#exposed limb actuator

[sw5w]

...I've Been Freed

STAR WARS EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace 01:14:19

[brwnicons]

Otto x Male Reader

PT. 1 Here

☆ Hope you like it! Please, tell me if you find any mistake ☆

"God, Otto, how can you be so soft?" You groaned, your words muffled as your face was buried on his wide chest. It was like lying on a warm pillow that had its own heartbeats and that eventually raised or lowered.

He answered with a loud belly laugh, his body moving with it and so it was your face "Soft? You're laying beside a supervillain, boy. I don't think soft is a very accurate word."

You lifted your sight to look at him, raising an eyebrow as questioning his words

"Supervillain, right? Oh, I am so scared" You joked after you raised your hand to grasp a metal claw that happened to be passing next to you. You started to caress gently the metal pieces while looking into the doctor's eyes.

"For being so dangerous" you emphasized the adjetive with a dramatical hand gesture "You haven't harmed me once, why don't you hurt me right now? I've got your pretty evil tiny gripper right here". The claw chirped confused, first at you and then at the Otto, why would it hurt you?

He sighed, "How could I ever hurt you, my dear boy?" He allowed his proudness walls fall a little. Just for you, just because the comfort of the situation, comfort you helped him achieve. "You're the most precious thing I have"

Ah, what a pity that he noticed too soon how cheesy he was being.

"But... that doesn't mean I'm not able to do horrible things!" He excused himself, "I have terrorized thousands, I have made a hell out of their lives and I do not regret any of it! This city fears me, boy." He continued while slowly raising, his face getting closer and closer to your impassive one, his bare teeth exposed as a primal show of intimidation and his eyes were piercing yours with false rage.

You couldn't help it at his efforts and giggled soundly at how he tried to intimidate you; you had seen him in the most embarrassing situations, you had shared the cutest moments with him and, damn, you just saw him overestimulated under your body, turned into a shaky mess. "Easy there, scary man" you snickered while giving him little pats on his shoulder.

It was physically impossible for him to hurt you or for you to feel intimidated by him, you both knew it, but you just looved to mess around with him about it.

"Sorry, I just can't see you as evil, you're too cute!" you said between giggles, still caressing the claw, just to end up leaving a little peck on top of it.

Otto sighed heavily in defeat and laid back again, closing his eyes, but he didn't try to take the actuator out from your grasp. You lied beside him and looked sweetly in his eyes.

"You know, I still think you're a pretty intimidating supervillain" you said while hugging his claw gently as if it were some kind of plush.

He didn't respond, but you saw how his eyes softened.

He really didn't have had a good streak lately, spiderman always dismantling his plans or taking his hostages out of him without too much effort. In addition, his experiments were not going as planned and his lab was full of scattered scrap and broken gadgets because of his tantrums.

"Also, I think you're an amazing scientist"

"I know" he dryly answered, his brow slightly furrowing. You looked back at the claw between your hands "Sometimes I don't think you really do" you muttered softly.

He turned his head to you with a serious expression, watching how you peacefully traced the pieces of his metal limb. He remained silent but passed and arm around your shoulders, holding you closer. You silently accommodated your head on top of his chest, letting his hand caress your face while your arms still clasped his claw.

"Thanks, for everything" he finally whispered, closing his eyes and nuzzling into you, you smiled softly and reciprocated his gentle love.

"Uhm... I know you like my actuators but, please, let it go -I can feel them and you're really turning me on with all those pettings"

"Oops, sorry. My bad." you snorted as you let his artificial limb free, which chirped sadly but moved away from you to return with the others.

"Although can't believe you have energy for another round, old man"

He ignored your comment and only bothered to roll his eyes. You remained silent and after a few minutes of him playing with your hair and you drawing circles on his chest, an idea popped I your mind and you were eager to share it.

"So" you started hesitantly, breaking the silent atmosphere "You wanna eat out of something? Unless you already have a date with spiderman, or the lab, of course" you said without looking at him. "I think my plan of helping you relax has succeed, so I declare you a free man now."

"I guess I could take the entire day off, did you have something on mind?"

Your face light up and you were fast to nod at his question "Well, since I can't go to a restaurant with my dear boyfriend because he is the most wanted villain in all of the United States and he has, you know, four gigantic metallic claws on his back" You started, earning a roll of eyes and a frown of his brow, "what do you think about a roof date?" You finally looked at him, your eyes shining like little pleading suns.

He just couldn't resist that sight and you knew it too well. Also, he had to admit that it had been a while since you guys got out and the idea of relaxing with you on top of a skyscraper, covered by bright stars, laying on some soft blanket while eating something or just chatting was really something tempting.

"I like the idea. You can go get ready as I go to buy some food, any preference?"

You immediately jumped off the bed and glared at him. You poked his chest "Don't even think of crossing that door before I come back to pick you up, old man. This is your relaxing day and you're not allowed to set foot outside unless it's for a relaxing purpose."

He pinched the bridge of his nose in defeat as he sighed deeply. "Alright, just stop speaking so loud already, boy -you're going to give me a headache"

You giggled and softly kissed his nose before heading out of the bedroom, "I've left your favourite shampoo next to the shower! Also, clean clothes are folded above the drawers in the closet in case you want to use them!"

He muttered a low "thanks you" you weren't able to heard though he knew it wasn't necessary either.

It was only when Otto found himself alone on your shared bed that he felt the unpleasant sensation of a dry, sticky fluid between his legs and the before forgotten back pain. He pulled back the sheets with a disgusted face and headed to the bathroom. It was true, his favourite shampoo was laying on the sink along a yellow post it with a heart on it.

Otto took it off so it wouldn't get wet and made sure to keep it safe. He never said it but he loved your little notes, even the silly little ones with animal fun facts or terrible knock knock jokes.

He got into the shower and turned on the hot water, instantly relaxing and the contact it made with his sore skin. His claws chirped excited as they played with the drops and the soap and Otto finally felt fully peaceful at the lack of their usual, violent thoughts. Though, since he started his relationship with you, he had to admit that his actuators had calmed down and now they even had pretty thoughts about you.

However, he made sure to accept your suggestion and relaxed, trying his best to push the usual million thoughts he would have to the back of his mind. His body welcomed the sensation instantly.

After his shower he did as you said and looked in his closet, where he found the black turtleneck sweater and the dark pants he was wearing just before your...encounter. They were both clean and smelled as if cologne had been sprinkled on them. God, how long had you been awaken before him? He was getting embarrased just at the thought of you watching him sleep —something he was sure you had done more than a few times—.

He took the same sweater since he knew it was your favorite but chose another pair of pants. He wiped his small sunglasses before putting them on and made sure to give himself a quick comb. He even decided to give his actuators a little wipe so they could be all shiny and pretty.

All done! All he would need to do then was to wait for you in the living room, so he took a science magazine that was on the coffee table and gave it a look to kill some time.

-

It wasn't long until you appeared in the front door, a wide grin painted on your face as you showed him bags of snacks.

"I'm here Otto- Oh! You really are stunning" You complimented when you saw his outfit as he got up and approached you. The red that crept to his cheeks because of the unexpected compliment making him even cuter.

"Thank you..." He scratched his neck, "Are you ready to leave?"

"In a minute, I still need to get dressed up all fancy for you", you giggled and winked at him as you let him pick the bags you were carrying, "Why don't you get some blankets meanwhile? I won't be long" and so, you rushed to your room without waiting for an answer.

With the help of his actuators, Otto gathered some blankets and waited for you to return. When you did, dressed up in your favourite outfit as a sweet smell of cologne left your clothes, Otto couldn't help but blush a dark red.

You giggled softly and kissed his cheek before extending your arm and offering it for him for take, just like an old, corny couple. And so, an actuator put on him his dark fedora, that could half-hid his blush too, and you took a jacket for the night's cold.

"Shall we?" Otto asked while opening the door as his actuators beeped and screeched excitedly around. You giggled at his manners and their difference with his actuators' personality and nodded at his question, already taking a step out of the house,

"Gladly".

[whumpster-fire]

Well apparently I'm back in the FNAF fandom now, so here are some headcanons about my favorite pathetic, skrunkly, strangely adorable engineering disaster, Mangle. From, like, an AU where the restaurant stays open for longer than a month and the animatronics are a bit less hostile / not possessed, just machines with horribly overengineered AI.

I'm sorry I know toddlers are comically destructive, but I do not buy Mangle actually being dismembered by them. Breaking down repeatedly / being damaged by slips and falls / having suit pieces fail or fall off, sure, but I don't think a machine that can easily overpower and kill an adult human would get its limbs torn off by a bunch of rowdy kids. I think "take apart / put together attraction" has got to be an inside joke and Mangle's current state is a result of being attacked by something much stronger than a child: either a disgruntled employee who was sick of wasting so much time trying to fix the same unreliable piece of junk, or one or more of the other animatronics.

Also someone or something clearly keeps repairing her. Either it's some chucklehead mechanic with too much spare time who's trying to see how many extra / mismatched limbs they can add before management does something about it or something non-human that has a vague idea of how to attach parts to each other in a "functional" way but has no idea what shape a Toy Foxy endoskeleton is supposed to be.

Despite this Mangle's level of activity varies a lot from night to night and week to week depending on whether she has enough working actuators and sensors to do more than flop around. She can't really stand and walk around in the tripedal pose she's normally depicted in most of the time because it's rare for at least one hip/knee/ankle joint to not be unpowered, jammed, or have position/force sensors out. Also having three legs splayed out like that makes balancing her long neck/arms easier but it's basically a stress position and uses too much energy to maintain for very long.

The restaurant has exposed steel roof trusses like a warehouse which is how Mangle moves around on the ceiling. She's learned to hook her various exposed parts onto the trusses to hang there without using effort. Management are not thrilled about this because she keeps breaking overhead lights, ceiling fans, exit signs, and stuff like that.

Freddy's has a big plastic tube climbing structure, I don't care if it's not in the games come on it should be like Chuck E Cheese. The outside of the structure has scrapes and gouges because Mangle likes climbing it to get to the trusses. She sometimes hides inside it too because the other animatronics either can't fit or don't have good enough motion control to crawl through tight spaces with a height difference, so it's a good place to avoid everyone.

The ceiling also has a series of rails to let the prize puppet navigate the restaurant. Half of these are bent or otherwise messed up from having an animatronic that is way heavier than the puppet trying to hang from them.

Mangle gets stuck on the ceiling at least once a week and it's so pathetic every time, like a cat getting its claws hooked on a curtain. Usually this is another annoyance for the opening shift / actually a safety hazard because even if her motors are locked out after 6 AM, getting on a stepladder and trying to dislodge a heavy, awkward bundle of exposed edges and pinch points is playing OSHA Violation Bingo. Welcome to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza.

