"Someone who can look at a 70s rocket muscle car Batmobile and say 'That's cosmetically unremarkable' wouldn't hear a dump truck if it exploded in a nitroglycerine plant."

- Anonymous

"Y'know, this was supposed to be my weekend off, but noooo. You got me out here draggin' your heavy ass through the burnin' desert with your dreadlocks stickin' out the back of my parachute. You gotta come down here with an attitude, actin' all big and bad. AND WHAT THE HELL IS THAT SMELL?!"

- Will Smith


You couldn't say you were living the real Pandora life until you had 20 liters of ionized protozoans diffusing their half-life in the gap between your boobs. Cassie was stuck in the middle of a Pandora pile getting squished on all sides with voluptuous body parts she didn't know some of the other girls in her squad even had. It only took 30 seconds for the Nova enzymes flooding through her ears, nose, and mouth to reeducate her and make her forget everything she'd learned in the past three years. In a couple more minutes, she'd forget she was ever human.

Things were getting pretty crunchy for the Kujikawa lookalike. Bones probably would have started breaking if the intense moisture and the muggy atmospheric temperature weren't making their bodies soggy and flexible against each other. Cassie had started off her day as a top ranking Eastern Genetics officer and ended it as a bottom-feeding alien genetics experiment. One moment, she'd been fighting a new unidentified form of Nova. The next moment, her Volt armor and weaponry disappeared as she was pulled through the monster's phase-shifting upper torso. New enemy ability discovered: Pandora deactivation and storage. But the real fun hadn't even started.

"Raw" was the only word that could describe the team's present state. One and a half tons of prime saturated girlbeef and not a single stitch of clothing to speak of. Athletic contours mashed so close together that they practically shared each other's pores, and other orifices. Their individual body scents were completely drowned out by something that smelled like acrid mushrooms stirred together with molten iron. It would take weeks to shower the scent off, if they were ever allowed out of this biological, anatomical, gynecological Hell so they could take a shower.

Cassie felt the back of her shoulders tingling as the Nova's chemical nutrients accelerated her Stigmata's reactions. The mysterious spinal implants that normally provided her powers were stimulated into rebelling against her body so they could take it over completely. She heard dozens of muffled, watery voices whimpering in alto and soprano tones as the rest of the squad became hostesses to the same cellular invasion. These cookies were getting dipped in something a little rougher than milk.

The place was clammy, and the girls were always looking plump and hammy. They didn't really have any free space to move around. They were all too dazed from the effects of rapid pupation to communicate with each other. They were a ball of glands, organs, and soft body lines that simply existed inside of a living alien sauna. They were able to breathe despite being totally underwater, if the pinkish-bluish 100-degree fluid they were submerged in could even be considered a form of water.

The densely-packed contents of the Nova's incubation vesicle were comprised of approximately 76% estrogen lifeforms and 24% fission-heated sea brine. A researcher could have mistaken them for mermaids taking a pleasant little bath on the beach if they were only reviewing the numbers. And there wasn't a hint of scrawny meat in the whole jumbled heap. It was all healthy, bulky sows and cows in this barn. Enrollment at Eastern Genetics apparently required no less than 37 inch round hips and at least a D cup.

It was indiscernible where one Pandora's thigh ended and another Pandora's armpit began. Individual jiggle physics became imperceptible when everything was just smashed together to form a single big jar of jelly. Cassie strangely never ran out of air despite having her lungs full of fluid and her nose completely squished up against someone's collarbone. When her eyes managed to focus inside the dark magenta space, all she saw were the indecipherable curves and creases of her squadmates shoved in her face.

Cassie's Nova carrier had evolved an organ for assimilating 20 Pandoras at a time and just plopped 30 them in together any which way they would fit. She would have dreaded thinking about if any of the other carriers were even more crowded, but she was no longer capable of thinking. Once the Novas first revealed their hideous absorption trick, they just kept piling up the waifus like waffles and smothering their squishy grooves in syrup.

Cassie's squadron had the total cognitive awareness of a heap of pears bundled in a damp fruit sack. The fluid surrounding them malted into more and more powerful mutagens as they gradually molted like grotesque butterflies.

The girls were getting to know each other on an intensely interpersonal level. Which helped their murky transformations along, because they were mentally becoming each other. Overwhelming chemical signals desensitized them to the concept of the personal self and taught them to think as a single entity inhabiting multiple pieces of flesh. There wasn't a single corner of their bodies that was considered a no-fly zone.

