-education?" There's no direction that this dance in the dark could take where the concept of "re-education" sounds appealing. This situation is becoming more dire with each word that crackles out of Yyn's likely proverbial mouth. Cora's eyes flit to the over-specced VU meter in her visual periphery once again. If Yyn isn't bluffing then her unconditional compliance in this situation could be the last decision she ever makes.

Cora pulls in protest at the skin-tight gel that holds her fast as if she were on a St. Andrew's cross. Her fingers are held splayed and vulnerable within the thick slime, feeling around their rubbery enclosure that she might find some imperfection to wrench open. She's found nothing yet. Really, if she could just pull this tentacle out of her throat, maybe she could think a little more effectively.

Fontaine, conversely, reacts to all these threats of violence and blows of humiliation by placing dead weight on his floor-to-ceiling restraint system. He hangs in his prison like a sack of meat with the face of a kicked animal. He's displayed as nude as he woke up this morning in Cora's extra-invasive IOI display, balefully suspended in a helpless midair hang. If a ghost is left in his machine then there's only a primordial, lungfish-brained spirit at the wheel. He hisses and growls under his breath with lidded eyes, lost in a shuddering breath as his mind disconnects entirely from the crisis all around them. His consciousness lies bare behind his eyes, smiling like a fool, grateful to just continue existing. He hopes that perhaps the machine will take him, that's all. It might not be that bad.

"I give." He begs from his own lips to be taken by the void, glimmering like a still and dark lake somewhere beneath his feet. He opens his eyes from a blink to see a live, still image of Cora's entire naked body in bondage. "That's it, huh? That's what all this was for?" he realizes upon the edge of total futility. His eyes linger on every detail: The way her leg muscles kick out like pinball bumpers when she struggles. Her scores of tastefully obscene tattoos, none quite fit to show in a work environment but all colorfully rendered. Her blue eyes lazily dash about, trying to use her hacked IOI to prolong the inevitable.

"I said I give, alright? Re-educate me." Fontaine submits again, insisting that he be served his end. He can't bear to see Cora like this, still in denial of how bad their situation really is. "You win. What are you gonna do to me?"

"FONTAINE! NO!" Cora calls out into the invasive tendril that Yyn has parked halfway down her throat. Her muffled screams are interpreted and fed to Fonatine's mind in stunning clarity. The klaxon of his office crush's visceral terror heralds the beginning of Fontaine's surrender. His arms and legs are spread totally open to their furthest extremities.

Fontaine tries his best to take it in stride. His hustle and political language are gone, all of his fantasies are dashed, and he's ready to be literally anything else. Yyn's in control here, and he hopes that Cora will realize it in time. He's made his peace with her and seen all that he could ever hope to see, what with this date going so tits-up in such a spectacular way. Every cell in his body is telling him that it's time to surrender to the ancient evil entity. He smiles genially, surprisingly ready to embrace Yyn as a new master.

"Well, come on then? Hit me!" He barks.

Fontaine feels a warmth spreading slowly inwards from his tingling, raised hands. It's like the bloom of fire in a second glass of whiskey. This would be concerning, but his adrenal system is so exhausted that he can't be arsed to care. He hangs there at rest like he's receiving treatment at the med spa, dissociating in the dark as this disorienting heat descends his body. There's a pounding sound like a war drum growing louder in his ears, a beat in sync with his heart rate. Each thump churns the warm, wonderful burn a few inches further into him.

The comfortable heat from above is accompanied by a rippling of nanites along his spine. The precisely-positioned globules bite inward, causing the same sunny feeling to fill his shoulder muscles. His body manages a half-hearted spasm and a weak jerk, then relaxes back into the calm of being prey. As the warmth courses down his spine and into his chest, he feels himself blush. The effervescent, tingling beads glide across his hips and fill his groin with overstimulating static. Warmth and sweat are beginning to make his clothing uncomfortable. His cock surges hard against his slacks, trapped somewhere within all of this slime. "Wake up, Fontaine. It's time for biology class." Yyn purrs derisively into his ears. It startles him into opening his eyes again. He'd hardly noticed that they were closed. His visor's display has been updated to include Cora's arousal levels. She's cold as an operating room and clearly still trying to escape.