She's gotten stuck in the security office twice. The first time, the guard was driven insane by having to listen to four hours of uninterrupted static / having an animatronic that could kill him in the office for most of the night, and he quit as soon as his shift was over. Jeremy stood up on his desk with the Freddy mask on and carefully dislodged the part that was stuck. He also noticed that Mangle was panicking about being trapped with important wires about to be yanked out, and handled the situation like he was untangling a panicking 300 lb mechanical cat from a curtain.

The end result of this was Mangle falling from the ceiling and yanking the Freddy mask off by accident. However, the facial recognition bug that affects the other toy animatronics isn't a thing with Mangle because ironically her visual processing has ended up better than what the toy animatronics were originally programmed with because of how much she's had to adjust to having working eyes in two independently moving heads / having eyes frequently fail / having her head be sideways or upside down most of the time. Jeremy is now one of the only people she trusts and she frequently hangs out in his office.

An unforeseen result of this is that one time the puppet tried to jump Jeremy and got clotheslined right off its strings.

Toy Foxy was actually designed to have easily interchangeable parts. The idea was that they could switch between giving her a normal hand, a hook, or a hand puppet with a second endoskeleton head. At this point Mangle contains parts of all her swappable arms, as well as random spares and parts that were supposed to be spares for the old model animatronics.

Related Tangent: Foxy's hook is supposed to be rubber because not even Fazbear Entertainment is dumb enough to give a children's entertainment robot a sharp metal weapon. However a metal hook was made for him, because they decided to advertise Foxy's debut with a commercial where they filmed him doing some sort of pirate stunt like swinging from a ship's rigging. This naturally was never supposed to be installed in the actual restaurant. In the time of FNAF 1 it somehow got put on him but the staff who saw the empty box in the parts room thought it got thrown out and didn't check if it was on the actual animatronic. Nobody noticed except some unfortunate night guards. In the time of FNAF 2 however, Foxy's horrifying steel meat hook wound up on Mangle for several days, until she got it impaled through the side of an air duct and was trapped there for the rest of the night. Nobody knows how it got attached to her but the working theory is some kid got into the parts and services room when no one was looking.

Months later, there's still tape over the hole in the duct.

Jeremy got management to finally fix Mangle's speakers because six hours of static is still annoying as hell. He has now discovered that she does not have enough preprogrammed jokes, stories, and sea shanties to last a whole shift, so he's started bringing in books and cassette tapes to expand her repertoire.

[hollowsart]

Mmmmmmm... I just read the thing with the scenario and really inspired me to give to you another one! (i like your style of writing) If you want to do that again hete it is!

But what about Otto helping an injured Acedia?

..ok so uhm.. I'm sorry 👉👈

this isn’t the best thing I’ve written, highly likely there’s some problems here and there, but it’s fine. I’ve worked on this long enough I think.

I apologize for the sheer length.. I got a little carried away.

====

Her senses were screaming, ears ringing, and eyesight blurred from the tears that wouldn't stop. Heaving and wheezing and coughing through her pained yet mostly silent sobbing. Up until this point in her life Acedia had never experienced this level of pain, gripping her stomach and arms as she buried her face into the comforting form that held her.

Otto, using his real arms, held her firm yet gently against him. Using his mechanical limbs to lift them both and scale down the building, moving from one skyscraper to the next. Panic and concern fueling him as he rushed the sloth-like hero to his place for some emergency care.

The man who had done this to her following along overhead, large mechanical wings gliding through the air, weaving around the buildings with ease. Though they were lightweight, they felt unbearably heavy, heavy with the guilt and remorse for what he'd done. Fighting someone who had only wanted to help.. blinded by his own senseless fury over who he had presumed dead just moments prior.

He hovered over the residence of his friend as they had quickly arrived, hesitating to land and follow. Only when one of Otto's actuators stretched out toward him and waved, beckoning him inside did he do so. Folding the wings back as he touched ground, closing them tight before he walked inside. He would just sit back and wait, he decided, making himself half at home and taking a seat in the living room.

--

Otto scurried down to his lab, frantically whipping his actuators around the room to trigger the table and lights, and to find the first aid kit. As soon as the table rose from the floor he placed Acedia atop it. She winced and groaned and he took a step back, anxious and trying to stay calm.

Acedia kept her head down toward her lap, merely hunched in pain. As much as it was necessary, she didn't want to move. She didn't really have much of a choice in the matter, however, as soon came Otto's voice, directing her attention toward him.

"Acedia.. I.. I-I'm going to need to remove your mask and suit so that I can help you." An actuator placed the first aid kit on the table at her feet as she let out another silent shaky sob.

She hesitated, looking in his direction as though processing his words. He avoided eye contact and reached to open the bag as she thought about what he'd said. As soon as he heard her little 'okay' he turned back to her, passing on a cloth to an actuator which took off upstairs. Otto cautiously brought his hands up to her face, hesitating just at her neckline when he spoke again.

"..Do you mind if I..?"

Otto was nervous, to say the least, about seeing under the mask. Sure he helped her to craft this new costume.. but he still had not seen her face even then. It felt wrong, yet Acedia gave him permission to do it, and he followed through.

Dipping his fingers carefully into the neck of her outer costume he delicately pulled it up and over her face. Unveiling before him her hidden features. With the mask now fully removed, he paused and finally got a good look at her.

Despite the tears, reddened eyes and face.. he felt his own face heat up just a bit. Acedia looked away and sniffed into her shoulder opposite of him. It took only a moment before Otto cleared his throat and his hands were back at her neck. This time he took the zipper and pulled, going down as far as he could before needing to help move her arms out of the way and soon out the holes of the sleeves.

Now with her undersuit exposed he got to work brushing her hair out of the way to get at the zipper in the back of it. He did the same as he had done with the top suit and helped her to remove it. Had her arms not been injured, she could have easily undone it herself, alas, this was not the case. As he was only working on her upper half at the moment he let everything sit at her waist before moving on.

Acedia hissed while moving around so he could get to her better, to see her better. The actuator returned with the cloth now thoroughly damp, Otto taking it in hand as he turned back to Acedia. With his hands raised once more he got to work helping to clean her face first before moving.. down.

A small whine caught in her throat made Otto pause for just a moment, assuming it was in response to the pain.

..In truth, it only partially was.

Acedia closed her eyes to avoid looking at the doctor, feeling embarrassed. Gosh he was close. She did her best to mentally focus on something else.. fighting off the creeping thought of how warm he felt, no matter how comforting that was at the moment. If it hadn’t been for Otto finding her and stepping in when he did, she couldn’t imagine what the outcome would have really been on that rooftop. What this very moment in time would have been if he hadn’t come to help stop the fight. Fiddling with her hands in her lap to give her something to do she gripped at the zipper and hem of her over-suit. At least now she had stopped her sobbing, it had grown tiring for her body.

Otto, on the other hand, had entered focus mode as he tended to her injuries, wiping away any blood he found with the wet cloth. An actuator was pulling necessary items from the first aid kit while another retrieved another cloth, one more was circling Acedia, examining the further damage Otto needed to take care of.

The poor girl, he thought, covered in scratches and bruises, cuts and scrapes.. and a gash or two, and that was only on her upper half. Otto frowned at the thought, brows knitting together with a mix of concern for Acedia and frustration with his friend upstairs for doing all of this.

--

Adrian could only sit so long, feeling restless he stood up and paced around the room for a bit. His mind a slurry of thoughts, both relief and remorse. Fretting over everything that had perspired earlier that night.

The man merely removed his headpiece and placed a palm to his face. Running his hand down his weary features, not caring if he smudged the makeup around his eyes. That was the least of his worries.

After a moment and a deep sigh he placed the headpiece back on and headed toward the door once more, muttering an apology as he did.

"..I'm so sorry."

--

With her face now cleaned, Acedia watched Otto as he went on to her arms, taking one in hand at a time. His touch was firm yet delicate, worried he may hurt her more than she already was. She did her best not to stare.. nor have her eyes wander to his face for too long, snapping her gaze away to instead examine the room she was in.

It was a quaint little place. A few tables were set up in the almost circular room, some posters and diagrams and blueprints decorated the walls. A couple of boxes lining the walls, some boxes and machines, unfinished projects she assumed, were covered with a tarp or a cloth.

Her eyes scanning and focusing on the sci-fi looking gadgets and devices and more that filled the space, noting that despite these things it still felt empty. Barren of feeling too lived in, par for some old mugs and scattered papers, a dry-erase board with equations scrawled all over it. And a single large aquarium tank at what she assumed was the back wall. Curious.. it didn't appear as though there was anything in it from her view, though..

Ah.

Snapped back from her thoughts by a sharp surge of pain at her side, she yelped and jerked away. Otto scurried back, fumbling with the cloth and sputter apologies, his face growing red.

"I'm sorry! I--! I didn't--! I didn't mean to cause you harm, I--!! Oh dear, oh dear.. I-I should have warned.. Should’ve asked before I went and..!"

"It's," Acedia hissed at the still stinging pain, "It's alright, I just--" another wheeze, "I wasn't.. Y'know, expectin' that..!" She did her best to sound reassuring, though it hurt enough to make the tears return.

Otto merely waited while she sniffed and breathed to try and settle down again. Only when she was calm did he approach the table once more, cautious over what he needed to proceed with doing to help her. For now, he skipped over her torso, feeling quite sheepish now from previously trying to merely check her sides. He’d seen the cuts and tears in the suit, he’ll need to fix that later.

He was careful with the rest of the cleaning process, gentle when he had to hold her legs, turning and twisting them around. His grasp was firm yet kind, she couldn't help her racing heart, fighting off some thoughts that weren't meant for here and now. She wasn’t the only one, however, having odd thoughts, Otto’s ears burning red as he focused on cleaning and patching whatever spots he could find, nothing too serious luckily.

It didn't take too much longer before he had finished patching her up. Wrapping larger cuts with gauze and tape, and decorating her spindly form with a variety of colorful and patterned band-aids wherever they were needed. With one last check he held out his hands to help her down from the table.

"There, as good as new.. well, as good and new as I can do for not being a medical doctor." he joked to lighten the mood.

"Thank you.." She let out a tired chuckle and sigh that transitioned quickly into a yawn. Everything that happened that night catching up, feeling more than exhausted. Otto took notice, an actuator sliding over and around her cautiously, giving her aid in staying balanced.

“..Do you think you’re able the get home safe?” he asked with concern.

“I don’t think I could even make it to the front door, to be honest.” She hardly had the energy to do really anything, much less think and worry at the moment.

“Acedia.. Uhm.. N-Now I know how this is going to sound, and I don’t want you to make a fuss, however--” he spoke quickly with nerves, trying to get this out without stuttering, “I could take you back myself, but.. Would you like to stay for the night? I’d feel better to know that you are really alright. I know I’ve already given you that new suit, but allow me to add to my debt paid?”

Acedia jolted at his words at first before chirping back with a tired smile, “I just want to sleep, I don’t really care where right now, thank you.” Fretting over the mere concept of staying the night at someone else’s place, especially the home of a man she’d only met relatively recently, was far from her mind at the moment.

