OYHN: Worm Chapter 3

Disclaimer: see chapter 2 to see just how much I have to disclaim. I still don't own anything except my main character, and he's pretending to be Control Freak.

Tuesday, November 1st, 2010

A Conversation with Steve

I had just opened the shop for the day after an exhausting night when Steve walked in. I could tell he was Steve because his name was floating over his head.

He paused as he came in, looking over my head. I looked up. I now had a line of asterisks floating over me.

Huh. Weird power interaction. I scanned him, and things made both more and less sense.

He was also a Builder.

Last night he had dressed as the default Minecraft character, and now he was a Builder.

Maybe I should lead with that.

I gestured him in, and he staggered in, letting the door close behind him. "You know, I've occasionally explained being a Builder as having Gamer powers, but you're playing Minecraft, but I never expected that to be literal."

Steve blinked at me in confusion. "Builder?" he asked. He shook his head. "I just knew I had to come here."

"Yeah, that's the business lure. It's a little glitchy, people who need something I can supply find themselves drawn here. Usually it's not so obvious." I said, as I came out from behind the counter. I helped him over to one of the couches in the gaming area, next to the Warhammer 40K terrain. I handed him a cup of coffee and a pastry without bothering to get them from the snack bar.

"OK, I guess, what I need are answers." He gulped at the coffee, then blinked and shuddered at the strength I make it. It's basically a mug of espresso.

"We are Builders. We are the act of creation. This power can never be lost, stolen, suppressed, or negated, but it can be copied. So be careful of copycat trumps and skill thieves, or else you might make someone an infant god by mistake." I'd been working on this speech for months, but the minions understood it instinctively and I hadn't told anyone else. At long last, a chance for monologue!

He choked on his coffee. "Gods?"

"In the 'Let there be light.' sense, not 'Bow down and worship my omnipotence.' I mean, if that's what floats your boat, you can make minions that'll literally worship you, but I suspect that will cause long term problems." I created a mug of coffee for myself and took a sip. "We can make anything, limited only by raw materials and our own knowledge. Oh, and property ownership, we can't put up a structure on land we don't own unless the owner gives us permission."

"So why do I have blueprints for everything I see bouncing around in my head?"

"That's the knowledge part. We start by copying what's around us, then mixing and matching the pieces we want. Eventually you start modifying the blueprints to make your own original creations. Don't worry if it takes a while to get it right, or takes a lot of mundane studying. You have time. Well, sort of." I said.

He mumbled something through his apple turnover.

"We're more or less immortal. We can be killed, but it takes something that reduces you to ashes, anything less we'll heal eventually. We heal better than baseline humans, but not much faster, so at some point you'll probably want to make a fix for that. We're also immune to radiation. The other main danger for us, funnily enough, is contracts."

He looked at me in disbelief.

"I'm not kidding. We literally can't break a contract once entered into. So make sure someone else handles bills, or anything that needs an end user agreement to use. It's possible to end up enslaved if you're not careful. I'm stuck saving this doomed, shithole planet thanks to the deal that got me these powers." for a given value of 'I' agreed.

He swallowed, then raised his hand. "Doomed?"

"Yeah, this world gets destroyed in like, two years? if I don't kill some physical gods and stop some people idioting as hard as they can." The door chime sounded. I turned and waved. "Oh look, some more of the consequences of my actions." I reached down like I was pulling something from underneath the table as I made, call it a basic Builder's survival pack. "Two magic tattoos, one that stops funky detects from finding you, one that stops mind control and possession. Just put them on like temporary ones. One copy 'Granger's Guide to Warding'. Blueprints for the Crystal Minion Tree. What am I forgetting?" I snap my fingers as I remember, then glance behind me. I turn back around and hold my hand up where the other customer can't see. "We're also shapeshifters, so we can blend into any population." I shift my hand into an old black man's and back. "So, my advice, scan whatever you can't live without, grab some of Professor Haywire's tech, and then bounce to an empty Earth, or maybe make a spaceship and flee Earth altogether. The universe is your oyster. Oh, by the way, can I have the blueprints for an enchanting table?"

He was a little shell shocked, but nodded, concentrated, and managed to make some blueprints appear out of nowhere.

I looked them over, then hugged them. "Oh, where were you when I was spending a week making my gear. Thanks." I absorbed the prints and then went to deal with more fallout from my genius plan.

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

A plan unfolds (like an umbrella in high winds)

OK, now I'm cuddling with a big-boobed alien clone of Willow Rosenberg. All the crap I've dealt with, all the crap I know I'm going to have to deal with, totally worth it.

