"A man's got to know his limitations."
- Magnum Force
"I can have the skin pulled and the charger replaced by tonight. It held up pretty well… considering you drove it directly into a missile."
- Viper
"Women are kind of like diesel engines. You know, it may take a little bit to get them going, but once you do, they can run a long, long time. Men, on the other hand, we're more like… bottle rockets."
- Jeff Foxworthy
"And you, West. Not every situation calls for your patented approach of shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more, and then when everybody's dead try to ask a question or two."
- Wild Wild West
"Egon, your mucus."
- Ghostbusters
Today's Klaxosaur was more frenzied than a bee in a flower field on a sunny summer afternoon. A 300 foot tall bee shaped like a t-rex who dreamed of being an industrial car crusher.
Despite the futuristic prehistoric madness towering in front of them, the team of Franxx units took their battle positions: Strelizia with her lance, Delphinium with her twin swords, Argentea with her claw fists, Genista with her massive cannon revolver, and Chlorophytum with her metal feather fins. The five vibrant blossoms were determined to plant their roots and hold their ground, if they didn't get picked first.
The Klaxosaur instantly attacked by belching a flood of viscous horror from deep within his armored gullet. The coarse liquid shined like clear black oil laced with ripples of flickering neon violet as it streamed under the sun and flew dead center toward the Franxx team.
Strelizia and her allies frantically changed tactics in the split second they could react. While most of the units were able to quickly dodge and only suffered from minor splash damage, the slowly lumbering Genista ate the brunt of the blast.
"Yugh. What did that thing hit me with?" Kokoro, the Pistil, cringed. She was crouched on her hands and knees over Genista's interface hub with her head cowering under her neural hood. Her mind was completely synchronized into Genista, leaving her own body paralyzed and making her oblivious to her physical surroundings. She only sensed what her Franxx could sense.
"Nothing, as far as I can see," Mitsuru, her Stamen, calmly said over her shoulder. He was sitting back against the pilot seat behind her gripping the control throttles belted to her waist. His attention was focused on the targeting panorama in front of both of them. Kokoro's thighs rested a few inches away from his lap.
"He didn't even dent the armor," Mitsuru added as he glimpsed through every diagnostic. "Do you feel okay?"
"Yeah," Kokoro replied with shy embarrassment. "Just a little sticky. I hope this stuff doesn't do anything weird with the hydraulics."
Mitsuru heard the sound of bubbling sludge flowing through the ventilation ducts in the ceiling. In the next instant, gallons of the ooze came rushing down through the cracks in the panorama screens and spilled onto the control hub.
Kokoro's motionless body was painted instantly in transparent dark violet. Within seconds, steam started to waft off of her pilot suit as the poly-rubber threads filled with holes like melting Swiss cheese. The details of her straightened back slowly emerged like an archipelago of smooth islands being revealed by a receding black tide. The slime flowed down her sides and washed along her undercarriage, destroying almost any synthetic material it touched along the way.
Mitsuru thought fast on how he should react. He considered doing an emergency desynch and scrambling to help Kokoro clean the sludge off, but then he worried Genista would be open to attack and the results could be even more disastrous that just letting Kokoro have an afternoon slime bath while she finished off the Klaxosaur. Besides, this fluid didn't seem corrosive enough to harm Kokoro herself, and the way her pilot jumpsuit was dissolving down her back was starting to look easy on the ey-…
Mitsuru screamed in horror as a second waterfall of slime poured over his head. He would never have a craving for grape smoothies again, but that was about to become the least of his troubles.
At the same time Mitsuru was being primed in raw Klaxosaur grease, the ooze splashed onto the panorama behind him and started seeping into the main piloting systems. A piece of metal framework behind him changed chemical properties and remolded itself into a black metal dome insulated with dense neural cables. The hollow shell latched tightly over Mitsuru's head as a helmet and completely hid his face. He flailed his arms in a futile effort to escape the purple oil spill as it slathered down his chest and feasted on his jumpsuit.
