Chapter Ninety - Xenocide Act VII; Denouement

Click.

A tinny, male voice is heard:

"Spontaneous orgasms, that is, orgasms without sexual stimulation, are a medically known phenomenon.

These can range from mildly pleasurable to invasive and torturous, and the experience of such varies from individual to individual.

Some studies have documented more than six hundred different causes for these reflexive reactions, from medications such as antidepressants, to normal physical stimuli such as sneezing that affected the subject in unusual ways."

Click. The voice cuts out. 

Some rustling could be heard, and someone clears their throat.

"Say, what's the chance we can use this?"

"Maybe as a new drug? If it can be made to vary in intensity, it can be made to be more and more addicting. And more and more expensive."

"Get on it."

– Recorded snippet from the boardroom of Naughtainment LLC, March 2042

 

***

 

I stared at the energy bubble. Some distant part of me noticed how it modulated its opacity against the glare, and probably did a lot of other stuff I didn't understand.

But most of me was utterly overwhelmed by the violence around me. Every dip in the spherical field sent a nervous flutter through me, every divot a maddening pulse through my spine.

My tail curled around my legs restlessly.

I knew Tynea had calculated things for safety. She'd said as much earlier.

But I saw death. And it was visceral.

The plasmatic storm outside strangled the sphere around me, and as if in answer, thrills quivered through my body.

My nerves were on fire, everywhere. My spine bowed and I whined under my breath.

I felt it coming.

It wasn't exactly sexual. But it was driving me insane.

From my diaphragm out, I orgasmed. Flashes of lightning went through me, and I shook as I came. My eyes squeezed shut, and my head leaned against the inside of the Aspis and my knees bumped against my chest as I curled up and wetness drenched my thighs.

I panted hard as the world around me suddenly went utterly dark, and then returned to more normal levels of light. My body was curled around my arm, which was being held in place by the shield. 

Holy crap that was intense. I shivered again. Wow, even back then, it never got this strong.

Huh. That… Uh. That was my first orgasm as Tinea, wasn't it? Huh. Yeah. 

Well. Wonder if it'll still be different from actual sex?

Pictures of a certain tall and occasionally leggy someone ran through my mind, and I hurriedly focused on something else as the flush on my face deepened.

My agitated antennae weaved through the air and painted a picture of my surroundings. I seemed to be hanging in a void of nothing but air.

I slowly opened my eyes as the last frissons quivered through my belly, and worked to calm my breathing as I looked around myself.

My shield and I were hanging in the air. There was a crater. A fuck-huge hole of a crater below me. Maybe thirty meters across, made of glass.

"Holy fucking shit what the fuck?!"

The nearly invisible sheen of the energy barrier flickered, then disappeared with an ugly pop from the shield. I yelped as the Aspis suddenly dropped out of the sky, and me along with it.

My dream-training kicked in, and I contracted my body and extended it like a falling cat would, to land on my feet.

My toes burned even through the thick sole and I hissed as I hopped onto the cushions inside the shield. I sat down, carefully balancing the convex disk and myself on its bulge, and massaged my feet after putting the broken rifle, cracked and probably shattered underneath the wrapping, aside. I smiled at it. Well, that was a worthy send-off, wasn’t it? Old friend.

I touched the weapon one last time and decided I’d leave it here. As worthy a grave as any.

Within moments, I felt an intense cold radiate against me from the glassy crater. Focusing on my heat detection, everything was utterly black. There wasn't a speck of heat aside from myself.

When I looked down, I noticed lines of warmth traveling from the shield and from where I'd touched the glass, slowly forming a crystalline grid and dissipating into the cold material around.

"How's this stuff so cold?"

The warhead inverted the teleportation after the plasmatic explosion and transported most thermal energy within a fifty meter sphere away. This was done to ensure that the localized fusion of the solar matter would not set off nearby ordnance after the attack. The molten ground was instantly frozen to temperatures close to absolute zero.

My eyebrows jumped into the sky. "Holy crap, how did I survive that?"

We created an exclusion zone around you. The warhead did not interact with anything within a three meter sphere around you.

"Huh…" My eyes wandered to the Aspis on which I was squatting. "And this thing? What was the energy barrier? I could sense a great deal of electrical charge from it."

The Death's Knell was modified with additional shielding through your Class I Esoteric Defense Systems. It served mostly to repel the plasma and radiation, as well as the temperatures. Most of the threat was handled by the warhead itself, of course. Still, I had to burn out the Aspis' circuits and emitters. It is nothing more than a well-crafted passive shield, now.

"I see…" 

I leaned back and looked up at the slowly darkening sky. The setting sun threw some spectacular reds and oranges around, and I felt the wind pick up a little. A cooling column of air was gently pressing down on me, and I closed my eyes, enjoying the sensation of dewy softness brushing through my sensilla and settling on my face and chest.

