CATS HAVE A HEIGHTENED SENSE OF SMELL THAT CAN WARN THEM OF IMMINENT DANGER. Unfortunately, Panther wasn't a real cat. She just dressed up like one for her nightly dose of espionage.
The Palace's Demon guards came at her as a horde, but this wasn't anything she hadn't planned for. Cracking her whip here, delivering a flying kick there, she slipped through their defenses with relative ease. She was going to be remembered as the central figure in one of the greatest heists of all time.
Just not the one she was expecting.
Several rooftops away, someone was privately tracking Panther's actions. A black shape highlighted with green stripes and long, rust brown hair, Navi watched the fight break out in the crosshairs of her visor binoculars. Her headphones provided an ad hoc soundtrack for the scene, cycling through a playlist that included "Smooth Criminal" by Michael Jackson, "Unmei no Saki he" by Kei Yoshikawa, "Love Forever" by MCR, "Little Bitty Pretty One" by Thurston Harris, and the Antenna Cradle theme from Goldeneye.
Reconnaissance was Navi's main objective: Simply take pictures and report back to the Palace's rulers about who was disturbing the peace. The circuits of her mind were already starting to change currents, however. She could deal with a situation like this by herself. She was expecting to see on a mob uprising. Instead, all she found was one noisy kitten who had gotten out of her cage.
Navi licked her lips as she followed the target. Panther battled her way through the demons with grace, elegance, and a bit of 70s action movie swag. Navi had heard of the Woman in Red causing problems for the ones in charge, but this was the first time she had seen her in-person and up close.
If nothing else, Panther was the voluptuous sort. Her Phantom Thief attire consisted of bright, skintight red pleather that covered everything except the lower portion of her face, a window around her bosom, and the pair of blonde pigtails flailing from the back of her head. Navi, by comparison, was an ironing board in a black jumpsuit. Jealousy crept into her mind.
Navi zoomed in with her gloved thumb on the edge of her visor, taking snapshot after snapshot in a thorough geographic survey of Panther's body. Her thoughts wandered into the girls' locker room at Syujin High. She could recognize those curves even before she activated the bio-filter on her binoculars.
Heh. So much for the secret identity, Anne.
Futaba was close friends with Anne in her regular life. Or at least, she pretended to be. Things could get a little demented when the world went dark and you lived a dual life in a Demon-infested alternate dimension. Anne, ever the bold heroine, had apparently chosen to fight the system as Panther. Futaba, a studious proponent of order and logic, helped uphold the status quo as Navi.
Futaba tapped another button on her binoculars. The Demons instantly disappeared from her digital view of the world.
Along with all of Anne's clothes.
The visor's built-in sonar and electron imaging omitted all the unnecessary information, displaying Anne as a bare blonde-haired figure on a wireframe background. She was an artist delivering an exotic aerobics performance for an audience of one. No matter how quickly or suddenly she moved, all of her important parts were kept perky and firm under an invisible layer of red pleather.
Anne turned her back toward Futaba, pounced straight up, and curled into a front flip over the Demon she was fighting. A quick glimpse of peach petals reminded Futaba she had a job to do.
Futaba tapped in her coordinates and hit the silent alarm to summon a squadron of Perennion Demons—The most ecological way to rid the Palace of uninvited pests. A dozen or so additional blips appeared on her radar, moving in roughly from the north.
Futaba's screen updated a second later. On one side of her detailed overhead view of the palace, there was a blip quickly scurrying this way and that as a red "D" flashed over its position. Far away, on an opposite wall, there was a stationary blip marked with a green "R." Futaba's backup units were making their way in a straight line between the two targets.
The stiffs wouldn't care about things ended, just as long as this Phantom Thief business was resolved. Everything else was left up to Futaba's discretion.
Her clever, mischievous, and spicy discretion.
She considered things briefly before she picked the "R" option. She couldn't deny she was the trashier of the two.
Anne still hadn't sensed anything wrong, but Futaba could hear the rumbling coming up behind her vantage point. She was so excited about what was to come that she almost forgot the meds. The compound she injected into her neck was powerful enough that it put her half to sleep and take away her ability to feel pain, but mild enough to keep her brainwaves hopping.
They rose up behind Futaba like ravenous beasts. Each one was a senseless hybrid of robotic parts and plant life, like a grove of giant Venus fly traps that had been fused with a woodchipper in a horrible foresting accident.
They ate her feet first. Jagged teeth tore through the rubber soles of her boots and shredded the black leather around her ankles. The motorized blades deeper in the creatures' stomachs ground her body straight down to into red sand. Just before they reached her heart, she smiled.
Turbines started to move in bowels of the Perennions. Futaba's tiny pieces were drawn through a central stem inside each monster. Midway up, the particles reached a Y-joint in the cyber-creature's ventilation system. Had Anne been the one who was devoured, her ground up remains would have been drawn through the left tube and come to their final resting place in a plain black container labeled "OEM FERTILIZER," sharing the same grisly fate as countless other enemies of the Palace, and that would have been the end of this wondrous tale of perversion.
Futaba was one of the few cases where the meal was allowed to pass through the right tube, heading into a different cylinder that looked more like a charged battery. The Perennions together sung in an ominous electrical hum before they began to move toward their next target.
Panther was nearly through with the guards when the Perennions arrived. She sensed she had sprung a trap. Munchers weren't part of tonight's regular security detail.
Massive chrome flowers bloomed from each creature, revealing a grated air duct built into its pistil. Panther was about to strike one of the creatures with her whip when it sprayed her. She accidentally inhaled part of the vapor before she covered her mouth and dodged out of the way.
