"Oh, please. I wouldn't touch you to scratch you."
- Michelle Pfeiffer
Lucky Chloe was turning this weekend doo-wop into an industrial demolition derby. She yanked the gun turret off of a drone tank like it was a giant stick of pocky. Her mittens shredded through internal power cables like they were strands of yarn. She twisted herself into a breakdance spin and applejacked a missile relay system into next week. She jumped up to catch an aerial sentinel by its mini-jets and chucked it at a bipedal artillery robot like it was a frisbee.
Unfortunately, she was about to learn this wasn't her Lucky day.
The company chairman watched the chaos unfold from several different angles on a surveillance grid. Kazuya Mishima sat on a leather recliner with his ankle crossed over the opposite knee, never changing his flat expression and hardly ever blinking every time he watched another company machine violently explode. Anna Williams, his trusted secretary, stood in the dim shadows behind him with a mechanical control board in her reach.
The slightly distorted black and white video of Chloe's rampage now showed her standing on top of a security sentinel and frantically trying to kick its AI radome off of its chassis.
"Problem with one of the advertisers?" the chairman asked casually with a fist curled against his chin.
Choe savagely yanked a camera sensor off the machine and threw it at another camera on the garage ceiling. Two of the approximately thirty different video feeds watching her abruptly cut to scrambled white noise.
"I'll say so," Anna chuckled sarcastically from the control board. "She's decided to renege on her employment agreements. Not very supportive with some of our corporate expansion plans. I believe her exact wording was 'This party's over. I didn't sign up for this evil taking-over-the-world bullshit.'"
"In that case, we're done with her," Kazuya issued his sentencing coldly. "We'll have to invoke the Remainder Clause on her contract, and then terminate her position with the company."
Anna smiled and pressed the big red button labeled with an icon shaped like an Easter basket.
The intense white floodlights filling the garage suddenly switched off and were replaced by some more moody blueish-silver operating lights. The pink parts of Chloe's outfit stood out with a glow-in-the-dark effect.
The following happened in a grand total of about seven seconds: The armor panels Chloe was kicking folded open without warning, and gravity sent her tumbling down legs-first into a hollow recess. She landed on a conveniently placed metal saddle that adjusted itself to support the length of her spine. A second artillery drone adjacent to the one she was fighting rolled up closer, until the two fuselages came together and Chloe's waist was wedged in a makeshift iron cradle. Levers guided her hips back so her kneepads rested against the heart symbols on her chest. Cables emerged from the shadows around her legs and wired themselves into the portable speakers decorating her waist, while a small pneumatic piston snapped into position underneath her ruffled tutu. The thin black material in her fighting shorts gave way without much stress.
"Gah!" Chloe yelped in weird discomfort. Not particularly painful, not irritating, but weird. Things were suddenly hooked up in ways Mother Nature never intended, her bare thighs were pressed against unyielding metal, this lighting made everything look like a psycho's rave club, and she wasn't happy about any of it.
Now let's shake all the produce out of those vines, Anna thought silently with an ominous smile on her face. Kazuya blinked with disinterest.
That was only the first four seconds. For the other three seconds: Chloe felt a little electronic bassline reverberate through her hips. She made a subtle wiggling motion with her lower body that was more of a nervous tremor than a voluntary twerking dance. The drone forming the front half of the cradle glared down at her with a bright digital scoreboard that read 3… 2… 1… ALL CLEAR.
Mission Successful. Novelty party confetti ejected from the machine's exhaust as it played the pre-recorded of sound of kazoos being blown.
R & D always had an odd sense of humor, the chairman thought in silent boredom as he watched the proceedings from a dozen different grainy angles. Above Chloe Cam, Over the Shoulder Chloe Cam, Side Chloe Cam, Underbody Diagnostic View Chloe Cam, etc.
Chloe suddenly felt really, really cold. A deep, permeating coldness that started on her lap and swept up through her waist, tickling the bottom of her stomach.