"Pokegirl minion clone. You've basically added a ton of functionality to your sexbot." she said.

"I don't know where the pokegirl part of that came from. You were supposed to be half to a quarter Vulcan. And how do you know what I'm thinking?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Being your minion bypasses your defenses? Tamer bond doesn't count as a Thinker power?" She rolled over. "And don't you think I didn't catch you giving yourself super stamina and a specific Tamer power, mister." she said, poking me in the chest. She frowned. "Wait, mister what? I don't know your name."

It actually hurt, and I was reminded of why sex with pokegirls had to be bondage sex. They were so much stronger than the humans they needed to be Tamed by that normal sex could cause serious injuries. "I don't know myself. I think losing your name is an important part of escaping the void, but I'm not sure. I got so caught up in setting things up and getting myself some help that I could count on to actually focus on my lack of a fundamental part of my identity."

She looked immediately contrite. "Sorry. I'm processing a lifetime of implanted memories, what it means to be a pokegirl, and a minion, and the basic world knowledge for here."

"OK, it's a lot. In my defense, I gave myself a Taming power because I was worried that all the enhancements and superpowers I was planning on giving myself, on top of the ones I already had, might make me no longer count as human and thus, unable to be your Tamer." I said.

"I will accept your flimsy excuse, and not just because you gave yourself a superpower to have sex with me. As the Alpha for this harem, it's part of my job to call you on your bull." She shook her head. "Pokegirl cultural expectations just hit me. I am the Alpha of this harem, right? I mean, Ka-D-Bras make great Alphas because our psychic abilities usually let us spot little problems in the group before they become big problems, you know? You do know, right? I mean you recognized the ball and what it meant right off and I just realized I could have just read your mind for the answer."

"Yes, you get to be the Alpha, for as long as you want me as your Tamer. And I remember the basics. Mad science, women genetically reengineered so they need sex an average of once a week or they lose higher brain functions, starting with language, and to be super strong monster girls. Normalized BDSM culture." I said.

"So at some point you're putting a collar on this neck, instead of a ring on this finger." She said firmly. "Now we need to get up, and do some system diagnostics on your minion pod before we make any more people with surprise features."

"Crap, Hermione. She should hatch in, nine and a half hours?" I groaned as I got up, resisting the call to cuddle for just a bit longer, as well as that feeling you get when you've done hours of physical effort, then stopped. Definitely adding regen soon. She, on the other hand, jumped out of bed with boundless energy. She wrapped the bedsheet around her in a vaguely togaesque way, then looked at me expectantly.

Crap. I'd spent my internal reserves of cloth making the bed and sheets. "Give me a second. Umm, sorry." as I deconstructed the sheet, and created an outfit I'd scanned that looked a little like one of her later season ones, that was also light enough for summer. The top promptly exploded. She looked down, then glared up at me without raising her head. "Sorry again. When I scanned the clothes, I was expecting Willow as played by Alyson Hannigan, not Alyson Hannigan's stacked pornstar lookalike." It took a couple of tries to get 'make this pattern fit this body' down.

It took us a few minutes to track down the problem. It helped that, although the screen was only visible in my mind, she could see it simply by putting her hand on my shoulder, and without using her psychic powers.

"There, see it! In Preferences, under Minion Defaults. Species is set to Pokegirl, instead of As Scanned." she said. We went and checked the other one and yes, that tree was set up the same way. "So, she's definitely coming out as another Pokegirl? It can't be changed?"

I poked around in the menus. "In order, yes and no. Once the process is started, it can't be changed or stopped before completion."

"Yes! I get to have Hermione Granger as one of my harem-sisters!" She put her hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. "We have to add a Luna Lovegood to the mix. I mean, as long as we're cloning fictional people. Because Lunar Harmony was the best ship, I mean, both books and movies they had better chemistry, and they all balanced each other so well."

"Yes, that was actually part of the plan." I facepalmed. "I just realized that makes me a waifu collector. I am both embarrassed and ashamed."

"You should be, if only for taking this long to realize that. Though I suppose if you're gonna be corrupted by your ability to create life, this is kinda small potatoes." she said.

"And you're not just saying that because my evil plans mean you get to have sex with at least two of your literary crushes?" I reply.

She quickly changed the subject. "So, what are your evil plans? I just get a jumble when I try to read those."

"Because I have a number of them with multiple backups. Plan A, once we get the base setup, we make the Silver Screen, and use it to target Planar Summons spells so we can grab useful people, technologies, and magic, and copy them." I explained.

