AlchemyMan smirked as Arch continued to talk; his brow seemed to contract into even further a squint as the operator talked, but it was hard to tell since they remained glaring, entirely white slits. "Must be useful, to have capabilities like that. He's a special snowflake, I'm sure," the tech department assistant leader agreed sarcastically, his face seeming frozen in a half-cocked smile now. The plan might be working; hearing Arch boast about his navi's abilities actually seemed to be lessening AlchemyMan's interest in the navi.
Madness did everything she could to avoid rolling her eyes at the "hot" comment from her ally, but she was clearly struggling. "What can I say? I'm a passionate person," she giggled. "And I'm especially passionate about... science... especially Hex's wet, hot, wriggling science," she cooed, clutching at her thighs powerlessly with both hands in a way that was upsettingly erotic.
"... Has my lovely little researcher forgotten the meaning of the word 'science?' Do you need to go back to science school?" AlchemyMan grumbled, looking uncomfortable now himself as he tapped one foot impatiently and crossed his arms. Not in an embarrassed way, but in a way that clearly displayed that he thought his time was being wasted. "Yes, please, Hex, get on with it! Oh, X-X-X-periment. Ha ha. Very funny. Gee, I'm starting to understand why you girls didn't preserve a video record of this test." He finally shut up, however, once he saw Madness and Method get lifted simultaneously into the air by Hex's limbs, then driven back down into a sloshing pool of gray-white navi goop.
The girls, on the other hand, didn't stay quiet at all. Method began wailing as soon as she was lifted in the air, while Madness began cheering in a way that was, honestly, more like she was riding a roller coaster than preparing for sexy tentacle play. Method stared up with a vulnerable expression of uncertainty towards the faceless avatar of Hex, while Madness stretched luxuriously as though she were laying upon a bed and gave a few coos of luxurious pleasure. Both of them started up their initial reactions again as Hex continued, moving his tentacles to some of the areas he'd mercifully avoided rubbing before. "U-Uwah! Arch, don't watch this!" Method cried, trying to pull her legs together as his navi began feeling out the lower portion of her bikini. Madness gave her a discrete elbow with one of her elbows to remind her to act her part. As far as Madness was concerned, her moans of ecstasy were very convincing.
"... What am I, chopped liver?" AlchemyMan joked, watching with one eyebrow raised. He did seem genuinely curious as to why Method was speaking to Arch like she cared about his opinion, if she really did hate him for subjecting him to the tentacle bath and, furthermore, if they'd done this experiment before.
"Wh-What was that about our meat and potatoes?" Method asked, not fully understanding Arch's words.
"That's exactly it~" Madness giggled, stretching upon the now-flattened pools while licking one of her fingers, as if to taste the Hex-goo that lingered on it (that was probably not particularly safe). "Mmm... science," she spoke again, running her tongue back over her smiling lips. With all of the excitement, the two had basically ignored the glitches that were starting to affect them. Three fist-sized balls of electricity were now hanging above Madness' body, ironically enough, but weren't doing much of anything other-wise. Her sister had a much more remarkable, although goofier, glitch, by which thin, iron-like, rectangular plates continually spawned around her right arm, slowly and noisily clattering to the floor to form a pile. It looked like she kept trying to form a shield, giving up, and tossing aside the waste. "... Let's get these glitches fixed, shall we?" Madness chuckled, rising to her feet but keeping her back low so as to avoid colliding with the newly formed orbs of lightning that seemed unwilling to rise along with her. Once she and her sister rinsed off, they disappeared, along with the trail and pile of mini-shields that Method had created. She returned to her original height and wrapped her arms around herself, smiling with heat apparent in her face. It was actually starting to look like she really was enjoying it, although, hopefully, that was just some remarkable acting. "I can't stand too much foreplay, Archie... please, let's go on to number three!"
"... I don't think I'm going to be able to get used to this..." Method sobbed, waving her arms to make sure the rain of shields had stopped before crossing them at her chest. "U-Um, I mean... used to the anticipation... that is..."
AlchemyMan was beginning to look thoroughly agitated. It looked like he was just another live-action Electopian porno or two away from dismissing the whole experiment as a waste of time, as it was becoming abundantly clear (or at least, he thought it was) as to why the sisters hadn't submitted him a real report of the events.
Glitch Test Lab
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Smirk-to-smirk combat raged on in Arch's conversation with AlchemyMan. The man's grin only widened at the dripping sarcasm, noting the successful diversion. Things only got better when the irritating scientist misinterpreted Hex's voice-glitch. "It kind of is a wonder that Hex didn't even plan that...at least, I'm pretty sure he didn't," Arch mused, tapping his chin idly and watching through the latest batch of glitches.
The dichotomy between Method and Madness, he decided while watching the twins, really did extend far beyond the aesthetic. Madness was clearly either giving the role her all, or was simply starting to enjoy it; Arch couldn't rightly tell what was making her squeeze her thighs and coo in such delight, and he was trying very hard not to open that mental can of worms back up again.
Method, though...after taking a moment to make certain that AlchemyMan was fully focused on the experiment, Arch let his mask drop for the first time since the other Navi's initial entrance. The alien smirk melted off, giving his facial muscles a chance to relax in favour of a more Arch-esque pensive frown. He was worried about the timid Elec-elemental, both for the sake of preserving the mission, and in hoping that she wasn't getting too stressed out by the acting. In that brief moment of relaxing his face, he tried frantically to brainstorm a way to keep her from freaking out too much come the next experiment.
Finally, a thought came to mind, and Arch painted his oily smirk back on, steeling himself for what he was about to do. As discreetly as possible, Arch tiptoed his fingers across his laptop's keyboard, opening up a sound test and padding at the test button rhythmically. A three-tone chime rang out in Arch's clearing, the artificial noise sounding strange and foreign in the dappled forest. "Oh, I believe that's an e-mail for me. Pardon me, AlchemyMan, girls, I'm afraid I need to respond to this. Shouldn't take a moment, don't worry!" With that, he actually did open up a text-box...that is, a private message, to be forwarded directly to Hex for his private viewing. Keeping his face on, Arch typed up a series of orders for his Navi to follow:
Just like the first time, twin tendrils sprouted from the morphic pool, one at the feet of each twin. "This is where the experiments started getting really interesting," Arch grinned at AlchemyMan, ostensibly the centre of attention again. "You can actually thank Madness here for the original idea. Somewhere in the brainstorming process, we got the thought in our heads, how might it work if Hex left a bit of his jelly-body...inside the host?" As he spoke, the Navi in question continued growing the two tentacles, snaking up Madness and Method's curves like the stripes of two exceptionally sexy candy canes. "Generally, when facing viruses Hex simply punctures them for the internal transmission, but we didn't want to do anything so barbaric to our companions here...and even besides which, it simply wouldn't be as fun~ as what we came up with~!"
The tentacles finished growing, giving Method and Madness one more wrap around their shoulders before angling a wide arc, coming to rest just before each girl's mouth. Evidently, Hex didn't feel like waiting for Arch's cue on this one, instead just giving his own announcement of, "Commencing Experiment No.3: internal transmission.". Both tendrils pulled back briefly, before giving a strong push against both girls' lips. In Madness' case, she was getting exactly what she'd bargained for: arms and legs pinned down by the warm, spiraling wraparound, the tentacle morphed into a flat spade at the very tip, the better with which to slip past her lips. The moment it was inside, the tip bulked right up again into a blunted point, thick and warm against her lips and filling her mouth deep.
For her sister, however, the experience was very different. The bondage was identical in every manner, but the moment the tentacle made contact with her lips and slipped inside, everything seemed to slow down. Outwardly the tentacle was moving at the same rate as Madness', but everything inside Method's mouth was slowed down, as though her lips were some sort of intangible barrier. Thanks to the supreme metamorphic capabilities of Hex's body, even as Arch cackled, "Yes, Hex, now give them a little thrust!" and both tentacles started thrusting back and forth ever so slightly, Method never felt anything actually invading her mouth. All she got was a large bit of protoplasm holding her mouth open from the inside, and appearing, from the outside, to plunge back and forth as though there were more in her mouth than there really was.
Presumably, AlchemyMan was busy watching the show...but just in case he turned back around, Arch kept his hidden messages small. All he did was try his best to make eye contact with Method...and give a showy, salacious wink. Again the doublespeak worked to his favour, giving him plausible deniability in simply winking because he was a creep and that was what creeps did, but more conveying that yes, there was something funny going on, and pretty please keep it a secret. Madness, of course, was getting the full deal, her tentacle giving her some good old-fashioned loving (if Hex were indeed capable of loving, which seemed unlikely). After awhile, Arch relaxed his grin back to a smirk and relented. "Alright, Hex, finish up and let the girls go; still two more to go after this, you wouldn't want to run out of stamina before we're done!" he said, leaning back against his tree and relaxing.
The tentacles did retract out of each twin's mouth, though not before leaving behind a fair portion of themselves to be swallowed down (of course, Method's portion was comparatively tiny). In reverse motion of the initial bind, the tentacles retreated back down their luscious bodies, disappearing back into the depths of Hex's body. Arch sighed a sigh of contentment and pleasure, while Hex's avatar stood tall and silent. The girls would soon feel their internally-generated glitches coming on, along with the little bits of Hex merging with the earlier pieces consumed during the last experiment...that is, of course, unless they'd been digested, and that line of thinking was getting far too into the really strange questions on Navis, such as where the food and NetCafe products they consumed actually went. This, despite being a test facility in the NetPolice's Department of Technology, was not the time or place to debate such things. Rather, it was a place to pull the wool over the Vice-Head's eyes, and look more than a little overtly sexual in doing so.
The dichotomy between Method and Madness, he decided while watching the twins, really did extend far beyond the aesthetic. Madness was clearly either giving the role her all, or was simply starting to enjoy it; Arch couldn't rightly tell what was making her squeeze her thighs and coo in such delight, and he was trying very hard not to open that mental can of worms back up again.
Method, though...after taking a moment to make certain that AlchemyMan was fully focused on the experiment, Arch let his mask drop for the first time since the other Navi's initial entrance. The alien smirk melted off, giving his facial muscles a chance to relax in favour of a more Arch-esque pensive frown. He was worried about the timid Elec-elemental, both for the sake of preserving the mission, and in hoping that she wasn't getting too stressed out by the acting. In that brief moment of relaxing his face, he tried frantically to brainstorm a way to keep her from freaking out too much come the next experiment.
Finally, a thought came to mind, and Arch painted his oily smirk back on, steeling himself for what he was about to do. As discreetly as possible, Arch tiptoed his fingers across his laptop's keyboard, opening up a sound test and padding at the test button rhythmically. A three-tone chime rang out in Arch's clearing, the artificial noise sounding strange and foreign in the dappled forest. "Oh, I believe that's an e-mail for me. Pardon me, AlchemyMan, girls, I'm afraid I need to respond to this. Shouldn't take a moment, don't worry!" With that, he actually did open up a text-box...that is, a private message, to be forwarded directly to Hex for his private viewing. Keeping his face on, Arch typed up a series of orders for his Navi to follow:
Quote (To: Hexadecimal.EXE; Subject: Command)
Throughout Experiment No.3, you will make the procedures for the next experiment appear outwardly identical on Madness.EXE and Method.EXE, but will exercise minimal force upon Method. This order will supersede anything I say during the experiment, and any orders will only be applicable on Madness.There was only a split second in between Arch sending his message and receiving a reply, but there was plenty of stress to be had in that single second. Thankfully, Hex's one-word laid all of his Operator's worries to rest; if nothing else, at least he'd been understood.
Quote (To: <OPERATOR>; Subject: <NO SuBJE-JEct>)
Compliance."Alrighty, and we're done!" Arch beamed (and noting, upon realizing how much it made his cheeks hurt, never to beam again), closing the e-mail application and returning his attentions. "Sorry about that, everyone; always a friend in need, you understand. Now then, where were we~?" He clapped his hands together and made as though trying to think hard, snapping his fingers in a mock-eureka gesture. "Ooooh, now we get to the fun part! Hex, two more tentacles, if you would!"
Just like the first time, twin tendrils sprouted from the morphic pool, one at the feet of each twin. "This is where the experiments started getting really interesting," Arch grinned at AlchemyMan, ostensibly the centre of attention again. "You can actually thank Madness here for the original idea. Somewhere in the brainstorming process, we got the thought in our heads, how might it work if Hex left a bit of his jelly-body...inside the host?" As he spoke, the Navi in question continued growing the two tentacles, snaking up Madness and Method's curves like the stripes of two exceptionally sexy candy canes. "Generally, when facing viruses Hex simply punctures them for the internal transmission, but we didn't want to do anything so barbaric to our companions here...and even besides which, it simply wouldn't be as fun~ as what we came up with~!"
The tentacles finished growing, giving Method and Madness one more wrap around their shoulders before angling a wide arc, coming to rest just before each girl's mouth. Evidently, Hex didn't feel like waiting for Arch's cue on this one, instead just giving his own announcement of, "Commencing Experiment No.3: internal transmission.". Both tendrils pulled back briefly, before giving a strong push against both girls' lips. In Madness' case, she was getting exactly what she'd bargained for: arms and legs pinned down by the warm, spiraling wraparound, the tentacle morphed into a flat spade at the very tip, the better with which to slip past her lips. The moment it was inside, the tip bulked right up again into a blunted point, thick and warm against her lips and filling her mouth deep.
For her sister, however, the experience was very different. The bondage was identical in every manner, but the moment the tentacle made contact with her lips and slipped inside, everything seemed to slow down. Outwardly the tentacle was moving at the same rate as Madness', but everything inside Method's mouth was slowed down, as though her lips were some sort of intangible barrier. Thanks to the supreme metamorphic capabilities of Hex's body, even as Arch cackled, "Yes, Hex, now give them a little thrust!" and both tentacles started thrusting back and forth ever so slightly, Method never felt anything actually invading her mouth. All she got was a large bit of protoplasm holding her mouth open from the inside, and appearing, from the outside, to plunge back and forth as though there were more in her mouth than there really was.
Presumably, AlchemyMan was busy watching the show...but just in case he turned back around, Arch kept his hidden messages small. All he did was try his best to make eye contact with Method...and give a showy, salacious wink. Again the doublespeak worked to his favour, giving him plausible deniability in simply winking because he was a creep and that was what creeps did, but more conveying that yes, there was something funny going on, and pretty please keep it a secret. Madness, of course, was getting the full deal, her tentacle giving her some good old-fashioned loving (if Hex were indeed capable of loving, which seemed unlikely). After awhile, Arch relaxed his grin back to a smirk and relented. "Alright, Hex, finish up and let the girls go; still two more to go after this, you wouldn't want to run out of stamina before we're done!" he said, leaning back against his tree and relaxing.