A wave of surprise and relief came over Otto, sighing to himself and offering his arm to help lead her upstairs and out of the lab. Thinking more to himself as he walked her to his spare bedroom. Feeling so relieved she wasn’t put-off by his strange sudden offer. He really would have helped her back to wherever it was she lived, the night had been more than eventful, though, and for now he, too, just needed a good rest.

He'll have to have a word with his friend Adrian later.. about all that transpired. He was intent on giving that old man an earful.

[thisblogcontainscgl]

Gimme a big boi android. I’m talking *chonky*. A boy that’s shaped like Baymax.

He’ll always come to me specifically to do his maintenance and repairs because I’m extra gentle with them. I always make sure to snap things into place smoothly and talk out loud about what I’m doing. Which parts I’m checking and how they feel in my hands. They get to pick the music. I let him hold my tool book and hand me what I need. I let them know he’s such a good patient because they’re so easy to work with.

Is it just him, or do my hands linger on his arms when I snap them back into place? Do the other medineers check hip actuator alignment this frequently or grab so high on the inner thigh when they do? Is it okay that they only charge him the base rate, even though our appointments always take so long?

They’re more flustered than usual when they come in and hand me an order for a full limb update. Apologizing and saying they know it’s a full day undertaking, he’s willing to pay for the time, they know I’ll be stuck having to look after him while, he’s sorry he won’t be able to help today on account of the updates, ya know?

Of course it’s not a problem, I love working with my favorite patient. I gently unclip his arms, pressing the back of their armpit and their collar “bone” to uncouple the joints, and lay them on an empty table covered in a cloth. Gently cupping their back and placing my hand on their chest to lay them down. Smiling as they start to chatter nervously, sliding one hand down to his inseam and the other to his hip. Pressing gently with my fingers, searching for the pressure points that will release his leg into my arms. Cradling it and placing it on the table before repeating the maneuver with the other leg as he starts to falter and trails off awkwardly. The soft music fills the room, silent save the sound of me clicking through the installation wizard.

He startles when I turn and delicately place my hand on his shoulder. I ask if I can start my basic diagnostics, and he nods shyly. His breath hitching and his fans whirring the longer my hands run along their exposed syntheskin. I reach over him to grab one of my screwdrivers and as my weight presses on him, they let out a soft moan.

As I sit up I see the mortified look on his face and smile sweetly at him, brushing their hair back off their forehead with my hand and leaving my hand resting on his head. I lean down to his ear and softly tell them that it’s okay. They’re being the perfect patient for me.

He takes in a shuddering breath as my hand rests on the bludge in their underwear. My lips trace a pattern on their neck as I grind my palm on their dick, eliciting from them the most adorable, pathetic moans. They start stammering, but I gently shush them and press on their jaw, locking their mouth in place.

My hands move along his body so gently it’s hard to tell if I’m actually touching them or hovering my hands just above their syntheskin. They writhe and wriggle, unable to grab for purchase, buck their hips, grind against me. Completely helpless and totally reliant on me to give them the sensations they crave. I kiss from his chest, down his belly, and when I reach his hips I grab his underwear and effortlessly slide them off. I grab his ass with both hands as I take him into my mouth. I can hear their cry of relief through his closed mouth as my tongue drags along the bottom of their head and shaft.

They writhe and curl their torso as cumming gives him no reprieve from the sensation. I reach my fingers into their ass, manually inducing another erection, as he whines pitifully. I edge them with my mouth before climbing on the table and revealing I’m completely naked underneath my lab coat. I mount him slowly and feel his abdomen spasm, trying and failing to thrust into me.

I ride them, gently at first, while cooing in their ear about how perfect they feel and how helpful they’ve been. Soon, my moans meld with his and I’m fucking so hard I have to plant my hands on his shoulders to keep them from sliding up the table. I cum with force, curling onto his chest and spasming on top of them. I can feel their fluids leaking out of me and hear it flowing onto the table, thinner and more abundant than a humans. I hear their servos whirring and their ragged breathing underneath my ear as I cling to his chest. Kissing their chest and neck and cheek I coo praise.

Much later, the computer beeps. A notification flashes that the update and installation has finished, but it goes unnoticed. The android’s unlocked mouth moaning for more as the medineer’s mouth does it’s work. The flashing window and still limbs stay abandoned for a while longer.

[acapelladitty]

Scarecrow & Doc Ock: Glow (fic)

(the art above is by the amazing @hermannco who is my partner in crime for this cheeky little self-indulgent endeavour)

Unexpected visitors were an unfortunate regularity in the life of any career criminal but, as Crane observed the man who stood merely a few feet from his own position, he had to admit that this visitor was decidedly more interesting than most.

Doctor Otto Octavius, alias, Doc Ock.

A man who had not been sighted in Gotham since before the new millennium.

A man who had he once shared a university campus with.

A man who had four extra limbs that one might consider slightly unnatural.

But as his eyes roved over the metal arms which were floating casually behind Octavius’ back, their calculated movements clearly collecting data for their AI based on video observation, Crane could admire the sheer technical prowess which went into creating such things.

“I was not too surprised to hear of your exploits, Doctor Crane.” His goggles pushed back into his hairline to expose a handsome face, Octavius tilted his head as he took another small draw of his cigar, “I have distinct memories of a young man barely scraping by his ethics class due to his controversial opinions. Or do you prefer to be known as Scarecrow these days?” His words trailed off into a thoughtful hum

“Doctor Crane is sufficient, but I must confess that I cannot share the same sentiments for you, Doctor Octavius.”

Matching the casual tone of the conversation, Crane’s words were laced with ice as he responded. Within his pocket was a small vial of toxin but, should this encounter take a turn, he felt woefully unprepared for a fight.

So, he settled on diplomacy as he continued.

“I followed your accident and subsequent rebirth into the guise of Doctor Octopus with some interest. It is not everyday that a man develops limbs which possess their own consciousness, and I say that as a man who spends his days working alongside human-crocodile hybrids and men who depends on sub-zero temperatures to survive.”

“How strange the world we live in.”

Speaking freely as though catching up with an old friend over coffee, Octavius focused his attention on the high collar of his coat as he smoothed it out against his neck, his fingers brushing against the useless chip still implanted into his skin as he spoke again.

“I am here because we both have a problem with pest control, and I would appreciate some assistance.”

A low, cold laugh broke free of Crane’s throat before he could prevent it.

“Your pest is a mere child,” he offered dismissively, “and I think you will find that my pest is being very well managed at the moment by an onslaught from the clown, or perhaps you haven’t been following the Gotham news?”

The scent of smoke wafting from Octavius was subtle in the air but it was enough to move Crane’s hands to his inner pocket as he pulled free a pack of cigarettes. Plucking one from the pack, he held it still between his teeth as he dropped the pack back in his pocket. His hands lowered to pat at the outer pockets of his lab coat but a frown of irritation was quick to marr his forehead as they came up empty.

A huff of annoyance, slightly muffled by the cigarette clenched between his teeth, escaped him.

“Allow me.”

Stepping forward with clear purpose, Octavius crossed the short space between them as he slipped into Crane’s personal space. One of his actuators dipped within the side pocket of his leather trench coat with obvious dexterity and pulled free a small box of matches, dropping them into his outstretched palm.

Crane, to his credit, did not flinch as he was openly challenged by the other scientist.

To flinch or take a step back would show weakness and he would not allow it.

While his impressive height usually gave him some advantage of intimidation, the sheer physicality which Octavius exuded, his wide body pairing with the obvious threat of his impressive metal arms, made it quite clear who would win in a physical bout.

Luckily, that was something Crane had no interest in and his skills in avoiding unnecessary combat were tuned like a fine guitar after years of experience.

Opening the small box of matches, Octavius was quick to strike the match and allow the bloom of fire to briefly add some illumination to his face; showcasing the focus in his eyes and the slight smirk which graced his lips. The match remained in his fingers for only a second before being plucked free by the metal arm once again as it was held in the space between them.

Steeling his spine, Crane allowed a sour smile to tug at the corners of his lips.

“My thanks.”

Crane was careful as he dipped his head, ensuring that the tip of his cigarette was lain against the match with enough pressure to ignite. Their faces now mere inches away, Crane focused his attention on Octavius’ cigar, glowing away as it lay pinned leisurely between his white teeth, and Crane felt the sudden itch of unwanted observation as the deep, brown eyes refused to leave his own

Only when the glow of the tip of his cigarette was certain did he pull back and inhale softly.

Holding the smoke in his lungs for a moment, he exhaled slowly and watched as the plume of cigarette smoke dissipated quickly in the dim lighting of the room.

“What do you want from me?”

“Your value as a distraction.”

“I have no interest in playing with the child you have the shame to call your enemy. I am nearing a breakthrough in my own work.”

“Help me,” voice lowering a notch, Octavius spoke with a honeyed tone, “and I will open up fresh networks of contact with my associates and their impressive resources.”

“You want me as a distraction, but know this Octavius, if you pit me against that child then I will kill him. Morality still beats at your heart while mine has long since ceased and I do not temper my toxin for the young. He possesses no immunities to my chemicals and he will die experiencing his greatest fears and screaming for all New York to see.”

For the first time since he had entered into this little exchange, something akin to uncertainty shone within Octavius’ eyes as he listened to Crane’s words.

“Are you surprised?” Picking up on the change, Crane honed in on the weakness like a shark.

“No.”

“Then why are you hesitating to accept?” Feeling bolstered, Crane took a long draw of his cigarette before dropping it to the floor and stubbing it out with the heel of his shoe, “May I indulge myself in some home truths?”

Without giving Octavius time to respond, Crane ploughed on.

“Your contacts within Gotham are limited and so you seek me out to assist you, not realising that the man you knew briefly in college is long-since dead and the creature that inhabits his body has long since lost any petty humanity which would hold him back from his goals.”

His fingers closed around the vial of toxin in his pocket, preparing for the possible outcome of his next words.

“You left this city to experience success; a fully funded project to save this planet from itself and a beautiful wife making you content with your life. Both of which were then lost to you to, leaving you trapped in a body which is barely your own.” A grin of malice stretched his lips. “The sheer amount of fear which must now guide your life is intoxicating to me, tell me, what do you fear more; the knowledge that you are responsible for your fate in this life or the fear that one day you will lose yourself fully to the AI and becomes the monster that you already suspect you are?”

As his words continued, a mottled flush of rage appeared on Octavius’ face and his metal arms bristled in position, twitching angrily as they prepared to attack. Through gritted teeth, fury flashed in Octavius’ eyes as he spoke.

“I’ll kill you.”

Having anticipated such a move, Crane pulled free the vial of toxin and ensured that it was clear in the low lighting.

“Move against me and we will find out, first-hand, which of those fears is truly the one which knocks at your soul. I am not the solution to your current problem. You may come back to me when you need something greater than a glorified babysitter.”

A crack of bone came from one of Octavius’ gloved hands as he tightened them into a fist.

“You will one day regret this, Crane.”