My eyes popped open again when something wet touched my nose, followed by another wet spot on my eyelid, leaving me blinking before I properly looked around me again.

Snow! It's snowing! Oh…

Wisps of fog condensed around the walls of the glassed crater and wafted down to gather at the bottom, slowly covering the ground. The crater was cold enough to generate its own weather, but my enhanced skin isolated me well, and I felt almost cozy as I enjoyed the beautiful sight.

The glass was striated with inclusions and impurities, but very smooth and glossy. It had a raised lip that stopped the mud and rainwater from flowing inside, and the gentle drizzle turned into snowflakes some thirty meters up, or so.

Looking beyond the crater, I could see iced trees creaking in the gentle wind, leaves crackling, and there was a quiet tinkle as they broke from their branches and shattered when they hit the frosted forest floor.

I smiled contentedly at the vision, and sighed a little when I realized it would only last until the frigid glass had warmed enough to kill the localized convections.

Well… Time to move. A quick mental glance told me that Leah was already approaching and would come into view momentarily.

I stretched my arms and let a yawn slip out, before I stood up and slowly stretched each limb, letting my tail do the work of keeping me and the Aspis balanced on its curvature.

 

***

 

Leah was utterly spellbound by the drone recordings of Tinea's last battle.

She'd replayed the last minutes five times already, but she just couldn't get over the enthralling…beauty and madness of that last bit, where Tinea recited a poem she'd never heard before, followed by the stupidly brilliant mother of all explosions right at the end there.

It… It just didn't seem real. It couldn't be. That wasn't how life went. The whole thing wasn't possible. No way would a battle like that happen outside a movie. But…it did. It wasn't acted. It didn't feel artificial. It was gritty, and bloody, and graceful, and utterly, utterly enthralling.

It was very Tinea.

She started the video again. And again, the way that Tinea moved hypnotized her. The gleeful smile full of crazed ecstasy on that pretty face danced and twirled with the hawk-eyed calculation in Tinea's gaze as she raged across the field, only for the complex mix of…things? Only for the complex whatever to gain yet more depth when she started that poem.

It told her things about the girl she didn't know how to understand.

Leah was still grappling with the unsettling and exciting flood of impressions and what they made her feel, when her pod arrived at Tinea's clearing, cannon and maintenance drone in tow. The freezing air brushing past her metal skin almost made her shiver, and she realized that she wouldn't be getting out of her pod here, either.

She chuckled at the juxtaposition of the two extremes. She'd had to escape the ridiculous heat of her own battle, only to arrive to be blasted by a cold that would probably physically hurt, if she opened her egg.

Leah let the cannon uncouple, and stepped closer to the glass crater. She edged past the lip and saw Tinea at the bottom of it, surrounded by softly swirling fog, eyes closed and stretching her limbs with languid grace. Her tail gently swayed with every motion, ice crystals glittering all over it, and in the girl's hair too.

Leah just stopped and took in the sight.

Snowflakes appeared out of nowhere a few meters above Tinea and sunk like feathers into the mist at the bottom. And like a nymph out of a fairy tale, the enchanting, partially obscured woman enjoyed herself with easy, almost dancing, motions.

The enhanced sensors of Leah’s pod could see through the fog and detect the inverted dome thing that Tinea balanced on that prompted the slow dance, but to the naked eye, it all combined into something completely magical. Leah decided to enjoy it to the fullest and set the pod and her robotic eye to keep the recordings of the last several minutes.

When Tinea smiled at her over her shoulders, Leah couldn’t help but stare hungrily and had to fight her desire to jump the woman’s bones.

Yeah, she thought, I’m a goner. Hella gone.

She carefully took each file that showcased Tinea in combat, included the captivating scene in front of her, and put them all into a folder she named ‘Battlepoem’.

“Ypsilon, can you back this folder up, please? Together with Lily’s video.”

Certainly, Leah. I’ll send it to your workstation as well, if you’d like?

“Yes.”

Done.

“Thank you.”

You’re welcome, Leah. Always.

She grinned at Ypsilon’s reassurance. It was good to have friends, even if they weren’t all human.

Seconds later, Tinea gathered herself, and pushed hard off the disk. It went rocketing across the crater and ramped off the edge, up into the air, and sailed out of sight where it crashed into the forest. Tinea, meanwhile, sprinted out of the crater as fast as she could, cursing under her breath at the cold nipping her feet, right past Leah, until she was off the painfully frigid glass.

Leah hid a delightful, secret little shiver as Tinea trailed fingers along her pod’s skin on the way past, and giggled as she turned to catch up.

 

***