Her legs gave one last flinch of defeat. Icy steam softly whooshed around her black skirt ruffles, and a single cryogenically-sealed capsule about the size of a AA battery was delicately pulled away from her thighs on a small hydraulic arm. It slid down into a narrow storage compartment on first machine that captured her.
She blinked in weak confusion as she watched the small robotic movements happening below her metal seat. Did that gizmo put something creepy inside of her? Or is that what it took out of her… ?
The garage's floodlights switched back on. The second drone reversed on its treads while the first drone remained in place. The metal cradle separated, and Chloe descended toward the floor in a short four-foot fall. She landed on the soles of her pink boots, but her legs quickly struggled to support the rest of her weight. Her whole center of gravity in her lower mid-waist just felt like a sensationless void, and it was throwing her balance completely out of whack.
One of her long mittens rested over the impression of her navel on her formfitting tutu, then gently slid lower. She looked down toward her stomach with combination of confusion and growing anger. She wasn't an expert in any of that science-y biology-y stuff, but she could certainly feel the difference when there was a lot less spunk in her tail.
She turned toward the damaged security tank looming behind her. Rotating her lithe abdominals sent additional ripples of cold numbness flowing up her belly and down through her hips.
"Ugh! The hell? What did ya creeps do to me?!"
Speakers opened on the machine's fuselage in response. Chloe grit her teeth the moment she heard the voice on the sound system.
"We just recovered all of the daughters from your disco balls before we bulldoze the entire club, my dear. You're a valuable asset to G Corp and we need someone to continue performing your services since you'll no longer be with us," Anna echoed over the Chloe-Harvester's intercom, adding "You really should pay attention to the fine print on the things you sign. I certainly wouldn't want to end up like you, just speaking as a lady with all her plumbing in working order."
The dance-fighter bit her lip as she felt a dull, empty tingle deep within her lower left pelvis. An entire lifetime of virility was gone in a second, and her body was struggling to adjust to the shock of running on empty decades before it was supposed to occur naturally. If she renewed her contract now, she could start promoting herself as "Mech Boyz Scrub Me Out" Chloe.
"Just when I thought you fuckers couldn't get any more gross…" she growled in hatred under her weakened breath.
"Who are you planning on using for the fertilization procedure?" Anna whispered to Kazuya with her mouth away from the microphone. There was now a very Unhappy Chloe on the security monitors, and she was tiredly swaying on her feet with all the typical post-op reactions they were expecting. Poor thing. But this was business, and the show must go on.
"No one who deserves to join her genealogy." Kazuya shrugged emotionlessly. "We'll use the full-synth option on the ova. I want agents who will inherit all of the donor's combat and personality traits without getting diluted. All we need to swap out is the gene marker that determines how much she likes us."
"A box full of kittens as feisty as the mama-cat. We'll make a fortune on the aftermarket." Anna smirked in agreement.
A highly exotic form of cellular genesis began to occur underneath the artillery drone's ten tons of armor. Cells instantly split and replicated into zygotes once they were approved for deployment. Zygotes developed into complex chemically-suspended embryos, and the embryos developed to early adulthood in a matter of seconds. An entire army of designer soldiers was fully grown inside the machine's reactor in less time than it takes to microwave a refrigerated brownie.
Chloe gasped when she suddenly noticed the giant red crosshairs aiming at her boots. She frantically scrambled away (botching a backflip when her legs wouldn't completely do what she wanted) as a barrage of six-foot-tall oval-shaped missiles launched out of the machine's missile tubes and smashed into the metal floor standing upright. Each shell casing was labeled LCX and then a number: LCX-01, LCX-02, LCX-03. She lost count somewhere around LCX-40.
The sentinel ended its first bombardment, and then slowly rolled backwards and parked with its diesel engine still idling. The missile pods all split open at the same time, releasing clouds of warm steam and a chorus of playful moans and giggling.