“Perhaps I will. We shall see about that.”

Knowing when a cause was lost, an aggravated snarl escaped Octavius as he turned on his heel and made a swift exit from the failed exchange. As a final insult he dropped the cigar which he had been holding within his fingers to the floor, the embers glowing subtly against the dark ground as the heavy footsteps of their owner grew fainter with every moment.

In the sudden quiet of his lair, Crane exhaled deeply as adrenaline continued to pump through his veins. Dropping the vial back into his pocket for safe keeping, his thoughts were piecemeal but the one which kept springing to the forefront of his mind involved his assessments of the handsome Doctor Octavius and his greatest fears.

Maybe he would agree to assist the scientist, if only to confirm his suspicions. It would break the monotony of the usual costumed rogues he subjected to his whims and provide some interesting data on how, or if, his compounds influenced artificial intelligences.

Anything for his beloved toxin.

[sinisterexaggerator]

Stars Above! | Cad Bane

Chapter 12

Explicit: Slow Burn, Gratuitous Smut, Porn with Plot, Canon-Typical Violence, Mildly Dubious Consent, Angst, Tatooine Slave Culture

This chapter: Blood, gore, death, physical injury.

Notes: To me, Jabba has more than one or two Rancors. This is not Muchi, and this is not Pateesa. This may very well be the mother of Pateesa because I say so ;D (the Rancor Luke Skywalker eventually kills).

Word count: 4.3k

[ Ao3 ] - [ Masterpost ]

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“If I had known you planned to kill him, I wouldn’t have brought him here,” Boba Fett stated openly before his audience with Jabba upon his throne.

“Boba… Jee oidn't. Made pej oecision oefying jeesh.”  

Boba Fett was Jabba’s favorite - it was a well-known fact – the young hunter assumed he might be able to use this to his advantage at the present juncture. Though it was true he did not care about, or even like his former mentor, still, he was a skilled and adept hunter who didn’t deserve to go down like that. To be tricked, electrocuted, made to be food for a hungry rancor - it didn’t sit well; he thought Brainee should be ashamed, though perhaps a fitting end. It might also be said Boba had the idea to one day take Bane out himself - to prove once and for all he was the fastest gun – to break the draw. The honor should be his.

“He defied you out of loyalty to his client, and what Brainee did was reprehensible."

Brainee came forward then, one finger extended in a show of contempt and malice. He thought it only fair after what he had been exposed to: a weapon against his head. “Bane threatened me. He pulled his blaster on me! He said he was going to come back for me if I lied to him! I am sure he would have killed me if it suited him.”

“Perhaps, but face-to-face, and maybe just don’t lie,” he offered with a hidden smirk beneath his viewplate.

“So, that’s an excuse? Let me just … wait around to be murdered “nobly” by one of the least moral bounty hunters of our time. You speak of loyalty. He is loyal when it’s to his benefit. Bane is better off dead.”

Brainee had a point; it shut him up. Boba returned his gaze to Jabba through his helmet’s visor. “Do not release the rancor. Maybe I can talk some sense into him.”

“Toooh alay, Boba. Chuga.”

“It is not too late unless you say it is, Jabba. - Hungry? Cad Bane will hardly be a meal.”

“Stang something else shash eat.”

“And if I do, you will release him?”

“Jee widd think ooout lo.”

“I suppose that’s better than nothing. Fine. It shall be done.” Boba left the palace in a flurry, off to find some other type of quarry. An animal, perhaps a bantha or a massif, something, anything, that would satiate the rancor’s appetite along with Jabba’s. That might be the only way to spare the hunter’s life, despite the Hutt only saying he would “think about it.”

Brainee sneered, his expression sullied with his bitterness, though deep down he was worried for himself. If Bane escaped unscathed, his own life would be forfeit, yet he would bet all his credits on Jabba’s pet.

“Better hurry, Fett. He won’t last long down there,” he japed.

---

Cad Bane had passed out for some ten minutes, not realizing where he was until he noted his limbs were still entangled in the lithesome net. His appendages were bound; his hat had fallen off; he coughed. He tasted the distinctive flavor of his blood.

The Duros wormed his hand down, fingers inching toward his leather boots. He bypassed beneath the edge, burrowing the tips until he grasped what he was looking for - the tool that would set him free.

He actuated the humming blade, slicing through the netting, the vibroknife easily shearing the thin strips apart to release his body from its captivity. Every movement stung; he was forced to bend to cut his feet loose. He coughed again, wiping his mouth off on the back of his gloved hand.

Sure enough, there was a streak of emerald green. He took a haggard breath, rising to his full stature, then grasping at his chest. He raised his voice, bellowing to the crime lord above, knowing the Hutt could hear him speak, or hear him scream, depending, for the rancor had not yet been freed and Cad was dreading it.

“Jabba! Let me outta dhis damn pit! Might jus’ spare yer life if ye act quick.”

Not the best choice of words, though Cad’s temper could not be pacified once it had been set aflame, but the bounty hunter was in no position to make empty threats.

His verbalized ill intent only seemed to tick the slimeball off, as the gears began to turn on the gate that housed the beast, the Duros grimacing with nearly every inhalation of stale oxygen. It smelled down here.

“Fek,” Cad mumbled to himself, listening to the telltale clinks and grinding of the metal as he backed a pace away, staring at empty space.

Bane knew that she was there, he could sense her; he could feel the creature’s presence, and there was a shadow looming just beyond the darkened threshold of the cage’s maw.

A deafening roar filled the chamber, though Bane’s ear canals were shielded by his skullcap, a towering hulk of muscle and reptilian flesh stepping forward at a pace that was almost leisurely.

Cad studied his adversary, swooping down to scoop his hat up and holster his fallen blaster. He placed the bolero atop his crown, ignoring his own pain for now as he fully faced the monster who slowly bore down upon him. He gave a final warning, hoping that the Hutt might rein her in.

“Unless ye want me te kill dhis thing, ye betta’ wise up, Hutt.”

He was met with no response but a thick, gruff laughter, Bane’s elliptic eyes narrowing into slits. He dug into a pouch he kept attached to his gun belt and retrieved a thermal detonator, impressing a finger upon its trigger.

He tossed it at the rancor but his attempt was thwarted. The creature knocked it back with a sudden extension of its lengthy arm.

“Sspast,” was all he had time to say, dodging and rolling, just as the trill of the small explosive increased, signifying the device was about to splinter. Cad ignited his Mitrinomon thrusters with a quick push of a button on the underside of his forearm gauntlet to travel airborne in reverse.

He tipped his hat down low midflight over his sensitive eyesight, protecting it as the baradium compound became unstable within the tiny sphere, washing the rancor’s dining room in a deadly glow.

The explosion made the rancor even angrier as Bane was thrown against the rock wall just behind him, his hearing ringing in his ears, the white-hot flash of luminescence overtaking half the den’s expanse. He shut his eyes tight beneath his hat, feeling the pain shoot up his spine and back. He cursed himself, thinking this day had gone to kark from the very start.

The creature, though disoriented, ran forward toward him. She swiped at the Duros who had to duck. He activated one gauntlet’s flamethrower, scaring the salivating mess enough to make her ambulate backward on her stubby legs.

“Piss off!!” Cad growled grouchily at the flat-faced being, his own fangs bared, though once the flames died down she returned to her attack.

Bane maneuvered sporadically, gripping cold stone to support himself; the beast retreated with another burst of fire encountering her gaping, tooth-filled mouth.

It gave the hunter sufficient time to recuperate and to gain his footing. He curled his fingers and flicked his wrist, encapsulating one of the monster’s armored arms with his conductive whipcord launcher. Its skin was tough like leather, and perhaps blaster resistance, but a friendly jolt might quiet her enough to sit down and shut up, or so the Duros hoped.

Cad was wheezing as he turned the dial to his contact stunners; it reached max threshold, a bolt of electric blue riding the length of the cable in a zigzag pattern. It found its mark, the rancor giving a choked cry of desperation before it became a kind of pathetic whimper, the animal thrashing against the makeshift leash that encased her limb.

“Don’ like dhat, do ye, ye sow?!” the Duros sizzed, digging his soles into the ground to retain his traction, the creature flailing its head to the left and right.

Bane held his arm steady, activating the sinewy tissue in his biceps. He was lean, gangly, but he wasn’t weak, though the oversized monstrosity began to shortened the distance between them. She tugged on the wire that restricted her; Cad administered another shock.

He was tired, in pain, and bleeding internally, though he kept his cool intact. It took every bit of his remaining strength not to let the rancor win.

Bane shouted out to the audience above; the hunter was leaning toward the cusp of going feral. He had a bone to pick, and he’d wind up gnawing on it before the night was done. “Hutt! S’over. Gonna burn dhis thing te a crisp unless ye-”

“Bane.” He heard Fett call his name, the Duros’ attention diverting momentarily. He caught sight of Boba with a rope loosely held within one hand, the other end drawn taut around a Dewback’s thick, beefy neck. He had come in through the service entrance. Caretakers most likely utilized this path in order to feed and maintain Jabba’s prized possession, though this bit of negligence gave the larger reptile an in to nearly end Cad Bane.

The whipcord tightened; it tensed; it became inflexible. The rancor drew Bane in, giving him seconds to react. His body was jerked forward, upward, one massive claw rising to strike. Cad slammed his palm against the quick release built into his gadgetry, the line connecting him to the rancor severed, and just in time.

However, the beast’s arms were elongated; they stretched to lengths beyond a standard reach to capture prey. Cad reactivated the thrusters on his boots in order to try and zip away.

He put just enough space between them to avoid the full brunt of her deadly swing; he felt the sting. The rancor’s nails stripped a layer of Bane’s armor clean through to his scales. The Nashtah-hide tunic was ripped to shreds, his chest exposed, grazed by the animal’s filthy talons as the force of the slap pushed him into jagged rock.

Bane rebounded involuntarily; he crumbled onto his knees, the contraption on his arm short-circuiting – it shot sparks. This was it. He couldn’t take another blow. It was Boba’s fault. He had distracted him, though the boy now spoke a word: the rancor’s name.

“Seuffa. Here, girl. Look here.”                     

Bane turned his neck, slowly, as he gasped for breath, his apparatus whirring as it compensated, releasing extra oxygen from the canister that resided along his back, though now it leaked as it had cracked at the force of his most recent impact. He watched, stunned, as Boba led the rancor off, coaxing it to follow in the opposite direction from where the Duros struggled to stand on his own two legs; he seemed to be a natural.

Cad heard the crunch of bones - the wailing of the Dewback - the smaller cold-blood’s death rattle. He tried to walk, though he stumbled from side-to-side like a drunken man who had more than his fair share of ale, his broad fingers splayed across his burning lungs.

When Fett returned, he paused to study him. He realized Bane was worse off than he had first observed; he needed help, or a bacta pod, which Boba was well aware of the fact he had one on his ship if he could only convince him to take his assistance.