Cassie was feeling progressively less classy and a lot more assy. She never thought "Stuck in a giant vat of girl soup" would be the solution to beating her legendary Quadruple Accel. Now this city-destroying creepoid was making a legend of out her derrière.

Five minutes ago, both of her hands were grasping Falchion's handles as she prepared to deliver the finishing slashes to the Nova's core. Now her bare right hand was full of someone's pointed melon, and her left hand was exploring the dark sweltering wilderness of who knows where. Amoebas probably had a better sense of their surroundings when they were osmosing with other microbes.

The only indication that their horribly cramped environment wasn't in total stasis was the steady, distant vibrations that lightly bounced their bodies against each other and rumbled through their slime-filled ears. The monstrous Nova was transporting the squad to another battlefield different from the Eastern Genetics complex where they'd been captured.

Cassie's eardrums could sense each wet echoing thud, but the vibrations hardly moved her. An indeterminant number of bulbous pheromone-excited chests mashed all over her like tightly wound bubble packaging. A well-rounded and slippery posterior was pressing against her right elbow, and an even rounder one stuck out and fought for space with the left side of her belly. Her right big toe pressed against a dimple or a hardened nipple. She could feel hair tangled around her left pinkie, but whose hair and what type of hair was a mystery.

This was unpleasant. This was ungainly. This was uncomfortable. But most important of all: This was evolution.

Cassie's biochemistry and brain activity were in a state resembling insect hibernation. Her team was a disorganized swarm of nymph wasps being turned into a single organic hive by having the humanity baked out of them. Useless things like "personal space" were overrated concepts in the Novas' more advanced society. This fermenting clump of smooth-skinned female orangutans was lucky they were being squashed into a new form of life that actually served a purpose in the Nova collective, instead of just being squashed into pulp.

Individuality was destroyed inside the plankton-infested hot spring. No one in the Pandora pile had the senses left to think of themselves as girls squashed together inside a Nova reactor organ with other girls. They were super-efficient cells that served as parts of a larger organic system.

The primitive amniotic environment bubbled more harshly as the team's clustered body temperatures rose. They wouldn't have to worry about being vulnerable for much longer. They would regain their Volt equipment after they celebrated their second birthdays in frothing puddles of Nova slime.

Or more accurately: They would regain the extremely corroded remains of their Volt equipment, and those remains were going to do a shoddy job of covering their enhanced, constantly perked neon moth bodies. Every nook and cranny of the battle pixies was enriched with enough Nova gunk to keep them pollinated and war-roused for weeks. Cassie was going to be perpetually aggravated by the meteor dust wadded in her butt crack once Milena got her knee out of there. She returned the favor by having her silt-clouded Achilles heel tangled up somewhere between Milena's legs.

The alert Cassie-body suddenly felt herself being pushed upward along with all the other girl-bodies mashing around her. Or was it downward? Or sideways? It was impossible to tell if her toes were pointed to the ground or her coccyx was pointed toward outer space with the chaotic way everyone was wedged together, but they all instinctively knew one thing: They were being pushed toward The Enemy. Their equally round-chested but considerably less evolved half-sisters.

The newly generated hive of Nova-Pandoras were ready to be deployed against a platoon of unsuspecting human Pandoras. The plan was to transport the biological cargo to an invasion site, and drop the charged up Nova-Pandoras on their unprepared enemies like a bomb made out of total bombshells.

They were being launched back into battle, now with their mesmerized insect-like minds subservient to their Nova mother. They were a swarm of sister drones with individual flesh forms and a single united intelligence.

Cassie's crowded world became brighter pink as the first batch of Pandoras were thrust out of the prison ahead of her. Fluid currents steadily pulled her toward the melting membrane wall so her turn could come soon. She and her hive-sisters moaned for fresh air as their exposed plasmodium-infused forms returned to the outside world in a steamy viscous cascade.


Author's notes: Lovely. I've un-remade Akanemorphosis.

I just think it's funny the song on the Freezing soundtrack that plays during this scene (well, technically the scene that takes place immediately after this) is called "Untouchable Queen." Like, gee, they seem awfully touchable when you have this kind of stuff happen to them.

Hey. Cassie Lockhart has the same voice actress as Rise Kujikawa, and Akane Soir has the same voice actress as Mima Kirigoe. Maybe they should hang out and have their multiple split personalities go nuts together. I say Aaaahhhhh! You say Eeeyyyyyyaaa! AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH! EEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAA!