You wake up, a pleasantly empty and sore feeling making itself known inside your balls. Before you, you can see the table you ate upon yesterday, several buckets filled with a fluid you have a feeling you know rather intimately sitting upon it.
"Oh, you're awake," the catgirl known to you as Katrina says from below, leading you to look and find out the somewhat stern restaurant owner is currently sandwiching your cock between her breasts, having just stopped licking it like a popsicle. "You've been keeping on coming all night, as expected from blessed balls like these."
"Muh," you say in response to her fondling said balls. They really do need a rest at some point...!
"Anyway, we probably have enough to last us for a few days at least once I bring this load to the preservation room, so if you want to get going, feel free... Unless you'd like some breakfast? And one last round, maybe?"
"... Muh." She's way too good at this. You agree with a nod. Also, food. You are the hungry.
"Great! If you want to come back, we can feed you in exchange for more whenever you want, but don't worry about keeping us stocked," the catgirl says with a smirk directed up at you. "Nobody expects us to have consistent access to particular ingredients anyway, even if they're this tasty."
And just like that, she returns to bobbing her head along your shaft, and you resume the long, arduous process of waking up.
The first thing you do, once you have extricated yourself from the clutches of the restaurant that has milked your dick like nobody's business (hey, if it means you get fed, you aren't exactly opposed...) is making sure your stuff is in place, then huffing a bunch of the bronze coins now that you're leaving the magical settlement and won't really need them anymore.
More power. More Power!
But putting your new advances aside, it is time for you to return, and, having already eaten breakfast, you immediately move toward checking in on your messages once you remember your smartphone exists.
It would seem Melanie actually responded to your general cries of distress expressions of disgust back when you had to recover after that, so you send her a text asking to meet up and speed toward the portal's location before it closes.
The travel is quick and quiet, as it is wont to do when you use your magically driven platforms, and so you soon arrive at the place she asked you to meet in response to your own message.
Which, as it turns out, is some kind of storage shed on the grounds of her school. You briefly wonder how that moving hole to some other dimension inside the main building is doing as you fly in, but soon focus on the sounds you can hear coming from inside.
The door is unlocked, so you soon find your way to a dusty Melanie inside a dusty, cluttered room, fiddling with a number padlock on some sort of large locked standing in a corner. "Oh, hey Jackie," she says as she hears you come in and turns her head toward you. "Sorry about making you come here, but I've been working on this thing for a few days now. It's somehow magically locked in a way I can't crack, so I've just decided to try all combinations on the lock instead and see if that helps."
... Well, it's good she's having fun?
"Mmh," you make as you approach, deciding you may as well try your luck. The lock has four numbers, so trying through all combinations, while probably possible, would be quite time-consuming. Which is unacceptable while you are demanding the attention this would take up.
So you stretch a hand out for it, pushing Melanie away and closing your eyes. If you were a lock, what would your combination be?
You open your eyes again, the first thought that came to mind taking form under your fingers. 4269.
The lock clicks, something about the locker clacks in a way you can't quite describe, and just like that it's open.
You look at Melanie. "Muh," you proudly state.
"How did you..."
"Intuition," you explain.
Melanie just... sighs, and then tilts her head. "Okay. So... What's inside?"
A good question, that. Best open that locker and find out, huh?
The locker cleanly opens, revealing insides full of... stuff.
You have no better words to describe it; it's a wild collection of knicknacks and various paraphernalia scattered wildly all over the storage device's insides, which is why it is taking you some time to really take them all in. There is really just too much stuff, and not all of it is magical, going by your finely honed and superior magical senses.
Fumuh.
The screwdriver? Worthless, just some cheap thing with a plastic handle. You can just shake down Brian if you need something to handle screws. Some pens, most useless, though one seems to be able to write in some kind of multicolored magical ink... Oh hey, the lock is probably worth something.
... No, it isn't. It doesn't seem to have been magical at all. Ah well.
"Jackie? What are you doing?" You look up at Melanie, caught in the middle of sorting through the freshly-acquired loot.
"Looting," you explain everything in extremely fine detail. You usually try to avoid wasting words, but as Melanie is your girlfriend, it probably does follow that you should spend some more for her, so you continue. "Magic stuff," you point at one pile, and then the other, "useless stuff."
"Oh, I see." And she does, Melanie's eyes shining with the appropriate amount of greed at your combined acquisitions. You would have nothing less. "Anything that looks like you want to keep it?"
And she even wants to give you first pick! Such a good girl!
Best teammate ever, can we multiplayer with her?
"... Ring," you say, picking out the one object that you noticed tumbling around a bit when you opened the door. Most of this stuff doesn't have much magic in it, you can tell that much; you mostly want it for ceremonial purposes. "Melanie give me ring."
... Shaddup, your grammar is extraordinarily correct.
The girl in question chuckles, mussing up your hair. You shall allow it, and even close your eyes to this transgression. "Alright, if you want me to give you a ring, you can have it. ... Oh, is that a lockpick?"
It probably is. You have no idea, but then you also never bothered looking it up.
The exact purpose of this ring becomes clear when you try to leave again; the hand you have provisionally had Melanie put it onto is the one you use to open the door, only to have it snap shut the moment you try to open it further than a crack.
... You then open it with the other hand, causing the same magical effect you already saw on the locker to fizzle out, again. "... Muh," you say.
"What's wrong, Jackie?" Melanie asks, gathering up her low-level loot you are leaving to her as the player who is playing the level-capped demo of the game.
"... Nothing," you shake your head. At least you've found out now how this locker came to be locked in the first place, you suppose... Even if the effect can be removed simply by opening whatever it is keeping locked normally, apparently.
Still a great way if you have a key to a place and hide it or keep it with you, you suppose?
The rest of your day, after a hasty retreat through your portal once you have given Melanie the customary kiss on the cheek for goodbyes (and quickly run away) is spent playing around with your golems, making them do random stuff and observing the clear criminal energy they are radiating.
Such fearful creatures. Should hide women and children wherever they pass through.
You also get around to building that enchanting box Brian designed. It has a lot of complicated moving parts, so you simply follow his instructions step by step once you made him give them to you in person. He also insists on putting a lot of decorations on the outer casing, but you do not concern yourself over that. He can do what he wants to.
Also, all the dying and screaming people in these weird robes are well chosen. You do not disagree with his taste.
Ultimately, however, your eyes turn toward your garden. It has reached a rather significant amount of spread by this point, having engulfed a good part of this neighbourhood, but it remains your garden nevertheless. You shall still have to look after your cat, being the incredibly responsible owner hungry for some sap again.
"Muhm." Finding Viridis is not very hard; she is very much suntanning right outside your back door, her exposed, shapely and lewdly pregnant body bare for all to see. Even though the sun never truly does shine inside the Overcity, caught in an eternal, gloomy night as it is.
And also, you are the only one that is allowed to see her naked. Anyone else trying to do so is subject to the Jackie Tax on lives. Or else part of your collection and thus allowed to do it, possibly.
Either way, you shall now do what is natural for you and- "Oh, my little stud has arrived?" Viridis asks, smiling at you and slinging an arm under her bust, the slightly leaking swollen breasts making you swallow instinctively. "Come a little closer, why don't you dear?"
A long, leafy tail waves you toward her opening legs, revealing a gleaming pussy to you. Incidentally, you have wisely come wearing not a stitch of clothing, so your immediate erection is also plain for all to see.
You scamper toward Viridis with all your might, taking in the lascivious pose and smile she is giving you. "There, there... It won't be long before our child is born, but I have enough milk for everyone, don't I?"
Your cock is almost painfully hard by the time you shove it right into her almost painfully tight pussy, stretching up along her body and pressing your own belly against the big, pregnant one of the catplantspirit, just about latching onto one nipple and suckling on the sweet, sweet nectar it contains... except, it seems, she wasn't just talking in hypotheticals earlier.
What streams into your mouth is not the plantlike, thick sap you have grown used to, but rather some kind of milk flowing smoothly down your throat. There is a lot of it.
"Oh? Do you like it?" Viridis asks, embracing your frantically moving body; your senses are enflamed, your cock harder than ever and every pistoning thrust met with the lewd squelching sounds of the copious fluids given off by your lovemaking.
You gasp aloud, moaning breathily as you switch breasts. This, this must be what heaven feels like. You longer need to restrain yourself, for you have already received the reward for your virtuous and righteous lifestyle.
"You're just so cute when you're like this," the goddess you're banging says, one hand drifting up to lay against your cheek as she licks her lips. "Too cute for your own good."
You are Jackie, and you are the cutest, manliest stud in existence.
Then, you can feel Viridis tightening up around you, her hot walls keeping you trapped in place and only allowing very slow, tentative movement- you keep on pushing deeper, intent on kissing her womb and your unborn child with the tip of your cock. This is a family moment now.
You are holding onto the large, bloated woman in front of you, desperately drinking more and more milk. Every pleased sigh she makes is music to your ears, letting you ignore the other sounds you do not realize you are making; at least you totally aren't mewling and moaning more than the actual cat here.
Totally. At all. Viridis' chuckle is just her having fun.
"Come..." You do not quite parse the message. It is too short and doesn't tell you everything. "Come inside me, little sweetie. Fill me up with your hot spunk," is whispered into your ear, your head being stroked.
That you do understand, and so without any resistance, your balls clench up and deliver a load of that same spunk, shot after powerful shot threatening to overwhelm your senses and making it hard to concentrate on drinking for a bit. Then you are lying there, not at all making a silly face and gurgling, overwhelmed sounds lying on top of Viridis, when her other hand comes around to fondle your balls, fingering your pussy and making it a bit hard to stay just like you are, buried inside of Viridis.
Hard. Hehe.
"Now all you have to do is go again," the pregnant goddess says fondly. "And again, and again... I'm sure you can do it."
"Bweh... heees..." You answer affirmatively, not at all hardly capable of understanding speech at the moment. The separate finger probing at your butt has nothing at all to do with you going back to pounding into Viridis with all your might, either, naturally.
Why is it so hard to moan and drink at the same time? This is just plain unfair, and the tight confines of the throbbing pussy you're fucking haven't stopped millking you for a single moment...!
Time after time you are seeding Viridis, all over the vicinity of your house. From the front, to keep yourself strong with her milk, from the back, from the side, all kinds of positions you go through, not resting for a single moment.
When the time you finally can't move anymore comes, you are left lying on your back, the soft forest earth cradling you as your erection, undaunted, rages against the sky.
Oh, oh, it's a cultivator!
It alone has stood successfully against this heavenly tribulation. "That was a fun bit of exercise," Viridis says, one hand playing with your overtaxed genitals- you must have come once every one to two minutes, and you've been going at it for hours. "I'm sure our daughter loved it too... She's moving a little, to greet you, you know?"
An itinerant hand confirms her words. There is a bit of movement in her very full belly.
"She can't wait to see her papa..."
"... Muhuh," you agree with the last of your strength. You'll just... take a nap for now.
THU, DEC 9, 2021 AT 02:23 PMNEW COMMENT24 CHAT
Having dragged yourself back home after a short nap, you first seek out sustenance in the form of a bar of chocolate, followed by some ice cream and then using a can of cola to wash it all down. Now re-sugared and slowly recovering your full faculties, you consider your next move.
... Well, let's be honest here, you won't be doing much with what's left of today. May as well go play a bit more on your PlayStriker.
And lo and behold, the mysterious streamer known only as Jackie_The_Great_And_Mighty returneth.
"Look, Olly, we're just woorriieed about ya, ya see?" The delivery of the words was lacking, but maybe Olivia would believe Bubbles more if she wasn't rolling her eyes as she said the words.
"Please don't call me nicknames like that, just use my real name," she asked, taking the shrug of the blonde girl to be agreement and turning toward Kerrie. "And really, I'm not sure you understand what you're asking."
"I'm just saying that until we can confirm what exactly Jackie is planning, it may be dangerous for you to stay in close contact with her," the dark-haired magical girl said.
"And I'm saying that Jackie does whatever she wants anyway and there's nothing I can do to stop her!"
"But you can at least try to avoid her or call us if you can't," Kerrie stubbornly insisted. "We are a team, so you can rely on us... If you're really serious."
"Argh, fine!" If they wanted to confront Jackie all the time, then sure, let them. It was their own fault now. "If Jackie calls me out to meet or something, I'll give everyone a call, now can I have the controller back?"
Kerrie wordlessly held the game controller out, Olivia snatching it back after the other girl had taken it earlier. Really, it wasn't like she couldn't listen to this otherwise, could she?
And now back to her first winning streak of the night. "I am going to crush you by the way," Olivia told Bubbles.
"Suuure you are, now shaddup and let's fight!" The blonde was abusing those stupid three-hit combos, but there was no way she was going to get away with it for much longer. Time for a few aerial strikes!
"You know," Kerrie spoke up again from the sidelines, "I didn't know both of you were into Tekken."
""We aren't,"" they both replied at the same time, turning to glare at each other.
"I just refuse to lose at this point...!" Olivia said.
"I'm like, so crushing you," Bubbles replied.
"Chu, good thing you are all so spirited, then," Puchuu jumped in out of nowhere, everyone in the room except Bubbles jumping in surprise. "Because I believe, chu, that this team will be ready for the real thing soon."
Olivia suddenly found her throat to be quite dry, remembering the harrowing experience she'd made at Jackie's side. This was... probably not a good thing? Uhh...
She may need to call Jackie sooner than expected.
Most of your day, once you awake in the comfy seat of your favorite armchair after last evening's (and night's) exertions, is spent in a mild haze, a certain fluid you partook in yesterday still heavily affecting you- you have no idea what Viridis is putting in the breast milk, but it really packs a punch.
You don't really mind or anything, even now that you realize just how unusually docile you are behaving. You haven't even eaten your second bowl of ice cream for breakfast by the time you fully awake, which is normally when you're on your third or fourth one.
It means you can savour it a bit more and longer.
Still you should probably at least pretend to be doing something constructive despite the constant mild level of aroused bliss you're in right now, so you ultimately end up summoning a bunch of golems, as many as you can with the entirety of your mana, and tell them to go and fight each other or something.
Outside the house. It is your house and you want it undamaged.
The thuggish summons immediately react with joy at this new mission, and it takes little time for them to go beat the crap out of each other, whereas you sit inside and occasionally watch, jacking off a little every now and then (because you are Jackie, after all) to random porn on the internet and playing Bloodborne again, seeing as you just managed to get to the part where the game starts to open up with these little chalice dungeons.
You are also procrastinating continuing with the story, because you want to explore and stuff.
This state of affairs end up lasting for approximately nine hours before you blink out of your funk, realizing that you should probably eat something again. So you turn everything off, having been conjuring new golems over by the door whenever one got destroyed and you regained enough mana to create another one, and view what you have in terms of food.
... You make more of those little carrots, the last of them you had. Plus a new bar of chocolate, some ice cream and a few of those chunks of ice cream encased in chocolate on a handle.
You stole a few packets of them. You are very smug about it.
Still you are yet again planning on actually doing a thing, now that you are shaking off the taste of Viridis' milk, and that means going out into the garden again. Sadly, your designated adult is not around, or at least not immediately present, so you simply pluck a variety of fruits until you can't carry any more and return inside.
Wandering down into the basement, you briefly stop by the ritual room you once kept the anal demon inside of, the sound of a screeching horde of malevolence made manifest attracting your attention.
It seems your demon minion has been hard at work, as a small horde of chaotic humanoids is running around inside of the ritual circle. There have to be dozens of them, stacked over each other in the limited room they have inside the circle keeping them in place.
Good, good.
"Muh," you greet your Puchuu when you finally find him, "Brian."
"Chuuh?" The small, cat-like creature wiggles itself out of the body of some person lying on the dissection table. Several colorful liquids are visible inside of it, and Brian is covered in them.
"Potions," you demand, grabbing one of the fruits you gathered inside of your item box and throwing it at Brian.
His tail swishes, or was already swishing, effortlessly catching the ingredient. "Chuh, can do, chust give me a minute."
You continue to throw the glowy fruits at him, but his tail catches them every time, as though already knowing where they will land. Even when you try tricking him, he always snatches them out of the air with a quick swish of his tail, even when you aimed at somewhere else entirely.
He is very good at this game. "Muh."
Still the possibly deranged little minion of yours soon runs off with your stuff, returning cleansed of all the yucky yucky he got on himself and with a pair of glass vials revealed unto you by his almighty tail. "Chuuh, there you are. Anything else?"
You eye the blue liquid, mentally noting that you could have made easily four to five sorbet chunks from this amount of fruits. Ah well. "Mhm," you confirm Brian's inquiry. "Scouting."
You unceremoniously grab Brian and place him on top of your head. You haven't been doing this together for a while, and your Stockholm Syndrome-induced bond with him demands you rectify this.
"Chuuh..."
Actually, is the portal open already for the evening? It probably is.
Going to university after all these years sure brings up memories again, you think to yourself as you glide through the air, your first long-lasting relationship built on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, the inevitable horrible crash, downward spiral after downward spiral, several other girlfriends coming and going, sometimes repeatedly... You will never forget that one chick that wanted you to tie her up and cut off small parts of her to eat.
... Now you're getting hungry again.
Regardless, soon enough you home in on the Generic University of Science, or Generuni as the locals sometimes call it. You believe this to be a stupid name, however, so you shall not. The campus is actually split into two bigger areas, the setting sun making it a bit harder to decide which is which, but thanks to your incredible wisdom and intellect, you soon come to a conclusion.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe...
"Chuuh, if there's a secret underground laboratory anywhere, it would be there," Brian says, his tail pointing at one building in particular. "It's got underground parking for ease of logistical access, chuh, and enough space."
You shall trust the expert on the matter. For the moment, it is indeed high time for you to go get a little closer and see what you can find out.
You briefly consider adopting a more subtle approach for this situation, maybe keeping yourself out of the line of fire for as long as possible, but with your brilliant disguise skills there is no reason you wouldn't infiltrate the building right away, now is there?
Quickly, you mess up your own hair a little bit, partially using it to hide your face, while you adjust the position Brian sits in on top of your head. Such prepared, you proceed to simply land your ice platform and walk right on into the university building, the hour a bit late but the doors still open to all that would come inside.
So you walk right on in. "Chuuh, you sure you know what you're doing?"
"Muh," you shush Brian. You have to concentrate right now, so you just keep on looking around. Now, if you were a secret entrance to a secret basement lab, where would you be?
You keep on wandering the halls for about a quarter hour, nothing around you particularly inviting any investigation. However, just when you're about to go take a break and just make Brian use his mad scientist skills to find out where to go, you hear footsteps coming down the corridors.
Quickly, you hide behind the nearest restroom door, luckily managing to get there in time before this mysterious person suspiciously still around at this time of day comes through- and letting you listen in on them as they speak on their phone, to boot.
"-n't care how integral he is to our operations, the man is still a fucking creep," the person you imagine to be dressed in a black suit says. "Every single time he has to be... difficult. There's a reason we don't have any agents volunteering for this."
Muh. This is highly valuable information, of course.
This person is definitely suspicious. What little you have been able to snatch up from the one-sided conversation you can hear confirms that much without doubt, and you are absolutely sure that this man is related to the suspicious activities Melanie told you about.
However, to avoid being found out at this stage, it is important you simply wait for the obviously evil government spook person to pass by, going in the opposite direction of where he came from instead of following after him. After all, when someone goes and gives you an obvious hint as to the general direction of your objective, what else can you do than to follow it?
Unless it is a trap, of course, but if it was you'd have obviously immediately noticed and used it to your advantage.
Obviously.
So you go your merry way, slowly closing in on the correct location by the method of elimination, eventually coming to a conclusion when you see one particular place: The elevators.
An obvious possibility, of course. You have neglected it so far to trick your potential, hypothetical foes into a false sense of security, but now you shall strike.
"Brian," you tell the freeloader on top of your head. "Find."
Well-trained doggie that he is, your Puchuu sighs and looks around as you enter the room capable of vertical movement. It has its own lamps inside as well as a mirror on the far side of it, something you appreciate. "Chuh, obvious keycard access on the panel, puuh."
You eye the location a fluffy tail is indicating from above your field of view. You don't see anything, but that is why you brought Brian with you. "Mm. Now?"
"Chuuh, either find a card or break in through force, pupuh. I know what I'm betting on."
Clearly you need to find yourself a key card, then. The search lasts for a little bit as you consider whether to just break the locks of various nearby doors to investigate what is beyond them, though you ultimately decide against doing so just in case it gives away your true power in some way. However, you do make sure to stay vigilant and observant as ever, soon finding exactly what you needed.
That is, when you go to the toilet, feeling a certain urge built up after all the ice cream and cola you ate and drank earlier, you stumble upon a wallet that must have slipped out of someone's pants. Picking it up and pocketing the cash therein (it's a couple hundred dollars, score), you soon pull out exactly what you are after.
Not the driver's license, though you only just realized you're actually in the men's toilet out of sheer habit you never bothered to rectify. No, what you're after is inside of the wallet, too- a simple plastic card sporting a random symbol with 'Basement Access Key' written in one corner.
Truly, this is what it's all about. All your numerous good deeds must have built up generous amounts of good karma and now you're cashing in on the universe. Cha-ching!
Then again, it owes you. It owes you big. It better not think this makes up for even a fraction of all the shit you've been through. You very much intend to reap the interest alone for a long, long time to come.
Anyway, secret underground lab, here you come. "Chuh, fate must really want something here," Brian lets himself be heard, still on top of your head. "Or it's just dumb luck."
It is karma!
Swiftly returning to the elevator, you hold out the card over the spot Brian pointed out to you earlier, and just like that the elevator begins moving down just as expected. It seems you have successfully begun your infiltration of this secret government lab!
It is a little exciting to suddenly find yourself in this kind of story, so you spontaneously decide you should really go all in on this. Therefore, you quickly use your old clothing creation power to spontaneously generate a height-appropriate lab coat you throw over your own outfit once you have changed it around through casting your ice armor spell, followed with a quick conjuration of an ice golem you have stand in place, adding a tailored suit and an earpiece now stuck to the side of its featureless face.
Your disguises are perfect. The government scientist and the brutish government thug serving as her slightly creepy escort. Nobody will see through this.
"Chuh, I feel I should mention at this point that I am aware of what is going on," Brian suddenly says, the elevator in one of those phases where it seemingly takes it forever to arrive anywhere to give the protagonists the time required for their impactful conversation to end. "Government agencies sometimes like to play at being the magic police, chuh, comically ineffectually more often than not. So nothing we will see is any real threat, chuuh."
"Muh," you make, chiding Brian for dismissing an enemy before having seen them.
"Puchuh, there is nothing new to see, I'm afraid," he says with a tired voice. "I have seen dozens of agencies rise and fall because they have no idea about anything, chuuh, including the veil, and make a mess of things before eventually picking a fight the shouldn't have. It's a tale as old as time."
And probably quite boring to watch even as a spectator sport, huh.
Just then, the elevator doors open, signaling the next scene beginning in your little detective novella and confronting you with a hallway wall bearing a poster you believe you may never quite forget.
"Chuh." Brian's voice is quiet, as though struck by abject disbelief. "Chuuuh."
Somewhere inside a place that had been as deep, dark and empty as any place could be since before the beginning of time, a primal scream of disbelief and rage escaped the confines of what passed for an excuse of a heart the creature currently going by the name of Brian had.
"Brian?" You ask, a little annoyed that your minion seems to be malfunctioning all of a sudden. "Briaaan."
You raise a hand over your head to poke him in the side, making a drawn-out, quiet sound that kept emanating from the area stop. "-uuuuuh. What is it, Jackie?"
"Which way?" You ask, gesturing around the hallway you emerged into from the elevator. While the big poster immediately draws attention, that still leaves a short corridor splitting off into a crossroad you shall have to navigate.
"Forward, chuh," your trusty guide minion says. "It's always forward, chuuh. And Jackie?"
"Muh?"
"Make them suffer, chuh."
"Muh."
Agent Jackie's first mission, it seems, is to secretly infiltrate this facility, categorically remove all living beings within it from being alive and, upon success, exfiltrate, optionally while leaving behind any blood stains acquired in the meantime. Simple, to the point and, most of all, not that far from your usual wheelhouse.
So you proceed onward, your golem 'bodyguard' lumbering behind you. Your hands are, conspicuously, buried inside your lab coat's pockets, and Brian is perfectly capable of staying quiet when it counts.
Your disguise is perfect. Matchless. Beyond any possible reproach, even.
Following your dark-furred Puchuu's instructions, you proceed onward, walking past several short hallways and the doors inhabiting them. Most of them are labelled, but a big, blunt B-03 or E-42 doesn't tell you much- at least until you find a map of this place printed out inside a glass case on the wall.
It looks like this entire lab thingy is surprisingly large. There's several wings dedicated to specific kinds of research, even if you have to wonder exactly what the 'Mating Chambers' and 'Pornhub Hub' are for.
A question for another day. First, you must fulfill your mission.
Further on and on you march, passing by several cameras tracing your movements but, as you are obviously looking like a scientist with all identifying hallmarks, whatever electronic mind controlling the security system they built in here is incapable of recognizing you as an intruder.
Perhaps it also has something to do with the wallet containing a bunch of stuff you are still carrying with you, but it is probably a lesser factor in your cunning game of chess outmatching your opponents.
The environment you are moving through itself is kept mostly sterile, unremarkable insofar as it is an obvious and lesser imitation of Brian's lab, both in terms of ambiance and in size, truthfully. They don't even have any bloody smears where still fresh test subjects were dragged inside, much to your personal disappointment.
Where is their spirit for discovery? How can they even call themselves scientists like this?
Anyway, once you enter the last area of the lab, called the 'Chief Magitech Laboratory', you are greeted with the sight of an old man in a lab coat (much crappier than yours, naturally) bent over a series of machines and vast vats holding glowing light blue liquid, of sorts, with more machinery hanging from the ceiling from above.
His coat, however, is closed tight, contrary to your own, and he is wearing thick leather gloves. More interesting than this is the contraption sitting upon his head, like an elaborate helmet with several lenses hanging above his head on movable arms, long and thick tubes connecting it to various parts of the environment. You think one bit of machined steel is also hanging over his cheek and into his face, though you cannot see this from your angle.
You immediately use your magical senses to take a closer look, and it seems both his helmet contraption and this strange fluid are magical, if not overly much so. However, this look also reveals something else inside the apparent laboratory; that is, a bunch of computers are over by the opposite side, and some of them have a trace of magical activity on their screens.
Leaving the weird scientist to do his thing for the moment, you turn toward the computers, several of which you can directly connect to their screens. It takes but a moment of mouse-waggling, as you like to call the technique, to confirm that several of them are merely on standby, and so easily accessible to you.
Showing Brian the complicated diagrams that are currently shown, you wait a moment for a tap of his tail before deleting them one by one, finally getting to the most important part of this investigation; just what kind of porn do these people look at at their workplace?
Because let's be honest here, everyone does it. From what you can remember back during your corporate slave period, there was not a single office worker that didn't have several tabs open at any one time at the very least, and those were either crappy boring games that were minimally less boring than the work they were supposed to do or else porn, simple as that.
Except, perhaps, Stevenson. But then again, it's Stevenson. He was always a little weird even while kissing the boss' ass, the little bootlicker.
Anyway, back into the present, only a few of these things have actual internet access, and finding the one that has the browsing history you are looking for takes you a bit. The topics that you do see covered in the other computers, while admittedly of mild interest, simply do not hold a candle to your morbid need to find out about this one thing.
Even if, it seems, a lot of it is relevant to you. There's a few internet searches for your name, Jackie, for example, and at least one person here has to have seen some kind of content connecting to you... somehow. You have been carefully keeping yourself off the internet at large, so this is quite mystifying.
Above your head, Brian's tail swishes and you get back to the topic at hand, having stilled for a moment. This seems to be the one computer used for the most mundane activity, so you shall simply have to search the browsing history for the word 'porn' and-
"I am afraid, my dear Arabella, you will not find what you are looking for once again," comes the dry, slightly rough voice of the old man behind you. "Truly, what kind of philistine do you take me for? Using the anonymous browsing feature is far from strenuous."
He really should have seen your old colleagues or, indeed, the average person looking up any kind of porn.
"However, it seems as though you have chosen most appropriate timing for your usual snooping- it is complete! After months of research and millions of tax funds, I have finally succeeded in delivering the results your agency has demanded!" Turning around, you can see the guy's glowing red eye and the front of his currently retracted helmet. "Harnessing the power of endless frustration and lacking release, the BlueBall Mark II is now complete! It shall serve as an almost inexhaustible mobile energy supply for enhanced individuals and drive weapons the likes of which the world has never seen before!"
Loosening his uneven gaze from his ball, the scientist blinks, not seeing anyone near the computers. Lowering his head a little, he manages to actually perceive you instead, blinking as both of you stare at each other.
You stare at him, he stares at you. It is a moment of wordless understanding.
"I see. You are an intruder sent to steal or disrupt my work," he sums up the entire point of this exercise. "Well, they shall know that Edward Van Kirchhausen is not a man to be trifled with! Who sent you, the Catholics? The Russians? They come to mind the most in terms of augmented humans or magic-driven homunculi."
Muh," you state, for once not finding the words to answer.
"Told you," Brian says, lazily shifting on top of your head.
"Oh my, a control unit? Could you be a drone, little girl? If so, I quite apologize for assuming you had any free will to speak of, that would have been quite unbecoming of me."
"Muh."
Slowly, you reach out a hand, pointing at the dimly glowing device filled with whatever weird blue liquid seems to be the center of research in this place. "Mark II," you say, slowly enunciating the unfamiliar words. Then you tilt your head. "Mark I?"
"Oh well, there was some... slight... accidents during the development phase," the older scientist shrugs, still holding his BlueBall. "It caused some minor damage and flooded the entire lab with BlueBall energy, causing the entirety of the workers to be overcome with approximately fifty years' worth of pent up sexual energy. It happened, people got over it after we established the PornHub Hub and they had a place to take care of any... business in relative private."
"Muh," you state. You suppose that's just about what you can expect when developing something like this, after all.
"However! It would appear that my earlier words are, ironically, still on point! It really is quite auspicious timing with which you have appeared." You express your puzzlement by tilting your head once more. "It doesn't really matter who sent you obstructive little creature, as you will serve perfectly to demonstrate a point."
"Muh," you interrupt, unhappy about both the moniker and the way this conversation is going. "Name. And kind of human. Maybe."
Brian doesn't say anything on the topic.
"It does not matter America doesn't have any ancient magics hidden away in dusty wizard towers or the like, nor notable mages in general! So what if no old religious orders or relics are calling this land home, nor any crusty cultivators?! America is the land of progress, and magic is no exception to this!" You have a bad feeling about this.
"Research into advanced magitechnical human modification is taking place already and no matter what anyone does, magical technology and human ingenuity will inevitably beat out any magical subhumanism! Just like Benjamin Franklin once rose beyond his limits to discover the hitherto hidden secrets of electricity hoarded by supernatural beings, so too shall we discover the secrets of magic and turn it toward the use of man!"
You are getting a little dizzy by the things this person is saying.
"And, as you have so graciously provided the time necessary, I shall prove so right away!" The scientist, Edward something something, presses something on his BlueBall, releasing a shining blue laser from it... and missing you by a mile.
So some people really can't hit the broad side of a barn, huh?
As you summon your guns to show him how it's done (and shoot him in the head), he hurriedly presses a big red button he's kept behind himself until now. "Well, that was to be expected, I'm a scientist and not exactly a field agent by any measure! Nevertheless, the experimental prototype weapon shall prove how powerful something driven by BlueBall energy can be!"
And just like that, a hidden door in the wall drives into the ground soundlessly, revealing a humanoid robot gleaming in yellow, while the scientist man disappears in a flash of light. Moments later, you can hear his voice through some loudspeakers that have to be somewhere in here.
"This is the HateBot 1000, driven by nothing but a former human consciousness and the desire to destroy all that it sees! Driven by endless BlueBall energy generated over the internet, it will demonstrate the power of human ingenuity!"
"Rrrgh..." The vaguely human robot growls, for some reason having the capacity to. The voice of a man distorted by mechanical means follows. "Hate... Kill... Hate... Kill!"
"Chuh, five points for presentation, but anything directly connected to a stationary energy source is just shoddy engineering, chuuh."
"It's a prototype! The end product would naturally be driven by a BlueBall Mark II or higher, once a few minor technical details have been worked out!"
"Murder... Hate... Kill!"
"In what socket, chuuh? This is not a prototype, it's a piece of chuhunk from inception, puchuh!"
"Why you little-! It is still far more than enough to make the point!"
"Kill kill kill kill killllll!"
Mhm, going in and demolishing this obviously inferior opponent would be a tad bit unsporting, as it would be up against you and therefore inherently inferior. However, you have the perfect way to even the playing field for this disgruntingly aggressive robot and, simultaneously, keep the situation under control in a way that does not involve any direct threat of harm to your own personage.
"Go," you order your ice golem, still dressed in a suit and having kept to the background so far. The thuggish creation steps up without a second thought, making a rude gesture with the middle digit of one of its three-pronged arm extremities toward the HateBot 1000.
"Oh, testing the waters, are we?" The annoying voice of the Edward guy comes. You purse your lips, annoyed.
"Smash." Having received your orders, your golem spends one more moment on posing, spreading its arms out above itself and shaking them at its opponent.
"Hate! Kill! You!" The HateBot 1000, for its part, seems to be tired of this, and immediately sprints toward your side of this cockfight... Come to think of it, does this count as a pokemon battle? And if so, is that robot a steel/psychic type or a steel/ghost one? Either would be big trouble for your ice type, so-
Your golem crouches down a little, meeting the charge with a ramming motion toward its foe's waist that has it rise again as it throws the HateBot behind itself in a smooth wrestling move, then turning around quickly to jump onto the sleeker robot to smash its bulky arm into its head.
Repeatedly.
This is what it's all about, oh yeah. You really are the best at pokemon.
Sadly, a few good hits is all that your golem gets before the Hatebot begins glowing, pushing it off with an omnidirectional blast of force and then executing an MMA-like attack where it gets on all fours, then pushes up backwards to kick the golem's leg with both of its outstretched feet, scoring off a few chunks of ice and forcing it to stumble long enough it can get back on its own feet.
"Hah! Using a former professional cage fighter for its mind was the right decision, after all! Bow down before the superiority of practical techniques accumulated over humanity's history!"
"Chuuh, historically most of humanity's achievements were made by imitating some magical feat somehow, chuh. Or natural ones, puuh, monkeys can be quite smart on their own too."
"Ice type, ice type. Wiiin."
A few similar exchanges follow, the two combatants circling each other always on the lookout for an opening in each other. The HateBot actually has inbuilt drill fingers ("Chuuh, why not take the whole hand for a larger one, chuh? Vastly more effective that way.") and several special abilities to keep itself on its feet, such as the force burst you already discovered or an inbuilt pair of guns in its arms, while your golem is quite simply faster, stronger and tougher than it by any measure, repeatedly pushing its opponent back thanks to the superiority your magic grants it.
Then, after a few moves right out of MMA handbooks, it finally happens; a double-handed hammer strike to the robot's side has the HateBot crumple a little, its stance compromised, and your golem presses the advantage immediately. "What are you doing?! You are made of metal and power, not feeble flesh!"
The HateBot, holding its side, dodges under a swing and digs its drill-claws into your own creation's shoulder, a few minor holes all it has to show for its trouble.
"Chuuh, obviously, human minds are inferior as they remember their inferior weaknesses even if cured from them, puchuh!"
"Ice type, super type."
And just like that, the fight is decided. Ramming an unwounded shoulder into the HateBot, your golem starts to just repeatedly smash its opposite into the wall, accruing more and more damage until the HateBot 1000 lies defeated, an arm and a leg broken. "Haaate... Youuu..."
"You are a disgrace to the entirety of humanity! Nay, the world!"
Your golem looks toward you for direction, and so just like the Roman emperors of old, it falls unto you to decide the fate of the defeated fighter. Stretching out an arm, you push out a thumb... and turn it downward.
A single last stomp, and the HateBot's head is crushed under the weight of your power.
"This is not over!" Now that he is getting more and more agitated, the Edward scientist guy is starting to let a light accent show; Russian or German maybe? It's a harder tilt to some of his words, but still so subtle you can't quite identify it. "Defeating a prototype with a half-baked magical puppet proves nothing!"
"Muh, won," you insist. "Loot," you continue to demand in accordance to the ancient practices of pokemon battles.
"I think not," the frustrating heretic replies. Then, however, he is quiet, and you cannot hear anything else.
Maybe he gave up and ran away? Then you'll just- "Self-destruct sequence initiated," a neutral voice comes from the speakers. "All personnel evacuate the base immediately. Catastrophic self-destruction in ten. Repeat: All personnel evacuate the base immediately. Nine."
"Muh." This is not fair. He owes you half the cash he has on himself.
"Chuuh, come on Jackie, this is taken care of enough. He'll show up again at some point, puchuh, narrative convention all but enchuhres it."
"Muuuh." Your loot! You wanted whatever he used to teleport!
... But he did drop the BlueBall Mark II before disappearing.
The escape from the secret evil government facility is fairly quick and simple; making your golem carry yourself and Brian back to the elevator (it is faster than yourself), you leave it behind to keep any possible people still down there from interfering with your own escape, yourself and Brian soon riding back up to ground level. Having kept count with the self-destruct countdown, you easily notice the mild shaking of the building to coincide with the end of the secret lab and everything within.
You are still going to make the science man cough up half his cash next time you meet him.
"Chuuh, that takes care of that, for the moment," Brian says, once more making use of the narrative potential of elevators elongating the ride however long it needs to be. Such a drag. "He will disappear for some time only to pop up again at some unforeseen moment to require another fight in a series of encounters, chuh. Congrats, Jackie, you just encountered your first recurring villain."
Oh, he's going to pop up around once an arc and be a repeat encounter that slowly reveals more about his past and character! I'm so excited
"Muh," you say, glad to have received some more confirmation. Your pokemon rival better not disappoint you now. Though you would've totally named him some derogatory term if you could have like in the games. Edward is far too respectable in your own humble opinion.
"In the meantime, we can expect your appearance will be known to certain types of agencies, chuh, yet another development that was inevitable," the Puchuu riding on your head as you ride the elevator notes. "Perhaps as a mirror to my own influence, they inevitably came up to oppose our operations, puchuuh. At least they can be worked around reasonably easily, but expect to have to fight them off on occasion in addition to your normal duties, chuh."
You do not recognize any authority, national or otherwise, over yourself and your actions. Worst case, you shall simply have to assassinate the current US president and frame them for it. Can't be that hard.
"Chuh, for now let's just go home, I shall have to hurry certain preparations after these events, chuuh. Also, you planning on using that ball storing emotional energy?"
You hold up the BlueBall Mark II. "Maybe," you say. You honestly just grabbed it on the spur of the moment.
"Chuh, I can help you with that. Emotional energy is not exactly what you usually work with, so in absence of a magical girl that does I shall have to go the extra mile," Brian explains. So apparently, some magical girls can actually draw power from feelings people have in the first place, which is interesting information to have.
Also, Brian is being a good minion again. You should praise him and never urinate inside of his lab going forward. You think. Yourself.
Silly you, of course you do. Who else would think inside your head?
... Oh well
Once home, you first deposit the spoils of your raiding safely inside Brian's lab, making sure he doesn't try to take it by taping a post-it note with your name on it onto the glowing blue ball, then proceed to relax a little as you stuff your face with chocolate and consider the possibilities of shaking down a couple of kids to play pokemon again at some point before shaking off the thought- while it would be fun, you're just too busy at this point in your life and have more than enough video games queued up already, sadly enough.
Maybe whenever you're not as swamped with things to do. However many years it will take. Hey, at least there'll be a couple new generations out by that point, you'd say.
Anyway, you're not brutally exhausted today, but still you don't really feel motivated enough to go on another scavenging run right this moment, so you'll just finish up your dinner for a little while longer before going to bed. Tired enough you certainly are, after all.
"Fuwaaah..."
It stepped through the woods silently, peering through the night with dark eyes. The gentle falling of soft whiteness masked its presence, the constant light snow making it easy to find prey.
It brushed past rough bark, opening its beak to inhale a rush of fresh air. It had found prey once again. A pang of hunger made itself known, but it needed to be patient, lest the food escape.
Quickly and quietly, it made its move. Masking its passing amidst the rustling of leaves not carrying a heavy, white load yet in the wind, it moved toward where it could smell the unmistakable scent of prey.
It was a group of it, hides in bright colors standing out amidst the dark. The surroundings made it easy to track their movement, and so it simply hid in the dark as it followed them.
"_" They were making sounds between each other, standing out in the stark silence it had forced in the forest around it. Tensing up, it waited for the perfect moment.
"_" Once they were occupied with each other, it struck. Rushing toward its prey on all fours, it punished the carelessness one displayed by not watching the other one, its claws easily piercing the soft throat and tickling the soft meat sitting above it.
"_?" The other one did not take long to take down, either, and soon it had enough meat for itself and its whelps for a day at least. These creatures were just too easy to take down and rarely fought back, making them the easiest prey to be imagined.
It shook out its feathers. One it would eat immediately, the other it would bring back. Perhaps this weak prey would serve fine to teach the whelps to hunt.
You turn around in bed, cursing the little voice telling you to get up in the back of your head. Reaching for it, you fish your phone out from under your pillow, blindly tapping its screen a few times before you realize you are holding it the wrong way around and rectifying this. Now finally having shut off the alarm that consists of a voice recording you made to tell yourself to get up, you once again drag yourself out of bed, rubbing the sleep out of your eyes and making the trek to the toilet down the stairs.
Once relieved of your more immediate concerns and slowly growing properly awake, rather than remaining a walking corpse for the whole day or, better yet, heading back to bed, you go down another set of stairs, letting you ravage the stores of chocolate and ice cream currently contained within the kitchen. You will need to restock that from your external cold house later, once you remember and feel motivated enough to bother.
In the meantime, you just drain a glass of milk (you have no idea if it will even become relevant for you anymore, but you shall grow up to the be the biggest girl ever) and eye Brian, who has joined you halfway through your meal. "Good morning Jackie, chuh, how are you feeling today?"
"MUh," you say. You know he doesn't care and is just acting concerned now for some reason. You do not trust it.
"Chuuh, in that case, let me cut the chase, puchuh; there is that contraption within my lab you took with you yesterday. Would chuh like to use it? Before you forget, I mean, chuh."
"Nuh." Complicated thoughts like this are too much for early in the morning, which is defined as anything earlier than ten a.m..
"Chuuh, I have to say I am a little surprised," Brian says as you watch the blue glow inside of the BlueBall Mark II slowly recede, the energy within being drained into the Bullet Enchanting Box you created just for occasions like these. "This is an actual creative thought you had."
"Muh," you nod, making no secret of your superior intellect and ability to do the thinky.
Plugging the BlueBall Mark II into your box took a moment of work, but luckily Brian already had what amounts to a magical adapter for it lying around. All you needed to do was to stick the ball into one side once he set it to being able to do just that and just like that, you can simply load the raw energy contained within the fanciful container into the bullets you already deposited inside of the box earlier.
"Puchuh, that takes care of that, at least." Brian turns around, walking off into the depths of his lab. "If you need me, I will be putting the finishing touches on a side project I have been working on for some time, chuh, so feel free to to do your usual for now."
That sounds a lot like Brian might expect you to give a shit, which you do not. Instead, it is time to-
Your phone is ringing as soon as you emerge from the lab back into the rest of the house. Pausing, you think about how this can be- but yes, you do have internet now, so you assume you can be reached like this now, as well.
Also, it is Olivia, which surprises you. You would think you regularly rape her ass often enough as it is, did you miss some hidden quota and she is calling you to remind you?
You should probably take the call, though, Only way to find out. "Mumuh?"
"Jackie, there you are, I've been- doesn't matter, I have something to ask you," the greenette says. How rude, she's supposed to tell you who she is despite both of you knowing already thanks to modern technology, just to satisfy antiquated customs.
You don't really miss working in an office, truth be told. "Muh?" Doesn't mean you'll do whatever Olivia wants for free.
"I- we- Okay, so my friends and me, we had a talk with our Puchuu," she explains. Right, her 'friends'. That may or may not be lizard people, else why would they ever be friends with Olivia? "And we're going to go out to investigate a pair of missing hikers after school today, but there may be a monster and I don't think the three of us will be enough to defeat it."
Olivia is breathing heavily, so you give her a moment longer to finish. You don't know whether she is fearful, excited or aroused at having a conversation with you. "Muh."
"I wanted to ask- Jackie, could you come along and make sure everything goes alright? I don't- I can't let any of them die," she begs. "Not even Bubbles."
Yes. You shall now apply what you have learned so far to analyze this situation and use it to your own advantage.
Going by narrative logic, this is not actually an optional event, at least not if you want to keep Olivia around- from the moment she called you, it was a sure bet that these three, apparently, magical girls are going to encounter something way out of their weight class, hence the call. The possibility of them bumping into some dangerous monster or the like is exceedingly, staggeringly high.
In other words, this apparent team is essentially offering to be bait for your next hunt. How nice of them. "Muh," you confirm. "When, where?"
"Oh, uh, after school and with a little extra time to ready everything, I'll give you the address?" You receive the more accurate information, noting down where they seem to be gathering in the evening.
"Muh," you say before hanging up. Just because you have seen through fate does not mean your plans for the day have changed.
... Much. They have not changed much.
Having sent a subset of golems off to clobber each other down once again, you soon turned your attention toward your other project.
Brian once told you that trying to use power armor made of ice you control to fly was a bad idea, as controlling it would be nigh impossible and very likely lead to broken limbs in the best case scenario. However, though you have no doubts about Brian's obvious experience and knowledge on matters arcane and mundane both, you have come up with a way to sidestep this issue and approach the idea from another angle.
That is, you shall first use your spell to conjure and control golems as a base to create non-flying power armor, then re-evaluate your options once you have secured the ability to do so. You are, plainly speaking, a genius.
So you try it out, encasing your body in a hollowed-out version of your normal golems... and promptly having no way to properly control it as you stand right outside the house.
This is a problem. You push and strain against the ice surrounding you anyway, willing it to move already.
Your control over it makes it move, too. At a different angle and higher velocity.
The layer of ice around you dampens the loud crack that follows, as it does for the scream filled only with mild frustration and not at all incredible pain.
And tears. Who would cry over something like this? Certainly not you, ha. Ha. Ha.
Daddy, daddy, stop! Don't!
However, in an act of pure willpower, you make your broken arm realign and grow back into place. And then you do it again.
The results are the same, as is the time you need to pull yourself together afterward. However, you refuse to let anyone tell you you can't do what you want to!
This time you try moving a leg instead. You think you may have created several additional hairline fractures in doing so, but it is hard to tell through the mind-bending pain that your broken and nearly torn-off lower leg is making you feel.
Stop hurting yourself, daddy! Please!
You keep on going, trying any tricks and ideas that come to mind. Invariably, they all lead to pain and disappointment.
That's right, you are very disappointed in reality. It really should know better.
A few hours of self-inflicted torture, or rather, mild pain, later, you are dismissing the casing of ice around yourself, wiping residual frozen pearls of ice from your face that are not at all tears and going off to eat a bunch of ice cream.
All the tubs you stole, in fact. You just feel like eating ice cream, okay?
"Chuuh, note to self, Project Frost, Observation one-hundred eighty-six: Subject may or may not follow the classical modern definition of insanity, chuh, as defined by the common internet user. Add to archive on mental conditioning. Chuh."
Once you are done comforting yourself with the only thing that loves you back (that is, ice cream, sometimes combined with chocolate), you take a moment to consider what it is that you are forgetting. You are very sure there was something...
Ah, right. Olivia. And her thing. You totally didn't completely forget.
Tenderly moving your body a little as you get out of the fetal position you took earlier, you look up the time, noting that the portal is about to open once again. Also, you repress the urge to sigh.
Nevertheless, a quick bit of traveling over to the real city and looking up the way on Giggle Maps later you are quickly approaching your destination, simply sitting back on your platform formed of ice and relaxing for as long as you can. You can already feel the nuisance forming as it is.
The first to come join you is Olivia, the green-haired girl jumping from building to building and soon nervously staring up at your majesty as you float comfortably above things (while steering against the wind to stay in place). "Uhm, hi, Jackie?"
"Mhm," you make in acknowledgement.
You ignore her from that point on, aware that there are supposed to be two more escort quest NPCs magical girls to come, assuming Olivia is saying the truth about there being three- you would say there's a fifty-fifty chance she's just counting her imaginary friend or something. You will see.
Of course, the next to arrive is Kerrie, the already transformed girl arriving in her costume and giving you one look before turning toward Olivia. "Why is she here?"
"She uh... I called her, okay? Just in case."
You ignore that, too, in favour of staring at the little parasite that is riding along on the black-haired girl's shoulder, pink and white snake returning the look you give it with its soulless little beady eyes.
"Chu, does your Puchuu know you are here?" It asks, keeping you within its sight at all times even as its host moves around.
"Muh," you state unhelpfully. Brian probably knows, and if he doesn't, it's his own fault. Nobody cares either way.
It is a few more minutes of you lounging on your heavenly throne and the two girls below you descending into a whispered debate before something happens beyond the snake seeming to grow mildly disconcerted by your endless, blinkless stare- a third person does actually open the door Kerrie came through herself, a nearly naked girl bouncing into view.
"Bubbles has arrived~! Oh, who's the new girl? Did we get a new teammate on the sly? Is she, like, shy or something?"
"She's Olivia's girlfriend."
"She's- wait, what? No!"
"Muh. Transform."
"Oh, right!" Holding up a hand, the blonde grins. "None of the others can ever tell. I AM...! STRIPPING DOWN FOR LOVE AND JUSTICE, LETTING NOT A THREAD ESCAPE! MAGICAL GIRL NAKED NIGHT!"
The sudden screaming aside, you can verify a brief flash of light and a new magical signature that tells you this girl is, indeed, a proper magical girl and now in her magical girl form... despite wearing the exact same clothes as beforehand.
"So what's, like, your name? Mine's Bubbles!"
"Jackie," you complete the formalities while pretending you aren't totally ogling her... equipment. "Bouncy Bubbles."
"Yeah, they are, aren't they?" The somewhat skanky girl agrees, using both hands to push up her breasts a little. "Everyone just loves playing with them!"
"Okaycanwepleasegetgoingwedon'thaveallday!" A red-faced Olivia interrupts, waving her hands in the line of sight between you and Bubbles' body.
A shame, but she is probably correct.
Curious as to how exactly these three expected to be able to get anywhere fast, you quietly follow after them back down to street level, where you watch with a mix of mild disappointment and amusement as Bubbles leads her, obviously less competent, team members toward a car parking on the curb right next to the building you met at at the snake's urging.
"Okay, so like, all aboard! I guess."
"Chu, not to worry, I'll drive." You watch as the purple snake thingy slithers into the driver's seat, sticking the keys in and turning them to start the engine with its mouth.
"... Are you sure you... can?" Kerrie asks, seemingly flabbergasted by this completely normal and expected turn of events. Bubbles, meanwhile, is already climbing into the shotgun seat.
"Chu, of course! Not to worry, I've never once gotten into any accidents."
"Chuh," you make, the Puchuu jolting and giving you another weirded-out look.
Naturally, you do not get into the car, instead silently floating next to it on your ice platform as it heads up a street that should lead it out of the city fairly soon-ish. On the way, you make sport of avoiding oncoming traffic, already above most of it (naturally, you stand above these piddly mortals) but still need to work around the occasional truck barreling through.
While doing so, you continue staring at the snake, unblinking in your effort to make it clear that you are dominant over it. It does not have eyelids, being some kind of animated plush toy or at least pretending to be one in the Puchuus' collective attempt to use the human tendency to treat small beings with no hard edges as unthreatening and cute, but that does not stop you.
It also cannot really move its eyes and so at least one of them is always pointed in your overall direction. You may need to abuse your regeneration to do it, but you do not lose the staring contest. You refuse to look away before it does.
On and on the drive goes, turning corners and moving rapidly. The Puchuu's driving is surprisingly smooth, rapid movement of its entire body that you only now find out is capable of stretching allowing it to actually drive the car normally, its mouth often on the steering wheel even as it seems to be holding a conversation with the girls inside.
It is very good at following traffic rules to the letter, in fact.
Anyway, the drive continues through and out of the city, soon having you follow along into the less urban surroundings filled with a somewhat sparse forest- it grows thicker deeper in, of course, but this close to Randomtown, the trees aren't as dense, is all. You notice, with mild interest and out of the corner of your eyes, that Olivia seems to be somewhat less spirited even compared to her usual state of mind.
You have no idea why that might be. And oh hey, you know this area- isn't this where you fought a bunch of goblins and her sister was killed by some?
Good times. Even if that weirdly powerful hobgoblin had you keep your distance and retreat that one time.
That said, the trio of magical girls doesn't get out here; instead, the mascot continues driving further, closer to the place where several missing hikers were apparently meant to be... hiking. What even is hiking, walking around in a mountainous area and calling it something special?
You never understood the appeal. People should just go walk around in parks if it's that important to them.
Anyway, it's getting a bit dark already, but before long you notice something weird; apparently, it's snowing. As a magical girl attuned to such matters, you instinctively and naturally know that this is weird, as it is not supposed to be snowing.
You still do like it. Snow is nice and you are immune to the cold now.
It is not long after this point that the car stops by the side of the road, the gathered magical girls piling out of it and eyeing their surroundings warily. With them comes the snake, this time curled around Kerrie's shoulder again.
"Chu, the monster is in this area, chu. Now all you need to do is find and defeat it before it attacks any more innocents, chu."
"Okay, people were attacked while hiking, so presumably they were on a hiking trail," Kerrie reasons while you let your gaze glide around the surroundings.
Nothing yet.
"Oh, I know where the trails are," Olivia says, turning to lead the group onward.
"What really?" Kerrie seems surprised.
"My parents used to take us hiking a couple times before... something happened." The green-haired magical girl is making a weird face.
Meanwhile, the group is moving onward, soon coming upon what looks like a general path that one may follow... if it weren't for the copious snow coming down. It isn't a blizzard, but it does keep the ground covered reliably under a thin layer of semi-frozen liquid.
"So, like, this is totally too cold, right?" Bubbles complains, fiddling with her fingerless fishnet gloves. "No way anyone without our powers could stand it."
"Muh." Not like you can sympathize. The cold doesn't bother you anyway, and you doubt it ever will.
"Chu, as you might have surmised, this weather is quite unnatural," the snake interrupts the conversations going on. "The monster is causing it to be able to hunt, chu."
"Captain Obvious," you throw in from atop your floating platform. You idly consider whether to make it shake a little to get the snow off, but ultimately decide not to bother.
"Be that as it may, chu, this means it will be dangerous and on the prowl."
"So we'd best keep our eyes open, got it," Olivia says, peering through the dark surrounding your group. "Not easy like this, but we don't want to be surprised."
The green-haired magical girl seems to actually be concentrating and calming her usual, pretty much omnipresent jitters.
"Like, why you all gotta be stuck in the mud like that?" Bubbles, however, doesn't really seem to care, kicking up bits of snow with every step she takes and leaving behind even more interesting tracks than the other girls.
As for yourself, you keep on floating along. Because really, why would you let yourself be tracked that easily? Though you do wonder when one of them will realize.
Really, their approach hasn't been bad so far, but the execution could use some work. Then again, being clumsy and ignorant seems to be the norm for newer magical girls, so you guess it can't really be helped, and you're too lazy to use all the words it would take to point things out.
Not that it matters all that much, in the end. Because you've finally seen a glimpse of the monster's magical resonance echoing through the forest, just as the sounds of the wind and pretty much everything else disappeared.
It seems obvious, but the monster isn't far, now.
Suddenly the slightly eerie silence only vaguely reminding you of the quiet of the Overcity is pierced by a shrill yell, desperation and fear almost palpable in the still air. "AHHHH! HELP!"
"Oh crap, must be a hiker!" Kerrie must think she is quick-witted for coming to this unfounded conclusion this quickly. "Come on!"
Without thinking things through nor discussing a general plan of approach, the trio rushes off, not a single bit of care for their surroundings in sight. You consider whether to fire your guns to call them to order, but no, they're making enough noise as it is.
Of course, the tense silence is broken when they all come upon the same scene of the crime, catching their first glimpse of what you're going to be facing. By none other than Bubbles, too.
"Like, that's one ugly motherfucker."
Kerrie takes a stance set to let her draw her sword smoothly in response, the three creatures now looking in your direction intently as you've made it clear you aren't running away. Olivia joins her, conjuring her twin spears and even Bubbles seems to be readying herself for combat.
"H-hel..." The injured person missing one shoe coughs, apparently still alive. Though judging from the amount of blood nearby, not for long. The monster, keeping him down still, lets it feather vibrate as it breathes in silently, letting out a croaking cry as the stunted growths probably meant to have been wings on its arms open up a bit, letting it look larger than it already is at four to five meters high even crouched down as it is.
You, in the meantime, are keeping an eye on the snake, even if you suspect you'll have to concentrate on the fight in a bit anyway.
"Muh." In a quick motion, you let your platform dart down and forward, stretching out a short (perfectly average and adequately sized) arm to snatch up the purple blur about to try moving out of sight, securely keeping it contained within one of your hands.
"Chu. Are you sure you should be focusing on this?" It asks, but you merely ignore it now that you have ensured it will not be able to use its secret Puchuu magic to run away.
Instead, you focus on the fight, such as it is; the three girls are charging forward, Olivia twirling her spears around to threaten the big monster and (try to) drive it away from the injured person while Kerrie draws her blade in a gout of fire, the smaller creatures chirping nervously and backing away.
To your mild surprise, the big one, henceforth to be considered the adult monster, actually does back off itself, choosing to carefully block Kerrie's path of approach. Screeching at her, a quick swipe of its claws has the dark-haired girl on the defensive herself while Bubbles is just approaching straight-up.
"Hah!" She punches its arm right in the twisted wing membrane, redirecting the attack and making it croak in pain. In response, Olivia, still mindful of the wounded, starts poking at everything monstrous within range, scoring a notable blow once but failing to do more than cause a mild puncture; black, stinking blood begins oozing out of the side of the monster, a few more wild exchanges following as it retreats steadily, keeping its young protected behind its body.
"Muh," you say.
"Please..." The dying person rasps.
You have noticed something, something you feel you should confirm sooner rather than later, so you don't waste any time in pulling out one of your guns, carefully lining up the shot you need through slowly changing position in the air.
Once you catch a good glimpse of one of the smaller creatures, hissing at the magical girls coming to kill the little baby abominations, you waste no further time; switching to ice lance fire mode, you blast off one of your carefully refined projectiles, sending it rocketing toward the disgusting little creature.
Its parent, realizing the danger, immediately acts- throwing itself in the line of your fire, it receives your lance head-on, being nailed through the chest for its trouble. It crows at you, mightily displeased, and bursts into a storm of snow, exuding a smokescreem made of the stuff to try and disappear from your sight.
You can track it easily, of course, keeping an eye on its course with your magical senses. It seems to be herding its young away from the source of the danger, that is, you, before swinging around to try and hit you from behind.
"Good work, Jackie!" Olivia calls out, proceeding to go over and take a look at the wounded man lying in the snow. "You don't look so good... Anyone know first aid?"
"Ugh... Please..."
Kerrie shakes her head. Bubbles, in contrast, shrugs. "Dunno, like, I can stem bleeding? But, like, don't think that'll do much here..."
Hmm... You do have that one healing potion, if you recall correctly. You also sure aren't going to waste it on some rando, though, not when someone actually potentially important (aka important to you) could be saved with it at some point instead.
Well, for now you shall simply wait and see as this random person of no potential importance whatsoever slowly bleeds out, and you also probably should get the girls back to paying attention to what truly matters.
So you stretch out the hand holding the snake, shaking the little fucker with perhaps a little more force than is strictly necessary, and announce yourself. "Muh. Coming back."
"What?" Olivia perks up, immediately forgetting about the dying person as her nerves snap to attention. "Where?"
You briefly consider whether to actually tell them the direction too or not, but ultimately resolve to do it. You can always subtract points from their evaluations- for individual and as a group- if they fail to perform in any more precarious manner.
"Ugghh..."
You won't make them fail this test quite yet. According to your senses, some kind of magic is building up in this random peasant, so clearly something is wrong with him, but if they do not execute him on principle alone for this it's on them. No points gained or lost yet either way.
So you point out into the forest.
"... Where?" Kerrie questions you. "I don't see..."
Clearly she is failing to look properly. Minus five points. Or maybe she is just incapable of watching out carefully. Even without your magical sense, this thing is incredibly obvious- it is just stalking around and circling the group slowly as it moves from one tree to the next.
And yet none of the three seems to be using their frickin' eyes! "Mm, all lose five points," you resolve.
"Since when did you grade this, chu?"
You do not deign to answer the unworthy question of a lesser Puchuu.
"Oh no!" Kerrie turns around, oblivious to the danger and obviously making herself the weakest target. "We have to-"
Before she can continue (and she better have been suggesting they get rid of this suspicious trash before it weighs them down), a grey and pale red blur speeds from the forest, making you frown.
If she manages to get herself killed, she will lose all points at once and a third of the group's points as a whole.
To your mild disappointment (it would have been hilarious), Kerrie is not killed immediately; whether because she didn't let her guard down all the way and remained vigilant like a good doggie after all, some innate sense of survival that let her actually listen to what you were saying or her glancing something moving out of the corner of her eyes, the dark-haired girl ducks just a little in the very last moment, thereby avoiding having her head taken clean off.
This thing is very fast, it has to be said. Almost fast enough to be a problem for you, though not quite. Seeing as how nothing is, ever has been nor ever can be.
With the possible exception of that one hobgoblin, forever accursed be the mention of its name (which probably didn't exist or else was some disgusting grunting sound).
Anyway, Kerrie loses a few strands of hair and also gets a shoulder shredded where outstretched, sharp and twisted talons managed to tear through it in passing, calling out in pain. Bubbles, turning around, jumps toward her, seemingly intent on protecting her teammate from any further harm and glaring at where the owl-like creature is darting off into the woods again.
As for Olivia... She is leaning back, bracing against the ground. "You do not fuck..." Both of her hands are grasping her spears, the weapons brimming and sparkling with power.
"... with my friends!"
Two spears are catapulted forth with every ounce of strength she can muster up, her breasts wobbling for a full two seconds with the force of it. The greenette has put everything she had into this throw, and just for a moment, it seems like it might hit.
It partially does. One sails straight past the now screeching creature, rotating two-pronged head piercing into a tree and felling it instantly even disregarding the discharge of power. The falling piece of wood crunches audibly, slowly barring the way the monster would have taken, but it simply rams against it, propelled by the force of the spear that did hit it.
It shrieks, filled with pain, and seems to be eyeing the group as it considers how to best take revenge, but ultimately still runs off into the forest.
"Are you okay?" Bubbles asks, quickly turning around and taking a look at Kerrie's wound. "This'll need a bandage. Here."
Holding out a hand, she conjures a white cloth, making it wrap around the shoulder of her team member by itself. "Olivia?" She quickly follows up.
"I'm okay," the wind-attributed girl responds, panting. "Just used up... lots of mana."
Somehow, you are reminded of something or someone, but you just can't seem to tell what it was.
So to sum up, Kerrie has lost another five points for actually letting herself look weak in front of an enemy and not doing so as part of a ploy to lure it into a trap, Bubbles has received five points for not actually making things worse and quickly administering first aid and keeping Kerrie in the fight and Olivia...
Olivia has gotten points, but as she is your property in the first place, all her points are your property, too, meaning it is unimportant how many she got. Even if it was way more than the others. "Muh," you nod to yourself.
"Jackie? Do you know where the monster is?" Kerrie asks, holding her sword with her unwounded arm. "We need a plan to tie it down and keep it from-"
"Help..." The dying person asks, rasping breaths and pale skin indicating one thing while surprising strength in getting up does another. "So... hungry..."
Huh, his eyes are sunk into their sockets really far. And kind of turning black and red around the edges, to boot. It would take a literal idiot to mistake these signs.
"Look, we're sorry, but we can't help you until we have driven off this monster!" ... Another five minus points for Kerrie.
"Mhm," you confirm, deciding to give the girls a chance at actually doing this themselves. They did think of asking a superior being (yourself) for guidance, and so you shall aid them just this once.
Knowing to ask you for help is an important skill, too.
Kerrie eyes the direction you're pointing at, anxiously peering off into the dark and trying to earnestly find the creature still moving- you keep on pointing it out, of course.
"Okay, a plan. Olivia, how are you doing?"
"I'm good, just don't expect me to use any mana for a bit," the spear dual-wielder (so edgy and tryhard, really) says, recovering her breath. Recalling her weapons, she nods resolutely. "Still have a couple of charges for today."
"Bubbles? You ready? We'll need your magic."
"Like, one sec," the blonde asks, holding up a finger. Then she promptly twirls around, having obviously heard the footsteps in the snow, and raises a leg to deliver a roundhouse to the random transformed peon's face. "Hands off the goods, bitch!"
The man (or thing in the shape of one, anyway) receives the full force of her full-body blow without seeming to react, being thrown back down into the snow with a sharp crack.
"Did you just..."
"Okay, where were we?"
... Bubbles gets another couple of points. Kerrie's evaluation will wait until she has revealed her plan.
"... When it next charges, Bubbles, can you try to use your magic on it? Catch it, slow it, keep it in place? Then me and Olivia can attack it from both sides and try to finish it off before it can do anything else."
"Dunno, that's gonna be, like, super hard, yanno? This thingamajig is fast."
"That's why I'll be bait."
"What, no! You're already hurt!" Olivia protests.
"That's why it'll work so well." 'Breaking down', Kerrie melodramatically holds her injured arm, talking loudly with a fake accent of some sort. "Oh, woe is me! For I am most painfully bleeding and in no condition to defend myself!"
"This thing is never going to fall for this," Olivia says, visibly tempted to facepalm.
"Nah, it's coming," Bubbles says.
"Huh?"
"Muh."
"Chu!"
To nobody's surprise except Olivia's, the monster comes running once again, Bubbles forewarned of the direction it is coming from and, therefore, forearmed. This time, the vaguely avian monster is met by a barrage of soft cloth, seemingly created from nowhere once again, and though none of it seems terribly strong, the bands of cloth adhere to and wrap around their target by the dozens- and said target seems to actually be slowing down.
Not in a temporal manner, but rather, its movements are slower, it veers off course within moments and just like that, the creature stays still.
"Go, now! Not much, like, time!" Bubbles calls out.
"Yaah!"
"Hiyah!"
Olivia and Kerrie do as they are supposed to, drawn weapons speeding toward the monster. Olivia jumps it from above, ramming both of her spears into the girls' enemy's back and holding onto them like elongated handles, acrobatically hanging above it as she pumps a dual charge of electricity into the monster, cooking it a bit.
Or maybe frying would be a more accurate word? Yes, she fries it a bit. You're kind of getting a bit hungry from the smell.
Kerrie, on the other hand, swings her sword in a calculated arc, aiming to behead the monster outright. However, its neck musculature seems to be too thick and powerful, stopping her weapon.
Then Kerrie seems to be doing something, as a bit of smoke rises up from the cut and she rips her blade on downward, cutting off the two outermost claws off its handlike extremity in reach.
The monster, obviously having recovered its wits, screeches angrily a little more and tries to buck off Olivia as it begins running away again, but Bubbles shoots out more of her weird colorful cloth magic to hem it in, leading it in a circle. "Running out of juice!"
"Got it! Kill it faster!" Kerrie orders.
... You shall add all the points to Bubbles, as her magic is the entire lynchpin of this operation.
As all of this is going on, you remain vigilant of the surroundings, of course, being the superior magical girl and not as easily distracted by some piddly third-grade mutated owl thingy.
The person-shaped thingy you shall consider the former hiker to be is still alive, of course, that one kick far from enough to kill it, but he seems to be struggling to get up, disoriented and hurt after passing out like a bitch for a moment. It will pass, but for the moment, he is down for the count, and Bubbles seemed to have realized something is wrong with him earlier, so she'll probably keep an eye on him, too.
As for the woods around the battlefield on this hiking trail, they are empty and quiet. You could still make out the magical signatures of those two baby monsters earlier, but even that has gone; they probably moved away since you last took a look around.
And here you were going to consider torturing them to distract the big one with their cries of pain and death. Then again, perhaps it is for the best this way.
You will be able to follow their tracks later. Probably.
Meanwhile, the girls are proceeding to fight properly, Olivia having had to leave her perch atop the monster's back and darting around as she keeps on using the threat of her spears to poke the monster into position for her teammates, braving its savage counterattacks, swift claws and snapping beak more than once.
She does keep on her feet and moving constantly, however, which is honestly a good first step according to your experiences playing Bloodborne. Even if her dodges could be more on point, she's taking quite a few wounds.
Bubbles seems to have run out of magic already, having ceased her weird cloth magic you don't really have any way to categorize- which makes you mildly nervous, by the way. Going by narrative logic, being a special snowflake oddball like that as well as the first one you have seen she might just secretly be the protagonist, or else secretly a traitor, secretly a magical space unicorn princess or perhaps a secret reincarnated character from a couple seasons back.
Ooohhh I want her to be a secret magical space unicorn princess
Or maybe you are just reading too much into it and she's just... an oddball.
Aww
Either way she is really laying into the creature, jumping into the fray to deliver targeted blows against its sides and joints before disappearing again. She is less graceful in doing so than she is... forceful, but it gets the job done and if she looks like some sumo wrestling mixed martial artist, all the better on her.
Though her battle cries could use some help. 'Prepare for some fisting', 'Better lube up' and 'Time for a gangbang' just... aren't appropriate for monsters like this.
If it had some tits, at least...
As for Kerrie, she is genuinely making up for her bad calls and high-pressure decision making. Always wielding her sword up close, she is single-handedly forcing the monster to concentrate and fight her instead of running around and picking off the girls one by one. Trying to keep up the pressure without taking too much risk seems to be her strategy, leaving shallow and less shallow cuts all over the enemy's front as she reacts to every move as best she can.
Until she can't. She's had to use both arms again to fend off a particularly ferocious assault, one during which the monster just straight out ignored the other two girls and the continuous attacks they are directing at it, Kerrie is overwhelmed and forced back. One step, two steps, three steps... And then she has to block a claw strike, her left arm too weak to hold on.
Her sword falls to the ground and, for the first time this fight, she is open.
Then she grits her teeth, resummons her blade to her other hand and turns around the axis of her own body, slamming her sharp sword into the beak poised to pierce into her and cutting off its tip. "Now!"
Bubbles tackles the monster, its pained squawk interrupted. From the other side, Olivia approaches, dual spears ready to go.
Kerrie thrusts her blade into one of the owl creature's eyes, keeping the struggling monster at bay for a moment longer.
Two weapons are thrust, finding their mark this time around. The monster dies.
You look on, mildly bored and watching the turned former human slowly stumble to its feet.
The three girls breathe a collective sigh of relief when the creature slumps down, this time forever. Out of mana, exhausted and wounded, but victorious, they all take a moment to relax.
Then you clear your throat. "Muh-um."
"Oh, right, Jackie..." Olivia seems a little at a loss, but firms up and smiles up at you where you float above the commoners. "Thanks for coming today. Without you we'd have been screwed when it was hiding."
"Yeah, like, that was supes awesomes." Bubbles is giving you a thumbs up.
"... Your aid is appreciated," Kerrie, too, has to admit. "Right! What about-"
"Rah!"
"Eek!"
Splosh.
Having already gotten up, the former hiker tried to rush the nearest source of sound, only to receive a spear through the chest.
"Good work," you say in the silence that follows, the obviously inhuman features of the twisted man in stark contrast to the surprised eyes of everyone, particularly Olivia who simply acted by reflex.
That takes care of that one, too. Just for that you float down a little and scoot toward the edge of your platform, patting the shellshocked magical girl's head. However, you still do have a few more words before you go. "Left the babies, though. Always have to kill them, too. Just in case."
Goblin Slayer taught us all many lessons, and while these are not goblins...
"... let's just go home already," Olivia says.
"Yeah."
"Sure, like, whatever."
"Mm," you agree, turning your ice platform around and floating it off toward the city once again. The monster's corpse will have to wait, but you already have a plan for getting it later, when nobody is watching and may attempt to ask for a share of the loot.
"Hey, wait, we need Puchuu to drive us back!" Kerrie's objection is met with a look from you.
However, the unnatural snowfall and intensified darkness surrounding you all are already beginning to recede, so... they'll probably be alright. And if not, they're a trio of magical girls with at least some base level of competence; at worst, Olivia can just stab any rapists, muggers or overly aggressive hikers they encounter, she seems to have a talent for it.
"Don't le- mmgh!" Also, the snake seems to be trying to talk, which necessitates you to squeeze the area you estimate its throat to be located.
So your answer is clear. "No."
And like that, you're speeding off, leaving the three magical girls behind and ignoring their calls for you to stop.
It's great to be you sometimes. After far too much utter despair suffered at the hands of your eternal foes, seeking comfort in the arms of Viridis, spending a night out in magical town and getting into a food- and sex coma, making a new enemy that apparently is going to be a reoccurring villain, finally having re-lit your passions and playing a bunch of video games all the while, you are finally back in the game of screwing over people for the most petty of reasons.
And no, mugging that one scientist guy for half his cash because he didn't follow ancient pokemon traditions isn't even petty, it's ensuring the narrative of the running joke is on your side forever. You shall be stealing a whole bunch of his stuff whenever he rears his ugly science head and, as the justice of comedy is on your side, get away with it every time no matter what he does.
"Chu!" Also, the snake in your grasp is wiggling around like crazy. "Okay, let's talk business now that the girls aren't there."
"Muh," you state in response. You aren't sure there's much 'business' between you and this thing so much as Brian has business with it.
Also, you quickly glance off toward the forest surrounding you, using a considerable amount of mana to create several of your golems ordered to go back after a certain amount of time has passed and gather the body of the monster, then transport it toward the old goblin cave you should hopefully be able to find again.
And capture and/or kill (if necessary) the young if they can find them. You'll just have to hope for the best.
"Chu, I do not understand your inherent sounds, but I shall attempt to converse with you regardless, chu," your captive says. "I do not know why you are bringing me somewhere, but I shall assume I will not enjoy the experience after that stunt I pulled with Olivia, chu."
Damn right it won't, or at least you hope so. Brian better make this painful.
"In my defense however, chu, I was assuming your creator was using you as a puppet, as opposed to you having a sense of self, a miscalculation I would like to formally apologize for. It was my bad and I should have gathered more information before throwing my subordinate at you."
... Huh, you hadn't expected it to actually apologize. That's new.
"With this in mind, I would like to suggest a formal alliance between you and my team of magical girls, leaving out the underlying Puchuu politics in this case, chu. I know your creator is unlikely to provide any support in this case, but I would be open to serving as an 'unofficial' liaison between you and other girls elsewhere through my own team, in case you require more reinforcements than you might be able to find locally, chu."
Those are a lot of words, but you can't help but suspiciously narrow your gaze at this thing, considering most of them come down to promises... in exchange for letting it go, you are assuming.
"I can't believe her!" Kerrie, for all that she might be harboring some newfound respect for Jackie, was certainly not going just... accept this. "Getting back to any semblance of civilization is going to take us hours! Why didn't you want to go after her?"
Olivia shrugged. "Jackie is... Jackie. If she's decided to run away, she'll open fire on anyone following after her. And I wouldn't be able to catch up to her with how much mana I have left anyway."
"Re~lax, we're gonna be fiiine," Bubbles said, walking next to the two of them without a concern in the world. "The car's still there and we all left the keys inside."
"And who's gonna drive it?" Kerrie asked, raising an eyebrow. "I don't know if you've realized it yet but we're all way underage."
"Don't worry, I know how to drive."
Olivia did a double take. "Really?"
"Yup, I've watched a bunch of people do it. Can't be that hard."
"... No matter what, let's not let Bubbles drive," the green-haired girl concluded.
Not that Kerrie disagreed. "Yep."
"Hey!"
In the end, Kerrie had to be the one to get them all back home. Firmly taking the wheel despite Bubbles' protests (they'd exiled her to the back seats), she only bumped into a handful of trees and one parked car by the time they were back in the (relative) urban bliss of Generic City.
"... No," you say. You do not trust this thingy at all. Its intelligence must have been neutered dealing with such easily fooled literal children that it cannot offer anything to you that would stop you from giving it unto Brian to inflict whatever tortures he wishes upon the peanut-sized smooth-brained bootlicker of a snake-skin boot to be. "Stupid."
"Chu, a shame, but the offer remains open for the future," the disturbingly unaffected Puchuu informs you. "It seems I shall have to negotiate directly with your creator, chu."
... Yeah, good luck schmucko.
So you go ahead and fly back, keeping an eye on the sky to make sure you won't miss the portal's open hours and have to keep an eye on the snake all night.
Which would be too much of a pain. You can't keep it in a cage and just take your eyes off of it.
Speaking of, however- should you just take it back home? It is kind of your home. You don't want any vermin intruding on it once it knows where you live.
So you use your free hand to take out your phone, snapping a quick picture of the purple snake you're holding onto and sending it to the number of Brian that just kind of showed up on it one day. 'Found snake. Bring where?'
'Bring it home, puchuh. Prepping the tools.'
Well, that's that, you suppose.
"Muh," you announce yourself as you re-enter your home, your trophy held securely within your grasp and a craving for something sweet making itself known as you stride inside.
"Chuh, I've been waiting," Brian says, coming out of the basement as he does so and immediately homing in on the snake. "Chuhchuhchuh, told you I'd get my paws on you again."
"Chu, good to see you're still the same as usual," the other Puchuu says from where you're holding it. "Are you still discarding 'projects' on the regular, chu?"
"No idea what you're talking about, puchuh," Brian says, his tail swishing as he turns around. "Come Jackie, make sure not to let it make a break for it at the last minute."
"Chu, there have been a lot of things said on both sides of this that I believe, everyone regrets, chu."
"Funny, chuh, for I am not capable of regretting anything," Brian says as you follow him deeper down into the lab than you've ever gone before; a few of these hallways are new, you're pretty sure.
"Alright, fine, chu, I am willing to help you out behind the scenes if it helps me do my own job, chuchu." It looks like the snake is finally getting to the point. "I still hate your guts, chu, but this entire place is one chuhole of a hellmouth, chu, and leaving it to itself is a recipe for disaster."
"... Chuuh, we shall see," Brian announces, wiggling a little until a single coin falls out of his fur. He picks it up, flicking it up at you where you catch it.
It's a silver coin.
"Chuh, good job bringing this one to me. Take that as your payment and deposit it inside here, chuh. No matter what, it will 'help' with a few experiments." You eye the complicated-looking machine he has led you to, the intake port looking like a mix between an electric chair and a large tube.
"A single silver, chu?! I am worth far more than that!"
Brian swishes his tail once, then twice, and you tuck away your newly gained riches.
"Chu, if you thought you were being subtle, you are wrong as usual."
"Chuuh, no idea what you're talking about," Brian echoes the sentiments currently preoccupying you. "Now put it in there so we can have a few... talks, puchuh."
"Muh." As always, you shall have the last word- as you insert the foreign Puchuu into the machine.
This game is being a bit stupid. You've already killed the one big mutated animal boss in that one cathedral, so you're now making your way through a few of the areas that unlocked- the place with the stupid minigun sniper guy is taken care of after a bit of frustration and you taking great joy in killing him as brutally as you could, there's a secret area you reached by accident by randomly jumping down a large hollowed out tower because it was impossible to tell which way to go (absolutely impossible) and now you're in this forest level.
You think it's where you're supposed to go. You aren't sure, though. And more importantly, this poison swamp you found inside it is super annoying.
It has evil parasite eels swimming around. That is never a good sign.
What's more, once you finally find the way out of it past the undead giant thingies wading around and screaming at you, you're back... at the beginning of the game.
What even is going on? ... Maybe you should just keep going a little and then circle back to that area you haven't explored yet. You keep on forgetting.
Today, you are doing science. Or magical research. Perhaps you should tell that one scientist man you are a better researcher than him the next time you find him, just to drive home the point you are better than him in every way imaginable once again.
Because you obviously are. He is just a bum that didn't train his pokemon correctly and then blamed it for failing to the obviously superior ice type.
A failure as a pokemon trainer.
Anyway, your superior golem science. Golems tend to have somewhat crappy eyesight and, more importantly, inferior senses in general, which is quite a bother to you when you try to use their senses in place of your own to scout your surroundings- or just look at what the obviously criminal, thuggish magical constructs are doing.
So you improve that. By waving magic at the problem until it fixes itself.
Incidentally, that is not the only way to address this problem you pursue, merely the most successful in that you finally find yourself capable of using your magical perception in addition to clearer senses in general after creating and destroying a few hundred golems in a constant training session involving your sword and unresisting target dummies. You also find yourself (possibly accidentally) realizing you can also put runes into ice you are creating- not the more constant, already defined shapes of constructs like the golems or your ice lances, but crafting simple repetitive shapes into ice you are generally creating is quite possible.
More importantly and with thoughts toward cheating in your next fight against whatever new pokemon your golems might have to defeat, you amble down into the lab, searching out a certain Puchuu.
"Brian," you say, bumping a hand against a nearby desk and making him pay attention to you from where he's installing an omnidirectional bone saw (it's the best way you can describe it).
"Chuh?"
You hold up your phone, showing him a wiki page describing the topic of your inquiry. "Pykrete," you enunciate. "Sawdust and ice. Use in golems?"
"Chuuh, possible," your trusty advisor you shall not punt into bladed objects no matter how tempting the thought is says. "Would need to have considerable amounts of it on hand and be impractical outside of prepared situations, but it would improve durability, chuh."
New knowledge revealed: Pykrete Golems: Variation of golem that gains inherent DR
"Muh," you nod. Next off, to ask about talismans and whether you could copy or reverse engineer them somehow. Plucking one out of where you keep them in the surprisingly roomy folds of your dress, you wave it in front of him. "Talisman thingies. Runecraft?"
"Chuuh, these are highly specialized casting devices using advanced methods of mana storage and self-enforcement. If you can copy them, make sure to tell me, puchuh, it would be a sensational scientific miracle."
... You shall take that as lacking faith and thusly reconsider punting Brian into something deadly.
However, before you can finish the though, the cat-like plush creature has jumped down from its perch and approach you, putting his front paws onto your knee as he looks up at you as though standing up. "Chuh, more importantly, I have been working on a side project and could use some help if you have the time?"
You take in the one widely opened eye, the squiggly mouth he doesn't actually use to communicate tilted at an angle and even the crossed-out other eye moving a little to appear more pitiful than ugly.
It's so cuuute!
Is... Is Brian trying to act cute?
... You shall indulge this strange behavior. A little. Picking Brian up and petting him absent-mindedly, you nod.
"Adorable. Do what?"
"... Chuh, do you see that mirror on the ceiling?" Brian's tail points up, as you are holding the rest of his body in place otherwise. "It needs to be moved toward the middle of the room by a few, ugh, inches. "
"Mm," you agree, conjuring an ice platform and floating it up to get into position. The mirror, you soon find out, is sticking to the ceiling, but can move easily just through you pushing it around. Once you give it a good shove, it rolls right over, clicking into place easily enough. "Inch?"
Brian understands the question easily enough. "Chuh, any society that refuses to use a more logical decimal system deserves to be wiped out and replaced by something better."
You don't really care about any of that, but you do agree that all currently existing civilizations should learn better than to not worship you with every breath each and every individual part of them takes. Or, as you are a merciful ruler and goddess, simply spend a minimum of half an hour per day in deep prayer and consideration of what your will may be on that particular day.
Enforced stringently, of course. Failure to do so shall be punishable by reeducation inside one of the centralized camps meant for this purpose. Camps? Prisons? Maybe just call them centers. Reeducation centers. Yes, that has a nice ring to it.
Still, Brian is getting fussy, so you look at where you're still holding him. "Anything else?"
"Chuuh, could you summon a few golems?"
The facility by now built underneath your house is... fairly gigantic. And you had a few inklings of this before, but you had never actually considered the presence of over fifty underground floors- and counting- to be anywhere close to reasonable.
They aren't small floors, either. Each of them contains enough space to put everything above the surface into several times over, crammed full of machinery, large rooms with some obviously industrial kind of purpose, long, blank hallways illuminated by stark light and much more, but if you had to describe it, it would be some sort of industrialized torture dungeon sized up to be an endgame dungeon in some game.
It also needs a lot of work to be adjusted for... something. What's more, it seems there are traps and security systems installed, including at least one room that tries to grab one of your golems and forcibly turn it into a robot servitor, which destroys it and ends your connection.
It also doesn't work, disappointingly, but at least the machines automatically detect conversion has failed and proceed to recycle the parts. Efficient.
"Mm, what's this for?" You ask, gesturing downward where you know a dozen golems to be doing various odd jobs Brian apparently didn't get to doing or else couldn't be arsed to.
"Chuh, it's my lab, of course," he explains, content to stay within your grasp as long as you do his work, "combined with my new way of raking in some cash, puchuh. Running a back alley clinic will be a valuable experience, chuuh."
"Muh," you make to keep the conversation going without straining your throat, "that safe?"
"Not to worry, chuh, parts of the clinic are defined as outside of the building on a technicality and there public areas while the rest of the place is part of it and thus under certain puchuhtections. More importantly, after considering certain options, chuh, the possibility to make active use of certain skills while charging those in need of them is simply too delicious not to take it."
"... Anyone tries to take revenge, it's all your fault." Talking this many coherent words at once is a little painful, but you should make this clear ahead of time.
You'd still murder anyone being an issue, but you'd then never, ever let Brian live it down.
"Chuh, not to worry, I do have my ways," he simply remarks. "There will also be several entrances constantly shifting around the Overcity to make use of its properties and gain more 'customers', chuh. Hard to say no to an entrance popping up just when you were wounded, sick or in need of aid, puuh."
"Muh."
"Chuh."
"Muh."
"Chuuh."
"Mm," you finally agree. You don't know to what, but you do.
Also, just how many lightbulbs does Brian need installed? At least half of what you're sending golems out to do is just doing so so the 'clinic' can gain an increased creepiness factor thanks to all the bright light leaving not a single shadow anywhere within easy sight.
The rest of your evening (and a few hours into the night) you spend playing Bloodborne again, this time taking a deep dive into this weird dungeon system you can access after defeating the boss you've only now realized was actually optional.
Thanks, Gehrman. Your advice is greatly appreciated and shall never again be considered going forward. Damn simpleton just telling you to go hunt beasts and the directing you toward the optional content because the game designers forgot to make it clear where you're supposed to go.
Incidentally, you have also explored around a little and finally found the thingy you need to use all those runes you've been picking up. Behind another entirely optional area's boss encounter. This game is just crazy about this stuff.
And don't even let yourself get started on that third optional area you discovered after getting lost in the woods, traversing the poisonous swamp and returning back to the very beginning of the game, picking up a quest item and then returning to the other optional area near the cathedral to get into a magical carriage and drive off.
It is also way overleveled and you nearly died to those weird giant jumping ticks made of mutated people, so you resolved to go do dungeons for a bit before returning.
Seriously, screw them. Their moveset is stupid and overpowered.
Anyway, it turns out the basement and these chalice dungeons are actually remarkably similar, if one were to replace the ambiance with gothic horror stuff in a few variations.
Naturally, your basement is yours and therefore inherently better, but the base idea remains the same; Brian legitimately created a dungeon. Come to think of it, perhaps you should eventually get into the habit of sending criminals, by which you mean any weak targets that disagree with you, down there to find their deaths in several amusing ways.
There's certainly enough traps and stuff. You could even stuff a bunch of demons and some random stuff in there, too, create an actual dungeon with monsters to boot.
... Come to think of it, how many imps does anal demon have in that ritual chamber by now?
Elsewhere, while Jackie was getting mildly tired and considering going to sleep where she was lounging, a certain room in the basement was host to a most unusual occurrence; a pillar of imps, dozens and hundreds of differently colored, small creatures combined into one wriggling mass of bodies incapable of moving much within the confines of the ritual circle they were summoned within.