“Bane, this way. Let us go through the tunnels.”

Cad had a second wind; his brow ridge narrowed in malevolence. He hissed in hatred at Boba Fett, his cuspids revealed to the sockets that lined his gums. He nearly spat his words. “Don’ need yer help, and Ah’m goin’ out de way Ah came!”

Bane withdrew both LL-30’s, pulling one trigger after the other as he aimed up high, forging a man-sized hole in the metal grate that barred him from Jabba’s antechamber. He heard sounds of shock; screams; the shuffling of feet. He slammed his hand down haphazardly upon an array of buttons until he forced his boots to fire. He went skyward with Boba right behind him.

The other hunter had launched himself with the jetpack housed across his shoulders, meaning to stop Cad’s vindictive revenge in its tracks, but before he could ascend and manage to halt the Duros’ instinctual inclinations, he had already lain Brainee out, the Siniteen stewing in a pool of his own viscera and blood – he was riddled with more than twenty shots; burns and scorch marks.

“Bane,” Boba enunciated sternly, though Cad had whisked around; he ignored him, storming forward to mount the dais where Jabba resided. He sucked in all his pain, his anguish, skirting the Hutt’s tail and implanting the barrel of his Persuader against the slug creature’s wide cranium.

The crime lord howled as no one in the room knew what to do. Even Bib Fortuna cowered, having rightfully kept his mouth shut since the start; he was the Hutt’s righthand man, though he wasn’t stupid.

The only other figure who bothered to step forward was the silhouette of a woman; she was tall and thin, rivaling Bane’s own wiry physique. She crossed her arms; she leaned into her hip, a look of curious incredulity spanning her ghoulish face.

Aurra Sing waited patiently, drumming her long fingers across her naked elbow. Her jumper had no sleeves with which to impede her skills, though her weapons, her rifle remained slung across her back. She would ascertain her own role in all of this once Fett said his piece.

She had arrived late to the scene; she had not been here to see Bane fall into the rancor’s den - where Fett was, Aurra was not far behind, as well as the rest of the Krayt’s Claw syndicate.

This situation was new to her, but there had to be a reason for it. She respected Cad, they had worked many jobs together. He was not one to give himself over to emotions without an explanation or a justifiable rationale.

“Stay outta dhis, Fett,” Bane seethed, his eyes molten like the lava of Mustafar. His gaze wandered briefly to his former colleague, a hunter who had also taken Boba beneath her wing. They were not on the best of terms, though it could not be said they hated one another, yet he stood his ground, unsure if Aurra planned to hinder him.

When no one moved a muscle he got close enough to smell him, tasting the putrid flavor of the Hutt upon his lips. His disgusting scent permeated; it traveled, encompassing his olfactory organs. Bane would have retched his guts out if he weren’t so consumed with cutting fury.

“Cad Bane let'z make oeal.  Let jeesh boll an jee  widd give uba 100,000 credits an jee-jee seel norget beet evah happened.”

“He wants to make a deal, Cad,” Boba translated hurriedly, hoping the lure of credits would appease the hunter and call to his base needs - his love of money. “He says he will give you one hundred thousand credits if you let him go and he will forget this ever happened.”

“Warned ye! Gonna hafta do better n’dhat,” Bane’s canines clicked as he felt like biting him; he would not be satisfied until he mocked and ridiculed the worm who called himself a Daimyo. “Wanna know why Ah’m here? Ah’ll tell ye, scuzzball.”

Bane pressed the barrel further inward even as his other hand gripped at his ribs. He was depleted; the ache in his bones was catching up to him. If he wasn’t careful, someone would most assuredly take advantage of his weakness. It would be in his best interest to take the credits and leave while the going was still good, but not before he satiated his bitter indignation.

‘’Ere ‘cause yer weak! Don’ even know when ye got smugglers runnin’ weapons under yer nose. Seperatists still kickin; Tour’s payin’ me te flush ‘em out. Look at’cha; missin’ out on all dhat tribute.”

Jabba squelched a sound of outage with Bane’s LL-30 still so close to his massive head, his tiny arms waving in lividness as he fought back many hostile words. though there was something there; something he could use; he would tempt the hunter with an even bigger reward to right his agitation.

“Stang these smugglers shu an jee widd oouble haku Tour Aryan paying uba!”

“He says bring the smugglers to him, and he will double what the governess is paying you,” Boba relayed quickly.

It was tempting, but Bane knew better. He had already said too much; he had spoken the nature of his task, but his temper had been such that he was unable to control himself.

“Ain’t sellin’ out,” he stated tersely. It was more matter-of-fact than charged with heavy feelings. The Duros was calming down; he did not want to be a failure in the eyes of his clientele. The Empire was a steady source of income this day and age.

“’Ere’s de deal: Ye stay out m’business. Ye give me one hundred thousand creds’ naht te kill ye. Ye let me walk. Don’t exspect te be seein’ me no more.”

“Agreed, Murishani.” Jabba answered without thinking.

“Double-cross me, ye die. Ah’ll find a way te do ye in if it’s de last thing Ah ever accomplish in dhis God’s fersaken galaxy.”

Bane relinquished; he dropped his blaster though he kept a wary eye on everyone around him. He stumbled off the platform, droplets of dark jade leaving a trail with every step he took.

He passed Aurra; he tipped his hat to her before laggardly trudging onward. He paused at the entrance of the palace, his fingers clamping down upon the edge of the last partition that separated him from the outside world.

He barely reached the darkened corridor that would lead him beyond Jabba’s residence as he kept one hand upon his weapon’s holster; it was a warning to the others, anyone who would try to fool with him in this condition. Injured animals in the wild would fight to the very last.

Boba watched him go as he propelled himself with a push from off the wall and around the corner. He would follow, but not before Jabba had given him a new set of orders. The clone glanced to Aurra as the Daimyo spoke, knowing that he would need her help on this; also Bossk and Dengar’s.

“Nind beet ulwan, an stang hoohat jeesh. Jee widd doo hoohat before Tour Aryan.”

“Yes, Jabba.” His new job was to bring the gunrunners to the Hutt before Cad could track them down, yielding them to Tour Aryan. It was a game of chance – let the best hunter win out in the end.

Boba nodded once -  a brief show of supplication to his employer before briskly turning to supervene behind the Duros - Aurra made to join him, but he held one hand aloft.

“Wait here for now,” he commanded with placid authority. She obeyed, though scowling, having little in the way of patience. If he had been any other man …

---

Outside in the dark, Cad Bane fiddled with his comlink, the set of switches that would signal the Justifier to his whereabouts. He received nothing but static from the other end as the device scintillated; miniscule sparks and wayward bolts of electricity nearly electrified his fingers. His face contorted in a show of unamused annoyance as he called his droid, “Todo, come in. Need a pick-up.”

He smacked his gauntlet; it only injured him. He growled out loud; he was frustrated beyond belief as he took a rasping breath. Bane realized he would have to walk it back. He had no way to contact his good-for-nothing robot, no way to summon his ship to him. A weaker man would have sat down in the sand.

It would be ironic to survive all this only to die out in the desert.

Bane put one foot forward and began the long trek into town where his ship was docked at the spaceport in Mos Eisley. Every part of him was suffering; his body, his mind; his psyche. He dipped his head to look at his open wound; the blood would most likely alert a predator. He was thankful he at least still had his blasters, though it was only a small consolation as he could hardly move.

“Bane,” a voice rather softly behind him said. He felt a hand rest atop his shoulder. The Duros jumped; he whirled around, his own hand coming to swipe at Boba’s as he skittered back. He thought to shoot him, blue digits itching at the grip of one seated pistol.

“Keep yer hands off me,” he spat.

“Bane, what are you doing? You'll never make it,” he said with a stern, yet careful calmness.

“Why d'ye care. Yer de one who brought me ‘ere!” Cad retorted, eyes flaring as his temper began to rise once more.

“I had no idea things would turn out so badly. I didn’t think-”

“Nah, ye didn’ think, did ye?” Bane turned again, marching onward, though sluggish; he was slow.

“You need help,” Boba did not relent; he kept on following him, matching his speed to walk along beside the irate grump.

“Don’ want it! Dhat’s what’s wrong with ye. Told ye dhat. Too compassionate.”

Bane ignored him otherwise, physically pretending he wasn’t there right at his side. Cad refused to look at him, instead facing the sprawling dunes he would have to conquer in order to get back to his ship alive.

“Would you have me work for the Empire then? To be like you?”

“A job’s a job, but maybe so. Need a lil’ backbone.” Bane took a breath that rattled, nearly dropping to one knee. He righted himself before he could fall, however unsteadily.

“Bane, you’re going to die out here if you try to walk all the way back to Mos Eisley, if you care.”

“Dhen so be it,” the Duros responded flatly.

Boba stopped in his footsteps. He let him meander another pace or two away. He removed his blaster; he aimed it at his former mentor and took his shot – it was set for stun - Fett only shook his head.

“Stubborn old fool. Your pride will be the death of you.”

---

Boba made the effort to drag Cad back to an awaiting land speeder. It was Brainee’s, but he would not be needing it again. He situated him in the best possible position: stretched out so as not to cause him any more undue pain.

Fett had no idea why he was even doing this; the Duros didn’t want his help. Should he find him aboard his ship alongside Todo, who knew what he would do. There might even be another duel.

Ultimately, he might have felt a small amount of guilt. He had once admired him, then he had tried to take his life. Disagreements happened all the time; he had learned to watch his back. Even Aurra had come crawling when he least expected it. Still, he had been the one to betray Bane; he had wanted off the job, and was willing to protect those people. If he had stuck it out, maybe there would have been another way for him to get his way.

Yet despite his crookedness, Boba could not leave him there alone in the harsh climate of the planet Tatooine – not in his condition - it was an unforgiving place. Besides, he would be eaten by a massif, or some other carnivorous creature like a sandswimmer, perhaps. In this state he was a sitting mynock.

It was the thoughts of those times he fed him, put him to bed, or let him cry to him that solidified Fett’s resolve; the times they had spent together with his father, Jango.  

Maybe Bane was right: he was too soft. However, he supposed the man might thank him one day if their paths ever crossed again.

Instead of going directly to the port where he knew the Justifier remained unattended except most likely by his droid, Boba did what he thought was best; he needed someone to monitor and care for him, and it could not be him.

Bane would not stand for that. It was ridiculous; ludicrous to even entertain it, though this woman he had taken a fancy to seemed like she might be the type to attend to his needs and wounds.

Fett left the speeder running as he approached her simple dwelling. Bane was still knocked out cold, thankfully unconscious, as he would have surely protested. He had not noticed that his own armor was coated with a thin sheen of sticky green.

He rapped three times and waited, glancing back to note the Duros’ breath was shallow. He needed bacta.

He had forgotten his appearance; his helmet was still on. The girl answered and mildly gasped. She appeared frightened, her fingers gently grasping at the edge of her hut’s doorframe as she studied him; her eyes were two different colored jewels that sparkled in the night.