The tentacles did retract out of each twin's mouth, though not before leaving behind a fair portion of themselves to be swallowed down (of course, Method's portion was comparatively tiny). In reverse motion of the initial bind, the tentacles retreated back down their luscious bodies, disappearing back into the depths of Hex's body. Arch sighed a sigh of contentment and pleasure, while Hex's avatar stood tall and silent. The girls would soon feel their internally-generated glitches coming on, along with the little bits of Hex merging with the earlier pieces consumed during the last experiment...that is, of course, unless they'd been digested, and that line of thinking was getting far too into the really strange questions on Navis, such as where the food and NetCafe products they consumed actually went. This, despite being a test facility in the NetPolice's Department of Technology, was not the time or place to debate such things. Rather, it was a place to pull the wool over the Vice-Head's eyes, and look more than a little overtly sexual in doing so.
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"Sure, sure... I'll remind you, you're on NetPolice time, however. If I'm holding off checking all of my e-mails right now, I hardly see what's so important that you can't do the same," AlchemyMan complained, crossing his arms with an impatient, teeth-gritting frown. His teeth always seemed to be clenched that way. Arch's diversion didn't take very long regardless and he quickly resumed the experiments, so there wasn't much room to complain. "Yes, please, Hex, more tentacles! I can hardly stand the suspense," the scientist navi joked. When Arch explained the "ins and outs" of the next experiment, the navi's face fell back into an annoyed frown. "Great minds think alike, they say," he scoffed with yet further sarcasm.
"Don't knock it until you've tried it!" Madness scolded her superior, then returned a lewd smile and lowered her eyebrows. "As I said earlier, Hex has that unique, exotic taste of science that I'm just crazy for. Maybe it's a thing that only a girl can understand? No one samples your glitch better than I do, right, Hex?" she chuckled, even as tentacles began wrapping up her legs.
Method began blushing again, as this experiment was especially embarrassing to carry out in front of other viewers. "I feel like we should-" she began momentarily, then forced her lips shut at the sight of the tentacle in front of her face. Regardless of her attempts to close it out, the tendril flattened and managed to slide in past her guard; she closed her eyes in anticipation of the big appendage reaching inside her throat again, but it never exactly happened. It was a pleasant surprise for her.
Madness was clearly surprised as well, as this time, her eyes widened as her lips opened up around the big, slithering mass of Hex that had entered into her mouth. The image was unmistakably like something out of the dark recesses of the net's archived videos, as the outline of the tentacle revealed itself on the outside, hitting the sides of her cheeks from the inside. A mask of red spread across her cheeks again, but she was either genuinely aroused by it or doing her best to seem that way; she assisted by sloppily sucking on the tendril as it slid in and out of her mouth, back and forth. At one point, her tongue flickered across the underside of the appendage for a brief moment. Method actually found herself watching her sister rather than focusing on her own engagement.
The one who they were trying to trick watched on with disapproving silence, shaking his head. He clutched one hand to his forehead as if he was starting to get a headache. He could be upset that his researcher was performing such an unethical or foolish experiment... but more likely, he was upset that his time was being wasted every second Hex failed to reveal more of his intrigue.
The glitches set in slowly, not taking effect until Hex was beginning his release, both of the girls and of the portion of his glitch-mass that he was leaving inside both girl's mouths. Method gave a small, girlish gulp, while Madness shut her eyes and made an unpleasant series of gulps before all of hers went down. Method suddenly appeared to pass out... hopefully that was part of the glitch and not her literally passing out from the exhaustion of the experiment. The pink-haired scientist appeared unchanged... until she started walking towards her sister, producing massive shockwaves from her feet with each step. She clenched her teeth and raised her foot warily, hoping she hadn't accidentally struck her sister or the Technology Department's assistant leader with one of the attacks. Thankfully, they shockwaves appeared to be veering off in random directions rather than aiming for anything. Carefully, she picked back up her sister and led her towards the showers, where the two would receive another blast of status curing solution. "Nothing like a shower after a good session," Madness laughed. "I wonder if I'm making Hex feel good..." she wondered out loud, again, probably for the purpose of putting dirty thoughts into everyone's heads.
"You're not making me feel good, that's for sure. Honestly, I've grown quite weary of all of this," the caped navi sighed. "So, I'm going to call in one of my associates and let him watch the rest of the experiments. It's pretty clear that nothing useful is going to come from my spending my time here." It sounded like the group was successful in driving off AlchemyMan... unfortunately, it also sounded like he intended to send in a proxy to witness the rest of it, so Madness and Method wouldn't be spared the unfortunate latter stages. "Maso, are you listening? Prepare for incoming budget cuts. SIGNIFICANT budget cuts!" he finished as he walked out of a door-like hole, which suddenly appeared on one side of the room and allowed only him out before vanishing again.
Madness gave a wink to Arch and a peace sign, but said nothing, in case he was still listening. Method gave a low sigh, indicating the same feeling. Before any of them could celebrate any further, two navis entered, seemingly holding hands. The first was a somewhat short girl, perhaps around 5'7", with black hair in a ponytail. She was dressed in a red and yellow, checkered pattern navi skinsuit with red gloves and boots. Her body was not bad, but not nearly on the same level as that of Method and Madness. Along with her was a very tall man in dark black armor, seemingly covered with iron bear traps. The face of his helmet was especially noteworthy, as the big metal jaws there looked to form a giant, clenched snarl atop upon his face. He looked a lot more like a Mafioso than he did a NetPolice officer. The girl seemed upset to be here and even more upset at the initial look of the experiment, while the guy started laughing to himself in a way that sounded a bit like what Arch was trying to imitate.
"Greetings," the girl began, waving with her free hand. "My name is Novelty. I'm actually with the NetPolice's Department of Prosecutions..." she introduced herself to Arch and Hex. "My companion and I haven't really been filled in on what's going on here... We were just told to watch and make notes on the next two experiments..."
"Watching is something I really look forward to doing! Kehehekhrrrrkharf!" the other navi spoke through the dull, muffled sound of his helmet, laughing briefly before breaking into an enormous cough. "Dammit..."
"This low-life is TrapMan... He's actually an ex-Mafia who's acting as an informant for the NP while... being tethered to my arm. It's a long story," the short girl sighed. "But AlchemyMan seems to want to get him into the Department of Technology, so he's being used as an assistant occassionally." TrapMan nodded enthusiastically, as if he liked being given a reason to sit in on this experiment beyond just wanting to be here.
Madness shot a quick glance to Method, then shrugged; she walked over to Hex and hugged his motionless goo-body, raising her leg to rub her thigh against his own. "Go right ahead! I like to have an audience~" she encouraged them, causing Novelty to look on in mild horror and TrapMan to breath more heavily, in an excited way.
"Don't knock it until you've tried it!" Madness scolded her superior, then returned a lewd smile and lowered her eyebrows. "As I said earlier, Hex has that unique, exotic taste of science that I'm just crazy for. Maybe it's a thing that only a girl can understand? No one samples your glitch better than I do, right, Hex?" she chuckled, even as tentacles began wrapping up her legs.
Method began blushing again, as this experiment was especially embarrassing to carry out in front of other viewers. "I feel like we should-" she began momentarily, then forced her lips shut at the sight of the tentacle in front of her face. Regardless of her attempts to close it out, the tendril flattened and managed to slide in past her guard; she closed her eyes in anticipation of the big appendage reaching inside her throat again, but it never exactly happened. It was a pleasant surprise for her.
Madness was clearly surprised as well, as this time, her eyes widened as her lips opened up around the big, slithering mass of Hex that had entered into her mouth. The image was unmistakably like something out of the dark recesses of the net's archived videos, as the outline of the tentacle revealed itself on the outside, hitting the sides of her cheeks from the inside. A mask of red spread across her cheeks again, but she was either genuinely aroused by it or doing her best to seem that way; she assisted by sloppily sucking on the tendril as it slid in and out of her mouth, back and forth. At one point, her tongue flickered across the underside of the appendage for a brief moment. Method actually found herself watching her sister rather than focusing on her own engagement.
The one who they were trying to trick watched on with disapproving silence, shaking his head. He clutched one hand to his forehead as if he was starting to get a headache. He could be upset that his researcher was performing such an unethical or foolish experiment... but more likely, he was upset that his time was being wasted every second Hex failed to reveal more of his intrigue.
The glitches set in slowly, not taking effect until Hex was beginning his release, both of the girls and of the portion of his glitch-mass that he was leaving inside both girl's mouths. Method gave a small, girlish gulp, while Madness shut her eyes and made an unpleasant series of gulps before all of hers went down. Method suddenly appeared to pass out... hopefully that was part of the glitch and not her literally passing out from the exhaustion of the experiment. The pink-haired scientist appeared unchanged... until she started walking towards her sister, producing massive shockwaves from her feet with each step. She clenched her teeth and raised her foot warily, hoping she hadn't accidentally struck her sister or the Technology Department's assistant leader with one of the attacks. Thankfully, they shockwaves appeared to be veering off in random directions rather than aiming for anything. Carefully, she picked back up her sister and led her towards the showers, where the two would receive another blast of status curing solution. "Nothing like a shower after a good session," Madness laughed. "I wonder if I'm making Hex feel good..." she wondered out loud, again, probably for the purpose of putting dirty thoughts into everyone's heads.
"You're not making me feel good, that's for sure. Honestly, I've grown quite weary of all of this," the caped navi sighed. "So, I'm going to call in one of my associates and let him watch the rest of the experiments. It's pretty clear that nothing useful is going to come from my spending my time here." It sounded like the group was successful in driving off AlchemyMan... unfortunately, it also sounded like he intended to send in a proxy to witness the rest of it, so Madness and Method wouldn't be spared the unfortunate latter stages. "Maso, are you listening? Prepare for incoming budget cuts. SIGNIFICANT budget cuts!" he finished as he walked out of a door-like hole, which suddenly appeared on one side of the room and allowed only him out before vanishing again.
Madness gave a wink to Arch and a peace sign, but said nothing, in case he was still listening. Method gave a low sigh, indicating the same feeling. Before any of them could celebrate any further, two navis entered, seemingly holding hands. The first was a somewhat short girl, perhaps around 5'7", with black hair in a ponytail. She was dressed in a red and yellow, checkered pattern navi skinsuit with red gloves and boots. Her body was not bad, but not nearly on the same level as that of Method and Madness. Along with her was a very tall man in dark black armor, seemingly covered with iron bear traps. The face of his helmet was especially noteworthy, as the big metal jaws there looked to form a giant, clenched snarl atop upon his face. He looked a lot more like a Mafioso than he did a NetPolice officer. The girl seemed upset to be here and even more upset at the initial look of the experiment, while the guy started laughing to himself in a way that sounded a bit like what Arch was trying to imitate.
"Greetings," the girl began, waving with her free hand. "My name is Novelty. I'm actually with the NetPolice's Department of Prosecutions..." she introduced herself to Arch and Hex. "My companion and I haven't really been filled in on what's going on here... We were just told to watch and make notes on the next two experiments..."
"Watching is something I really look forward to doing! Kehehekhrrrrkharf!" the other navi spoke through the dull, muffled sound of his helmet, laughing briefly before breaking into an enormous cough. "Dammit..."
"This low-life is TrapMan... He's actually an ex-Mafia who's acting as an informant for the NP while... being tethered to my arm. It's a long story," the short girl sighed. "But AlchemyMan seems to want to get him into the Department of Technology, so he's being used as an assistant occassionally." TrapMan nodded enthusiastically, as if he liked being given a reason to sit in on this experiment beyond just wanting to be here.
Madness shot a quick glance to Method, then shrugged; she walked over to Hex and hugged his motionless goo-body, raising her leg to rub her thigh against his own. "Go right ahead! I like to have an audience~" she encouraged them, causing Novelty to look on in mild horror and TrapMan to breath more heavily, in an excited way.
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Arch felt the urge to wipe his brow in relief, seeing Method's distinct lack of freaking out. Granted, Madness was getting a little...err, friendly with her tentacle (and just when the hell did he start actually thinking in creeper-euphemisms, anyway), and it was honestly pretty distracting and made him start thinking on the concept of sentient, female-identifying AI again...but if AlchemyMan's headache/frustration was as bad as it looked, that was completely fine with him. He himself was getting quite the headache, from the sheer exhaustion of having to keep this damnable face on for so long. How long had it been since AlchemyMan had entered the room again? Arch honestly couldn't remember, but it felt like hours ago to him.
There was a brief moment of panic as Method completely passed out, in which Arch wondered if it had either been too much stress for the young lady, or if Hex's glitches had been too potent that time. Thankfully, Madness didn't seem to be panicking any, and her odd shockwaves didn't keep her from getting her twin to the showers...and her question gave Arch yet more opportunity to be creepy. "Oh~, you know how he's the strong silent type, Maddy~" he forced himself to use the cutesy nickname that had been suggested in their first introduction. Thinking fast of what next to say, he just went with 'blend half-truths', and rolled with it. "I'm certain he's enjoying this very much...why, if he had the choice himself, he'd probably want to keep you and your lovely sister!" He was fairly certain AlchemyMan wouldn't think anything of his choice of emphasis, so he felt as safe as he could really get while lying to a NetPolice official.
It was around that exact point that AlchemyMan, at long last, announced his exodus. Once again, Arch had to resist the urge to wipe his brow, not even caring that the experiment wasn't necessarily over; anyone, he reasoned, would be more pleasant to deal with than this self-important jackass. Looking through his window into the room, he saw Madness' little victory symbol. Breaking character for a quick moment, he closed his eyes and sighed, cupping his face in his face and massaging his temples with his fingertips. Recovering after a brief moment, he saw Method's expression mirroring his. His Navi, set roughly between the two ladies, stood in place, the avatar's tentacles waving in casual defiance of gravity. Glitches periodically ran through Hex's body, scrambling the black digits within his protoplasm, or making his form waver and shake like some kind of bad recording.
Then two newcomers, presumably AlchemyMan's associates, entered the room, and Arch took a moment to get his first impressions. The female seemed...uncomfortable, which wasn't the least bit surprising, but it wasn't as though she was there to stop anyone. It didn't hurt, he figured, that she seemed, if nothing else, like a fairly reasonable person; The male, on the other hand...his laughing was sounding awfully familiar to Arch, and worse yet, not the slightest bit forced. It became remarkably easy to transfer all the earlier annoyance with AlchemyMan directly onto this new unpleasantness, and fast as grease and just as disgusting, back on went the man's mask.