"Hmm... Wonder how many more before they all are just squashed to death," a certain demon possessing a mortal body wondered aloud to herself. "Ah well, I wasn't ordered to stop, so... let's just add a few more reaaal slowly, eh?"
Spider! There are spiders in there! All of a sudden you are wide awake, brain going into overdrive.
They are huge and black and their beady eyes stare through the screen into your soul. What do you do? What you do do?
Daddy, they recoil from blood damage! Like from guns and stuff, keep them at bay!
Instinctively wanting to stay at a distance, you try shooting at them first, discovering that while you don't deal much damage, you can throw them back just like dogs- Okay, that's step one. Now all you need is to kill it with fire.
Luckily, you literally never use these fire paper thingies, so you may as well try them out now. And indeed, swinging a giant flaming axe around to dispatch these ghastly creatures from existence is satisfying. Next you shall be trying out the saw spear, which just so happens to be your favorite weapon these days because it's just capable of cheesing everything with its transformation attacks.
Only, the spiders actually dissolve into mist when killed. You don't have to see their corpses, which is good, but on the other hand... What if they come at you in the real world as revenge? A second stage or something?
... You shall need to be prepared.
Viewers later continued to talk about the 'spider freakout incident' for weeks, forever mentioning it on and off as one of the cutest things the virtual idol known as Jackie_The_Great_And_Mighty had done in her early days.
"You still could have told us in advance so we could have come prepared," Kerrie said, not for the first time that day. Olivia was growing increasingly tired of it- know what, she'd speak her mind for once.
"No, I couldn't," she began, holding up a hand when her teammate tried to assert herself. "No, listen, I'm not done. Look, I know I should have told you guys I was calling Jackie in, but you were absolutely rabid about her and I didn't want to deal with the endless arguments when it was about something that was going to save our lives."
Off to the side of their secret hideout, Bubbles, who was playing some random egoshooter (bad taste in games, that), slipped one side of her headphone aside so she could participate in the conversation. "She's, like, got a point there princess, could've been screwed without the ice cannon."
"Could have?" Olivia asked against the shrill voices screaming profanities audible from the now displaced part usually covering an ear. "Did you see how fast and stealthy that thing was?"
"Eh, I'd call a fifty-fifty on us dying, really," the blonde slut drawled, waving a hand in the air. "Definitely would'a been, like, in for a rough time, though."
"And I don't cherish the though of losing a couple of limbs to an overgrown owl mutant," Olivia finished, finally getting a two-thirds majority on something (if she believed hard enough and accepted that Bubbles was worth one third, which was, ironically, on a fifty-fifty right now). "Fighting monsters is dangerous."
Frustrated, Kerrie ground her teeth, but she was rational enough to accede the point. "Still, we're supposed to be a team. You could have told us, or if you thought it was dangerous you could have suggested we, dunno, train a bit more, scope out the situation first somehow. I'm not even against the idea, but I just hate you of going behind our backs and calling for your girlfriend as backup!"
"She's not- Jackie is very, very dangerous, okay? More so than any monster you could ever imagine. I've seen her in action before and she's just... Dangerous."
"Yeah, sure," their wayward teammate called over, "for your panties maybe."
""Bubbles!"" The worst part was, she probably knew what this was really about, or at least wasn't caught up in a stupid misunderstanding like Kerrie, she was just needling Olivia at this point.
Speaking of, the sword-bearing girl sighed, closing her eyes. "Anyway, what's done is done. Did either of you see Puchuu after Jackie made off with it? Because that's the real problem for now."
Olivia shook her head while Bubbles just shrugged with one shoulder.
"This is an issue. What're we going to do with our only actual guide into what's going on missing?"
"I'll look into it," Olivia declared despite herself. "I asked Jackie to come with us, it's my responsibility to get Puchuu back. No idea why she took it, but I'll try to get in touch with her and convince her to give it back."
Worst come to worst, she could always try to... bribe Jackie. Because she had to. The situation was forcing her hand.
"In the meantime," she continued, shaking off the intrusive thoughts, "how about we just take it easy for a few days, maybe try to train a little? Not like we can do much else until then."
"Could ya two lovebirds do that outside then? I wanna get a clean hundred killstreak and you're, like, super distracting me."
... Why did Bubbles have to be like this?
Meanwhile, certain supporting characters were doing their own things, fulfilling their roles more or less adequately. For one, a certain serpentine Puchuu, held in place by several chains and eyes that could not blink no matter how much they wanted to after infinities of punishment in this manner.
At the very least, however, their owners, worn down by eons of time and torture in equal manner, did not possess ears anymore to perceive the true torture the being they were used to observe and therefore define into one place.
"WAKE ME UP, BEFORE YOU GO-GO!
DON'T LEAVE ME HANGING ON LIKE A YO-YO!"
"Mm-mm!" Said Puchuu was not only bound into place, its mouth was kept shut by a metallic device that also spanned the rest of its head, letting it cover its eyes and leave only its sense of sound to become the primary focus of the simulated brain used by all of its kind.
All of a sudden, however, there was a lull in the extremely annoying human voice, letting a new and decidedly inhuman one be heard instead. "Chuchuchuh, how do you like my compilation of mankind's most annoying songs ever recorded? They made me manually sift through all data on the internet before sending me down here, chuh, would be a true shame for it to be useless now."
A few chains rattled, but the prisoner contained within the specialized device filled with more space than there should be within it was unable to respond any further.
"Chuh, in that case, I'll just make sure you get a couple of my favorites before we're done here, chuh, chuchuh, chuuuchuchuchuchu!"
Then the things taking the shape of something far too innocuous left, leaving behind only incredible annoyance and the complete disability to do anything about it. In fact, it had turned up the volume a little more, too, and set all songs in the playlist it had chosen to repeat several times just to make sure they would be absolutely, obnoxiously intolerable.
In another dimension entirely, a group of icy thugs was guarding a cave empty save for the carcass they had dragged into it discretely after all eyewitnesses had left. Left with nothing else to do themselves, they soon decided to waste a little time on the side.
So they smashed a few trees to use the logs as rudimentary seating, pretending to be playing dice or cards (they had neither and couldn't fabricate imitations with what they ha don hand, so they just made do) while two of them remained on the lookout nearby.
Unless, that was, hikers or similar travelers were nearby, as was the case right now.
Suddenly appearing from the forest, they surrounded the hapless group of three, approaching them menacingly and, in two cases, waving branches as weapons. "Wh- what?! What do you want?!" The father of the family of three, by the looks of things, asked, perturbed by the confrontation with humanoid creatures made of ice appearing to threaten him and his family.
Gesturing, the lead thug made it clear that this was a mugging, but they all did want to be reasonable; pointing, it explained that they would be collecting any wallets, phones, watches and such, but leave the family to go on unmolested otherwise.
As long as they cooperated. Or else.
One of its henchgolems slammed an icy fist against a young tree, neatly splitting it in two and picking up the upper half to use as a club.
"I- I understand?"
Like this, the golem brigade continued to amass some meager riches, waiting for their creator- their boss- to come and collect. Wouldn't do to have the don question what they'd been doing twiddling their thumbs, after all.
When you wake up, totally not finding some saliva to have dribbled out of the corner of your mouth only to freeze on your face and be wiped away, dropping to the ground as a little chunk, you slowly become more active in your usual dignified and wonderful way.
By which you mean you stumble around, wishing not for the first time you could just inject caffeine straight into your bloodstream. Sadly, coffee has become anathema to you ever since you were put into this body and you refuse to try it again after the bitterness made you retch that one time.
Coff-coff is bleh. It's in the name already.
Nevertheless, you should find a way to fit more chocolate into your diet already. It does help you get going at the start of the day, hence you keep on eating a bunch of it to the point you're starting to run out.
Lots of things to do today. Glancing at your phone, you tuck it away again in short order- ignoring Olivia shall be an active effort on your part, rather than merely not responding.
"Briaaan," you call as you traverse the underground lab, randomly walking around until you find what you want to. Interestingly, you almost always either stumble upon him very quickly or he comes to find you instead.
Either way you get what you want. As it should be, truly.
Anyway, today it seems Brian is found fiddling with what looks like a mix between an electric chair and an iron maiden that apparently needs to be included in his plans for a clinic of some kind. "Chuh, what is it today, Jackie?"
Well, since he asked, you shall be open about it. Brian apparently considers his medical capabilities good enough to make money with them, as opposed to the generalized mad science you considered to be his focus (hence his competency in adding monster body parts to yourself), so he may just be the right 'expert' to ask about your mild troubles.
"Talking hurts," you explain, feeling the piercing sting inside your throat. "Literally. Any ideas?"
"... Chuuh, maybe. Come along, we can give the diagnostics department a test drive while we're at it."
Brian's testing is... You do not know whether to describe it as exceedingly short or exceedingly intrusive, but in order for him to help you get rid of this entirely minor affliction you hardly ever notice, you apparently need to get him some blood samples, saliva and scraped mouth cell samples as well as urine samples for good measure.
At your disgruntled question about sperm just to complete the collection, he just waved you off mentioning he can just collect some whenever you next play with your pet demon or Viridis. You are mildly creeped out in that Brian apparently has no compunctions about this stalker-ish behaviour, but it does mean less awkwardness about jerking off in front of him, which is a positive.
Anyway, after a short physical exam right afterwards (it is not that awkward to be naked around Brian, he's seen and literally added most of your body and its insides, or more than you ever hope to, at any rate), Brian seems to have made some conclusions about what is going on... And then he tells you to stand in front of a large device that's been standing in the room the entire time.
His final words are chilling. Pun. "Chuuh, from the looks of it, you have an acute case of iceritis, chuh," the magical mascot proclaims as it reads over the output of the large, pod-like unfolding structure you didn't quite have to go inside of, thankfully. "Limited to your throat and vocal chords for the most part, chuh, which would indeed make speaking and swallowing anything warm quite arduous for a meat chunk capable of feeling pain. Puchuh."
"Muh," you make, realizing that you have been eating more ice cream than usual lately.
"Puuh, in simple terms, your magic is subtly affecting your body's physical makeup outside of your conscious control, chuh. Hence parts of your body are slowly freezing and turning into ice, chuuh, particularly while you are transformed."
Makes sense. Your awesome, god-like powers are such that even you can hardly contain them. Why, if it were not for your immense willpower and iron control over your emotions, you would have turned the entire world into a frozen wasteland already, such is-
"Chuh, luckily it isn't too advanced, so treatment shall be relatively simple," your healslave continues, unaware of the global catastrophe he just nearly triggered by interrupting you and breaking your concentration. "One way to do so would be for you to forego your transformation regularly for extended periods of time, such as while asleep or not in need of your magical powers, letting the affliction heal naturally."
"Chumuh," you deadpan, telling him exactly what you think about that idea.
"Chuuh, thought as much. Alternatively, there is a quicker and more invasive method of treatment, puchuh, just a moment." Flicking his tail against a part of the wall, Brian opens it up, revealing a sliding door that hides a much larger space behind a black partition. He crawls inside, making the sound of something rummaging through a large amount of items.
Then you hear what sounds like an engine starting up, a cat hissing and scratching, a jackhammer going to town on... something, and finally Brian returns.
"Chuuh, just suck on this object several times a day, this end down, and try to get it down your throat as deep as possible, puuh," he says, handing you the item in question. "It's not a complicated disease to treat, chuh, just rare because few magical girls stay in their transformed states permanently. For a good reason, puchuuh."
You eye the thing that's supposed to be treating you. It is very big and pink. "Dildo," you state with a voice that has grown drier than any desert in recorded history.
"Chuuh, it is the most efficient shape for its purpose," Brian insists. "Just make sure to deepthroat it regularly and the iceritis should recede quite quickly, puchuh. It will always reappear as long as you stay transformed, chuh, but you should be able to manage it with this."
You eye the not-quite-silicone sex toy as you hold it in one hand, the material warm to the touch. Emotions war within you.
You have made your choice. "... Muh. Threat Neutralized. Defrost."
Only to be met with a sudden sense of vertigo, your magical girl outfit replaced with some random pyjamas and all your sheer superhuman power vanishing into nothing.
You fall to your knees, quietly lamenting the loss. Humanity shall never recover from it, its one true (future) ruler and Goddess reduced to nothing but an insignificant, worthless child's body and capabilities.
"Stop being so melodramatic, chuh."
Holding back the tears, you let the long, strong and not at all spider-like legs sitting inside your back sprout out, hugging the only source of power you still have access to even in this diminished, pitiful state.
"Chuuh, stop it with the useless breakdown and get out of my clinic already." Brian hops next to you and attempts to push or roll you away, but you refuse, jamming your bladelike limbs into the ground and refusing to be nudged.
"Puchuh, I'll give you candy, so get up already!"
Candy!
You like candy. Standing up and wiping away crocodile tears, you suddenly realize that with you having stepped into the guise of a weak child again, your currently active golems have ceased functioning and desummoned themselves.
Ah well, it'll probably be fine. Now where's that candy, Brian is going to need a stash at close hand at all times if he wants to ensure you're too preoccupied to trash his place!
"Chuuh, I miss the transformed you already..."
"Muh." You shall be pampered and showered in worship, as proof that you are inherently worthy of this worship, rather than just because the inferior mortal masses are rightfully fearful of your wrath should they fail to pay tribute!
Not all is well in the queendom of Jackieniens, however. You distinctly recall, after taking a moment to really think about it, having sent your pet demon to summon a large amount of weak demons. What even ever happened with that?
Turns out, she has done as you told her and summoned imps, the small, humanoid creatures of various colors stacked inside the ritual circle meant for simple demon summonings. So many stacked so high, in fact, that they have reached the ceiling and started to become more a singular, solid mass of bodies than a group from how tightly they're pressed against one another.
"Muh," you say sharply, interrupting the anal demon from chanting for even more. You suspect more than a few of the little things to have been turned into mush already by this point.
"Oh hey, boss girl. You finally got a use for the buggers or should I continue my experiment on imp compression methods?"
... You do appreciate the snark. A little.
"Brian," you call back out into the hallway, "void summoning chamber into fog world?"
Your throat feels a little weird and rough, but nowhere near as bad as you had begun taking for granted by this point. Turns out taking on this form is actually much better when you plan to talk as opposed to open fire on anything that moves, after all.
Shouldn't surprise you, you suppose, considering what magical girls usually do.
The powers of friendship and superior firepower shall surely save the day! Orbital befriendment incoming!
Surprisingly, Brian just appears from around the corner, wordlessly walking into the summoning chamber and gesturing at the wall with his tail. A piece of it turns out to be a rotating panel, swinging around to reveal a lever of some sort.
The lever clicks down automatically and the floor under the squeezed up imps turns into a portal, letting the now chittering horde (they couldn't so much as breathe in until now due to lacking space) be deposited into the desolate world you can see below them.
"Muh. Summon more and pull the lever when full," you order your slave as Brian walks back out. "Rinse and repeat. Fill that defense system with fodder."