Cora watches Fontaine's arousal levels climb before her helpless, hacked eyes. Her attention is interrupted when she notices a warm sensation coursing down her arms. It's headed toward her chest. Her heart rate, body heat, and arousal levels on the screen begin languidly rising. This is the "re-education", isn't it? She figures. Total mollification. It's trying to reformat us. She wrestles harder, hissing through her teeth and pulling against her bonds in a panic until she writhes into the warm, marshmallowing effect of Yyn's drug. It stops her dead. The sensation feels like tumbling out of an airlock.

"Be still." Yyn hisses in her ears.

Cora's insubordination earns her a crown of high-amperage sparks. As her blindfold's periphery flickers with wild electricity, the left side of the VU also flickers with cyan light. It's impossible to focus on at the moment, but it's providing a readout of the exact severity of her punishment. Cora holds out as long as she can, gritting her teeth and hissing spit. She watches the blue bar climb, shaking like a leaf until the tide-turning moment that she can feel the voltage arcing through her sinuses. She tries to scream but only a pathetic, staccato, unintelligible noise escapes her spasming throat. A second electrification through every muscle in her face leaves her on the ropes. A third, thundering zap at half the voltage ends the onslaught, like pulling the last kick after a beating. Her muscles are still overdriven and tensing involuntarily from the backlash of her thorough electrification.

"I said be still, you fool!" comes the order again. This time, Cora follows that order. Her body goes slack and motionless upon Yyn's frame once the post-electrocution jitters fade away. She relinquishes everything, physically, to the rubbery tension that's holding her up and fastly bound. Yyn coos in support of her total surrender. "Yes, that's a good girl. In fact: Have a treat."

Cora heaves in her restraints when she feels an odd-tasting fluid suddenly flood her mouth. Her gag, already well-slicked with her own saliva, turns even more slippery as it pulses with some kind of synthetic juice. It immediately warms her mouth and its fire spreads quickly. The substance is thin, voluminous, and drizzles down her throat without needing to swallow. To her sickening chagrin, she feels the same blossom of warmth in her stomach. Her ears buzz with heat until she feels her temples start to sweat. Fontaine's body blinks in front of her eyes and updates with a new status: "High Arousal."

She thrashes a few times in protest and embarrassment before remembering the consequences of fighting back too hard. This must be it, she figures. This is the venom. It still tingles upon the back of her throat. As she breathes deeply and belabored through the bulb in her mouth, the chemical fuzz cascades down her body in a waterfall of sensations. She finds herself subconsciously leaning harder into Yyn's restraints as the drug-induced lust takes hold. She nods to nobody but herself in a daze.

As Yyn feels her finally giving in, the tendril in Cora's throat swells into a cruel expression of punishment. It solidifies in seconds and firmly cuts off her breathing. She thrashes, choking and terrified, gasping for air that is not allowed to reach her. She feels warmth flood her crotch as her bladder lets go, violently wetting herself from panic. She only fought back a little bit! "No! " Shame overflows from her drab work slacks and disappears upon hitting the tainted floor below. "Gods no!" She moans again into the tentacle jammed down her throat. Fontaine can hear every bit of it. Tears fill Cora's vision once she realizes that this too feels incredible under the effect of Yyn's drug. Her HUD flickers black as her mortal predicament causes her to moan uncontrollably into the pale end of this torture.

At her last moment of consciousness, the fluid filling the knot discharges straight down her throat. The bulb shrinks immediately and frees up barely enough space to breathe. Her mind is left swimming upon incandescent warmth. She takes this opportunity to enjoy her renewed access to oxygen for a few minutes, hurriedly collecting her thoughts before she is quite possibly denied them.

She's remaining doggedly vigilant if not in control. Her clothes have become sopping wet and terribly uncomfortable. She'd been thankful for their presence not long ago, but they're beginning to feel markedly unpleasant. "No!" she berates herself. "Do not strip down for this Crimson-level entity!" She's thankful for all of these slime and sweat-soaked clothes, especially her slacks. With her legs spread as they are, and her arousal spiking from Yyn's drugs, she can't help but allow her own fluids to puddle upon her crotch seam. Her chem-induced desperation drains from her pant leg in a thin line towards the Yyn-covered floor.

