Ch. 133 - Wonderland

  "Look, Ethan! How brightly the missil— I mean, fireflies glow, like a thousand shooting stars! And see how beautifully they boom— I mean, bloom, like the prettiest of roses!"

  "Yes, Mia, I see it! And watch the bouncing betties— I mean, bumble bees, as they hop from ugly plant fuc— I mean, daisy to daisy! How they spread the shrapn— I mean, pollen, with every hop!"

  "Yes, brother, let us murd— I mean, take good care of the wildflowers!"

  – The Ever So Slightly Unhinged Siblings, also known as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, also known as Mia and Ethan Rockbottom, who coincidentally became Vanguards on the same sort of day in the same sort of situation, quite far from each other.

  ***

  "Look at the trees, Tinea." Leah's voice tore me out of my musings about the samurai we'd probably be meeting soon. We were being carried along at about two hundred kilometers an hour on the abandoned highway.

  "Hmm?"

  "They're healthy."

  What? I hooked into the mechs' cameras again, and found that indeed, the trees were healthy. And getting healthier as we closed in on Baie-Comeau. Healthier and taller. Before long, rich green crowns blocked out the late morning sun above us and the highway was broken up not just by age and exposure, but also by powerful roots pushing against it from below. We swayed a bit as our spider's gait changed to adapt.

  "Huh. What do you think? The samurai?" I asked.

  "Nobody else has the technology or resources to cure open nature like this. More importantly, it might also mean they care a lot about their home. Don't you think they're gonna think of this as their territory? Like animals mark theirs, or something like that."

  Ah. Smart Leah. What a turn on. I dragged her out of her pod again until she collapsed on top of me, squeezed her around the ribs until she giggled before I came up for air. Woman had boobs enough to smother me.

  "You're probably right. Let's make sure not to litter. Or break stuff."

  "They're likely also hella strong if they can afford to toss points at a forest for, as far as my sensors can see, no other reason than to make it pretty."

  "That, and they've been around for a while," I said, thinking about it. "Probably an experienced veteran, this far out. They must have plenty of Antithesis expanding into their territory all the time."

  Leah rolled off of me and womanhandled me so she could spoon me, but my wing arms got in the way. I could almost feel the waves of disappointment rolling off of her.

  "Um…" I tried to figure out where to put the extra limbs. Not spooning was not an option, after all. Unfortunately, a lot of flopping around made the untenableness of normal beds obvious—at least if we were laying on our sides. Leah could fit between the arms and get close enough to hug if I stuck my bed-wise pair out the front beneath my waist, but it left my spine too kinked for comfort.

  "I'm gonna have to design a special bed, Leah." I felt her nod against my nape.

  "If I may," said Tynea through the internal speakers of the mech, "There are methods of shunting body parts, too. That's Class III, however, and you're still low on tokens."

  "Huh. That could be really useful for daily activities, though. How does it work?"

  Leah shifted behind me and patted my tail down until I fitted it against the curve of my butt so she could snuggle against my hips better. I did love feeling the warmth of her presence behind me, so I entwined our legs more with my floof-noodle.

  Our exploration of satisfaction-per-surface-area cuddledom with all my new limbs did bring a smile to my face. I figured that once I'd actually grown my wings, I'd be able to hug with entirely new magnitudes. Pictures of myself completely wrapping up Leah and yelling "Get on my level!" made me snort.

  "You'd be wearing a harness around your torso that'd be fitted to your contours. It would carry a portal covering your lower back, and your wings would be stowed in another dimension."

  "Dimension? Where?"

  "Inside a small warehouse I'd prepare for them."

  "Oh! Is that how the shunting for the Myriad works, too?" I asked. "And the Chrysaora Plenum," I added, looking at the new battle skirt. Not remembering how I got the Chrysaora still niggled at me, and I was really looking forward to resolving those uncertainties.

  "Indeed, they, and the plug-tanks use warehouses and containers I've made available in the same place as my computers and the machinery I use to manufacture the items you buy."

  "So you're not actually in my head?"

  "No, the carbon wafer I teleported into your brain during your initialization is just a transceiver that allows me to interface with you. The rest of me, or should I say, the vast majority of me, lies within another dimension."

  "Huh…"

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  "You'd need some very specialized knowledge and training to follow the math if I tried to explain dimensions. If you're interested, there are appropriate lessons available for your dream-learning implant."

  Leah nudged me. "Your stuff's got a lot of shunting in it. Knowing more about it might be useful."

  "Maybe," I answered, "but Tynea's creating and managing it all, right? I'm not sure I'd be doing much more than satisfying my curiosity."

  "That would be true at first, yet knowledge does lead to innovation and invention. And to hobbies, of course. Older samurai tend to invest their points into quality of life, not power. It's a form of mental hygiene."

  Grinning, I said, "That might be the first time I hear hobbies described as quality of life."

  "The two do tend to go hand in hand."

  "Alright. Let's earmark that for after we've gotten back home."

  "Understood, Tinea."

  As a thoughtful silence filled our mobile home, I digested the conversation. It felt like our relationship was slowly shifting back towards something nicer. It reminded me a little of our earliest talks, when I was still designing Tinea. She'd asked some very helpful questions then, had helped me dig into some of my hangups. It'd been possible because I'd trusted her—a trust she'd broken by omitting certain details that would come back to affect me in a most intimate manner.