Fett cleared his throat; she was in nothing but a nightgown. Her raven hair was down and framed her face of a lovely shade of purple, or maybe pink. It was unique. He fumbled for his words, deciding to remove his beskar headgear first, his handsome face revealed along with dark locks of chocolate brown.

“Who-who are you?” she meekly stuttered. “What do you want? It’s late. Perhaps you have the wrong address.” She moved to press the button that would close the door; Boba stuck his boot out and halted her.

“Come with me.”

Her lower lip quivered; perhaps she thought she was being kidnapped, or forced into coercion by this strange person who expressed his necessity of her.

“I’m not going anywhere with you. I don’t know w-”

“It’s Bane. He needs help.” Fett moved to the side, giving her a clear view of the vehicle that resided close behind him. He took this time to observe her - the golden slave collar at her throat – she was beautiful. Boba could see why the Duros favored her.

The girl’s expression changed; her eyebrows furrowed inward in a state of pure alarm as she caught sight of Cad in the backseat of the land speeder. She moved to rush beyond him; her hand reached out; he blocked her path using his right arm as a barrier to access. “Get dressed first, and hurry.”

She reluctantly stayed silent, tears forming in her eyes, then turned around to obey his hushed command.

---

Masterlist

Sorry for the long wait.

Note about Aurra and Boba’s relationship

[codylabs]

YEAH BABY NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE IT

Class-5 Berserker Frame

Lore and Process below cut

Lore:

A highly specialized and expensive class of combat armor intended for delicate or complex strike applications where other options like missiles, drones, tanks or traditional infantry might be too clumsy or slow, or when collateral casualties are of high concern. Common applications are storming buildings and bunkers, or long-duration scouting missions. The Class-5 was designed with fully-robotic hands and feet, such that the operator’s own hands and feet don’t reach all the way to the ends of the limbs. This allows the suit’s hands to be a lot stronger and tougher, as well as able to be swapped out with other mission-specific attachments. The feet were driving cleats, able to extend outwards in a violent and sudden springing action, to aid jumping and running at speed. The Class-5 was precise and specific enough that they needed to be custom fit to the wearer, and they required advanced manufacturing techniques to maximize performance of the various components, so they cost a lot.

Stolen Class-5 units were favorites of the Time Knights. Since specific suits would only accommodate a very specific set of body measurements, it was frequent that each warrior could only find a single suit to match them, (or only a single warrior could be found to match a suit.) As such, the Knights often took strong ownership of their suits, and decorated and repainted them as they saw fit. A tradition arose of painting stripes/tying ribbons to the suits to symbolize the warrior’s past feats. The specific character drawn big in the third picture is supposed to be the girl from the Forest of Daggers, so she’s decorated to reflect the accomplishments in that story: a red and grey ribbon together means some dark and horid victory in battle, something that she felt guilty about. The purple, blue, and white ribbons together means she swore to bring somebody back from death, and succeeded after persevering through many trials. All time Knight suits (and ships) have two blue stripes permanently painted onto them somewhere, to represent the two oaths that they must necessarily have fulfilled: The oath to maintain the absolute secrecy of the cause, and the oath to stand by one another, and persevere until the war’s completion. Since they are eventually destined to win, it is a historical absolute that none of them had ever broken either of these oaths.

Process:

Picture 1: Idea for the basic silhouette of the design I was wanting to go for. Not thinking about mechanics at this step, just wanting to visualize and exaggerate a cool shape. I was really inspired that day by Evangelion, if you couldn’t tell by the words, which is why it looks all lean and gaunt. The extended limbs were put in to emphasize that look, and I liked how the the proportions came out. I also really liked the long helmet that blends into the back, since it calls to mind pillbugs and xenomorphs. I’m def keeping the long head. The visor is supposed to be either some kind of reinforced 1-way glass. Transparent from the inside, pale and opaque from without.

Second picture was drawn to clarify the mechanics and various internal/external details. Happy with how this came out, with the possible exception of the exposed flexribbing on the hips. The suit’s limbs will be actuated with electronic muscle cables directly beneath the outer layer, so I needed to make room (especially around the hips) for those too. It was apparent at this point in the design process that the suit makes the wearer’s butt look absolutely enormous, which is acceptable on grounds of hilarity.

Third picture is yeah boy. I should note that NONE OF THIS IS FINAL. I’m still experimenting with a lot of these designs, and this is still pretty early in the character-design process, no matter how much I like this one.

Fourth picture is a couple cool poses. The upper-middle pose shows how the driving cleats work. A jetpack modele could be attached to these suits, but I didn’t draw any of these with it. Left image showcases both the gravitic battery power source (birthday cake-sized cylinder on the upper back) and the big butt, still allowed on grounds of hilarity.

Fifth picture are a whole bunch of different character designs, as a proof-of-concept to show how swapping out weapons, paints, and clothes can result in an extremely wide variety of characters. Green one is a noir detective with a big iron on his hip, Blue one is waifu, Yellow one will kick your ass, Black one has cool braids and a nice color scheme, Grey one has a knife and a legacy to live up to, Brown one specializes in C L A M P, Orange one is hardcore.

Inspirations:

1. Bubblegum Crisis Hardsuits (I had various inspirations before, but seeing this anime really solidified what I want and what I didn’t want from this design, and gave me the idea to customize weapons and colors based on the wearers’ personalities.)

2. Evangelion Evas (There is very little cooler than the stance and the attitude these things radiate. Look at this duuuuuuuude. Inspired basic shape, as well as the idea of having an onboard AI helping with movement and coordination.)

3. M E T R O I D (I don’t think ANY power armor I EVER draw will be fully free from Metroid inspiration. I’ve been in love with this design ever since the tender age of 11 1/2 when I scrolled through Smash Melee’s roster of pokemon and marios and found a COOL ROBOT GUY. Mwah. Iconic. Lovely.)

[valancyjane]

Nusquam aliud est vertere (Nowhere else to turn) Chapter 28

‘“That shirt looks better on you than it ever did me… but you’ve done up too many buttons –“ and he slips free the top two before she can stop his nimble fingers.

“Much better.” Hermione huffs as Draco tries to peer down her shadowed cleavage, now partially exposed by the gaping neckline.

“Cut it out, you pervert,” she is stymied in her attempts to re-button the shirt as Draco easily drags her to sit atop him.

“That’s not what you said last night,” he remarks, rubbing his big hands onto the small of her back beneath the loose shirt and running his thumbs beneath the waistband of the amaranth panties. “I’m happy to refresh your memory, though…?”.

Draco presses his back to the arm of the sofa, nestling Hermione more securely into his embrace as he kisses her hungrily. He tastes like rich coffee and his own unique, earthy flavour; she wedges her knees into the padded sofa cushions as she eagerly responds, nipping aggressively at his pliant mouth. Her arms are braced on his pectorals as she bumps suggestively into his boxer-short clad groin. He is already rock-hard and thrusts up slightly as she shifts down. The forgotten cashmere throw bunches around her hips and his legs as he digs in his heels for better purchase.

Their combined moans and coos are rudely interrupted by the sound of the Floo actuating.

Hermione doesn’t notice it (lost as she is to blossoming passion), until a cool feminine voice announces, “Good morning, Draco. And Miss Granger.”

Looking up at her in horror, Draco pushes aside the curtain of her sienna curls, face frozen as he turns his head to confirm the identity of his unexpected visitor.

“Hello, Mother,” he sputters faintly.

Mother! NONONONONO! Without conscious thought, Hermione hurls herself to the left and springs over the side of the low-backed lounge, tumbling face-first to the floor with a muted “oof”. Had the circumstances not been mortifyingly humiliating (dry-humping her newly-acknowledged boyfriend as his patrician mother watches is not her idea of an appropriate introduction), Hermione might have been impressed by her panicked athleticism. She briefly contemplates trying to wedge herself beneath the couch, but Draco is already running his concerned hands along her jumbled limbs.

“Granger – what were you thinking? Are you alright?” He gathers her into a quick, crouched hug before helping her rise to her feet. “She doesn’t bite, you know,” he whispers into her tingling ear. “Just be your lovely self – it will be fine.”

Fine. Ha. Unlikely. Hermione hopes her face and neck are not quite as flame-red as they feel as Draco hooks her arm through his and turns them to face Narcissa. His mother is regarding them with a look as coolly imperturbable as Draco’s fall-back expression; but Hermione takes some heart from the twinkle in Narcissa’s azure eyes. She doesn’t appear shocked or surprised, which is… peculiar?...’

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23994118/chapters/60882619

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13573419/1/Nusquam-aliud-est-vertere-Nowhere-else-to-turn

[sinister-official]

EARLY DAYS

WORD COUNT:  1.3k // SUMMARY: In which Olivia wakes up. // ERA: Predebut

Olivia thought.

In her current situation, it was all she could do. Oh, she could speak, and swallow, and swivel her eyes about behind her bandages to no end, but her arms and legs were limp and lifeless, as weak as an infant's. When she’d first became aware of her situation, there hadn’t been any feeling at all in them, and panic had flared in her chest, hot and stifling, before she’d realized that she wasn’t actually paralyzed.

Her actuators, though, were infallible. They were made of metal, unlike her weak, fleshy limbs, and they could keep moving when her legs gave out underneath her, or when her arms grew too sore to lift. She could see through them, through the cameras mounted on their ends, and through them she could see that she was in a hospital, with a man - Japanese? - watching over her. His pulse had spiked. He's scared.

Her actuators crept over the floor towards her, sliding into her bed, handling her bandaged form with care. They manoeuvred by touch, nosing up her back, until they uncovered a knot of scar tissue at the base of her neck. They left it untouched.

When the microwires re-interfaced with her spine, it felt like coming home.

Who needs weak, badly-designed eyeballs when you could have high-definition, high-quality cameras?

"Mirror," Olivia rasped, and the Japanese man pointed to her right. Her actuators turned to look, and there was a door. Slowly, careful-as-you-please, the harness crackled over her stiff, sore hips, gliding over the gauze, and slotted into place, supporting her spine. The pressure was familiar, applied evenly from her hips all the way up to her ribs (since when could I feel my ribs?), and as her actuators lifted her out of bed and into the bathroom, she saw herself, suspended a foot above the ground, hanging limply from her actuators. She couldn't see a single square inch of skin that was uncovered, apart from around her mouth.

Let's change that.

One of her actuators unsheathed a blade (oh, it's dull; I'll have to replace it). The bandages had been applied deliberately and carefully, to apply pressure to her whole head, and as they fell away, Olivia realized just how constricted she'd been.

That realization, however, paled in comparison to her new face.

Wow.

She had cheekbones, now, and her eyes were larger. Her double chin had vanished, and the spray of acne that had been the blight of her high school years (among other things) seemed to have been wiped from existence. She was bald, though, and her eyes -

"Fuck," Olivia hissed, and squeezed them shut.