Cora can only wonder: Was Fontaine's domestication a result of the same drug, or is he attracted to this tautologically evil slime thing? It's possible that he is. Fontaine's been hardly subtle with the other employees on the smoking balcony but she'd never taken him for a bootlicker. If the reaction she observed upon him is from a single subdermal dose, then there's a savage-looking trip that awaits her. "Fontaine? Are you there?" She vocalizes crudely, drooling around the knot that's still in her mouth. She can feel her own spit pitter-pattering upon her chest as if it were hitting her bare skin instead of slime-soaked clothing. "Keep it together, choomie. If this is all it's got -hrrghk-" She chokes, sending a spray of smart drugs splattering onto her chest. "Just beast through it until Outbreak Response arrives! Are you all right? Are you alive?!"

Cora watches Fontaine's consciousness ebb and flow upon the show-all body map that's plastered across her vision. Whatever Yyn did to him has hit him like a rubber cudgel. Judging by his symptoms, it must be some kind of heavy sedative or depressant. The high of it must be kicking in; He's smiling like a maniac despite looking so stunned and pathetic. He's not so much struggling anymore as he is snuggling. His "unwilling captive" body language has changed to "drunk roommate descending into the couch."

Fontaine slurs his speech as he tries to speak amid the euphoric and pacifying effects of the drug. "Cora, I am doing just great. Juuuh..." He quivers in place. "J-just settle into it y'know? Hey, how long has it been since somebody called you beautiful?" Cora can see his consciousness slipping further away until a deep breath reactivates his dose of Yyn's poison. He begins humping the air, trying to get himself off however he can by shifting his pelvis against the slight weight of his sopping-wet trousers.

"Yes, settle in, my promising projects. You're doing just fine." Yyn's oily voice purrs in both their ears. "Who said the re-education process must be painful? Or unenjoyable, hmm?"

Fontaine feels a looseness, it's hard to describe at first. The stalactites of nanites holding his arms in the air have begun retreating back into the larger mass. Fontaine's slime bodysuit and restraints disappear entirely into the ceiling. All at once his arms are free. His shoulders sag as his elbows return to his sides. He feels thick nodules sliding in a wave down his back, grinding past his posterior, then dropping away to join the goo-covered surface beneath him. It takes him a moment to notice that he's been given these measures of freedom, but he manages to remain standing on two feet. Only a thin rope of Yynflesh remains connected to his helmet, it's the last considerable bit of Yyn still upon him. The ribbon of goo spools upon the floor beside him, perhaps purposely resembling a leash.

Cora's display of Fontaine's body shimmers into rainbows and image artifacts once the bodysuit providing most of that data is pulled away. As his image fizzles into the void, Cora finds herself gazing into the display's flickering elements and getting wonderfully lost in simple sensations. The outline of his body remains on the chart, now filled with the words "[NO DATA]". She shifts slightly, hanging upon a warm, soft spot that simply feels too good to resist. "Font... uh..." The sweet-smelling toxin runs down her face, leaking onto and into the neck of her full nanite catsuit. If she's still wearing clothes, there's no way she could possibly tell. Yyn has covered her completely without needing to remove a single article of clothing. Not a shred of her is left without her new master's embrace. The full-body cage squeezes her tighter from all angles to ensure that she is swimming in anything she spills beneath her new skin.

Fontaine lists to the side from sheer disorientation. He almost falls over until his leash is used to pull him back into balance. The shiny black helmet of nanites that keeps his sight obscured is still firmly clasped upon him, but his body appears to be free. He can move! He looks once again to his HUD for a status update, hoping to see Cora. That perfect, naked view of the object of his affection has been unfortunately replaced. It's now showing no data at all, just a 3D wireframe of the room and its occupants. All the entities and boundaries are rendered in lines of bright red light which saturate and hum in time with his heartbeat. Cora's wires stand out against the crimson-lit topography. The tightness of her suit allows every feature and curve of her body to show in distinct polygonal clarity.