  The explanation she'd given for it had…made sense in an inhuman way. They were the answers of a statistician or analyst. Which probably shouldn't be a surprise, considering that she was a statistician or analyst, and wasn't human. They'd felt cold, distant, and somewhat unrelated to me specifically, the person she was supposed to be assisting.

  They'd also made me recognize that perhaps I should shape our relationship with more intent. That, yes, Tynea might be my assistant, and yes, she might be too intelligent for me to grokk, but she was still not me. Not human, and—the thought had me snort—as much as she might be in my head, she wasn't in my thoughts.

  Perhaps she couldn't quite grasp me, just like I couldn't grasp her?

  I felt Daddy-Long-Legs slow down and perked up. The light playing through the forest slowly brightened as we came up on its fringe; the asphalt disappeared gradually, dug under by more and more roots and grass. The highway cut through the trees didn't fade, but it narrowed a little, and a meandering path of beautiful wooden planks, raised waist-high on stilts, popped out of the forest on our left, crossed the gap between the trees ahead of us, and vanished again on our right. Tall grass reached up, high enough to brush against the bottom of our spiders.

  We reached the edge of the woods and Leah stopped us entirely. We found ourselves gazing across two or three kilometers of…pastures? I wasn't sure of the right word. These kinds of places just didn't exist anymore. It was too healthy, too green, too…protected. Lots of grass and flowers. Lots of lines of bushes to break up the open space.

  Small, fluffy yellow creatures flitted among the many flowers in the grass.

  "Are those bees?!" I whispered, incredulous.

  "I'm recording this shit," Leah mumbled.

  I just nodded, numbed by the fantastical sights of…meadows. This was fantasy shit, the stuff you read about in stories about magic.

  Baie-Comeau itself was a tiny village of maybe a hundred houses around a tiny lake, just a little inland from the shore. The houses looked old, made of brick. Some were more modern prefabbed stuff, but by and large, you could tell that they'd been built long before the times of samurai and Antithesis; even if the roofs were all covered with solar panels.

  There weren't any people in sight, strangely enough. Hiding? Or just busy elsewhere?

  A wide gravel path connected the village and a tasteful, highly modern hotel, which was built half on land, half stretching out above water. Its U-shape suggested it could fit a yacht within its…harbor? Wateryard?

  The place looked abandoned, but considering the scan we'd experienced just a few minutes ago, I was sure it wasn't. Unless they had automated defenses? I could easily see a samurai set up something like that.

  Maybe the villagers had fled to safety during the global incursion? Color me surprised. Seriously.

  "That's what I'd picked out as our rest area," Leah said and pointed at a particularly beautiful copse of trees halfway between us and the village. These were almost as tall as the trees of the forest, but a lot more…full. Rounder, impenetrable. And they were blooming with graceful pale-pink flowers. It looked like it hid a holy site, really.

  The wooden walkway from the woods behind us reached across the pasture, in its characteristic meandering manner, before it disappeared between the houses. It also passed by the copse, and a discreet wooden portal led inside, a bit like those Japanese temple gates.

  "Looks…special? Think that's where the samurai will be?" Leah asked me.

  "Maybe? Let's see if we can enter?"

  "Yeah. It's outside the village too. Neutral ground, sort of. Hopefully."

  Leah parked her mechs a few meters away from the northward entrance.

  "Wanna point the guns all towards the forest? I imagine the local samurai will have picked up on the horde heading our way. Show that's where our aggression is directed."

  "Mhm," Leah nodded. She shuffled the Dakka and the Sapper around, and turned the one-oh-five and its turret in that direction, too.

  Best we could do without anyone to talk to.

  My girlfriend—squeee!—finally unsqueezed me, and we climbed to our feet. I carefully tested my injured leg. It was still quite a bit thinner than my good one, but the vomit-inducing squirming of flesh beneath the skin had ceased. Everything was there, all the muscle, fascia, and the skeleton, but it would take a bit longer for the mass to come back, too.

  Until then, the leg would remain weak. I couldn't even hop on it, just barely walk a few steps.

  Well, good thing I have a, heh, third leg.

  My tail pulled locomotion duty instead. I wrapped it around the almost-lame limb for support, while Leah helped me strap the Second Wind back on. We weren't necessarily in friendly territory, and whether the threat turned out to be Antithesis or assholes, I wanted to be ready to fight and fly.

  Armed and armored, we crowded around the airlock and sucked in a deep breath once it opened and a breeze washed up through the cabin.

  "Holy crap that's fresh!" I said, astounded at the liveliness of the scents my senses caught. So different from the musky humidity of the swamp where things rotted and digested each other, or the mold and cut grass of the Antithesis.

  Leah, too, just paused for a few breaths, parsing everything. Then she shook herself, slipped out the airlock onto the walkway, looked around a moment, and then nodded up at me and held her arms up.

  Grinning, I let her catch me underneath the arms and hooked my knees around her hips, before licking the tip of her nose. She laughed, replied with a kiss to mine, and subsequently deposited me on the ground.

  Yes, this was probably not the time to be playing around. At least not until we had an idea if the serenity of this place was real, or just a sham hiding more violence.

  I still grabbed Leah's hand happily. No reason not to enjoy the time we spent side by side.

  Together, we turned towards the entrance into the copse of flowering trees and started forward.

  ***

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