Chloe froze in confounded terror.
She was facing off with a mass-produced mob of her own impersonators. Their steamy garden-fresh forms were minimally dressed in scraps of metal foil and magnetic tape that tried to crudely mimic her tutu-and-fuzzy-jacket combo. Most of them had the same bright blonde hair as her, others had darker hair. There were a handful of cherry blondes in the group, a few brunettes, and at least one oddball with pale violet hair (She made Chloe think of a commercial for grape-flavored toothpaste). But they all had their hair done in the same familiar style: Twin pigtails tied back with leftover electrical cables.
Each was built slightly different from Chloe. Some were taller. Some were lankier. Some were thicker. But regardless of the minor variations in their genetic patterns, they were all distinctly her, as if Chloe was looking at reflections of herself in dozens of different carnival mirrors. And they all had matching belly buttons for the sake of anatomical consistency.
Her vision blurred from the after-effects of light anesthesia, making the already intimidating Chloe Gang quadruple in her eyes.
"Hi mom," one of them snickered deviously, with a voice that matched hers at her most giddy.
"Betcha weren't expecting to see us outside of your warm-up studios this early. Nothin' wakes a girl up like a sick beat poundin' through some subwoofers," another winked at her, speaking in her deeper "Mature Chloe" tone.
"You're old news! We're the hot new remix you couldn't contain thanks to the manager making a boombox out of your booty!" another said as she confidently pointed her thumb toward the damp and thinly-wrapped swellings of her chest. Her vocal cadence fell into the more rare "Geeky Chloe" variety.
Their faces were what resembled her the most. Bright, cheery, sinister giggling faces with barcodes and G Corporation logos tattooed on their cheeks and foreheads. A little makeup to hide the markings is all many of these cyber-homunculi would need to become virtually identically to her.
"Chloe, I'm delighted to introduce you to Chloe Two Point O. Our latest natural resource acquisition here at G Corporation," Anna's voice proudly announced over the intercom. "All 138 of them, with another… oh, hundred and twenty-six thousand or so stored on standby. We'll have to divvy up the supplies between our various Delivery Units once we get a complete manual count."
Chloe grunted with stubborn disapproval, pressing one of her paw pads against a numb corner of her waist that wouldn't stop throbbing. She didn't need to be a mad geneticist to know those were probably never going back where they came from, even if she held her claws to the boss's neck and demanded them back.
Well. There was only way to deal with this new threat. At least now the renegade ad girl wouldn't need worry about the humiliation of losing to some brainless G Corporation goons on her way out. If anything, she'd just be losing to her own badass cuteness and coordination.
Chloe, already worn down from fighting war drones and half-asleep from the IGR (Instant Gamete Recovery) procedure, stretched her mittens to gather what little energy she had left. She took a deep breath, and charged into her last samba against her overwhelming backup dancers.
Author's notes / psychotic ramblings:
Izumi Noto just can't catch a break without getting dissected by bizarre sci-fi mining gizmos, apparently.
IGR… IRG… I don't try to make these funny little things happen. They just sort of accidentally appear when I'm writing. (IRG = The initials for the Imperial Royal Guard in Muv-Luv)
Kagami Mikage out there sub-contracting to any wacko who will pay him these days. Eggy Boi must be on hard times after the whole "Replacing humanity with the new humanity" deal fell through.
You know the Bolivian Army ending? Well here's the Bohemian Rhapsody Army ending.
New Cyber Monday deal: We'll completely overstocked with Lucky Chloes. Get them all 50% off!
General worldbuilding info: Alisa is probably over on the Mishima Zaibatsu side going "Uhh… I hope you're not planning on making me do that to Xiaoyu."
It still amazes me Tekken has TWO secret evil super soldier industrial corporations that are constantly trying to out-secret evil super soldier industrial corporation each other. Most fighting game continuities settle with just having one.