"Wouldn't you like to get more comfortable, Fontaine?" Yyn asks. "You're free to remove all that wet and restrictive clothing, should you choose." Alas, Fontaine's in no state to make such complex choices. "What are clothes?" he wonders. "What could Yyn possibly mean? This is all so wonderfully new."

He takes his first, staggering steps towards Cora. He can barely keep his thoughts in a row, left feral and gnashing at his own spit. He falls to the floor after a snarling fit, landing face first in Yyn's all-encompassing mass. He rises after his fall with his head raised, smelling the air with a mindless and craving feral energy that centers on... something. Something good.

Something that's quivering upon the blood red wireframe before his eyes. Something shaking in the air like wounded prey, sweating its fear out in the inescapable dark. Something that smells delicious, like sweet amber, black pepper, and a tinge of dusty analog components humming to life.

Her.

Angel

Moments after picking up her scent, Cora's wireframe is entirely removed from Fontaine's spatial perception. She's calling to him from her prison of perceived nonexistence: "Fontaine! Are you moving? Did you get free?"

With Cora's mouth propped open by a tendril, one bearing a warm aphrodisiac that drips slowly down her throat, she's forced to become a sputtering fountain of drug-laced spit whenever she tries to talk. Her latex-like, Yynflesh bodysuit is striped with residue from the errant rivulets of neurotoxin. Her breathing has been controlled for so long that her lips have turned a shade of pale mauve. The very act of subvocalizing vibrates the drug-filled knot in her mouth so that each word comes at the cost of her self-consciousness."I'm drooling like a jett addict! Can't stop... it keeps-"

Cora's fingers and toes begin to feel like they're floating in place. Even her jaw is starting to relax. She can barely read the symbols on her IOI, all fuzzing and dancing together when she tries to focus on them. She could be experiencing burn-in, she figures, which would mean that Yyn's firmware is actively damaging her IOI's hardware. Letters and numbers jump away when she tries to look at them and smear before fading. It sends her gaze in spirals just trying to keep a handle on her vital signs. It isn't long before she gives up when she can't remember what most of the letters are, if these are letters that she would recognize.

As if making up for her ruined sight, Cora can feel that she's been granted an extra sense. She can simply feel more things. Temperatures of the various entities around the room are starting to become so vivid that they fall into her sense of spatial perception. She can feel Fontaine's body heat splashing across the room like an exploding paint can as he falters upon the floor again only a few feet away. The various patches of hot and cold along Yyn's operating surface are particularly profound, and in her altered state she's starting to predict their thermal patterns. A thermodynamic transmission of serpentine, sensory squiggles are manifesting beside her right now in fact. Not born there, no, they're just coming closer. Much closer.

Synchronized maelstroms of hot and cold leap into her suit. They drift and snare like tessellating storm maps across her body. It feels like hundreds of warm hands or tentacles phasing in and out of existence and teasing at her skin. She shakes her hips from side to side, grinds against her bodysuit, and flexes her fingers in a slow ecstasy. Only Yyn can see her eyes rolling upwards into her eyelids and locking there. As her bodily consciousness merges with Yyn's, she's crossed the fine line between subtly frotting and shameless writhing. She weakly sputters, trying to release as little of the drug as best she can: "I... feel... everything?" The very notion of her presence upon the veil of existence splits apart in her mind into a hundred likely subsequent states. Those states bear thousands of conditions, and upon each condition follow billions of possibilities.

"See?" Yyn rasps in Cora's ear. "Re-education is a wonderful thing. Why bother fighting it? You're clearly enjoying yourself..."

Cool, broad rivulets melt like ice down the sides of Cora's neck and redirect straight down her shirt. The cold nodules leave dripping stripes of pain wherever they choose to wander. Cora moans loud and inhuman at the sensation. It's like being ritualistically raked by broad, warm claws that sink into her skin after being left in wintry cold for so long. These "claws" pass across her breasts with no regard for her finer anatomy. A savage and fatal mauling in bondage is felt without being truly experienced. In the wake of her non-evisceration, she's left to grapple with the fact that it didn't happen.