"Oooooh, what delightful company AlchemyMan has given us! Novelty, TrapMan...I'm simply charmed," Arch smirked until his cheeks hurt, then playacted at thinking on something, complete with theatrical humming. "Weeeeell...if you don't know what you're in for, then so much the better for me to simply show you~! Hex, care to begin?"
It was so much the better that Madness decided to play right along with this; Hex buzzed out, "Affirmative. COM-CoMMEncing Experiment No.4: inter-host transmission," and promptly, for lack of a better word, exploded. His humanoid, legless body utterly vanished in a flurry of writhing tentacles: his arms split and twisted with a boneless ease that would have been agonizing just to imagine on a more solid Navi, and his head sank into his torso, which bloated and expanded until Madness was pressed against a giant globe easily large enough to hold five Navis her size. The many tendrils dotting its surface twined and coiled for several moments more, until several of them stopped to rub against Madness, keeping her pressed against the surface of the globe. Her back, her hair...even her firm, round derriere wasn't safe from the studying tentacles. It seemed at first like this was the extent of the experiment.
Then the tentacles very promptly pulled her straight through the outer membrane, straight into the middle of the globe.
The feeling of being utterly surrounded on all sides by Hex's morphic body would be terrifyingly familiar to Madness, but just lessened enough to avoid being a complete rehash of the horrific first time. As she was still on the 'surface' (and, she might notice, in perfect view through the translucent fluid of everyone present, Arch included), the pressure was significantly lesser, and if she so chose, she could indeed move or swim through the gel with some effort - a large step up from the utter helplessness of being caught inside Hex's pool, nothing to see but white protoplasm and dark numbers and corpses and corpses and corpses.
On the outside, Hex's tentacles reached out, snaring Method in a multifaceted grip that did a very quick, efficient job of binding her limbs up tight. Working to avoid the threat of thrashing, the electric twin was quickly retracted to the surface of the Hex-globe, and before she knew it, she was sucked into the morphic mass, trading the feel of individual tentacles for an omnipresent pressure, her entire body feeling the mass of glitches press at her; this made for an interesting effect on her and her twin's science-wear, pushing them utterly tight to their luscious curves, as tight as a second skin.
Just when they thought the experiment was over and done with, the true purpose of Experiment #4 revealed itself, as the globe rippled for a second, and then pulsed like a beating heart. The contraction sent the protoplasm, and by proxy Madness and Method, pushing towards the center of the globe. The two would meet flush against one another, all the 'high points' of their curvaceous bodies meeting and squishing together. The burning, tingling sensation of Hex's glitch base only increased everywhere the twins touched, pleasure stacking on top of pleasure. Every few seconds, just to keep the contact fresh, Hex would pulse yet again, sending Madness and Method and their tingling bodies closer into one another.
The experiment wound down soon after, Hex's globe steadily shrinking down until there wasn't enough of his morphic body to contain Method and Madness. He continued shrinking down to a more humanoid configuration, the two of them squished inside him as he shrunk, until finally they burst from his sides with two wet splats. By virtue of his not-quite-liquid body, the protoplasm on them did not mat but simply sloughed off, pooling at their feet and returning to the pool. Hex reformed himself in an instant, motionless once more, waiting for glitches and Operator input.
Said Operator input was...somewhat short in coming. Somewhere around the time Madness got sucked into the Hexosphere, Arch found himself caught between having to cheer his Navi on, and struggling to keep from aborting the mission, remembering Madness' earlier adventure. In the end, he simply had to content himself with putting on a show of cooing and oohing and ahh-ing, all while lingering his finger right over the Emergency Jack-Out button; had there been even the slightest indication Hex was about to pull her (and later Method) down, he would be taken straight out of the room, experiment be damned. It was with great relief that the experiment ended and he was able to resume. "Sooo..." he addressed the two new guests, "I suppose it would be difficult to glean the purpose of these experiments from simple observation, so let me...enlighten you."
"My lovely Hex here is a Bug-type, exceptionally talented at transferring his unique glitched code through...ahem, multiple variables," Arch began, punctuating liberally with smirks, nose-taps, and other generally creep-ly gestures. "Truth is, this is really the side-dish; his main course, as it were, is as my model: to spread my art across the Net, and enlighten others to the...pleasures, shall we say, of life? Now, our two lovely hosts here needed someone capable of glitches for their experiment; you can imagine my excitement! And of course, Madness here seems more than willing to ~indulge~ me as I have my fun...keep it a secret, but I daresay she's gotten herself a wee mite hooked on my Hex, here!" The last bit was spoken with a stage whisper and a mental apology to the ember-haired Navi in question, but he felt that, given there was only one left to go, it was smooth sailing from here on out.
There was a brief moment of panic as Method completely passed out, in which Arch wondered if it had either been too much stress for the young lady, or if Hex's glitches had been too potent that time. Thankfully, Madness didn't seem to be panicking any, and her odd shockwaves didn't keep her from getting her twin to the showers...and her question gave Arch yet more opportunity to be creepy. "Oh~, you know how he's the strong silent type, Maddy~" he forced himself to use the cutesy nickname that had been suggested in their first introduction. Thinking fast of what next to say, he just went with 'blend half-truths', and rolled with it. "I'm certain he's enjoying this very much...why, if he had the choice himself, he'd probably want to keep you and your lovely sister!" He was fairly certain AlchemyMan wouldn't think anything of his choice of emphasis, so he felt as safe as he could really get while lying to a NetPolice official.
It was around that exact point that AlchemyMan, at long last, announced his exodus. Once again, Arch had to resist the urge to wipe his brow, not even caring that the experiment wasn't necessarily over; anyone, he reasoned, would be more pleasant to deal with than this self-important jackass. Looking through his window into the room, he saw Madness' little victory symbol. Breaking character for a quick moment, he closed his eyes and sighed, cupping his face in his face and massaging his temples with his fingertips. Recovering after a brief moment, he saw Method's expression mirroring his. His Navi, set roughly between the two ladies, stood in place, the avatar's tentacles waving in casual defiance of gravity. Glitches periodically ran through Hex's body, scrambling the black digits within his protoplasm, or making his form waver and shake like some kind of bad recording.
Then two newcomers, presumably AlchemyMan's associates, entered the room, and Arch took a moment to get his first impressions. The female seemed...uncomfortable, which wasn't the least bit surprising, but it wasn't as though she was there to stop anyone. It didn't hurt, he figured, that she seemed, if nothing else, like a fairly reasonable person; The male, on the other hand...his laughing was sounding awfully familiar to Arch, and worse yet, not the slightest bit forced. It became remarkably easy to transfer all the earlier annoyance with AlchemyMan directly onto this new unpleasantness, and fast as grease and just as disgusting, back on went the man's mask.
"Oooooh, what delightful company AlchemyMan has given us! Novelty, TrapMan...I'm simply charmed," Arch smirked until his cheeks hurt, then playacted at thinking on something, complete with theatrical humming. "Weeeeell...if you don't know what you're in for, then so much the better for me to simply show you~! Hex, care to begin?"
It was so much the better that Madness decided to play right along with this; Hex buzzed out, "Affirmative. COM-CoMMEncing Experiment No.4: inter-host transmission," and promptly, for lack of a better word, exploded. His humanoid, legless body utterly vanished in a flurry of writhing tentacles: his arms split and twisted with a boneless ease that would have been agonizing just to imagine on a more solid Navi, and his head sank into his torso, which bloated and expanded until Madness was pressed against a giant globe easily large enough to hold five Navis her size. The many tendrils dotting its surface twined and coiled for several moments more, until several of them stopped to rub against Madness, keeping her pressed against the surface of the globe. Her back, her hair...even her firm, round derriere wasn't safe from the studying tentacles. It seemed at first like this was the extent of the experiment.
Then the tentacles very promptly pulled her straight through the outer membrane, straight into the middle of the globe.
The feeling of being utterly surrounded on all sides by Hex's morphic body would be terrifyingly familiar to Madness, but just lessened enough to avoid being a complete rehash of the horrific first time. As she was still on the 'surface' (and, she might notice, in perfect view through the translucent fluid of everyone present, Arch included), the pressure was significantly lesser, and if she so chose, she could indeed move or swim through the gel with some effort - a large step up from the utter helplessness of being caught inside Hex's pool, nothing to see but white protoplasm and dark numbers and corpses and corpses and corpses.
On the outside, Hex's tentacles reached out, snaring Method in a multifaceted grip that did a very quick, efficient job of binding her limbs up tight. Working to avoid the threat of thrashing, the electric twin was quickly retracted to the surface of the Hex-globe, and before she knew it, she was sucked into the morphic mass, trading the feel of individual tentacles for an omnipresent pressure, her entire body feeling the mass of glitches press at her; this made for an interesting effect on her and her twin's science-wear, pushing them utterly tight to their luscious curves, as tight as a second skin.
Just when they thought the experiment was over and done with, the true purpose of Experiment #4 revealed itself, as the globe rippled for a second, and then pulsed like a beating heart. The contraction sent the protoplasm, and by proxy Madness and Method, pushing towards the center of the globe. The two would meet flush against one another, all the 'high points' of their curvaceous bodies meeting and squishing together. The burning, tingling sensation of Hex's glitch base only increased everywhere the twins touched, pleasure stacking on top of pleasure. Every few seconds, just to keep the contact fresh, Hex would pulse yet again, sending Madness and Method and their tingling bodies closer into one another.
The experiment wound down soon after, Hex's globe steadily shrinking down until there wasn't enough of his morphic body to contain Method and Madness. He continued shrinking down to a more humanoid configuration, the two of them squished inside him as he shrunk, until finally they burst from his sides with two wet splats. By virtue of his not-quite-liquid body, the protoplasm on them did not mat but simply sloughed off, pooling at their feet and returning to the pool. Hex reformed himself in an instant, motionless once more, waiting for glitches and Operator input.
Said Operator input was...somewhat short in coming. Somewhere around the time Madness got sucked into the Hexosphere, Arch found himself caught between having to cheer his Navi on, and struggling to keep from aborting the mission, remembering Madness' earlier adventure. In the end, he simply had to content himself with putting on a show of cooing and oohing and ahh-ing, all while lingering his finger right over the Emergency Jack-Out button; had there been even the slightest indication Hex was about to pull her (and later Method) down, he would be taken straight out of the room, experiment be damned. It was with great relief that the experiment ended and he was able to resume. "Sooo..." he addressed the two new guests, "I suppose it would be difficult to glean the purpose of these experiments from simple observation, so let me...enlighten you."
"My lovely Hex here is a Bug-type, exceptionally talented at transferring his unique glitched code through...ahem, multiple variables," Arch began, punctuating liberally with smirks, nose-taps, and other generally creep-ly gestures. "Truth is, this is really the side-dish; his main course, as it were, is as my model: to spread my art across the Net, and enlighten others to the...pleasures, shall we say, of life? Now, our two lovely hosts here needed someone capable of glitches for their experiment; you can imagine my excitement! And of course, Madness here seems more than willing to ~indulge~ me as I have my fun...keep it a secret, but I daresay she's gotten herself a wee mite hooked on my Hex, here!" The last bit was spoken with a stage whisper and a mental apology to the ember-haired Navi in question, but he felt that, given there was only one left to go, it was smooth sailing from here on out.
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Madness played along, smiling back over her shoulder at Arch. "Well, a girl could get used to being kept by Hex, really~" she chuckled, although her attempts were wasted, seeing as AlchemyMan had already decided he was fed up with the charade and was going to leave the situation alone. Mostly alone, anyways. He'd brought two others in to do the supervising, two who were as unfamiliar to Madness and Method as they were to Arch and Hex. All of that said, she snapped her head away quickly and hid her face. It was pretty clear that the idea of being owned by Hex didn't inspire any nice feelings for her, given how the SP inside him was living and what she knew of the place inside Hex.
When Arch introduced himself to the new girl and her conjoined companion, he noticed that she seemed immediately skeptical of his greeting. "Really? TrapMan and I are polar opposites. I don't know that it's actually possible to be charmed by both of us," she murmured, although perhaps she just didn't like being lumped in any group with TrapMan. It was also possible she had just been immediately off-put by Arch's assumed personalities; his relationship with her would be an unfortunate casualty of this mission, it seemed.
On the other hand, the guy was buying what Arch was selling, so to speak, and would probably leave the mission with a much different impression of Arch and Hex than was desirable. "We're just a cute couple, you and I... Yes, this looks like the kind of experiment I myself enjoy! Please, continue," TrapMan agreed, wheezing through his big, armored helmet. It seemed talking to him was going to be like conversing with a mirror, as long as Arch kept up the fake personality.
With the experiment commencing again, Madness and Method both kept their brightly-colored eyes on Hex, watching him unfold like a Swiss-army knife of tentacle fetish. Even with her efforts at acting or otherwise real arousal in regards to the situation, the fiery-haired sister was having a hard time pretending that being pushed up against a sheer, gelatinous wall of Hex was doing much for her. TrapMan began huffing and puffing, however, when the tentacles started grabbing at her buttocks. "Oooh! Wow... I should have looked into joining the NetPolice Tech Department a lot earlier..." he laughed, rubbing his shiny gloves together in a way that produced an annoying metal-on-metal skrch-skrch noise.
"I-Is this really an experiment?" Novelty asked, squinting as the scenario played out. "It's one thing when a guy like you does this, TrapMan, but I expect the NP to have some standards... Did you girls really devise this yourselves?"
Method nodded along, looking somewhat guilty. "... It's a real experiment related to glitches," she defended, then remembered that it was important that they keep to their story: the experiment was just a front to enjoy tentacle play. "Honest! You tell him, sister..."
"Yeah, that's it," Madness chuckled briefly, but before she could participate any more in that build-up, Hex pulled her inside of himself. The shock on her face made it look like she probably would have yelled her safe-word out, if she'd had time to do so before she was engulfed. All of the fires on the tips of her hair went out as she entered the liquid area, thrashing a bit before realizing that everyone could see her and furthermore that she wasn't in any particular danger at the moment. Once she understood that, she stopped moving and blushed, realizing she'd made a fool out of herself. Method seemed to be thinking the same and looked away, trying to be respectful. Of course, that made it all the more surprising when Hex grabbed her and reeled her in alongside her sister. What was alongside quickly became atop of, as the two were pushed into each other, Method moving her arms outward as if to break free while Madness found herself instead clutching at her sister, as if to find something to grab hold of for stability. She locked her hands into her sister's hair, then quickly withdrew them and shook them as bristles of Method's characteristic electricity ran through the follicles. The inside of the orb had almost become slapstick and amusing to watch rather than arousing... almost. Their bikinis had been pretty tight to begin with, but with the new pressure applied, it was now apparent to anyone watching closely that Method and Madness were anatomically correct in relation to humans.