"They might not appreciate being abducted and cloned." she said dubiously.

"And if we can't do that safely, then comes Plan B. The magic system I know has various Create spells. Create Food, Create Object, Create Servant, Create Warrior, and one of the things you can do with them is reach into a TV and use them to make a copy of whatever is on the screen, to the limits of the spell. I use that to get some scans and build the rest of the team, and then we run them through the Halloween spell to empower them." I said.

"There's a couple of problems with that. The Ritual of Masks Inverted is a modified festival rite. It needs, like, dozens of participants, and, well, a 's a reason Ethan Rayne cast it on Halloween, and it wasn't the irony." she explained.

"OK, well, we've got a bit less than two months to set it up, but, doable."

"The next bit is that the reason I kept my powers was because I, well, resonated. I was dressed as my character from our old Star Trek game. It was basically me in Starfleet with pointed ears." she said.

"Oh my, I have an excuse to engage in one of my favorite hobbies, with a group of beautiful women as part of a plan to save the world. What a sacrifice." I said.

"Which brings me to my last point. It's chaos magic. It's not meant to be controlled, if it were, then it'd just be regular magic. You just point it in the general direction of a problem and hope it works out. It will do things you don't want it to, There will be consequences. If you try to make it something predictable, it'll explode in your face." she said seriously.

"So it has to have 'go catastrophically wrong' failure points built in? Kinda like making your hot water heater safety valve something that will shoot off like a bullet if worst comes to worst, instead of the tank exploding?" I asked.

"Something like that. Oh, and there's a power cap. You're not gonna get Superman or Thor or one of those guys. Maybe, like, a low power version of Magneto as an absolute limit." she said.

"I can work with that if I have to. Hopefully it won't come up."

"So, what's your Plan C?"

"Disgaea item world portal on various media to get useful scans, then build the team."

"That's kinda iffy. The stuff in there is usually magic that only works in the item world, and how it improves the item can be kinda random. I remember a candy bar that was both tasty and burned like high quality coal."

"OK, that is random. Is it horrible chaos magic that will explode and kill us all if we try to make it less random?" asked I.

"Not really. It just doesn't have any way to input what you want out of it." she said. "Anyway, that's long term stuff. Right now, we have to make this place a proper Taming suite. As a good Alpha, I'm not letting another girl have to play charades to say 'I want a padded bench with high ends so I can lay sideways on it, one arm and one leg attached to each end, head and ass hanging off for maximum access.'"

"That was a bit much to convey with gestures. Alright, I need to run out for some raw materials, it'll take about two hours. What do you need?"

"Food, a shower, and internet access."

I made her a Fugly Bob's Challenger meal, complete with greasy take out bag and watered down fountain drink. "Here's a local delicacy, shower's through there." I said pointing. "Water's on voice commands, should be kinda familiar. As for internet, " I created a few more items, "here's a faraday cage, some tools, a copy of local comedian hero Clockblocker's smartphone, and a laptop running local popular operating system OS360. Please get me access without in any way giving away this location, because local gangs, PRT included, like to recruit people by putting guns to their heads, and I have yet to achieve a sufficient degree of bulletproofiness."

"They track things like that?"

"Sometimes, and I know how shit my luck is."

When I returned from the landfill, my internal stores full of deconstructed furniture, clothing, wood and metal, I found her tapping away, the phone partially disassembled and plugged into the laptop.

"Your name is now Robercie Aleksander Budowniczy. I played with Google translate and the Polish word for builder worked as a name, so I just went with it. Your grandfather emigrated here a bit before World War Two, along with his parents. Your parents gave you the full Polish name so your grandparents would leave you their money." said Willow.

"So I'm Bob the Builder?"

She looked at me, face full of hope. I caved immediately. "This is what I get for procrastinating about important things. OK, but we have to make sure to come up with cape identities before we go out in costume. Can't let PHO decide what we'll be called for years to come. So, to completely change the subject, how'd you get the thing to connect without giving away our lair?" I asked.

"The tracker works on a snitch system, so I spoofed the GPS to make it think it's in the PRT building. This way, it'll look like someone cloned his phone and searched for bondage furniture as a prank." she said mischievously. "Ooh, I think you'll like this one. It's a sex chair that'll hold you in the perfect position to suck on our boobs while one of us is riding you in basic cowgirl position."

I paused and shook my head. "I agree, sounds great, I'm just getting used to actual you vs your canon TV portrayal. So, let's get this sex dungeon together."