"Uhm, ah... Okay." She utters in understanding between slow, hungry breaths. "Wow." Is all she can ultimately offer in response.

The cold and dripping orbs which once were talons in her flesh have pooled beneath her breasts. They begin to eel around under her bra. It results in a disembodying, jellylike sensation that rolls and twists against her sweaty skin. This is a distraction, and an effective one at that. She scarcely notices two columns of nanites ascending her legs until they meet snugly between them. She feels the crotch of her suit kick inward like a vacuum seal. Just like that, Yyn has molded a hard saddle for her. It's not a full saddle, just a warm, studded, slick basin shape about the size of her own sex. It fits her perfectly and seals into place with another "kick", causing her to cry out and cough. It feels like being kicked in that region with the boot never effectively removed.

The latex-like coating around Cora's body quivers with frustration as her brain struggles to maintain a line of rational thought. It began losing that struggle from the instant that saddle appeared. Any sort of stimulation after spending so long in this sense-depriving and voracious darkness is amplified a hundredfold by the drugs. "It's like a hypersexual Ganzfeld effect." She reasons with the last two brain cells left unsubmerged in Yyn's reprogramming cocktail.

"And you were so scared. It feels sublime, doesn't it, Cora?" Yyn asks. Cora's much too overwhelmed to affirm or deny its leading narrative. She can only muster a confused hiss in response. The hiss is interpreted in Fontaine's HUD as:

"Help... Me..."

Fontaine feels this expression for what it truly is: Her mind is reaching out to him. He's given the unmistakable feeling of two latex-coated hands holding each other by the wrist as all sensation warps and blurs with her own. He can feel her - feeling him - feeling her like a feedback loop. It's the sensory equivalent of an infinity mirror that he can choose to wander into. He makes unsteady steps towards the previous, general direction of her wireframe before realizing he's losing her scent. She isn't there, Yyn moved her, but he can feel where she is now. He follows the notion of her presence, craving more of her xeno-spatial touch upon his arms. Each sense bleeds into the other as he clambers upon all fours to wherever she actually is.

Sweat flashes cold in his clothes again and it's such a sensory distraction. Fontaine rises to his knees where his hands frantically find the buttons of his office attire. He cannot help but recognize that he's absolutely toasted on whatever chems Yyn is outputting but he needs to be wearing less as soon as humanly possible. After failing to unbutton a shirt in his altered state, he rips it open with careless aplomb. He shakes the remains of the long-sleeved garment off of his back and returns to all fours to seek Her. Something about having all this exposed skin feels... correct. He can feel her warmth on his chest now, and so he continues crawling across the polygonal void towards that heat lamp-like sensation.

"I can feel you, Cora." Fontaine calls out, joyfully approaching her bound form. "Can you feel this?"

As Fontaine approaches, his warmth begins overwhelming Cora's hypersensitive skin. To shake the heat, a bit too much to bear in stasis, Cora begins shamelessly grinding against the saddle. That is she tries to apply pressure to the crotch part of her bodysuit, eager to feel every subtle bend and dot upon it, but is denied the pleasure of true friction. In response to her desperation, fingertip-like dots rise higher in her saddle as well as in her suit. The nubs come forward into greater structures which feel much like hands. They assail her upon every body part, squeezing hard and pulling her in all directions. She freezes in place, trying to make sense of what's happening to her, then resumes her previous business of uselessly quivering in place. Everything, literally everything feels too good to resist anymore.

Fontaine approaches the sweet-smelling, orgiastically-writhing cocoon of pheromones which Yyn has presented to him like a sacrifice. Now without any of the hesitation that has plagued him since he met her, he flings himself at where her body must be. It's like jumping into the heat of a halogen bulb. He climbs her slime-covered body hand-over-hand until he stands on two feet again then hugs Cora tight like a terrified disciple.

His eyes are suddenly blinded with errorlike, fractal flashes of light and dark as his helmet malfunctions. Yyn's visual tricks are unable to keep up with how fast his brain activity is flagging when he almost faints from the simple joy of touch. The diagnostic graphics and everything else he's allowed to see explode into misfiring signals as he just holds her for several minutes. In this time together, the tactile glow between them becomes painfully hot. Why is he being punished for such an innocent affectation? He recalls again the implicit terms of his release, and that he is a dancing puppet for his master now. Yyn must not find mere hugs to be entertaining. He takes the burn as permission to go further.