Furthering the odd contrast of slapstick comedy with fetish play, the two girls were spat out from opposite sides of Hex. Madness looked especially relieved, as apparently oxygen was something that she needed as well, which made sense, given most navi's tendency to drown when submerged unless they were aquatic themselves. TrapMan has been staying mostly quiet until this point, but when he reacted, it was with apparent outrage. "D-Dammit! I want a personal laboratory of my own!" he announced, stomping his feet irritably. "Where I can have cute test subjects... no, better, twins... doing this and that, while I watch from a safe distance, alone!"
"... The 'alone' part isn't going to happen until we find a way to resolve the handcuff situation," Novelty remarked, but she couldn't muster much more than that. She looked somehow more exhausted than the sisters did, after watching experiment #4.
Glitches soon followed, as Arch figured they would. At first glance, they proved to be basically ignorable: Madness looked like her skin was tanning, while Method's hair was growing. Pretty simple stuff. Shortly afterward, however, they both looked momentarily queasy, then began vomiting Hex-fluid onto the floor uncontrollably, which was almost as unpleasant to watch as it was to actually be afflicted by. "Oh gross," TrapMan murmured, suddenly losing his buzz. It would probably be relieving for everyone to know that at least he wasn't into this.
"D-Do something!" Novelty demanded, but the girls were already on top of it. They weren't any more eager to continue hurling up Hex than anyone was to watch them do it, so they ran to get themselves showered off as soon as possible. All of this was putting something of a damper on Arch's speech about spreading his creepy brand of tentacle love across the net. "Geez... What are you three thinking?"
"Well... that little detour aside... Archie is right!" Madness exclaimed, bouncing back with surprising quickness and raising her arms above her head. "You'd be surprised how addictive this sort of thing is. Why, my discovering it has practically justified all costs of the experiment itself. I feel compelled to spread it to others now~"
"... I'd rather not be molested by a creepy tentacle creature and barf up my guts, thank you," Novelty rebutted. TrapMan remained quiet, but the fact that he kept subtly turning his head down to Novelty combined with Arch's research and newfound experience with the pervert psyche made it obvious that he was trying to think of a way to get her involved without having to suffer being molested by Hex himself.
"There's one more experiment, right, Archie?" Madness asked, hugging her sister close to herself. Method was silently running her fingers through the back of her own swimsuit, trying to discretely get out the wedgie that Hex had inadvertently given her. "Don't keep us in suspense!"
When Arch introduced himself to the new girl and her conjoined companion, he noticed that she seemed immediately skeptical of his greeting. "Really? TrapMan and I are polar opposites. I don't know that it's actually possible to be charmed by both of us," she murmured, although perhaps she just didn't like being lumped in any group with TrapMan. It was also possible she had just been immediately off-put by Arch's assumed personalities; his relationship with her would be an unfortunate casualty of this mission, it seemed.
On the other hand, the guy was buying what Arch was selling, so to speak, and would probably leave the mission with a much different impression of Arch and Hex than was desirable. "We're just a cute couple, you and I... Yes, this looks like the kind of experiment I myself enjoy! Please, continue," TrapMan agreed, wheezing through his big, armored helmet. It seemed talking to him was going to be like conversing with a mirror, as long as Arch kept up the fake personality.
With the experiment commencing again, Madness and Method both kept their brightly-colored eyes on Hex, watching him unfold like a Swiss-army knife of tentacle fetish. Even with her efforts at acting or otherwise real arousal in regards to the situation, the fiery-haired sister was having a hard time pretending that being pushed up against a sheer, gelatinous wall of Hex was doing much for her. TrapMan began huffing and puffing, however, when the tentacles started grabbing at her buttocks. "Oooh! Wow... I should have looked into joining the NetPolice Tech Department a lot earlier..." he laughed, rubbing his shiny gloves together in a way that produced an annoying metal-on-metal skrch-skrch noise.
"I-Is this really an experiment?" Novelty asked, squinting as the scenario played out. "It's one thing when a guy like you does this, TrapMan, but I expect the NP to have some standards... Did you girls really devise this yourselves?"
Method nodded along, looking somewhat guilty. "... It's a real experiment related to glitches," she defended, then remembered that it was important that they keep to their story: the experiment was just a front to enjoy tentacle play. "Honest! You tell him, sister..."
"Yeah, that's it," Madness chuckled briefly, but before she could participate any more in that build-up, Hex pulled her inside of himself. The shock on her face made it look like she probably would have yelled her safe-word out, if she'd had time to do so before she was engulfed. All of the fires on the tips of her hair went out as she entered the liquid area, thrashing a bit before realizing that everyone could see her and furthermore that she wasn't in any particular danger at the moment. Once she understood that, she stopped moving and blushed, realizing she'd made a fool out of herself. Method seemed to be thinking the same and looked away, trying to be respectful. Of course, that made it all the more surprising when Hex grabbed her and reeled her in alongside her sister. What was alongside quickly became atop of, as the two were pushed into each other, Method moving her arms outward as if to break free while Madness found herself instead clutching at her sister, as if to find something to grab hold of for stability. She locked her hands into her sister's hair, then quickly withdrew them and shook them as bristles of Method's characteristic electricity ran through the follicles. The inside of the orb had almost become slapstick and amusing to watch rather than arousing... almost. Their bikinis had been pretty tight to begin with, but with the new pressure applied, it was now apparent to anyone watching closely that Method and Madness were anatomically correct in relation to humans.
Furthering the odd contrast of slapstick comedy with fetish play, the two girls were spat out from opposite sides of Hex. Madness looked especially relieved, as apparently oxygen was something that she needed as well, which made sense, given most navi's tendency to drown when submerged unless they were aquatic themselves. TrapMan has been staying mostly quiet until this point, but when he reacted, it was with apparent outrage. "D-Dammit! I want a personal laboratory of my own!" he announced, stomping his feet irritably. "Where I can have cute test subjects... no, better, twins... doing this and that, while I watch from a safe distance, alone!"
"... The 'alone' part isn't going to happen until we find a way to resolve the handcuff situation," Novelty remarked, but she couldn't muster much more than that. She looked somehow more exhausted than the sisters did, after watching experiment #4.
Glitches soon followed, as Arch figured they would. At first glance, they proved to be basically ignorable: Madness looked like her skin was tanning, while Method's hair was growing. Pretty simple stuff. Shortly afterward, however, they both looked momentarily queasy, then began vomiting Hex-fluid onto the floor uncontrollably, which was almost as unpleasant to watch as it was to actually be afflicted by. "Oh gross," TrapMan murmured, suddenly losing his buzz. It would probably be relieving for everyone to know that at least he wasn't into this.
"D-Do something!" Novelty demanded, but the girls were already on top of it. They weren't any more eager to continue hurling up Hex than anyone was to watch them do it, so they ran to get themselves showered off as soon as possible. All of this was putting something of a damper on Arch's speech about spreading his creepy brand of tentacle love across the net. "Geez... What are you three thinking?"
"Well... that little detour aside... Archie is right!" Madness exclaimed, bouncing back with surprising quickness and raising her arms above her head. "You'd be surprised how addictive this sort of thing is. Why, my discovering it has practically justified all costs of the experiment itself. I feel compelled to spread it to others now~"
"... I'd rather not be molested by a creepy tentacle creature and barf up my guts, thank you," Novelty rebutted. TrapMan remained quiet, but the fact that he kept subtly turning his head down to Novelty combined with Arch's research and newfound experience with the pervert psyche made it obvious that he was trying to think of a way to get her involved without having to suffer being molested by Hex himself.
"There's one more experiment, right, Archie?" Madness asked, hugging her sister close to herself. Method was silently running her fingers through the back of her own swimsuit, trying to discretely get out the wedgie that Hex had inadvertently given her. "Don't keep us in suspense!"
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Somewhere around the time Hex mutated into the giant globe, a decidedly sinking sensation had begun worming its way into Arch's gut. The first few experiments had been all fun and games, both in the original run and this one...and then Arch distinctly remembered things turning sour the moment Hex was asked to comprehend and enact force. The Hexosphere was innocent enough on its own, if bequeathed with sinister undertones if one happened to know the truth behind the glitch-gestalt, but Arch was fully prepared to start yelling out the twins' safewords for this last experiment, just in case they didn't...or couldn't.
Alas, that line of thinking had to be put on hold the moment Arch saw what effect being surface-immersed in Hex had on the twins. "Oh dear," he muttered, thankful he'd remembered to keep his face on; what he'd actually wanted to say had included a good deal more cussing. Casting around for something to add, he did his best to combine grease with a 'what-can-you-do' face and exclaimed, "Well, that's glitches for you! Never a dull moment with Hex around, that's for sure." He did his best not to stare too much at Madness and Method in their Hex-altered bikinis - even if his character demanded a quota of perversion, thinking about Navis that looked that much like humans made his head hurt. "Well, TrapMan, I'm frankly quite flattered! It's always a ~pleasure~ to get another interested in my line of work," he chose to say instead, deflecting attention off himself as best as he could. "Buuuut, enough about me, let's put the spotlight back on the star of the show! Hex, you of course remember how the last Experiment #5 went, yes? Of course you do."
Despite the heavily-applied rhetoric, Hex still replied, "Affirmative. Experiment No.5: Differing transM-M-M-missions. Conceptualizing force routines, embrace routines..." Voice encoder as mechanical as ever, one could almost hear the clicking of the Navi's internal systems as it parsed its communication out into speech.
"Splendid!" Arch clapped his hands together (and after noticing bug splatter on his palms, discreetly wiped them on his jeans). "Now, it would be easy to just recreate the same experiment from last time, but..." he broke off with a glance in Madness' direction, "...well, that just wouldn't as fun, would it? So I want you to think up something different for our lovely ladies. Oh, but keep in mind, the ~recipients~ are the same as ever."
The misanthropic everyman then turned to directly address Madness this time, giving her a saucy wink. "I think Maddy here wants a little more rough loving from Hex, here. And make no mistake, Maddy dear, I wouldn't be saddling you up if I didn't think you couldn't take it!" Arch could think of no way of conveying what he really meant without alerting their watchdogs, but he hoped that Madness would remember full-well what happened in the last Experiment No.5, and prefer to keep her sister from potentially experiencing anything like what she'd gone through. There was no choice here, but to take the leap of faith and continue along...and perhaps hope that whatever 'force routine' Hex was creating, it wouldn't involve surprise dunkings.
Whatever Arch, Madness, or anyone else present may have thinking, it was too late to change anything; Hex finally completed his processing with an audible *click* echoed from somewhere in his databanks, and announced, "Conceptualization complete, commencing Experiment No.5: differing transmissions." There was another second of dialogue, then a short, angry buzz. "Error: insufficient vectors. Debating...debating complete, rectifying," the gestalt Navi began to pulse, drawing in protoplasm into his avatar. A command seemingly in place to limit height, the humanoid shape bloated, throbbing like a diseased heart, and proceeded to split itself in half, slow and grotesquely fascinating to behold. The added mass became self-evident the moment each half began to grow another arm, misshapen heads filling out and re-aligning. Long strands stretched between the two bodies as one Hex became two, still-forming limbs pushing at their opposite bodies in an attempt to hasten the full-body mitosis. The process finally finished with the connecting strands splitting, leaving two identical Hex avatars looming from the morphic pool. "Executing embrace routines," Hex parsed out, his voice emanating from the entire protoplasmic construct at large.
One Hex body moved to approach Method, the pool it rose from stretching and trailing to match its course of motion. It stopped right in front of the voluptuous Elec-elemental, arms raised as though to wrap around her. Any indications that this would turn out precisely as the original had, however, were dashed the instant Hex was pressed against Method...and continued pressing. By virtue of his unbelievable morphic capacity, the entire avatar rippled, making the electric twin's skin tingle with glitch-feeling, and began flattening out as Hex enveloped her body within his entirely. Only her head was left 'above water', as it was, and there was a brief moment wherein Hex and Method were face-to-lack-of-face, close enough for his optics to register every minute detail in her immaculately-coded features. All the while, her whole body from the neck down was buzzing and tingling from the unique sensation of coming into contact with the glitch-Navi.
The moment passed, and Hex's head swiveled around Method's, as though he were about to continue wrapping his way around her until he was out the other end. For a second, it felt like precisely that, with the majority of Hex's mass moving behind her. Then she would come to realize that while he was indeed moving, he was still attached to her somehow. A quick look down would confirm the finding: while her torso was untouched, her arms were snagged in perfectly spaced loops of protoplasm still attached to Hex, gradually getting pulled behind her as he moved. Her legs, similarly, were bound in a series of interweaving tentacles that, while not uncomfortable, still wrapped quite tightly around her thighs, digging in just enough for Arch to warrant taking a moment to faux-marvel at. The oddly intimate bond only gained more erotic charge when her arms were pulled back enough to push her chest out, doing a remarkable job of emphasizing her sizable bosom.
While Method was (hopefully unintentionally) having her body flaunted for all present to marvel at, Hex's avatar rotated its axes directly behind her. The head spun around in an utterly seamless feat of morphism, his arms bent until the boneless limbs no longer looked backwards, and the slight curves indicating his dorsal and ventral orientation reversed themselves with tiny shifts in the protoplasmic body. Finally, two thin strands rose from his pool, right beneath Method's feet. With motions that could have felt ticklish or pleasurable, or anywhere between the two, the twin tentacles threaded and melded their way through the intricate bindings holding Hex to his captive, binding legs and arms together. Only then did Hex break the ties between himself and the binds, the new threads keeping the entire ensemble bound to the morphic pool and wrapped together. To prevent a loss in balance, his rarely-used hands were brought up once more, this time to be wrapped in a firm grip around Method's waist. Bond finally complete, Hex's whole body began pulsing against his captive's, forcefully pumping aberrant code into her system via the contact.
<(Reference)>
The entire process had taken perhaps a minute at absolute most, yet the intricacy of the tie and the strange mix of intimacy and perversion was positively mesmerizing to behold; even Arch hadn't been able to watch with some level of interest, which left him feeling strangely enlightened yet uncomfortable in his own skin. "W...ahem, weeeeell, I'm certainly glad I'm not the only artist present today! Excellent show, Hex, excellent show!" he applauded his Navi anyway. "So, is Maddy's side of the fun ready yet? Don't be stingy, let her in on action too!" he added, trying to decide whether his words had a better chance of getting things over with quickly, or sealing Madness into another terrible horror.
"Saving state...state saved. Executing force routines. Corrupting...corrUpTing..." the motionless Hex-avatar fritzed, flashing with static for a split second.