All the noise was enough to bring Kokoro out of her mechanical zen. The metal frame of her hood only allowed her to turn her head a few degrees, blocking her from seeing what was happening behind her. Her feedback limiters were still engaged, preventing her from feeling what was creeping over her body.
"Mitsuru, what's going in there?"
Mitsuru's screams stopped as suddenly as they had started. His arms slowly and limply lowered to his sides. His faceless metal head gazed down ominously on the raised curve of Kokoro's lower back.
Kokoro went through a frightening ordeal of her own once the slime seeping over her reached its saturation point. Her hood turned semi-fluid and collapsed over her forehead. When it turned back into solid metal, it concealed the entire top of her head and the upper half of her face, eyes included. Her mouth gasped for a second as an unnatural chill ran up her spine, then she went completely silent. Her body was crouched as steadily as a curved piece of furniture.
The synchronization display on the back of her neck that the Stamen was meant to monitor shorted out and instantly went black. When it rebooted, it no longer displayed its normal bright white UI and colored percentage bars. The screen was filled only with dark red static, showing a more primal signal was stirring in her brain.
The proto-organism with the XX chromosomal pattern glanced over her shoulder as far as her equipment would allow. Her gently smiling lips below her visor signaled she was ready. The black ooze had already done a more than sufficient job dissolving the section of the pilot suit that obstructed her important end.
The faceless and testosterone-enabled counterpart stationed behind her pulled apart the frayed threads that were barely holding together the groin of his own suit, freeing his slime-dipped male components from their confines. He ignored the awkward control sticks strapped to the base of Kokoro's spine and held her by her natural hips.
The two pilots were now just a pair of bodies animated by the same electronic amoeba infecting their Franxx unit. Everything that happened next was done in a very careful, formal, and compulsory way.
Kokoro slowly pushed backward with her waist while Mitsuru leaned forward with his pelvis, closing the tiny barrier of space between them and letting go of any pretense of what the control cabin was for. His stalk gently glided through her gate as far as it would go until his light bronze berries rested comfortably against her petals. Male and female both made a short grunting sound (his more muffled than hers) as they officially locked in place.
Stamen and Pistil realized their true functions in perfect unison. There was no thrusting or grinding once their two halves became one. There was only coexistence.
A powerful change started to take hold of them. An aura of mysterious energy aroused through them, turning their pale earthling skin to a much deeper shade of red as it spread. It started from the hardpoint where their anatomies connected and spread through both male and female at an equal rate. They both remained perfectly still as they let their bodies change.
The alteration was finished in a few seconds, rendering the two pilots into a statuesque display of smooth curves and sharp ridges sculpted from a single block of wet porphyry. Their genomes were crossed and rewritten into a more appropriate form that straddled the line between human and Klaxosaur. The handful of metal accessories and scarce tatters of pilot suits still clinging to their exotic skin were the only vestiges that remained of the humans they once were.
Kokoro and Mitsuru loved each other with all of their hearts. Now that they were completely integrated with Genista's neural grid and had their bodies made immortal through intensive Klaxosaur science, they never had to worry about being separated. They would live off the constant nutrients and moisture the purple ooze provided as it soaked through their pores. Waste disposal was a surprisingly hygienic process given the rugged circumstances: Anything the bodies didn't need would be removed on a cellular level and filtered through Genista's normal exhaust.
They were the central cog in a corrupted Franxx system. Their bodies were the biological dual processor that formed the brain of the Klaxosaur-controlled Genista. Her hips would do the steering while his deeply planted root kept everything stabilized. His hands with their half-dissolved gloves were loyal and diligent, never leaving Kokoro's slimed gluteus contours even when they would be asleep in Standby Mode.