She thought the machines were trying to paralyze her with their toxins. Nobody wanted their dinner to be thrashing around on the table while they ate. She had no idea being devoured alive would have been a more merciful outcome compared to what awaited her.
The human conscious was nothing more than a series of repeating electrical currents. Those currents could travel through the tiniest molecules, just as long as the material was conductive enough, the electrons were condensed close enough together, and there was a clear path to hold the current. Once it was in vapor form, the charged particles that made up a person's identity could find a new home in any living brain they floated through.
And now a tiny hint of Navi's Eau de Possessión was salaciously creeping into Panther's nostrils.
Panther flipped through the air to escape the first sparkling metal cloud, but the flowers pointed up like gun turrets and blinded her in an even thicker cloud. There was nothing she could do protect herself. Navi's spirit dust met Panther's synapses with more impact than an airborne Dodge Stealth colliding with a concrete wall doing 120.
Time stopped in middle of Anne's acrobatics. The feeling was more disorienting than it was painful. It was a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere at once, the sudden realization that you weren't the only person in your own mind. The last thing Anne was able to do under her own control was widen her eyes in terror.
Futaba finished the move for her, swooping to the ground and landing gracefully on one knee. On the outside, it all happened in a matter of seconds. It looked as if Anne had been hit with the first cloud, escaped that unharmed, disappeared briefly inside a second cloud, and came back out of that with a perfect landing, all with no indication that her soul had suffered a crippling blow somewhere in between.
The internal narrative, however, was a different story. If neurons had voices, Anne's would be screaming "GET OUT OF MEEEEE!" right now. Futaba's would have replied with a simple but explicit "Unf."
The Perennions rustled over the ground until they formed a ring around Anne. Their optic units performed a mental scan to reveal Futaba was only 54.348% assimilated into Anne's mind. There was no question who was in control at that particular moment, but there was still plenty of work to be done. Futaba's fingers were already beginning to twitch in subtle rebellion.
Futaba shifted her legs and placed her hands forward. The red pleather creaked softly down her back as she stretched on all fours.
"Come on, boys," Futaba purred through Anne's lips. "Panther's been a bad kitty."
The Demons blanketed her in blast of hot steam, adding a dew-like sheen to her outfit. Futaba closed her eyes and sighed.
A carefully calculated spike in body temperature would get her blood pumping. The increased heartrate meant the cyber-pollen invading her brain would have an easier time dispersing through the rest of her body.
The Perennions took turns delivering their punishment on Anne. The odd ones in the ring would sprinkle more of Futaba's twinkling particles on her, then the even ones would blast more heat from their bellows. She would be seasoned with Futaba some more, than simmered in thick steam. Half were responsible for monitoring the wavelengths that compared her Anne-ness to her Futaba-ness, the other half watched out for her thermal readings. They updated their scans by the millisecond, obsessively inspecting the prisoner like a sci-fi version of Javert.
The trip through the girlwash ruined Panther/Navi's catsuit. All that extra moisture would dry off, certainly, but the microscopic flecks of metal and nanotransistors that now soaked deep into its fibers would make it light up like Akihabara on Christmas Eve even on the most basic security systems. Its days as practical stealth attire were over.
But that was okay. Anne had had a good run with it, not counting its less than dignified end, and Futaba figured it was about time to exchange it for something in black and neon green.
The machines were almost ready to put the finishing touches on their captured Phantom Thief. On the outside, she was drenched in a half-and-half mixture of Anne's fresh sweat and Futaba's artificially preserved corpse-wax. On the inside, her assimilation rate hovered somewhere around 94%.
The tip of her tongue slipped over her bottom lip as she panted ever so quietly. A small reservoir of moisture had formed in the smooth dip of her cleavage. In thermal vision, she was rendered as a white hot fire pixie taking a breather after a long flight. Raising her body temp any higher would push her beyond the safe human tolerance.
The Perennion directly in front of Futaba made a motion like it was growing out of the ground, revealing a hollow space between its "roots." The underside—just visible from Futaba's crouched eye level—was lined with a sophisticated garden of leaf-shaped electromagnets and scrubbing pads.
The Demon rolled forward like a tank, adjusting its equipment to Futaba's personal width. Brushing over her, the leaves guided the particles in her bloodstream to make one final comprehensive sweep through her body, starting from the back of her head all the way down to her heels. Futaba positioned her herself to maximize the machine's effects. She had her chin to the ground and her hips straight up in the air when it started on her head, crawled back on all fours when it was near the halfway point of her spine, and sat up on her hands and stretched her pelvis to the ground when it caressed her lower back.
Futaba found this to be delightfully refreshing, like a gentle message after a long day in the sauna. Anne—in the last moments before her fleeting existence was rinsed away—didn't have enough of a free will to disagree. The mental takeover peaked at 100% by the time the person-sweeper reached the back of her ankles.
The Perennion finished its slow pass, allowing Futaba to climb to her feet. The first thing she did was peel her red mask and carelessly toss it aside. Anne had always been concerned with hiding her identity inside the Palace. Futaba didn't share the same sentiment.
One of the Perennions tilted its cameras in front of her. Futaba was displayed in its optical processors with her arms crossed and a mixed look of confidence and seductiveness on her face. Her image pixelated, shifted through the entire spectrum of colors, and appeared for a few seconds as a faceless silhouette standing behind a grid of computer code. When the image returned to normal, a list of diagnostic results were displayed to her right.
PHYS—OK
PSYCH—OK
IDENT—OK[RECYC]
The magic phrase "CONTAINMENT SUCCESS" appeared below Futaba's grinning face. The carnivorous plant abominations rumbled away in the same direction they had come.
Futaba tapped her stolen foot as she looked around with her stolen eyes. She started to think about how she should deal with those other Phantom Thieves.