"Um...Hex, you alright there? We're waiting on you, man!" Aaaaand there it was, the sinking feeling right in the pit of Arch's stomach.
"COrrUptInG...corrupting...corrRrRRruptiIiIiIing..." It was as though Hex's voice was stuck on repeat. With every repeat, the edges of his avatar blurred, fading. Static fuzz began spreading across his protoplasm, graphics glitching themselves out of existence as Hex continued growing his internal glitches, letting them spread and consume his state of being. The protoplasmic pool split, half retracting to the unchanged avatar binding Method, and the other half writhing in a mess of seizing, glitching tentacles. The humanoid body contorted, humanoid shape losing cohesion, mutating further and further until...
"CORRUPTIIII-"
Without warning, the Hex-avatar's chest exploded, spurting a stream of noxious, pitch-black static into the air; the virtual aberration pooled into a dense, opaque cloud, hovering in the middle of the lab. A horrible howling, rushing noise that almost resembled a modulated scream filled the room as more and more of Hex's systems were consumed by the sentient glitch, fed to the beast that was, ultimately, himself. The avatar shrank and crumpled like a deflated balloon, the static eating away at the systems and protoplasm within until there was nothing left, translucent white disappearing in favour of deep, roiling black. This was the inevitable conclusion of Hex's being: an unrestrained, living abomination of the Net world, known as a glitch.
"Oh...my...what?" Arch's tiny utterance trailed off into nothing. He was frozen at his laptop, unable to do a thing but watch in horror. Last Experiment No.5 had only become freaky after he'd learned the truth from Madness. This, though...this went even beyond Navi-cannibalism, the man thought. Hex was acting less like a Bug-type Navi and more like some kind of virtual Cthulhu: something that flat-out didn't belong in the Net. "There's nothing I can do about him," Arch thought, fighting the urge to laugh hysterically. "He repels all delete commands, and yeah, I could try and ask the NetPolice to just disable EJO and do it manually, but then there'd be questions...what can I really do about him?"
While Arch was busy having a minor panic attack, the once-Hex made its move. With Method trapped by the pulsing binds of her own Hex, she could only watch as her sister was engulfed in the opaque cloud of the avatar-turned-abomination. From the outside, the howling of the static storm muffled all sound coming from within; anything could have been happening inside, for all that anybody could see or hear.
To Madness, the entire world would have appeared to vanish in a haze of roiling, wailing dark, as though God turned off the light and the fog rolled in; it was a stark contrast to the endless white of her last excursion into Hex, a wholly different brand of horror. Any attempts to escape the cloud would prove most futile; the Hex-abomination would move with her, keeping her right in the centre.
All around Madness pulsed a sickening mien of darkness, heaving with swells of nameless shades of void and misshapen faces. The mouths opened and stretched, deformed to maddening levels, until the jaws extended past the face and consumed it all in self-cannibalism. They crowded around her, caressing her face, smoothing her unkempt hair, stroking down her back with the sides of their fangs.
Behind the nightmarish visages, barely perceptible and all the more unsettling for it, were silhouettes of what might have once been people. Most of the shapes were humanoid, reaching out with wispy arms towards the Navi trapped amongst them. Others were cowering, trying to shy away from Madness, shielding or clutching their faces. Some were completely motionless, patches of stillness at odds with the twisting shadow. For want of mouths, their faces split and torn open one by one, and as a single entity, began speaking in whispers that scraped at Madness' ears.
let us in let us in let us in
it hurts so much make it stop please make it stop
end us
feed us
this hunger will never cease
"Become one with us." The last voice was unlike the others: clear, familiar, right behind her. Floating amidst nothingness was Egomorph, eye glowing crimson with the rage and misery echoing around her and Madness. "Become one with us," she repeated, tone bereft of feeling, cupping Madness' face in tiny pale child's hands. Her body dangled lifelessly as she floated, held up by the incandescent Manifest Conduit behind her. "We are one and yet we are not one. Your heart is isolated - you are alone. Make us whole, one who is alone. Make us whole...make us whole..." Egomorph's eye was glowing brighter and the static aberration all around her was convulsing as though it was going to swallow her whole and the whispers were all around and everything was getting darker and darker and darker
"...til. P...stil." Another voice pierced the wailing darkness, cutting through the whispers. "Pistil! PISTIL!" Arch shouted, voice finally breaking through from the outside by virtue of good old-fashioned stubbornness.
The Conclusion storm heard the command but did not act upon it, in possession of little more than a beast's mind and no conscience to speak of. The Hex-avatar, save-stated from the beginning and running autonomous of Hex's separate body, did heed the call of its Operator. "Operator override, ending routines. Deleting saved state..." it buzzed, and with barely a thought from the twin body, Conclusion.EXE was scattered. Bits of junk data flickered around the room like tarnished fae-lights before vanishing themselves, and Madness was left in the middle, free to react as she pleased. Method's Hex-avatar released its bonds, tentacles unwinding from around her body in seconds, and Hex was standing in his corner of the room as though the entire experiment had never happened.
Arch, realizing that he'd inadvertently drawn a considerable amount of attention by shouting, scrabbled to cover his tracks. "Hex, buddy, are you alright? Too many glitches? Talk to me, man!" he tried to act as though this had all been some horrific mistake, as though this was a revelation of nature rather than just one more confirmation. He turned to Novelty and TrapMan, trying to paint grease over his shaken sunken eyes and mostly failing. "Oh, and the experiment, it was, it was going so well! I'm...well, I'm really sorry about this. Hex is a Bug-type by his nature and his glitches can get pretty strong, but I've never seen anything like this before. He...he probably just overextended himself, pushed too hard. Yes, he should probably get some rest. Oh my." His heart pounded in his temples, his mouth dried faster than a water pitcher in northern NetFrica...lord have mercy, he needed to not be sober right now.
Hex's subtle wavering was in stark contrast to the convulsing darkess he'd existed as not minutes before. Comparatively, there was something almost cartoonishly docile to the body-gestalt's mindlessness: barely sentient, yet incredibly intelligent, nothing but a pool of agender protoplasm and the black digits fritzing about within, in a world of post-Turing AI. And yet, for all the complexity of a human mind and the potential for wildly creative horror it contained...all that those present had witnessed was the result of a single, primitive concept embodied and made manifest: the inexorable, insatiable lust that was hunger.
Alas, that line of thinking had to be put on hold the moment Arch saw what effect being surface-immersed in Hex had on the twins. "Oh dear," he muttered, thankful he'd remembered to keep his face on; what he'd actually wanted to say had included a good deal more cussing. Casting around for something to add, he did his best to combine grease with a 'what-can-you-do' face and exclaimed, "Well, that's glitches for you! Never a dull moment with Hex around, that's for sure." He did his best not to stare too much at Madness and Method in their Hex-altered bikinis - even if his character demanded a quota of perversion, thinking about Navis that looked that much like humans made his head hurt. "Well, TrapMan, I'm frankly quite flattered! It's always a ~pleasure~ to get another interested in my line of work," he chose to say instead, deflecting attention off himself as best as he could. "Buuuut, enough about me, let's put the spotlight back on the star of the show! Hex, you of course remember how the last Experiment #5 went, yes? Of course you do."
Despite the heavily-applied rhetoric, Hex still replied, "Affirmative. Experiment No.5: Differing transM-M-M-missions. Conceptualizing force routines, embrace routines..." Voice encoder as mechanical as ever, one could almost hear the clicking of the Navi's internal systems as it parsed its communication out into speech.
"Splendid!" Arch clapped his hands together (and after noticing bug splatter on his palms, discreetly wiped them on his jeans). "Now, it would be easy to just recreate the same experiment from last time, but..." he broke off with a glance in Madness' direction, "...well, that just wouldn't as fun, would it? So I want you to think up something different for our lovely ladies. Oh, but keep in mind, the ~recipients~ are the same as ever."
The misanthropic everyman then turned to directly address Madness this time, giving her a saucy wink. "I think Maddy here wants a little more rough loving from Hex, here. And make no mistake, Maddy dear, I wouldn't be saddling you up if I didn't think you couldn't take it!" Arch could think of no way of conveying what he really meant without alerting their watchdogs, but he hoped that Madness would remember full-well what happened in the last Experiment No.5, and prefer to keep her sister from potentially experiencing anything like what she'd gone through. There was no choice here, but to take the leap of faith and continue along...and perhaps hope that whatever 'force routine' Hex was creating, it wouldn't involve surprise dunkings.
Whatever Arch, Madness, or anyone else present may have thinking, it was too late to change anything; Hex finally completed his processing with an audible *click* echoed from somewhere in his databanks, and announced, "Conceptualization complete, commencing Experiment No.5: differing transmissions." There was another second of dialogue, then a short, angry buzz. "Error: insufficient vectors. Debating...debating complete, rectifying," the gestalt Navi began to pulse, drawing in protoplasm into his avatar. A command seemingly in place to limit height, the humanoid shape bloated, throbbing like a diseased heart, and proceeded to split itself in half, slow and grotesquely fascinating to behold. The added mass became self-evident the moment each half began to grow another arm, misshapen heads filling out and re-aligning. Long strands stretched between the two bodies as one Hex became two, still-forming limbs pushing at their opposite bodies in an attempt to hasten the full-body mitosis. The process finally finished with the connecting strands splitting, leaving two identical Hex avatars looming from the morphic pool. "Executing embrace routines," Hex parsed out, his voice emanating from the entire protoplasmic construct at large.
One Hex body moved to approach Method, the pool it rose from stretching and trailing to match its course of motion. It stopped right in front of the voluptuous Elec-elemental, arms raised as though to wrap around her. Any indications that this would turn out precisely as the original had, however, were dashed the instant Hex was pressed against Method...and continued pressing. By virtue of his unbelievable morphic capacity, the entire avatar rippled, making the electric twin's skin tingle with glitch-feeling, and began flattening out as Hex enveloped her body within his entirely. Only her head was left 'above water', as it was, and there was a brief moment wherein Hex and Method were face-to-lack-of-face, close enough for his optics to register every minute detail in her immaculately-coded features. All the while, her whole body from the neck down was buzzing and tingling from the unique sensation of coming into contact with the glitch-Navi.
The moment passed, and Hex's head swiveled around Method's, as though he were about to continue wrapping his way around her until he was out the other end. For a second, it felt like precisely that, with the majority of Hex's mass moving behind her. Then she would come to realize that while he was indeed moving, he was still attached to her somehow. A quick look down would confirm the finding: while her torso was untouched, her arms were snagged in perfectly spaced loops of protoplasm still attached to Hex, gradually getting pulled behind her as he moved. Her legs, similarly, were bound in a series of interweaving tentacles that, while not uncomfortable, still wrapped quite tightly around her thighs, digging in just enough for Arch to warrant taking a moment to faux-marvel at. The oddly intimate bond only gained more erotic charge when her arms were pulled back enough to push her chest out, doing a remarkable job of emphasizing her sizable bosom.
While Method was (hopefully unintentionally) having her body flaunted for all present to marvel at, Hex's avatar rotated its axes directly behind her. The head spun around in an utterly seamless feat of morphism, his arms bent until the boneless limbs no longer looked backwards, and the slight curves indicating his dorsal and ventral orientation reversed themselves with tiny shifts in the protoplasmic body. Finally, two thin strands rose from his pool, right beneath Method's feet. With motions that could have felt ticklish or pleasurable, or anywhere between the two, the twin tentacles threaded and melded their way through the intricate bindings holding Hex to his captive, binding legs and arms together. Only then did Hex break the ties between himself and the binds, the new threads keeping the entire ensemble bound to the morphic pool and wrapped together. To prevent a loss in balance, his rarely-used hands were brought up once more, this time to be wrapped in a firm grip around Method's waist. Bond finally complete, Hex's whole body began pulsing against his captive's, forcefully pumping aberrant code into her system via the contact.
<(Reference)>
The entire process had taken perhaps a minute at absolute most, yet the intricacy of the tie and the strange mix of intimacy and perversion was positively mesmerizing to behold; even Arch hadn't been able to watch with some level of interest, which left him feeling strangely enlightened yet uncomfortable in his own skin. "W...ahem, weeeeell, I'm certainly glad I'm not the only artist present today! Excellent show, Hex, excellent show!" he applauded his Navi anyway. "So, is Maddy's side of the fun ready yet? Don't be stingy, let her in on action too!" he added, trying to decide whether his words had a better chance of getting things over with quickly, or sealing Madness into another terrible horror.
"Saving state...state saved. Executing force routines. Corrupting...corrUpTing..." the motionless Hex-avatar fritzed, flashing with static for a split second.
"Um...Hex, you alright there? We're waiting on you, man!" Aaaaand there it was, the sinking feeling right in the pit of Arch's stomach.
"COrrUptInG...corrupting...corrRrRRruptiIiIiIing..." It was as though Hex's voice was stuck on repeat. With every repeat, the edges of his avatar blurred, fading. Static fuzz began spreading across his protoplasm, graphics glitching themselves out of existence as Hex continued growing his internal glitches, letting them spread and consume his state of being. The protoplasmic pool split, half retracting to the unchanged avatar binding Method, and the other half writhing in a mess of seizing, glitching tentacles. The humanoid body contorted, humanoid shape losing cohesion, mutating further and further until...
"CORRUPTIIII-"
Without warning, the Hex-avatar's chest exploded, spurting a stream of noxious, pitch-black static into the air; the virtual aberration pooled into a dense, opaque cloud, hovering in the middle of the lab. A horrible howling, rushing noise that almost resembled a modulated scream filled the room as more and more of Hex's systems were consumed by the sentient glitch, fed to the beast that was, ultimately, himself. The avatar shrank and crumpled like a deflated balloon, the static eating away at the systems and protoplasm within until there was nothing left, translucent white disappearing in favour of deep, roiling black. This was the inevitable conclusion of Hex's being: an unrestrained, living abomination of the Net world, known as a glitch.
"Oh...my...what?" Arch's tiny utterance trailed off into nothing. He was frozen at his laptop, unable to do a thing but watch in horror. Last Experiment No.5 had only become freaky after he'd learned the truth from Madness. This, though...this went even beyond Navi-cannibalism, the man thought. Hex was acting less like a Bug-type Navi and more like some kind of virtual Cthulhu: something that flat-out didn't belong in the Net. "There's nothing I can do about him," Arch thought, fighting the urge to laugh hysterically. "He repels all delete commands, and yeah, I could try and ask the NetPolice to just disable EJO and do it manually, but then there'd be questions...what can I really do about him?"