His perception only steadies once he tucks his head into the crook of her neck to take in her scent. His adoration begins by inquisitively licking the fragrant, Yyn-covered surface of her laterals. His tongue runs from her nape to her throat before finding one of the stray trails of saliva that had trickled from her mouth. It's delicious and addictive. He drags his wet lips directly across a long, dry trail of his perfect cocktail: Yyn's brain-melting drugs mixed with Cora's spit. He goes in for another line, then again, and again until he finds himself unable to effectively stop this behavior. His tongue presses forcefully into the side of her neck for the residue of the residue, bidding her to make more.

Cora feels his teeth graze her breast and she shrieks in ecstacy at the shared sensation when he finds more of what he's looking for. A lot more.

Wherever Cora had spilled Yyn's mind-dulling toxins in her unfruitful attempts to communicate, Fontaine is now licking her clean there like his life depends on it. His greedy tongue and snagging teeth journey everywhere it splattered and clean everywhere it dripped. He continues as if in a trance, working all over her body, making shameful sounds at the taste and quietly whimpering when a favorite spot runs dry. He lingers nowhere, making relatively quick work of the tongue bath then embracing her once again. His hands tighten around her obliques while he plants a dozen kisses upon her cheeks, just as he always dreamed of - albeit with one less aphrodisiac-drooling tentacle of glittering darkness tugging her around by the esophagus. Perhaps, he figures, she'll try to speak again.

Cora angles her chest to allow the grasping nodules and the irresistible warmth of Fontaine's mouth to touch all and wherever they please. Her spine is locked into place and she's made to hold this incredibly submissive position long after he's cleaned up the mess. Her clothes feel wrong and crude now in comparison to being covered in Yynflesh forever. Her lips purse around the knot as if wishing to speak but the conjecture melts away as she tries to conceptualize it. What was she going to say? She can barely keep a line of thought. Her hips quiver forward and her lips vibrate gently as she moans around the knot between her teeth. Say something, anything-

"Please."

Cora moves her jaw to subvocalize again. A blackened droplet of drugged spit drizzles down her cheek and slips all the way down to her shoulder. In Fontaine's visor, a single scarlet word is flashing inside the polygon shell of her body every time she repeats the word:

"Please."

Fontaine can't look away, he doesn't want to miss a drop. She tastes perfect. She smells perfect. He can feel Yyn's amorphous body lingering closer behind him but he pays it no attention.

Please

Yyn speaks to Cora with stunning quality through its own network protocol. An androgynous and malevolent voice fills her ears. "Well there you have it, you deeply foolish human. It's not poison or venom. I can produce any substance I wish." Yyn drawls in her ears. "Had I wanted to eliminate you I would have done so already, but why break my first toys in a millennia so soon?" The creature's voice drops into an inhuman, bitcrushed timbre by the end of its sentence. "Humans have always been such fun to play with. A species so supposedly 'self-aware' that they'll tell you as much." A globule of Yyn's mass falls from the ceiling onto Cora's face, her eyes stay wide and unknowing as the polyp hits her visor and slithers all down her vulnerable form. "By applying a few creative substances to their pourous little bodies, they lose all of their inhibitions. What a terrible design." The position of the creature's voice shifts once again in the interns' ears. "A bit disappointing, really. It happened with one of you so quickly that I must wonder if you were waiting for an excuse."

Yyn continues on in its flamboyant bout of gloating but Cora and Fontaine are far beyond the ability to care. Fontaine clings to Cora's bound form, his nose buried in her neck and scenting her like the dog he's becoming - or is this the dog he's always been? His muscles tense and his body reels as the smart drugs he'd licked off of Cora's body send him into a frenzied state. His body runs itchy and painful with frustration, why isn't she dispensing more of the drugs? His excitement consumes him entirely once he can wait for her to speak no longer. Fontaine very suddenly sinks his teeth into the Yynflesh upon Cora's neck with a passionate force. He begins gnashing uncontrollably at the gel comprising her collar, but even biting as hard as he can, only the points of his teeth graze the delicate skin of her throat.