"Your eyes haven't been exposed to light in months," a woman said, dryly, from behind her, and one of her actuators spun around. "Take it slow."

"And who are you?"

"Call me Natsuko," said the woman, who seemed to be as old as Olivia herself. "It’s nice to meet you in person, Ms Choi."

-----

The hospital in which she had been warded was located on the outskirts of a Japanese city, one of the smaller ones. They’d told her the name of the city, but Olivia hadn’t bothered to devote any effort to retaining it. She wasn’t sure, but it seemed as though she was the only patient there.

“We use it to house injured personnel,“ Natsuko told her, glancing up from her phone to answer her question, and Olivia nodded absently, sunglasses perched on the bridge of her unfamiliar nose.

Her eyes were still adjusting, as was the rest of her. The doctors said that it was good that she hadn’t tried to walk immediately upon waking up, because her legs wouldn’t have been able to support her weight. They were putting her through a physiotherapy programme in the desolate, hastily-retrofitted underground basement, and it was this programme that she was currently enduring, arms quivering as the treadmill beeped and the electrodes plastered to her scalp fizzled.

“I’m getting stir-crazy,“ she said, between abortive, heaving pants, and Natsuko nodded sympathetically.

“That’s understandable. Honestly, if you weren’t getting a little cooped-up, I’d have been worried.“ She leaned against one of the handrails. “I’ll talk to the doctors. We should be able to let you go out on a few… eh… night-time excursions.“

“Great.”

Natsuko shifted. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about something else, actually,“ she began, carefully, and took Olivia’s grunt as permission to continue. “Now, as we understand, there’s a lot of people who are currently searching for you, yes?”

Olivia nodded. Her legs were sore, but she couldn’t find it in herself to be tired of how they pumped and glided beneath her. They’d made her so tall.

“Have you ever heard of the phrase hiding in plain sight?“

“What?“

“You see, there’s this little project of mine,“ Natsuko muttered, leaning in, and Olivia, intrigued, listened. “Imagine, if you will, being adored by millions. You’d be called upon to film commercials, or to model. You certainly have the looks for it, after all.“

Adoration.

It was a novel concept, to be sure. Olivia had never been adored before. There was a boy in high school who had asked her to meet him behind the bleachers, like in the movies, but that had just been the set-up to a particularly cruel prank. Apart from him…

“Blouses and skirts,“ Natsuko enthused. “Lipstick and mascara. There’d be a full complement of staff whose job it would be to make sure that your every need is met.“

Olivia had never been one for blouses and skirts. She’d always preferred hoodies and sweatpants, baggy clothes that concealed her pudgy figure and allowed her to fade into the background. Now, though…

“Think of it as… oh… making up for lost time.“

Olivia squinted. “What?“

Natsuko blinked. “What?“

“What's making up for lost time supposed to mean?“

“Just a turn of phrase.“

“Hmph,“ Olivia grunted. The treadmill was finally slowing down, after an interminable period of time, and she called her actuators to her as it ground to a halt. “And if I say no?“

“Well, according to the terms of our prior agreement, you’ll remain in our employ for a decade or so, producing technology to our specifications.”

Inwardly, Olivia winced. She’d been desperate, exhausted and shaken when she’d signed that contract, all those months ago. (How long has it been? A year? More?) They’d placed it in front of her, and she’d signed it without a second thought. “A decade?“ she repeated, numbly.

“A decade,“ Natsuko confirmed, and as her actuators tramped past the shorter woman, Olivia wondered if it would be wiser to flee in the night and try to make it to China on her own. She discarded the idea almost immediately, of course. “Perhaps more. I’d have to check, of course.“

“Can’t I renegotiate?“ Olivia tried, attempting to hide the sinking feeling in her stomach.

“No.” Natsuko looked as though she might smile, just to rub it in, but her expression didn’t change. As Olivia’s harness tightened over her waist and lifted her off the treadmill, her head tilted upwards to continue looking at her. “Besides, we’ve already delivered on our end of the bargain. We’ve shielded you from your pursuers for the past few months, and we’ve made you unrecognizable. We’ll continue to protect you from them for as long as the contract stipulates.“

Which is more than a decade. What if they come and get me after my time is up?

I deserve it.

Olivia inhaled.

No, I don’t.

“And I suppose that if I go along with this enterprise, you’ll reduce my…” Olivia searched for the phrase, “… term of service?“

“We’ll reduce it to five years, but we’ll keep in touch with you for as long as we need to. Just to make sure that you haven’t been brought in or captured, of course.“

That makes it easier to decide.

“I’ll think about it,” Olivia said.

“Please do,“ Natsuko answered, smiling thinly, and left.

[sw5w]

He Has to Complete Two More Circuits?

STAR WARS EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace 01:03:13

[tenthspeedwriter]

Recon Three (A draft of a short story about a space orc)

“Recon three, approaching target. Going comms-quiet.”

“Understood, Three Preeminent. Good hunting.”

Captain Sallys slid the communicator back into its pocket in her armor, folded seamlessly against her serpentine body. Behind her, Bo checked her mag rifle with a nervous tic.

Yualith rebellions were nothing new in the cosmos--the fractious insectoid folk had dealt with internal struggles since well before their starfaring days--but humans in the Orion Peacekeeping Alliance were an entirely novel matter.

Bo, for her part, felt absolutely out of place. Back in the Solar Defense Force, she’d been a highly decorated marine: a master marksman, a dauntless survivalist, and an uncanny tactical wit. It was why she was chosen among the first five hundred to take part in her home arm’s united security front.

For her part, though, she might as well have been fresh out of boot.

This world, for starters, was nothing like home. She’d rooted out contraband enclaves on the cold canyons of Pluto, led formations on the dusty plains of Mars, and run dozens of drills under the hellish heat and pressure of Venus.

Gios, though? It was surreal to her.

Monolithic vegetation akin to fungus dominated the landscape, undergrown by lichens so rigid they scraped the paint from her shin plates. Sporeclouds stirred each time the wind blew and cut visibility to a few tens of meters. Even her life support system, for all it could do to filter out a wisp of breathable oxygen, left an acrid taste of ammonia in her throat.

She had no idea what tactical superiority even looked like in a place like this. After five years as a fire team leader and three as a platoon commander, it felt bizarre to her to be entirely beholden to the combat sense of another. Sallys had proven a reliable leader in training and a’ship, but this would be the first time Bo had ever followed her into a combat zone.

She trusted, as much as someone one knows only through their records can, her team leader. Regardless, she couldn’t shake the feeling of fighting blind.

Then there was the unit in which she found herself.

Captain Sallys, foremost, was of a serpent-like people called the Ixori. Their agility and marksmanship were unparalleled in the cosmos, and she’d seen twice as much combat in the last few years than Bo had in a lifetime.

Second in command was Warden Iommo. He stood barely a meter tall, yet had the aspect of a chameleon: incredible situational awareness, and skin that melded into the vivid colors of the landscape. He wore no camouflage--just a translucent ballistic vest and the kit on his back.

On point was Peacekeeper Abrox--a Gorolai whose resilience in battle was without peer. They were bipedal, manually dexterous, and of a meter and a half’s height, much like a human; yet, they could see and hear well past the spectra of homo sapiens. They further differed in their amber exoskeleton, upon which they nailed their battle plate like an old-age shoe upon a horse. Bo asked them once if it hurt; in return Abrox asked, “have you ever gotten a tattoo?”

Just behind him marched Peacekeeper Ojore, a Taelic. An tripedal fellow with leathery skin of a dozen brilliant hues, he carried an enormous recoilless rifle--not to mention the team’s allotment of explosive charges. His hands were as large as Bo’s head, yet when priming a detonator, they moved with a surgeon’s grace. For this mission he had daubed himself in deep fungal-brown pigment, giving him the image of an alpha predator in the shadows. (Bo, of course, knew him to volunteer in children’s creches and sing in the OPA All-Faiths Choir whenever ashore--but the foe didn’t need to know that.)

Then there was Mender Hali--a Kastarine. Bo had never cared for cockroaches, and though she was hardly proud of her prejudice, it didn’t sit well with her that a being who so resembles one was her medic. If he cared to stretch his limbs and lean upright, he would stand near to her chest--yet like most of his kind he scurried along the ground, his rigid digits quite comfortable on the unwelcoming terrain. 

And last, there was Bo. Peacekeeper Lashawna Boudicca. A mere human in a galaxy of fantastic creatures. She stood near two meters tall, a hundred kilos of muscle and grit, yet in the company she now kept she felt as feeble and clumsy as a suckling child. For all two decades of training did for her, Abrox could still lift her with gear and all single-handedly. Hali could outrun her with a sprained pedipalp--she’d seen him do it. Iommo could scale a ten meter climb before she’d so much as made her second step.

But here she was, marching into a fungal grove the likes of which she’d never seen, their designated marksman. These five put their faith in her covering fire, their lives in her aim.

She might have lost herself in her doubts, but the team’s march was cut short. Sallys raised a spindly hand and signaled them down low.

In the clearing ahead stood a blood-brood of Yualithi--a dozen razor-clawed beings each clad in the colors of the Gios rebellion. Most bore gas-actuated assault weapons with cruel-looking bayonets.

If the wind were to turn, or the sporeclouds dissipate for even a few moments, team three would be exposed and assailed in an instant. Mercifully, however, whatever orders the brood were waiting on came; they filed out in bored succession.

“Remember,” said Iommo in a hushed breath, “we’re not here for a firefight. We find that depot from the orbital scans, we drop a multiwave beacon for the artillery battalion, and we get the hell out.”

“I don’t think anyone has forgotten, Warden” said Sallys. He shot her a glance which she met immediately, and after a few stern moments, she signaled the team to carry on.

“I hope we don’t find a fight” said Ojore as they marched. “It would be so nice to have a peaceful operation for once.” He shrugged his weapon further back against its strap, apprehensive of it even still.

“Peaceful,” said Abrox with their best impression of human “air quotes.” “We have an objective. Anything between it and us is as good as forfeit.”

“Still,” added Hali, “it would be nice not to return covered in viscera. You lot have an awful way of staining my good uniforms.” He gave a chittering laugh, and Abrox along with him. The grimace on Ojore’s face was rather like Bo’s.

“Quiet, all of you” said Iommo with a hiss. “Our orders are to engage responsively, and that is all to say on the matter.” As soon as he turned his eyes back to the horizon, Bo saw Sallys’ tail-tip twitch in a circle--a gesture she’d learned was much like rolling one’s eyes.

Kilometers of alien vegetation passed beneath foot, tail, and claw, led with certainty by Abrox’s keen senses. They could see further through the sporish haze by naked eye than any targeting sensor--and they seemed just the slightest bit perturbed that the rest of the team fought to match their pace.