While Arch was busy having a minor panic attack, the once-Hex made its move. With Method trapped by the pulsing binds of her own Hex, she could only watch as her sister was engulfed in the opaque cloud of the avatar-turned-abomination. From the outside, the howling of the static storm muffled all sound coming from within; anything could have been happening inside, for all that anybody could see or hear.
To Madness, the entire world would have appeared to vanish in a haze of roiling, wailing dark, as though God turned off the light and the fog rolled in; it was a stark contrast to the endless white of her last excursion into Hex, a wholly different brand of horror. Any attempts to escape the cloud would prove most futile; the Hex-abomination would move with her, keeping her right in the centre.
All around Madness pulsed a sickening mien of darkness, heaving with swells of nameless shades of void and misshapen faces. The mouths opened and stretched, deformed to maddening levels, until the jaws extended past the face and consumed it all in self-cannibalism. They crowded around her, caressing her face, smoothing her unkempt hair, stroking down her back with the sides of their fangs.
Behind the nightmarish visages, barely perceptible and all the more unsettling for it, were silhouettes of what might have once been people. Most of the shapes were humanoid, reaching out with wispy arms towards the Navi trapped amongst them. Others were cowering, trying to shy away from Madness, shielding or clutching their faces. Some were completely motionless, patches of stillness at odds with the twisting shadow. For want of mouths, their faces split and torn open one by one, and as a single entity, began speaking in whispers that scraped at Madness' ears.
let us in let us in let us in
it hurts so much make it stop please make it stop
end us
feed us
this hunger will never cease
"Become one with us." The last voice was unlike the others: clear, familiar, right behind her. Floating amidst nothingness was Egomorph, eye glowing crimson with the rage and misery echoing around her and Madness. "Become one with us," she repeated, tone bereft of feeling, cupping Madness' face in tiny pale child's hands. Her body dangled lifelessly as she floated, held up by the incandescent Manifest Conduit behind her. "We are one and yet we are not one. Your heart is isolated - you are alone. Make us whole, one who is alone. Make us whole...make us whole..." Egomorph's eye was glowing brighter and the static aberration all around her was convulsing as though it was going to swallow her whole and the whispers were all around and everything was getting darker and darker and darker
"...til. P...stil." Another voice pierced the wailing darkness, cutting through the whispers. "Pistil! PISTIL!" Arch shouted, voice finally breaking through from the outside by virtue of good old-fashioned stubbornness.
The Conclusion storm heard the command but did not act upon it, in possession of little more than a beast's mind and no conscience to speak of. The Hex-avatar, save-stated from the beginning and running autonomous of Hex's separate body, did heed the call of its Operator. "Operator override, ending routines. Deleting saved state..." it buzzed, and with barely a thought from the twin body, Conclusion.EXE was scattered. Bits of junk data flickered around the room like tarnished fae-lights before vanishing themselves, and Madness was left in the middle, free to react as she pleased. Method's Hex-avatar released its bonds, tentacles unwinding from around her body in seconds, and Hex was standing in his corner of the room as though the entire experiment had never happened.
Arch, realizing that he'd inadvertently drawn a considerable amount of attention by shouting, scrabbled to cover his tracks. "Hex, buddy, are you alright? Too many glitches? Talk to me, man!" he tried to act as though this had all been some horrific mistake, as though this was a revelation of nature rather than just one more confirmation. He turned to Novelty and TrapMan, trying to paint grease over his shaken sunken eyes and mostly failing. "Oh, and the experiment, it was, it was going so well! I'm...well, I'm really sorry about this. Hex is a Bug-type by his nature and his glitches can get pretty strong, but I've never seen anything like this before. He...he probably just overextended himself, pushed too hard. Yes, he should probably get some rest. Oh my." His heart pounded in his temples, his mouth dried faster than a water pitcher in northern NetFrica...lord have mercy, he needed to not be sober right now.
Hex's subtle wavering was in stark contrast to the convulsing darkess he'd existed as not minutes before. Comparatively, there was something almost cartoonishly docile to the body-gestalt's mindlessness: barely sentient, yet incredibly intelligent, nothing but a pool of agender protoplasm and the black digits fritzing about within, in a world of post-Turing AI. And yet, for all the complexity of a human mind and the potential for wildly creative horror it contained...all that those present had witnessed was the result of a single, primitive concept embodied and made manifest: the inexorable, insatiable lust that was hunger.
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"Don't tease me, Archie! You know that this experiment isn't about what I want, it's all about scientific advancement! Right?" Madness gross-chuckled along with Hex's operator, giving a playful wink-wink that was either part of the act or her just goofing off now that AlchemyMan wasn't around. "We're starting with Sis again? Aw, don't make me wait!"
Method gulped, preparing herself for another embarrassing, tingly hug (which, granted, hadn't been entirely unpleasant, besides the glitching). Things never go how one expects, though, in science nor acting; Hex changed up the formula by passing her through him, emerging on the other side, simultaneously binding her and pressing against her from behind. She gave assorted minor protests as this proceeded, but nothing that included her safe-word. Her face showed clearly that, unlike her sister, she was neither possibly enjoying the experiment nor even pretending that she was, given that she was now beet-red and clenching her teeth. Once she realized that the form of Hex behind her wasn't packing a tendril in at least one key position, she calmed down a bit. The position wasn't comfortable, but, like the work of any S&M professional, Hex's handiwork applied just the right amount of tension to make the captive feel powerless and possibly going to have some rope marks, without making them feel like they were going to dislocate a shoulder. She said nothing, almost as if she was gagged, although Hex had applied no such thing.
Madness' reaction had some mixture of shock and being turned-on, with an awkward smile half-cocked on her face. "Wow, sis... I guess, in the end, Hex is a butt guy," she chuckled, which did nothing to improve her sister's attitude towards the situation.
"Hfff... Hfff...! I feel like I could watch this for the rest of my life...!" TrapMan huffed, sounding unsettlingly as though he was currently masturbating. Thankfully, one hand was still hanging at his side and the other was still attached to his NP officer cohort.
Novelty said nothing for a while, but stared in awe instead. Finally, she glanced over to make sure TrapMan was indeed not pleasuring himself, which she'd vowed to never let happen as long as they were bound together. Once she confirmed that, she cleared her throat to try to speak up, but gulped it back down, as she wasn't sure what would be appropriate.
"Alright, Hex! Me next, me next! My butt is just as good as my sister's! Honest, we're exactly the same, you know?" Madness called out, almost as though she'd forgotten what happened last time somehow. She leapt forward and spread her arms, as if she intended to hug Hex rather than the other way around. Unfortunately for Madness, what Hex arrived upon next was not a hug, nor was it a method of bondage, a sexual behavior, an act, nor even a scientific experiment. Instead, blackness erupted out of his body in an obscene way, something that anyone in the room would have a hard time putting into words. Madness had enough time to comprehend that, just like last time, Hex wasn't intent on doing anything related to the experiment; Hex was possibly not even in control of what he was doing. She didn't have time to ponder whether it was worse for him to be doing this with no conscious thought or purposely trying to consume other navis. Tellingly, this time around, fire began to burst across the skin of her hands and up her arms; there was no doubting that she was actually going to attack Hex, which wasn't anywhere inside their agreement of handling the situation. Could anyone blame her, though? "Back off-!" she cried out, no hint of friendliness or joking in her voice; the emotions were instead fear and only the paper-thin self restraint that separates an officer who pulls his gun out as a warning and one who fires away immediately in self defense. It didn't amount to much, as she was
"W-What the heck is this? I can't get buzzed off of this," TrapMan weakly joked, before realizing from everyone's reactions that the show wasn't really a show any more.
"Stop him! Stop him now!" Novelty warned Arch, showing him a fierceness that revealed she'd probably have turned a weapon on him if he wasn't outside the net. She had already deployed a Varitails weapon, however, and the only thing that was stopping her from using it was trying to figure out which point of Hex needed to be attacked. "Are you doing this, Arch, or are we being attacked by the enemy?! Are you with the Mafia?!" Adding to the chaos, the anti-glitch solution, which all involved in the original experiment recognized as potentially uncomfortable, now came raining down over the entire room in concentrated, liquid form, like a sprinkler system.
"Oh, hell! It's EvolutionMan! H-H-he found me!" TrapMan whimpered inside his helmet, falling over onto his butt and dragging Novelty down along with the clattering of his heavy armor. "Hrk... Krhrghhh! I was just doing recon on the NP, I swear! I'm useful! I'm not betraying the Mafia! I'm not a weakkhhhrkhurfhuuuff!" he groaned until, unable to keep going any more, he collapsed into a coughing fit.
"Get a hold on yourself! TrapMan!" Novelty gasped, shaking her unfortunate ally and slapping his helmet to try to get him under control. The picture was starting to get less chaotic, now that she realized Hex wasn't spreading to attack the others (in fact, the one holding on to Method looked perfectly docile), but she also understood that Madness' status was unconfirmed and that she needed to act. Doing anything while being held to the ground by the babbling ex-mafioso was impossible, though.
Method struggled back against the Hex restricting her, but didn't have the physical power to break free. "Madness?! Sister!" she called out, more affected by the panic that everyone else had taken on than anything she actually knew. As a person of rationality, Method could construe several key points that ought to have calmed her: whatever secret Hex and Madness had shared, she'd been left out of it and its omission had caused AlchemyMan to ask for an investigation into the experiments. Madness had been shaken about it, which she knew as a sister, and Arch had also been, which she knew by his own reactions now. Whatever it was, however, Madness had survived it once and taken the mission again, knowing the risk she was taking. So, whatever it was, Madness would definitely come out of this fine. All reason, her guiding principle, told her this. And yet... she couldn't imagine anything emerging from that cloud of blackness again.
----------------------------
Whereas Method's guiding principles were reasoning, order, and logical induction, her own were faith that anything can happen at any time, that no one can be prepared for everything, and that the universe worked in mysterious ways. All of those principles were proving themselves inside of Hex's dark space, but not in the happy-go-lucky way she usually liked to see them apply herself. As many unspeakable things around her vied for her attention, some of their number visually, innumerable voices audibly, she found her own face frozen in disbelief, just as Arch's had been, with tears and anguish both wanting to come out, yet bottle-necked inside.
"This can't really be happening... We all agreed... Hex agreed not to eat me and Arch ... We made safe words... We're inside the glitch laboratory, with other NP officers... We've got the anti-glitch solution in the event that anything goes wrong..."
"I can't doubt it any longer... With all of these voices telling me that they're in pain, that they're hungry, that they're hungry for their own kind... Hex isn't a technological marvel, nor is he a misunderstood navi that needs research to overcome his issues... Whatever this is... Whether it's Hex or something else, it doesn't need to be understood... It needs to be destroyed..."
Flames continued to creep across her body as the voices assuaged her from every direction, burning the hands and mouths that insisted upon touching her. The fire popped out at random points now, shooting outward in spikes and arcs, as her eyes began to swirl in a crazy way, imitating the seemingly aesthetic movements behind her old goggles.
"Don't touch me... Keep your mouths off of me... Who would possibly create something like this...? No matter how much you think of the world as a serious of random incidents... This isn't random, it can't be... Someone had to have a huge amount of malice to program something like this... So it's only right that it be destroyed, wiped off of the net, so that everyone is spared from it... Just because I wanted to help Hex, that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to defend myself... and to defend everyone... right?"
"But what am I, even...? I was born by a glitch myself... maybe Hex has just as much of a right to exist as I do... even if he's like this... or maybe... neither of us need to exist..."
"Sister and I... we should just be Method... and this creature... he shouldn't be... he just shouldn't be... Or maybe it's too late to become one with my sister again... maybe now... maybe now I'm going to become one... with this evil thing..."
She barely recognized the voice of Egomorph, but with the tears she'd fought back last time running down her face, she listened to the creature's words. In spite of herself, a stupid, crazy smile spread across her face, reminiscent of her goofy behavior, but this time, entirely, seriously insane. "Become one with you? I'm not part of you, though... But I'm not part of Method either..." she spoke through her choked throat with surprising clarity. In this moment, she seemed to correct the spinning of her eyes, the painful gape of her jaw, and became her former self. "I split off from Method and became my own person... I'm a real person... All of you are real people!" she shouted, not really comprehending who she was reasoning with. "There is no 'one!' There is no 'need to be one!' When I broke off from my sister, that was the fortune and circumstance demanding two unique individuals! The universe doesn't want a 'one' like this! It's demanding we all be separate again... You're not food! You all need to get out of here, just like I need... I need to get out of here!" she shrieked, thrashing about and sending pillars of fire careening into all parts of the darkness around her.
----------------------------------
When Madness emerged from the cloud of Hex again, she was covered in flames and spewing them dangerously in all directions. The other navis were repulsed by the heat, intensity, and unexpectedness of the attack, before the navi simply vanished from the net in an ordinary teleport beam. TrapMan may have seriously soiled himself at some point and appeared to be unable to get up. Thus, Novelty spoke while kneeling upon the ground. "Just what... on earth was that?" she asked, glaring very seriously at Arch. She didn't seem to be buying the act any more. Whatever glitches the two sisters had gotten were but an afterthought, as they had vanished almost instantaneously due to the saturation of glitch liquid spraying the room.
Amazingly, Method attempted to salvage the situation. "My sister... she probably, erm... she probably just got overwhelmed... I know we were all kind of freaking out there. That's the thing with experiments like this. You never really know what is going to happen, at least not without repeat testing," she explained. The last part seemed added in some feeble attempt to cling on to the idea that there was some pattern and logic to all of the behavior they'd seen from Hex so far.
"I... I thought I was gonna die..." TrapMan huffed from inside his helmet, his voice muffled and out of breath.
"I can't believe you omitted something so unexplainable and dangerous from the report you gave AlchemyMan, though..." Novelty added, crossing her arms. "He ought to know."
"... Should he?" Method asked. She gazed into Novelty's eyes with seriousness that showed another meaning. Novelty seemed to understand and nodded slowly. "That is... Perhaps it needs more investigation... But AlchemyMan has enough on his plate already." The two of them seemed to mutually understand now why AlchemyMan needed to be nowhere near this... but it wasn't sympathy for Arch or his navi that Arch saw in their eyes. It was caution. They weren't afraid of Hex being imprisoned or experimented on at this point, nearly so much as they were afraid of AlchemyMan finding a way to use whatever Hex had just shown them.
"Minor suggestion: for future experiments, keep the first part and ditch the last," TrapMan added, breaking the serious mood as he stood back up to his feet, still shaking a bit.