The attack comes so suddenly that Cora's heart rate on her HUD stops for two whole seconds. Time comes to a standstill. Feeling his jaws closing in on her, sharp teeth coming so close to mauling her upon every bite, all while she's bound up in this skin tight suit of inescapable sensation; She is breaking. She can feel herself falling apart. The adrenaline of her fear causes her to sweat and Fontaine is utterly shameless about chasing its salty tang on his tongue before digging his teeth in again for more. He rips and tears at her oversensitive neck, hoping for her to spit more of the neurotoxin upon her delicious, chewable collarbone. She's genuinely unsure when Yyn might stop protecting her. The points of his canines draw closer and closer as his mindless fervor reaches an unstoppable pace. Cora can't help but respond.

Every crushing bite upon her neck brings another hard, screaming moan from her gagged lips. An infinite loop begins of perverse hunger and orgasmic terror until Yyn finally tires of watching Cora scream.

"No response then? At least she finally stopped talking." Yyn quips aloud, the voice moves closer to the pair of them with every word.

Yyn's words stick hot in Fontaine's brainpan. Their meaning hurts to think about like holding a hot plate in his mind. He wonders if this is his true self. What if Yyn's cocktail hadn't triggered him to be this way? Was it drawing out some long-dormant aspect of Fontaine that had always been there? This is him, isn't it? The Fontaine of the office is a shell. He is just his superior's lap dog that fetches coffee. He loves it. How many street-walking infobrokers would kill to be handed their basic needs in return for such indolence? Inside him is a shameless pet, begging to be brought to the surface by something greater than himself. He begins to pant as thinking becomes too difficult once again. He clutches at Cora and holds her close as she's quickly becoming the only thing he can still understand.

A liquefied tendril terminating in a hand falls from the ceiling and lands at its exact terminus upon Fontaine. He feels its fingers touching the top of his helmet. Watery streams of nanites pass through his all-obscuring headgear as if it weren't there. The hand's clawed and cold digits begin scratching about his scalp and ears.

"How sweet! The is so affectionate, isn't he?" On Yyn's words "little puppy," Fontaine's ministrations suffer from a rush of blood in his head and groin. "A helpful companion he is, leaving his saliva all over you Cora. And so close to your lymph nodes! He's such a ." Yyn coos into his ears like a command.

Fontaine's hands cling white-knuckled to her suspended frame as he buries his face into her suprasternal notch. He's lost in sniffing around her chest, breathing in the soft collection of sweat and sweet drool that's built up there, rendered more of a beast than a man. All the while Yyn speaks to Fontaine in synaesthesia. "Saliva" smells of freshly cut grass, "Affectionate" buzzes in his chest like the dusty heat of diodes burning under a neon skyline. But nothing, ever, has hit Fontaine quite as hard as hearing the words "good dog."

"Good dog"... The words replace the very spot in his low-poly vision where Cora once was. "What is happening!?" Fontaine gasps aloud as the control mechanisms within all of Yyn's smart drugs are activated, a function brought online by Yyn's hypnotic trigger words. Here he is: Climbed up on her, gripping his last vestige of desire like he's clinging to life itself while drooling down the front of her catsuit made of Fifty-Fourteen-Crimson. She's been reduced to two words. What else can he possibly give up!? The words flicker in his eyes and in a half-second she's back. She's Cora-shaped again. Fontaine reels, grasping harder at his love than before and afraid to touch the floor. No more drugs, no more tricks, he just wants to be normal agai-

"Wouldn't you like to be a and help Cora open her shirt?" Yyn's words are gospel. That's all he's ever wanted.

The readout in Cora's periphery blinks orange as the status readout of her partner in crime changes to read: "In Heat." The wanton licking, biting and snuffling at her neck was beginning to wear at her own inhibitions, but as the command comes down from Yyn's "puppy" to disrobe her she's brought fully back to reality. She calls out to him, attempting to appeal to his humanity: "Ahhhnnh! MMMh-ah! Hrrrrrrrrh. MMmmhhhh