"Huh, and here I thought something was off about you," the increasingly impertinent creature says, looking you over from head to toe. "You're not transformed right now, aren't you? It's pretty obvious in hindsight. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, haven't they?"
"Muh. Still mighty enough to rape your ass all night." And with that you turn right around- you have stuff to do, and so does this demon.
Now then, you still have a full itinerary for the day, even as you have spent quite a bit of time on things already. For one, you're trying to investigate one particular species currently inhabiting your magical garden of magical rainforest-ness. That is, the weird lumps of flesh just kind of... hanging around, sticking to trees and the ground in various places.
You know they can extend some kind of thorny spikes to defend themselves if threatened, and are somehow filled with that weakening aphrodisiac venom you once brought into this forest to see what would happen. You shall not think about the source of this venom, of course, nor about the effect it had on yourself.
Now then, time to apply the scientific method. And by that you mean 'poke them with sticks until you have learned something'. At first, all you achieve is making them puff up, but as you vary your approach and try out various things, you quickly discover some remarkable things.
For one, they only extend their spikes when prodded with a certain amount of force or else over a longer period of time, indicating they are actually intelligent enough to feel annoyed at being poked. Or perhaps it's just an instinctive response to what they perceive as a predator scoping them out.
Probably that last one.
Here's the kicker, though; when you carefully and gently nudge a wide enough stick under them, they tend to just kind of... crawl onto it, moving much like a caterpillar or similar. This is not only greatly amusing and kind of cute, it also lets you carry them around however you desire.
Within a short time, you become a master at doing so. You also greatly enjoy yourself in creating patterns throughout the forest.
The spikes themselves, of course, are extremely sharp- surprisingly so, even, easily piercing through any wood you wave at your test subjects. You imagine most kinds of skin wouldn't fare any better, and thusly expended testing sticks show, after closer investigation, a certain fluid smeared along the newly made holes. After you managed to pull one off relatively intact, anyway.
These things are very hard to move once they decide to really pierce into everything in reach, particularly the ground they're clinging to.
So there you have it, the spikes are either coated in the venom or else have a very thin hollow letting the stuff be shot into any attacker through. Interestingly, they also extend the spikes when swung at high velocity, making you believe they may be triggered by rapid movement somehow, too.
It is also a lot of fun to do.
At one point, you nearly manage to properly juggle the spinies (provisional name) with a pair of sticks, but a close call involving losing control and bumping into a tree, only to narrowly dodge one that falls from said tree and nearly grazes you has you stop playing around for a bit.
More importantly, you have made an important discovery: cutting one of the things open to see about how they work, you find that they're basically just a shell of muscle and thin bones surrounding a central venom sack producing a fairly generous amount of the venom they use for self-defense. And probably mating or something, too, you ain't no biologist.
What's important, though, is that you can harvest the stuff in somewhat decent quantity by just picking up a couple here and there and cutting them open, draining the fluid into whatever container you have brought. You're a little worried it may lose potency when stored amateurishly, but worst come to worst, you can just make Brian take care of it like always, so you aren't going to let it bother you all that much.
Technically, it's a new type of ammunition for your guns, though perhaps using it as it is may be just as good- it's a magical contact venom, you can probably figure out some way to use it well.
Aside from your (cough, cough) research (cough, cough) on the small, but interesting beings populating parts of your forest garden, you also have a lot to do inside the house, mostly insofar as you have some crafting to do, something you can actually do without being transformed for the most part. You still require your full power at certain points, but you can keep it relatively short, at least.
The same is not the case for your work on improving your golems, but some sacrifices need to be made. You don't really need to talk while doing it, at least, which makes pulling through with it relatively harmless, you think.
Next off, you shall be taking a short trip over into the real world once again, mostly for fun and to exercise a little. You hesitate for a long moment, immense intellect weighing pros and cons of various approaches, but ultimately resolve to use your magical girl form to go outside- one can never be too careful, after all.
So many highly threatening things lurk right out there, it is surely prudent to retain the ability to nuke an entire site from within it just in case.
The part of the city affected by the demonic taint supplying you with sweet, sweet power condensed into a fluid is still active as usual, people coming to and fro and general depravity being at the forefront of activities left and right.
This does not stop you from passing through of course, your Jackiement (Jackie Government, as you are the one and only authority that truly matters) mandated relaxation time demanding you find something fun to fuck, or at least proceed to engage in a good bit of depravity yourself before breaking into a random apartment and sleeping there as is your self-given right.
Are we a cat?
You briefly entertain the thought that your behaviour is somehow cat-like, but quickly forget that line of reasoning as you stride through the populated hallways of that one apartment building at the core of the effect you appropriated. You have seen some opportunity to have fun and, therefore, do not give a fuck anymore.
As before, many of the floors you pass by as you ascend one flight of stairs after another follow a particular 'theme' of sorts, alternating with mostly completely normal and random ones that just have the people that live there constantly descend into one orgy after another of some sort while going about their daily lives otherwise.
Going up a good bit, you pass by one floor where everyone actually staying is wearing a lot of latex, one where everyone is wearing silly furry costumes (you hurried along and got out of there quickly) and even one floor seemingly dedicated to long rows of pillories holding a bunch of kids of different ages to be defiled by whoever visits, a location you note down for later just in case.
Damn furries spreading their filth and never shutting up...
The sight that finally attracts your attention more than any other on your pilgrimage to the satisfaction of your boner, however, isn't on a specialty floor at all, but instead a mostly 'mundane' one. Particularly, you pause to look at a poster drawn with simple materials and hung above one of the many open doors of this building.
It reads as follows: Eighteenth Birthday Party, Any Big Dicks Welcome
This seems right up your alley, letting you fuck a barely legal chick and make use of your immense cock, so you walk right in without a second thought.
The apartment is about what you'd expect, a decently sized party house at the moment with writhing sex piles dotting the area here and there. Walking in, you are confronted by a couple of guys, ages ranging from high schoolers and frat boys to adult men. "Hey, hey, not sure you should be in here young lady. No offense, but-"
You get the idea and so simply push your panties down, letting your enormous boner (that drove you to come to this place in the first place) poke up out of your dress.
"Oh. Well, hell."
"Guess that means she is supposed to come in?"
"Hahah!" One of the older guys just laughs, beckoning you deeper inside. "Guess the little lady has the biggest balls of us all, eh? Come in and go a couple rounds, the birthday girl's over there and her friends, sister and mother are around," he explains.
"Mhm," you nod, a hand searching through your magical box. You did have some of that aphrodisiac venom lying around from what little you had time to harvest earlier and at this dilution it should be... relatively safe, at least.
You hand the small bottle out. "Spike drinks," you say, having noticed many of the people around are holding these little plastic cups full of punch. With this, you have succeeded in fulfilling the bro code.
This is all very much like back in university if you take out the various age differences. Certainly easy enough for you to fit in despite your stature and gender, anyway.
The 'birthday girl' is easy enough to find thanks to the directions you received earlier, soon letting you come to a halt before a shapely blonde girl held in the air by her legs, being double-penetrated by two guys alternating their rhythm as she howls in orgasm again and again. As common courtesy demands, you wait a moment until one of them comes himself, grunting and squeezing her tits as he spurts his meagre load inside of her, the white liquid joining the rest oozing out of her already very well-used pussy.
Coming in once he pulls out, you direct the guy in her ass to lay back, which he does once he becomes aware of your magnificent dong pulsing angrily- you're pretty horny by this point, what else was to be expected?
Spreading the girl's legs with your hands before she has the time to regain full consciousness, you shove your large cock right into her soft folds, lubricated by previous takers. She moans and her tongue lolls out of her mouth, head thrown back to the sensation of your mighty meat rod conquering her in a way no other man ever could.
"Shit, bitch is getting tight," the muscular guy just holding himself inside her ass says, teeth grit to resist the urge to just pound her senselessly. An area you are far ahead in, of course, straining and absolutely not panting like a horny dog.
Still it takes you only moments to pierce the girl, or young woman or whatever, up to her womb, your knot nestled against her entrance. A visible bulge shows on her belly, some of the bystanders whistling in appreciation at the thorough fucking about to be dealt out.
"Hah, now this I gotta see. Wanna bet on who can hold out longer, Missy? Whoever can't keep going first loses!"
"Muhh," you accept the challenge with your usual stoicism, not at all barely able to keep yourself where you are as the urge to breed a bitch rises in your loins without limit.
"Now that's what I wanna hear!" And so the challenge begins, the insensate girl being used as the battlefield squirming with pleasure at every alternating thrust. You can feel the other man inside her, the thin layer of flesh between you making every of his thrusts just kind of push against your cock, too, and if you can feel him he certainly does feel you.
It doesn't take long until your dominant pace drives you beyond what you can take, pumping this nasty little slut full of your baby batter to flush out any inferior fluids without bothering to stop, not knotting her so you can keep fucking and prove your true dominance. Both you and the brave challenger keep at it, coming several times as the party's main actor convulses between you uselessly, but for all that your competitor is strangely persistent and only comes once for every two times you do, you can just keep on climaxing anyway.
A lot. A whole lot. The girl has a noticeable baby bump by the time you finally win the competition. "Uggh, my balls are in fucking pain now."
"Mumuh, muh," you pant, sweat pouring down your forehead and the underside of your balls wet with your feminine fluids. You also absolutely didn't mewl like a kitten at some point(s) throughout this test of your incredible virility and power.
However, the girl must have come to her senses at some point, one arm wrapped around your shoulders as she licks her lips, feeling the full belly of cum you gave her. "That was great... Kind of don't want to let you go now."
"Size queen, size queen!" One of the other girls in the room calls out, having been repositioned to watch what's going on around you.
"And you're a suck slut, Mirry!" Your subject shouts back. "Go shut her up, tiger," she tells you with a wink.
"Muh," you nod. Your incredibly virile loins shall ensure that all of the women and girls being gangbanged in this place shall have a bun in their respective ovens before you're done.
One night, without any indication or obvious change, as these things go, a new recurring feature was added to the Sprawl, that infinite and wildly confusing realm home to a great many magical creatures. Not unlike the markings that could lead one to large settlements when followed or the prevalence of wandering merchants carrying just the right items on them before they were needed, some individuals began to find certain doors marked with a specific sign replacing the ubiquitous normal pathways found in the urban environment on occasion.
As it later turned out, all that did so shared a particular common denominator, that being they were wounded, sick or suffering from a magical affliction, whether they knew of it or not. Most did not dare approach, wary of the unusual phenomenon, but as it went, plenty of people eventually found themselves filtering inside nonetheless.
The sign did not make it all that clear exactly what sort of place 'Brian's Clinic' really was in itself, at least not on first glance.
Nevertheless, Brian managed to receive a decent stream of 'customers', one being ailed by one thing or another coming in only to be diagnosed and either cured, healed or offered a cure to whatever their problem was. Of course not all customers were calm and steady or capable of paying, but, well...
The creature known as Brian may have lost all of its capabilities for combat in that little... temporary demotion, but that didn't mean it hadn't prepared.
One after the other, Brian treated patients and demanded payment in turn. A great many just paid up without much complaint, but every now and then there was someone that just didn't seem to get with the program. Especially as the mechanism to selectively attract viable patients didn't discriminate between monsters and other magical beings or, indeed, mundanes, though they were just very unlikely to show up.
"Huahaha! Puny thing! Me not pay! What do, huh? What do?!" Cue the brutish ogre whose insides Brian had just rearranged into their proper order after a fight it seemed to have lost. It would seem as though the demand for a silver coin hadn't achieved what it was meant to.
No matter.
"Chuuh, me? Nothing," 'Brian' said, its tail switching modes and activating one of the many defensive measures placed inside the operating room. "The ground, on the other hand, chuh..."
"Huoh?!" The stupid brute fell for it immediately, looking down instead of up where a ceiling panel opened up. A drill descended, mounted upon a robotic arm, and proceeded to drill straight into the back of the patient turned victim. "Hugah! Tha... dat tickle..."
It did not kill the ogre, of course, merely inhibiting most of its brain functions; the things were notoriously hard to put down. However, that would not save it as the drill was replaced by a pair of spikes that latched onto the brute's torso, lifting the babbling thing up into the ceiling where it would be moved out and... processed.
And in the end, Brian would have another cyborg servant to keep order around the place and do menial work tasks. The idiotic thing may even be becoming smarter as most of its individuality and thought centers were being replaced by superior hardware.
Free will, the thing known as Brian maintained, was a mistake. Always had been. And now, it could finally set out to correct any instances of its misuse it could find. This was way better than the actual payment it received from the patients it was simply letting go back to where they had come from (or else the nearest settlement, whichever they preferred).
It had been at this for a mere few hours and there were a dozen servitors already, most of average build and strength but every bit did count. Now if only there was some use to an unshakably loyal army of near-mindless cyborgs...
Brian flicked a dart at the world map it had plastered onto the wall of its office. It hit the nation of China, a particular province within it that was known among the mundanes to be mostly rural and underdeveloped. This was, of course, because retarded cultivators just destroyed anything modern meant to be constructed in the area and regularly raped the locals to death for some inane reason.
Funds and soldiers, it reminded itself. Funds and soldiers. The quick and mostly painless solution was out of the question, so instead it simply had to... change its approach.
Brian perked up, the cameras picking out a new patient. Time to go reattach an arm and remove a festering curse, it would seem. Soon enough it would be able to demand favors as payment from those that couldn't afford it, rebuilding a network- this time of mortal creatures that it could get to do what it wanted.
Its plans were proceeding apace. "Chuchuh, chuchuchuchuchuh, chuuuuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhu!"
She wordlessly looked upon the thing, knowing that it would not be long. Truth be told, they rarely were, these days.
Carefully taking aim, she thrust her blade into its back, severing muscle and tendons, the motion mirrored on the other side. Screaming, the monster tore away, turning around to face her.
"You bitch! I'll-"
The words were stuck in its throat as it beheld her countenance, the demon realizing exactly what kind of trouble it was in. Cutter Of Bonds recombined her blades,letting her regain the use of her most powerful (and most feared) abilities.
"Fucking no!" The demon snarled.
"Yes," she calmly replied, twirling her scissors around to snap them shut.
Her foe immediately felt the effect, the connection to its source of power severed cleanly.
"Ragh! Do you know how long it takes to get this much juice into one place?! I'll fucking kill y-"
Cutter Of Bonds severed the next connection. This time, it was the one to hell. Without another moment to spare, she used the creature's shock to close in, the shearing blades making up her weapon closing in along its neck.
Disbelief was the last thing the Demon Lord showed, its head tumbling to the ground. Even with her abilities, it would be able to return to hell... but greatly weakened, not more than an average demon in strength.
"Enemy eliminated, now moving to clean up," she stated into the empty room she barely even bothered to look at, ignoring the various naked women strewn around. They were of no interest nor consequence for her.
"Puu~, no need. Something more important came up," the empty room stated back. "Return home to receive further instructions."
"Haah..." And there went a short work day.