Interrupting, a familiar face that had been gone for some time emerged: Maso Cuocco, who appeared upon a viewscreen nearby Method. He was grinning handsomely, with his green goggles clinging to his face and hiding his eyes. "Thank you for observing, Novelty, TrapMan! If I may, could you please exit the room? I want to bounce a few post-experiment concepts off of Archie here," he chuckled. It seemed that he had picked up Madness' naming scheme for Hex's operator at some point. Novelty nodded, then quickly exited, practically dragging TrapMan along with her. As soon as the two of them were gone, the smile left Maso's face. His eyes couldn't be seen due to his eyewear, but he'd lost his usual animation. "I saw it this time... I was there, watching what Hex did to Madness. This isn't something that you walk away from," he spoke softly.
Method held her hands to her mouth, seeing that their original goal of protecting the two from NP custody had been altered. "Why? What happened to Madness?" she asked hesitantly.
"Madness will be fine. Arch and Hex here, on the other hand, are at a crossroads," he remarked, keeping his focus on the operator. "Because as a member of the NetPolice, I can't allow you to just leave and go on harboring this... whatever it is," he murmured. It wasn't hard to sense some contempt beneath his calm demeanor, which ought to be understandable, given what he'd just seen his navi go through and what he had to go off of. "The only right thing to do is to research it. And correct it." Again, the hardness came through in his voice. "So, the way I figure it, you've got two options. The first: we call this an experiment and a contract. You get the pay you were promised this mission and, in return, you agree to work with the NP to resolve Hex's issue. I'll table my own glitch research and devote myself to this, foremost. I have generous sample data that I can use to investigate Hex already due to our experiments, and hopefully, you'll cooperate so that we can get some more. That's my offer to you and my promise, as a scientific genius and a friend. You'll have assistance from all of us, Hex won't live in captivity, and all you have to promise is that you will ally yourself with the NP for the time being and keep a close eye on your navi."
"The second possibility. If you won't accept my offer, I'm going to consider what you've done here a virtual crime perpetrated by your navi against mine. Twice. I'm going to consider Hex an active threat. I'm going to consider you an enabler refusing treatment. I'm going to speak to the Prosecutions Department to get Hex brought in, wherein he will live in captivity, possibly after being sedated, injured, or whatever is necessary, to the extent that the Prosecutions Department must do so to ensure his cooperation. I'm damn sure not going to pay you for today, if you aren't going to cooperate, of course," he added, shrugging in a cool-guy way that was a bit contemptible. "So, all things considered, I believe you ought to give me a spoken handshake that you will cooperate with the NP and, whenever we deem appropriate, will allow us to examine Hex to further his treatment. And you will not, under any circumstances, allow the Mafia to know that you have a navi like this inside your PET. TrapMan's nothing to worry about, but anyone else... and, you know, confinement and getting beaten up won't be the worst that comes of this. He'll be turned into a weapon and used to destroy other navis. The same if AlchemyMan finds out. I want you to give me something stronger than a god-forsaken safeword this time, Arch. I need your word that you are with the NP on this, and if you are, the NP will be with you... to help you, and your navi, to correct whatever is wrong with him. Whatever that correction ends up being."
Method kept silent, with a worried frown, not understanding how the conversation had turned into what it had.
Method gulped, preparing herself for another embarrassing, tingly hug (which, granted, hadn't been entirely unpleasant, besides the glitching). Things never go how one expects, though, in science nor acting; Hex changed up the formula by passing her through him, emerging on the other side, simultaneously binding her and pressing against her from behind. She gave assorted minor protests as this proceeded, but nothing that included her safe-word. Her face showed clearly that, unlike her sister, she was neither possibly enjoying the experiment nor even pretending that she was, given that she was now beet-red and clenching her teeth. Once she realized that the form of Hex behind her wasn't packing a tendril in at least one key position, she calmed down a bit. The position wasn't comfortable, but, like the work of any S&M professional, Hex's handiwork applied just the right amount of tension to make the captive feel powerless and possibly going to have some rope marks, without making them feel like they were going to dislocate a shoulder. She said nothing, almost as if she was gagged, although Hex had applied no such thing.
Madness' reaction had some mixture of shock and being turned-on, with an awkward smile half-cocked on her face. "Wow, sis... I guess, in the end, Hex is a butt guy," she chuckled, which did nothing to improve her sister's attitude towards the situation.
"Hfff... Hfff...! I feel like I could watch this for the rest of my life...!" TrapMan huffed, sounding unsettlingly as though he was currently masturbating. Thankfully, one hand was still hanging at his side and the other was still attached to his NP officer cohort.
Novelty said nothing for a while, but stared in awe instead. Finally, she glanced over to make sure TrapMan was indeed not pleasuring himself, which she'd vowed to never let happen as long as they were bound together. Once she confirmed that, she cleared her throat to try to speak up, but gulped it back down, as she wasn't sure what would be appropriate.
"Alright, Hex! Me next, me next! My butt is just as good as my sister's! Honest, we're exactly the same, you know?" Madness called out, almost as though she'd forgotten what happened last time somehow. She leapt forward and spread her arms, as if she intended to hug Hex rather than the other way around. Unfortunately for Madness, what Hex arrived upon next was not a hug, nor was it a method of bondage, a sexual behavior, an act, nor even a scientific experiment. Instead, blackness erupted out of his body in an obscene way, something that anyone in the room would have a hard time putting into words. Madness had enough time to comprehend that, just like last time, Hex wasn't intent on doing anything related to the experiment; Hex was possibly not even in control of what he was doing. She didn't have time to ponder whether it was worse for him to be doing this with no conscious thought or purposely trying to consume other navis. Tellingly, this time around, fire began to burst across the skin of her hands and up her arms; there was no doubting that she was actually going to attack Hex, which wasn't anywhere inside their agreement of handling the situation. Could anyone blame her, though? "Back off-!" she cried out, no hint of friendliness or joking in her voice; the emotions were instead fear and only the paper-thin self restraint that separates an officer who pulls his gun out as a warning and one who fires away immediately in self defense. It didn't amount to much, as she was
"W-What the heck is this? I can't get buzzed off of this," TrapMan weakly joked, before realizing from everyone's reactions that the show wasn't really a show any more.
"Stop him! Stop him now!" Novelty warned Arch, showing him a fierceness that revealed she'd probably have turned a weapon on him if he wasn't outside the net. She had already deployed a Varitails weapon, however, and the only thing that was stopping her from using it was trying to figure out which point of Hex needed to be attacked. "Are you doing this, Arch, or are we being attacked by the enemy?! Are you with the Mafia?!" Adding to the chaos, the anti-glitch solution, which all involved in the original experiment recognized as potentially uncomfortable, now came raining down over the entire room in concentrated, liquid form, like a sprinkler system.
"Oh, hell! It's EvolutionMan! H-H-he found me!" TrapMan whimpered inside his helmet, falling over onto his butt and dragging Novelty down along with the clattering of his heavy armor. "Hrk... Krhrghhh! I was just doing recon on the NP, I swear! I'm useful! I'm not betraying the Mafia! I'm not a weakkhhhrkhurfhuuuff!" he groaned until, unable to keep going any more, he collapsed into a coughing fit.
"Get a hold on yourself! TrapMan!" Novelty gasped, shaking her unfortunate ally and slapping his helmet to try to get him under control. The picture was starting to get less chaotic, now that she realized Hex wasn't spreading to attack the others (in fact, the one holding on to Method looked perfectly docile), but she also understood that Madness' status was unconfirmed and that she needed to act. Doing anything while being held to the ground by the babbling ex-mafioso was impossible, though.
Method struggled back against the Hex restricting her, but didn't have the physical power to break free. "Madness?! Sister!" she called out, more affected by the panic that everyone else had taken on than anything she actually knew. As a person of rationality, Method could construe several key points that ought to have calmed her: whatever secret Hex and Madness had shared, she'd been left out of it and its omission had caused AlchemyMan to ask for an investigation into the experiments. Madness had been shaken about it, which she knew as a sister, and Arch had also been, which she knew by his own reactions now. Whatever it was, however, Madness had survived it once and taken the mission again, knowing the risk she was taking. So, whatever it was, Madness would definitely come out of this fine. All reason, her guiding principle, told her this. And yet... she couldn't imagine anything emerging from that cloud of blackness again.
----------------------------
Whereas Method's guiding principles were reasoning, order, and logical induction, her own were faith that anything can happen at any time, that no one can be prepared for everything, and that the universe worked in mysterious ways. All of those principles were proving themselves inside of Hex's dark space, but not in the happy-go-lucky way she usually liked to see them apply herself. As many unspeakable things around her vied for her attention, some of their number visually, innumerable voices audibly, she found her own face frozen in disbelief, just as Arch's had been, with tears and anguish both wanting to come out, yet bottle-necked inside.
"This can't really be happening... We all agreed... Hex agreed not to eat me and Arch ... We made safe words... We're inside the glitch laboratory, with other NP officers... We've got the anti-glitch solution in the event that anything goes wrong..."
"I can't doubt it any longer... With all of these voices telling me that they're in pain, that they're hungry, that they're hungry for their own kind... Hex isn't a technological marvel, nor is he a misunderstood navi that needs research to overcome his issues... Whatever this is... Whether it's Hex or something else, it doesn't need to be understood... It needs to be destroyed..."
Flames continued to creep across her body as the voices assuaged her from every direction, burning the hands and mouths that insisted upon touching her. The fire popped out at random points now, shooting outward in spikes and arcs, as her eyes began to swirl in a crazy way, imitating the seemingly aesthetic movements behind her old goggles.
"Don't touch me... Keep your mouths off of me... Who would possibly create something like this...? No matter how much you think of the world as a serious of random incidents... This isn't random, it can't be... Someone had to have a huge amount of malice to program something like this... So it's only right that it be destroyed, wiped off of the net, so that everyone is spared from it... Just because I wanted to help Hex, that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to defend myself... and to defend everyone... right?"
"But what am I, even...? I was born by a glitch myself... maybe Hex has just as much of a right to exist as I do... even if he's like this... or maybe... neither of us need to exist..."
"Sister and I... we should just be Method... and this creature... he shouldn't be... he just shouldn't be... Or maybe it's too late to become one with my sister again... maybe now... maybe now I'm going to become one... with this evil thing..."
She barely recognized the voice of Egomorph, but with the tears she'd fought back last time running down her face, she listened to the creature's words. In spite of herself, a stupid, crazy smile spread across her face, reminiscent of her goofy behavior, but this time, entirely, seriously insane. "Become one with you? I'm not part of you, though... But I'm not part of Method either..." she spoke through her choked throat with surprising clarity. In this moment, she seemed to correct the spinning of her eyes, the painful gape of her jaw, and became her former self. "I split off from Method and became my own person... I'm a real person... All of you are real people!" she shouted, not really comprehending who she was reasoning with. "There is no 'one!' There is no 'need to be one!' When I broke off from my sister, that was the fortune and circumstance demanding two unique individuals! The universe doesn't want a 'one' like this! It's demanding we all be separate again... You're not food! You all need to get out of here, just like I need... I need to get out of here!" she shrieked, thrashing about and sending pillars of fire careening into all parts of the darkness around her.
----------------------------------
When Madness emerged from the cloud of Hex again, she was covered in flames and spewing them dangerously in all directions. The other navis were repulsed by the heat, intensity, and unexpectedness of the attack, before the navi simply vanished from the net in an ordinary teleport beam. TrapMan may have seriously soiled himself at some point and appeared to be unable to get up. Thus, Novelty spoke while kneeling upon the ground. "Just what... on earth was that?" she asked, glaring very seriously at Arch. She didn't seem to be buying the act any more. Whatever glitches the two sisters had gotten were but an afterthought, as they had vanished almost instantaneously due to the saturation of glitch liquid spraying the room.
Amazingly, Method attempted to salvage the situation. "My sister... she probably, erm... she probably just got overwhelmed... I know we were all kind of freaking out there. That's the thing with experiments like this. You never really know what is going to happen, at least not without repeat testing," she explained. The last part seemed added in some feeble attempt to cling on to the idea that there was some pattern and logic to all of the behavior they'd seen from Hex so far.
"I... I thought I was gonna die..." TrapMan huffed from inside his helmet, his voice muffled and out of breath.
"I can't believe you omitted something so unexplainable and dangerous from the report you gave AlchemyMan, though..." Novelty added, crossing her arms. "He ought to know."
"... Should he?" Method asked. She gazed into Novelty's eyes with seriousness that showed another meaning. Novelty seemed to understand and nodded slowly. "That is... Perhaps it needs more investigation... But AlchemyMan has enough on his plate already." The two of them seemed to mutually understand now why AlchemyMan needed to be nowhere near this... but it wasn't sympathy for Arch or his navi that Arch saw in their eyes. It was caution. They weren't afraid of Hex being imprisoned or experimented on at this point, nearly so much as they were afraid of AlchemyMan finding a way to use whatever Hex had just shown them.
"Minor suggestion: for future experiments, keep the first part and ditch the last," TrapMan added, breaking the serious mood as he stood back up to his feet, still shaking a bit.
Interrupting, a familiar face that had been gone for some time emerged: Maso Cuocco, who appeared upon a viewscreen nearby Method. He was grinning handsomely, with his green goggles clinging to his face and hiding his eyes. "Thank you for observing, Novelty, TrapMan! If I may, could you please exit the room? I want to bounce a few post-experiment concepts off of Archie here," he chuckled. It seemed that he had picked up Madness' naming scheme for Hex's operator at some point. Novelty nodded, then quickly exited, practically dragging TrapMan along with her. As soon as the two of them were gone, the smile left Maso's face. His eyes couldn't be seen due to his eyewear, but he'd lost his usual animation. "I saw it this time... I was there, watching what Hex did to Madness. This isn't something that you walk away from," he spoke softly.
Method held her hands to her mouth, seeing that their original goal of protecting the two from NP custody had been altered. "Why? What happened to Madness?" she asked hesitantly.
"Madness will be fine. Arch and Hex here, on the other hand, are at a crossroads," he remarked, keeping his focus on the operator. "Because as a member of the NetPolice, I can't allow you to just leave and go on harboring this... whatever it is," he murmured. It wasn't hard to sense some contempt beneath his calm demeanor, which ought to be understandable, given what he'd just seen his navi go through and what he had to go off of. "The only right thing to do is to research it. And correct it." Again, the hardness came through in his voice. "So, the way I figure it, you've got two options. The first: we call this an experiment and a contract. You get the pay you were promised this mission and, in return, you agree to work with the NP to resolve Hex's issue. I'll table my own glitch research and devote myself to this, foremost. I have generous sample data that I can use to investigate Hex already due to our experiments, and hopefully, you'll cooperate so that we can get some more. That's my offer to you and my promise, as a scientific genius and a friend. You'll have assistance from all of us, Hex won't live in captivity, and all you have to promise is that you will ally yourself with the NP for the time being and keep a close eye on your navi."