Jumbled images flashed across the cockpit panorama as the Klaxosaur virus overwrote every onboard system. Geographical information for the human Plantation the pilots enlisted from—saved for future reference. Garbled junk characters and error messages possibly left over from a user interface that was no longer needed. Detailed mechanical schematics pulled from an encrypted file and stored away along with the Plantation maps. A radio imaging of two brains sitting on top of rapidly filling update bars. And finally, magnified underside before-and-after snapshots of the mated Genista genitalia: Petals and bulbs snuggly fitting together as they naturally belonged, speckled with droplets of dense purple moisture for encouragement, and surrounded with deteriorated skintight pilot suit threads. A window on the left side of the panorama displayed the common human strain, an admirable but prudish tickle of the masterpiece it could be. The slightly lighter pigmentation of the female component's flesh compared to the male's showed the picture had been taken during one of the last moments when they were two separate species. The rarer and aggressively pungent red variation was displayed on the right. A botany textbook might someday label these two images as g. genericus and g. superior.
The entire panorama fragmented into an unintelligible cluster of pixels. Kokoro's and Mitsuru's status profiles merged into the vital signs for a single lifeform.
The screens abruptly shut down as the interior lights dimmed. This was to divert more energy to Genista's combat systems, and to give the fully assimilated control unit some privacy. Everything recorded on Genista's sensors was now routed directly through the pilots' brains for optimized performance.
The sludge enveloping the outside of the cockpit block turned opaque as it hardened, sealing the entire compartment so its fragile processor components couldn't be removed. Within the cockpit, Kokoro and Mitsuru's bodies were even more tightly secured together as portions of the ooze tangled around their waists and thighs like a dense black coral reef.
The bland mechanical confines of the cabin had been converted into a crude but feasible ecosystem within a few hasty seconds. Slime clinging to the ceiling would spray dark mist into the air every few days in a minimal effort to keep the bio-processors from becoming too fetid and have their old grime and perspiration dusted off. Things like physical aging and hair growth could be halted by tampering with their genes, but there were still certain less pleasant aspects to using living human components flourishing in an endless metabolic season that the slime found low-priority and would only sporadically tend to. Kokoro and Mitsuru would either have to teach themselves how to photosynthesize with the weak cockpit lighting so their bodies produced less salt and bacteria in their moisture (not likely) or just accept each other never being completely fresh. If they had been capable of thinking for themselves.
Tiny ooze nets were constantly massaging over their physiques with stimulating electrical currents so their muscles never grew tired as they remained in the same fixed positions. A special wisp of slime threads would delicately fiddle up between their legs to check the connection between their two identifying organs and make sure it never became dry, irritated, or saggy. On the rare occasions when it did need maintenance, a quick nudge to her dark rose bud or a tiny brush around his lustrous cherries was usually all it took to bring things back to their optimal conditions. When things were more serious, the slime would ease Mitsuru's stalk out a quarter of the way (any further could be lethal to both of them) so it could be diagnosed for circumference. A few drops of Klaxosaur ooze injected straight into his dorsal veins gave him a little extra help during those times his hardware wasn't quite up to the required specs. And if Kokoro was the one who needed servicing, an extremely thin and graceful thread of ooze would slip through the connection seal and spread its oils to soothe the fatigue in her Pistil interior.
Genista eerily stood frozen as the clumps of black and purple grime rolled down her armor. She was still aiming her cannon at the spot where the Klaxosaur had been standing 30 seconds ago, but her hull hadn't moved an inch since she was struck.
Strelizia, Delphinium, Argentea, and Chlorophytum were looking at each other in bewilderment as they recovered from their close call. The Klaxosaur use his tiny mangled t-rex arms to wipe some purple drool off his jaw. His nose anxiously reared like he was liable to sneeze again.
Genista's pink optic sensors blinked. She slowly turned to adjust her aim… toward the other Franxx units.
Her cannon made the sound of a muzzled thunderclap as smoke exploded from the barrel. The metal ammunition round flew in an arch into the center of the team. Their pilots screamed at each other in panic and ran in four separate directions. The cannonball struck the ground before bursting into a pillar of fire.
Genista fired a second shot, nearly taking off Argentea's head this time. The smaller Franxx ducked and swung out her nimble claws as another explosion rocked behind her.
Inside Genista's cockpit, Mitsuru and Kokoro were in full bloom. That was to say, their god- and goddess-like ogre-colored bodies made subtle interactions as trillions of terabytes of raw combat data processed through their brains. Her mouth never changed its stoic and trance-like expression. His head was forever imprisoned within his black helmet, while his body language was soulless and automated, operating on the same basic biological impulse that told a plant where to sow its roots and when to spread its leaves. His lean and sturdy physique had been incorporated for its efficiency, not its allure.
Their heads began to grow warm from all the neural activity, activating the cooling gel that circulated inside their helmets. But the greatest source of heat was the contact area of their perpetual static intercourse. An icy wiggling ooze finger tucked itself under their union to serve as a heat sink. It sizzled quietly as soon as it touched their shared flesh. The bio-computer purred in two soft overlapping tones as the stress on its primary circuit dissipated and pleasure set in.
"Kokoro! Mitsuru! What's gotten into you two?" Miku said over Argentea's comms signal.
Genista loaded her next round from its revolver and pointed her cannon without responding. When the rest of the pilots tried to hail her cockpit, all that came up on their panoramas was a dark video image scrambled in a mosaic pattern. The wave representing the audio channel was completely flat.
"Cut it out, you idiots!" Zero Two screamed in rage from Strelizia.
"Maybe it's a good thing I broke up with her!" Futoshi said from Chlorophytum.
Genista fired her next shot. She missed. Streliza charged her in close quarters, leading to a shockingly quick fight that ended with Streliza stumbling back onto her rear boosters after Genista overpowered her with an impossibly strong bayonet swing.
She did seem to be moving a little faster than usual.
The Franxx team regrouped as Genista launched toward a vantage point a few thousand yards across from them. The Klaxosaur stomped into a spot opposite to Genista, forming a two-pronged attack on both sides of the team.
Genista held her position in a tense standoff. The logic processor of the rogue Franxx calculated the probability of destroying the other pilots was lower than the probability of successfully forcing them to Klaxulate.
Kokoro's organic crankshaft sent a tiny pulse up through Mitsuru's biological gear. The order processed through his two hanging storage queues before tingling straight up to his brain in a millisecond. His steady thumb pressed lightly into the plump left haunch of his female half.
Genista's cannon switched to an alternate setting it had never demonstrated until now. The top of its casing ejected and revealed a long clear tank filled with the same purple muck spewed by the Klaxosaur. The cannon bore disconnected from its ammo compartment, swiveled 180 degrees, and locked back into place in front of the slime tank.
The rest of Genista's soiled armor mysteriously began to eject. Her hat blasted off of her head to reveal a pair of small wing decorations in her long blonde hair. Her hulking kettle fuselage split apart and crashed to the ground in pieces, revealing a second more petite and feminized armored frame hidden underneath. She was constructed with a breastplate of yellow metal flower petals. The same type of petals were hanging off her lower back in a ribbon arrangement. The rest of her narrow frame was black with glowing blue veins—the same texture as Klaxosaur hide. She vaguely resembled a dark Cupid.
The more nimble Genista twirled her cannon over her head and aimed it steadily for the remaining Franxx units. The Klaxosaur rocked back his head to roar. The Franxx team split in half and charged 2-on-1 toward each of their opponents.
The Klaxosaur suddenly grew two extra heads and dropped his mechanical jaws to the dance floor, spewing his caustic black bile in a spread that could have flooded an entire city block. Genista pulled the trigger on her cannon and sprayed waves of electron-enhanced love potion.
Author's note 1: Hey I made a weird version of Obsidian Fury. And it's Mint Adenade with a grenade launcher and a Nadleeh mode for some reason.
Author's note 2: So you know how the Dummy System is like an AI version of Rei, right? So when the Dummy System is active, EVA-01 is essentially Rei. And if Shinji is piloting EVA-01 when the Dummy System is on, it's like Shinji is inside of Rei?
Author's note 3: I was using "Bubblegum Crisis" as a placeholder name for this story before I came up with my Totally Original(TM) pun title.