"The second possibility. If you won't accept my offer, I'm going to consider what you've done here a virtual crime perpetrated by your navi against mine. Twice. I'm going to consider Hex an active threat. I'm going to consider you an enabler refusing treatment. I'm going to speak to the Prosecutions Department to get Hex brought in, wherein he will live in captivity, possibly after being sedated, injured, or whatever is necessary, to the extent that the Prosecutions Department must do so to ensure his cooperation. I'm damn sure not going to pay you for today, if you aren't going to cooperate, of course," he added, shrugging in a cool-guy way that was a bit contemptible. "So, all things considered, I believe you ought to give me a spoken handshake that you will cooperate with the NP and, whenever we deem appropriate, will allow us to examine Hex to further his treatment. And you will not, under any circumstances, allow the Mafia to know that you have a navi like this inside your PET. TrapMan's nothing to worry about, but anyone else... and, you know, confinement and getting beaten up won't be the worst that comes of this. He'll be turned into a weapon and used to destroy other navis. The same if AlchemyMan finds out. I want you to give me something stronger than a god-forsaken safeword this time, Arch. I need your word that you are with the NP on this, and if you are, the NP will be with you... to help you, and your navi, to correct whatever is wrong with him. Whatever that correction ends up being."
Method kept silent, with a worried frown, not understanding how the conversation had turned into what it had.
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The moment the black cloud had parted and Arch caught sight of Madness' burning form, he gave a sigh of sheer relief, wiping his sweaty brow (and that was odd: when had it gotten sweaty?) He hadn't seen her face before she'd jacked out...but somehow, he knew intrinsically that he did not want to know what she'd seen this time. Still, it was cause for relief, and having just witnessed how far Hex had deteriorated, he was going to take what he could get.
While Novelty and Method shared their silent moment of clarity, the Netopian man shifted his back off the tree trunk, turning to lie down in the soft grass. Gazing up into the dappled forest light, he tried to calm his thundering heartbeat. It was a perfectly warm day, yet his whole body was wracked with shivers; he could feel his pulse surging in his temples, his stomach tightening up like someone had a wrench on it, his breath shaking like the leaves about him no matter how hard he tried to calm it. "What the hell is going on?" he thought, searching for some sort of epiphany. There was no two ways about it: he, Arch, was going to be brought into NetPolice custody, by association to his freaking cannibal nightmare of a Navi. The thought had all the impending doom about it as though he himself had just committed the crime, nevermind that he'd just been sitting under this damned tree the whole time watching.
Finally, he was brought out of his musings by a familiar (if loathed) voice calling his name. Arch sat up, fear being replaced with vitriol at an astonishing rate in his head. With all this nervous energy being stored up, he needed an outlet, and hating people seemed like a perfect way to burn a little steam before he headed home. He opened his mouth, ready to start cussing a blue streak...and then Maso's words pierced his misanthropic haze like a needle to a soap bubble. "This is still on me," he thought, overwhelming despair bubbling forth once more.
Hex was motionless under the heavy spray of the status cure, tentacles waving idly in the air. "Experiment complete," he - it buzzed, almost as if in utter mockery of everything that had happened in the past minutes. Sensing no further need to remain unarmoured, Hex began forming himself a new body. The protoplasm at the naked avatar's feet pulsed, and while Maso gave his ultimatum, a trio of empty corpses swiftly shattered into a tangle of limbs and torsos. Hex's new face, a once-handsome male with its face stuck in a perpetual scream, told a chilling tale of what would've happened had Madness been unable to escape in time.
As nightmarish as Hex was, Arch barely paid him half a mind, more than used to the Navi's unsettling forms. He was much more focused on Maso's words...and the sinking feeling sprouting in his gut. There was only one real option available to him: he was going to have to work with the NetPolice, and with this...person, if he ever wanted to see Hex again. He steadied himself, preparing to accept...when a thought struck him: why did he have to accept? It wasn't as though he was particularly attached to Hex, or as though Hex was even worth anything as a Navi, being incapable of searching the Net or anything else Navis were supposed to do. He'd just found the PET lying in the alley, and accepted that hey, there's a weird creepy tentacle-ghost-thing borrowing his old projects' bodies, cool. If he really wanted another Navi that badly, he could just go and buy one like the rest of the damn world. It was an easy solution, and it wasn't like he really had any sympathy left for the damn thing.
...And yet, the man couldn't bring himself to say as much. Whether he was coming into a fledgling sense of responsibility, or there was some lingering sympathy or remembrance for the silent companion he'd had for so many quiet nights, Arch didn't know. All he knew was that his mouth was open and he was telling Maso, "Screw you."
'...Okay, try again,'
"You don't...I just found...this isn't my..."
'Come on, Arch, get a grip already.'
"FINE," Arch finally snapped, "but I'm not doing this for you and your research, and like fff...like hell I'm your friend. I'll agree to this so that what just happened to Madness won't...won't happen to anyone else. So yeah...you've got my e-mail, or at least Madness does. Just...keep in touch, or whatever the hell you do." He pinched the bridge of his nose, unable to stop the feeling of his heartbeat pounding inside his skull. The thought of letting someone as sentient as the two twins come within touching distance of Hex - hell, him allowing them to get near his damn cannibal Navi, was enough to make him feel sick. "What the hell happened to you?" he breathed, looking towards his motionless Navi. "I just...you were going on about self-actualization and...sentient people-things just a few days ago. Hell, it was almost like you were getting more human. And now you're all...this," Arch waved a limp arm towards the screen, no longer expecting a reply. "Screw it. Hex, jack out. You're getting out of here, and I'm getting blasted for the rest of the day."
"..." There was no reply; for whatever reason, Hex wasn't responding. Far from it, he was turning his body towards Method, locking dead eyes with her.
There was nothing for it, not right on the coattails of the last disaster. "Freeze!" Arch called, tapping data into his corrupted PET as best as he could (and since when had it gotten so utterly buggy, anyway?) Hex's body froze, unable to move against the operator command. "For the love of...Command Override: return to PET!" This time, Arch was obeyed; Hex's body was overtaken with static fog, one last cruel reminder of the experiment gone so horribly wrong, and disappeared with a crackle that brought to mind storm clouds and muffled voices. The Glitch Test Lab was silent once more.
<(Jacking out)>
While Novelty and Method shared their silent moment of clarity, the Netopian man shifted his back off the tree trunk, turning to lie down in the soft grass. Gazing up into the dappled forest light, he tried to calm his thundering heartbeat. It was a perfectly warm day, yet his whole body was wracked with shivers; he could feel his pulse surging in his temples, his stomach tightening up like someone had a wrench on it, his breath shaking like the leaves about him no matter how hard he tried to calm it. "What the hell is going on?" he thought, searching for some sort of epiphany. There was no two ways about it: he, Arch, was going to be brought into NetPolice custody, by association to his freaking cannibal nightmare of a Navi. The thought had all the impending doom about it as though he himself had just committed the crime, nevermind that he'd just been sitting under this damned tree the whole time watching.
Finally, he was brought out of his musings by a familiar (if loathed) voice calling his name. Arch sat up, fear being replaced with vitriol at an astonishing rate in his head. With all this nervous energy being stored up, he needed an outlet, and hating people seemed like a perfect way to burn a little steam before he headed home. He opened his mouth, ready to start cussing a blue streak...and then Maso's words pierced his misanthropic haze like a needle to a soap bubble. "This is still on me," he thought, overwhelming despair bubbling forth once more.
Hex was motionless under the heavy spray of the status cure, tentacles waving idly in the air. "Experiment complete," he - it buzzed, almost as if in utter mockery of everything that had happened in the past minutes. Sensing no further need to remain unarmoured, Hex began forming himself a new body. The protoplasm at the naked avatar's feet pulsed, and while Maso gave his ultimatum, a trio of empty corpses swiftly shattered into a tangle of limbs and torsos. Hex's new face, a once-handsome male with its face stuck in a perpetual scream, told a chilling tale of what would've happened had Madness been unable to escape in time.
As nightmarish as Hex was, Arch barely paid him half a mind, more than used to the Navi's unsettling forms. He was much more focused on Maso's words...and the sinking feeling sprouting in his gut. There was only one real option available to him: he was going to have to work with the NetPolice, and with this...person, if he ever wanted to see Hex again. He steadied himself, preparing to accept...when a thought struck him: why did he have to accept? It wasn't as though he was particularly attached to Hex, or as though Hex was even worth anything as a Navi, being incapable of searching the Net or anything else Navis were supposed to do. He'd just found the PET lying in the alley, and accepted that hey, there's a weird creepy tentacle-ghost-thing borrowing his old projects' bodies, cool. If he really wanted another Navi that badly, he could just go and buy one like the rest of the damn world. It was an easy solution, and it wasn't like he really had any sympathy left for the damn thing.
...And yet, the man couldn't bring himself to say as much. Whether he was coming into a fledgling sense of responsibility, or there was some lingering sympathy or remembrance for the silent companion he'd had for so many quiet nights, Arch didn't know. All he knew was that his mouth was open and he was telling Maso, "Screw you."
'...Okay, try again,'
"You don't...I just found...this isn't my..."
'Come on, Arch, get a grip already.'
"FINE," Arch finally snapped, "but I'm not doing this for you and your research, and like fff...like hell I'm your friend. I'll agree to this so that what just happened to Madness won't...won't happen to anyone else. So yeah...you've got my e-mail, or at least Madness does. Just...keep in touch, or whatever the hell you do." He pinched the bridge of his nose, unable to stop the feeling of his heartbeat pounding inside his skull. The thought of letting someone as sentient as the two twins come within touching distance of Hex - hell, him allowing them to get near his damn cannibal Navi, was enough to make him feel sick. "What the hell happened to you?" he breathed, looking towards his motionless Navi. "I just...you were going on about self-actualization and...sentient people-things just a few days ago. Hell, it was almost like you were getting more human. And now you're all...this," Arch waved a limp arm towards the screen, no longer expecting a reply. "Screw it. Hex, jack out. You're getting out of here, and I'm getting blasted for the rest of the day."
"..." There was no reply; for whatever reason, Hex wasn't responding. Far from it, he was turning his body towards Method, locking dead eyes with her.
There was nothing for it, not right on the coattails of the last disaster. "Freeze!" Arch called, tapping data into his corrupted PET as best as he could (and since when had it gotten so utterly buggy, anyway?) Hex's body froze, unable to move against the operator command. "For the love of...Command Override: return to PET!" This time, Arch was obeyed; Hex's body was overtaken with static fog, one last cruel reminder of the experiment gone so horribly wrong, and disappeared with a crackle that brought to mind storm clouds and muffled voices. The Glitch Test Lab was silent once more.
<(Jacking out)>
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Method was the only one really paying attention to Hex at this point, clearly both disturbed and confused by what she was seeing. There wasn't really anyone in the right position to explain the situation to her, nor to comfort her, so she kept her thoughts to herself.
The NP officer nodded along, in the sort of "get-it-off-your-chest" way an Alcoholics Anonymous brother might to a guilty confessor. "What was that?" he joked, pressing two fingers to his ears and leaning forward. When Arch continued mumbling, he exaggerated the motion further. "Can't hear you over the static buzz of your glitched monster navi!" Not realizing that the joke was probably in bad taste, he shrugged and accepted "FINE" as the best he was going to get from Arch. "Fair enough. I am a genius after all; I'll live without your well-wishing towards my career in navi science. You're absolutely right: what's important here is making sure that this doesn't happen again. You have to understand that it's not just a matter of containing Hex or removing him as a threat. We need to understand what created him, what's made him this way, why he does what he does... you've heard of 'root cause analysis,' I'm sure. If we don't know the reason Hex is this way, we won't be able to handle future threats effectively." Maso realized now that Arch had very little interest in what he said and an active contempt towards him in general, so he decided to cut the message short. "We'll be in touch, Arch. Don't get so hammered that you forget my name, alright? It's Maso Cuocco!"
With a look that was neither horrified nor afraid, Method met Hex's obvious gaze, which was apparent with or without the features necessary to express intent. Her own expression was one of curiosity more than anything. She'd gotten very few answers and less exposure than either her sister or even her operator as to the nightmare-zone that existed inside Hex or how seemingly incapable he was of repressing it. For that matter, he might even be embracing it, but she was in the dark on all of the details. "If it helps to know... I'm sure there's a reason he's like that. Where there is a method of transformation, there is usually a method of reversion! That is the code that I model my own studies and experiments after," she reassured Arch. "Hex isn't this way because of a random act of nature, or certainly not God. We'll figure out what made him this way together."
But this time, Arch's mind wasn't on setting the score straight with Maso or offering reassurance to Method. As such, he took his leave.
((FXP to be added later...))
The NP officer nodded along, in the sort of "get-it-off-your-chest" way an Alcoholics Anonymous brother might to a guilty confessor. "What was that?" he joked, pressing two fingers to his ears and leaning forward. When Arch continued mumbling, he exaggerated the motion further. "Can't hear you over the static buzz of your glitched monster navi!" Not realizing that the joke was probably in bad taste, he shrugged and accepted "FINE" as the best he was going to get from Arch. "Fair enough. I am a genius after all; I'll live without your well-wishing towards my career in navi science. You're absolutely right: what's important here is making sure that this doesn't happen again. You have to understand that it's not just a matter of containing Hex or removing him as a threat. We need to understand what created him, what's made him this way, why he does what he does... you've heard of 'root cause analysis,' I'm sure. If we don't know the reason Hex is this way, we won't be able to handle future threats effectively." Maso realized now that Arch had very little interest in what he said and an active contempt towards him in general, so he decided to cut the message short. "We'll be in touch, Arch. Don't get so hammered that you forget my name, alright? It's Maso Cuocco!"
With a look that was neither horrified nor afraid, Method met Hex's obvious gaze, which was apparent with or without the features necessary to express intent. Her own expression was one of curiosity more than anything. She'd gotten very few answers and less exposure than either her sister or even her operator as to the nightmare-zone that existed inside Hex or how seemingly incapable he was of repressing it. For that matter, he might even be embracing it, but she was in the dark on all of the details. "If it helps to know... I'm sure there's a reason he's like that. Where there is a method of transformation, there is usually a method of reversion! That is the code that I model my own studies and experiments after," she reassured Arch. "Hex isn't this way because of a random act of nature, or certainly not God. We'll figure out what made him this way together."
But this time, Arch's mind wasn't on setting the score straight with Maso or offering reassurance to Method. As such, he took his leave.
((FXP to be added later...))