At last, silhouetted against the glow of the sky, their target came into view. Iommo leapt to the top of one a towering fungal spires to train an omniscope on the target. “It’s a match to the gamma signature from the scans,” he said. “Enough ammunition and fuel rods to supply this rebellion for weeks longer. Captain, shall we being our app--”

Without warning, Iommo’s perch burst out from underneath him. A hail of mass-reactive shells rained from the flank, and he plummeted toward the ground. “INCOMING FIRE!” cried Ojore as he reached out to catch his Warden. Sallys slapped Abrox’s shoulder as she advanced ahead. “Weapons hot, get to that hill line! Defilade, now!”

Iommo locked eyes with Ojore for a moment: first in bewilderment, then quickly-swallowed fear, then in burning displeasure. He laid his superior down on his feet with an awkward gentleness, and refrained from the urge to pat him on the head. Another volley pulped the vegetation that concealed them, and they put aside their differences to dive for cover.

Bo brought up her targeting sensors, following the tracers from Abrox’s assault-mag. Her first shot went wild into the alien flora. “No, dammit” she said to herself, “fire discipline.” She choked down the surge of adrenaline that followed the break of battle. Hali could smell it on her--he gave her a sideyed glare as he drew his sidearm.

An absurdity of humanity. One of the most dangerous combat drugs known to science--and humans simply dripped with the stuff when you so much as startled them. How they managed to form a single coherent thought in the throes of it was beyond him. Bo raised her head up again and, this time, ventured a longer look at her target. Three Yualithi on an emplaced weapon at four hundred meters; another nine barreling down upon them fifty meters closer. “They spent their surprise too early!” she said. “Targets at three-fifty and closing.”

“Then deal with them!” answered Iommo as he hunkered into cover, his carbine quite useless at such range. Bo’s training flashed through her mind. Prioritize: their heavy weapons were too far out to be accurate, but held them under suppression. Objectivize: clear the air for her allies before the foes closed on them. Actualize: …” She squeezed the trigger and sent a mag-driven bolt directly into the field gun’s frame. Its crew ducked for cover for a moment before resuming their barrage, and the stream of fire edged its way toward her. “Damn it all!” she swore, chambering the next cartridge. She’d only have time for one more shot, and there were three of the clackers to take down. “Mark that… whatever it is!” said Ojore as he drew his weapon. “Give me a bead, if you please!” “Trusting you here, Ojie!” she answered as she trained her sensors. She didn’t love the thought of shooting an enemy pointing high explosive armaments at her with an infrared dot instead of a mag-cartridge, but she knew he had the right idea. The gentle Taelic broke into a song of war as he hoisted his launcher high. “He’s really going to fire this one blind?” Bo thought as she steadied her barrel.

“Blood upon stone and ash upon coals…”

“I swear if you nip the canopy and frag us, I’m going to come back from the grave just to kick your a--”

Ojore’s weapon screamed and scorched the earth behind him to glass, his payload rockering skyward.

“Fear within hearts as the fire-wind blows…”

Bo held the lock as long as she could. Not until splinters of woody fungus rained onto her did she at last roll back into the cover of the hillside.

“Onward we march; to glory we rise…”

Ojore ducked beneath the fire that Bo drew and emerged just in time to guide his rocket himself to its destination. 

“Our lives we will gamble; our enemies die.”

The micro-atomic impact was nearly as deafening as the launch. Mass-reactive shells cooked off like the rolling of thunder, drowning out the screams of the weapon’s operators. “Good damn shot!” Bo said as she rolled over pat her comrade on the back.

“No time to celebrate,” Sallys interjected. “Troops closing fast; small arms, go!”

As Bo drew her sidearm and caught her breath, shame gutted her. She’d missed. She’d put her comrade in harm’s way because she’d been too panicked to make a single shot against a stationary target. She could almost hear her former sergeant scolding her from beyond the grave for her mistake. A rookie’s mistake. A fool’s mista--”

“Head in the battle, damn your glands!” cried Iommo, not content to let her sulk with foes bearing down.

He and Abrox, freed of their biggest threat, laid a fierce volley against the storming insectoids. Their entire exchange would bring down only a couple of foes, but it forced them into a covered approach and gave the fire team a valuable moment to prepare.

Ojore raced to load another rocket; by the time he could prime it, however, the target had drawn too close. Its safety sensors squacked at him in anger, and with a sigh, he shouldered it again. “So much for hoping, I suppose…” he said, as he reached instead for the enormous charges belted to his waist.

Bo had to admire his willingness to stick himself in harm’s way. The enemy’s scattered fire whizzed about him as he lobbed charge after charge over the crest of the hill. At last Sarrys flicked the safety on her own assault-mag. “Foe closing to ideal range; make your shots count!”

She wasted no time in leveling her fire. Two hard bursts--”That’s one for me,” she said proudly. “Two for me,” laughed Abrox as they swapped their magazine.

Regardless, recon three was still outnumbered. Their enemy was in full assault--they strode through the oncoming fire at a bloodthirsty sprint. Her foe at last close enough to target, Bo leapt up with pistol in hand.

One shot, two, three. Miss after miss. The Yualith rebels danced like mad hornets, and their aimless shots became concerningly effective as the distance diminished. For the first time since she’d joined this fire team, Bo caught a glimpse of fear in her captain’s eyes.

“Brace for close quarters!”

[spookyspaghettisundae]

The Lonesome Wreckage

Waves lapped repeatedly at the jagged edges of this hunk of broken plastic and titanium. The spacecraft’s wreckage was shored up against a rocky spire that jutted out of the water like a spearhead, forming a small artificial island. All around it was nothing but a vast, endless ocean.

A woman stood just on the edge of the ship’s wreckage. Something about her stoic pose lent her a majestic air, despite how strange she looked. Her skin was a white so pale that it looked unnatural. Wherever her body was not covered with bright yellow strips of torn cloth wrapped around her limbs and torso, the exposed spots of her skin were visibly littered with a disturbing amount of scars of varying shapes and sizes. The wraps around her knuckles showed dark spots with crusted blood, and she was barefoot. Her very short white hair swayed in the gusts of wind that swept over this ocean.

Until recently, most people had only known her as Inmate Zero-Zero-Zero-Zero-One. The escaped prisoner stared out over this vast nothingness, not budging an inch. Watching her there, even doing nothing at all, had been distracting Dirk from his efforts to jury-rig a communication amplifier from the wreckage. He wondered if she would get a sunburn easily with such pale skin and after having spent fifty years locked in a windowless cell within the maximum security prison of Avidya Prime, drifting through the dark void of space. His curiosity about how she appeared to be little over thirty years old despite actually being over one hundred still refused to subside. And how could she stand it, being scantily-clad in tattered rags like that? The ocean air was cold and the metal plating of the wreckage underneath them freezing. The deserter shivered just thinking about it and looked back down at the pile of scrap parts he was trying to solder together with his multi-tool.

“The faster you work, the sooner we might leave,” she said. Her voice was low, the words smooth.

She had noticed his long lapse in operating the multi-tool due to the lack of flying sparks and fusion sounds.

“Couldn’t you just fly off from here? You’re a witch, after all,” he said, grimacing.

“I could, and I can even survive in the void of space for longer than you’ve seen, but you’re useful to keep around,” she replied while turning around. The irises of her eyes contained a thin streak of blue and were otherwise a stark white—he would have described them as silver, like arctic ice. Her gaze was piercing, like it drilled all the way down through flesh and bone to pierce his very soul. “For now.”

The former soldier sat on the scorched hull of a spacecraft next to a pile of assorted junk parts. He looked uncomfortable. His head was shaven bald, and the expression on his face told her that he was not only over a hundred years her junior, but also deeply insecure. The powered armor he inexplicably still wore had had all of its imperial insignia deliberately scraped off of the intact parts, and it was severely damaged on others—his right shoulder and arm and the same side of his torso were exposed. That part of his body should have been torn off by the ship cannons that had blasted right through their escape vessel, but she had conjured a magic that kept his flesh and bone and organs intact. Mostly. Unlike her, he did not know that he still had some natural convalescing to do on his own, and it was probably for the best that he was not aware of it. In a way, he had been a corpse, even if only for a few seconds. It must have been painful. These thoughts triggered a thin and cold smile to creep across her pale blue lips.

“Oh, I see, you’re amused by all of this. Good. Good for you,” he said in an attempt to break the awkward silence and then groaned, while continuing to solder an emitter array into the makeshift amplifier he was putting together. He only did that to break the uncomfortably long eye contact they had kept. While working, he spoke again, with more fire in his voice and sarcasm dripping from every word, “And what use, pray tell, may I have to you, oh great sorceress?”

Maintaining her smile, she said, “For one, I need someone to tell me how to operate all contemporary devices and someone to tell me what has happened to this wretched galaxy in the past fifty years. You could handle both. What I saw of your ship told me that things have changed a lot.”

“Cruiser,” Dirk said, correcting her without looking up from the device. “They’re not called ships anymore, and this particular vessel is a cruiser.” He cursed as he accidentally showered the exposed skin of his right hand with stray sparks from the soldering process. “Was a cruiser,” he then said, correcting himself. He sighed and dropped the multi-tool and scrap parts, and they plummeted to the hull underneath them with loud, clattering sounds of metal striking metal.

With the sounds of hydraulics in his armored legs that accentuated their engaging and disengaging of joint controls, he stood up. The deserter walked over to the edge of the wreckage, knelt down, and stuck his bare hand in the water to cool it off against the sensation of burning pain. The smile faded from her face as she observed him doing so.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she said to him.

“Computer readings said it was safe. Something off with this water?”

“No, not with the water. But I only have so much in me to keep you alive. And it’s just not a good idea to dive in here to retrieve your arm, should it get torn off,” she replied.

He rose to stand again and began to shake his hand dry while asking, “What?” No second too soon, as something fleshy and lumpy snaked out of the water with lightning speed as it swiped at where his arm had been a second ago. Dirk stumbled back a few steps, away from the edge, and the powered armor emitted some hissing sounds when it stabilized his movement and prevented him from falling down on his ass. Whatever that thing had been, the tentacle-like shape of it splashed right back into the water and disappeared into the darkness underneath the ocean waves.

She laughed when he burst out into a short tirade of profanities, mixed with incredulous questions about what that creature could have possibly been. Something about a disciplined soldier breaking down so easily was deeply amusing to her. Something about her laugh was genuine in a way he had not heard in years; something about it was infectious. Perhaps soothing.

Even before she had stopped laughing, he actively refused to show any signs of easing up and grumbled while he returned to the pile of junk he was trying to assemble into a functioning device and sat back down. He picked up one of the parts and resumed his efforts.

She sensed his denial and grinned before asking, “What’s your name, Imperial?”

“I am not affiliated with the Knights anymore, and I already told you, it’s Dirk,” he said, averting his gaze.

“I know you did. But I was concerned about escaping and surviving. I chose to ignore you.”

He clicked his tongue in frustration and trained his eyes on the device before removing the power supply again.

She asked, “I take it Shahan is still in power?”

“Yes.”

Soldering sparks began to fly from the device again.

“Is he still called the ‘golden child’ or some such nonsense?”

“Yes.”

“Does it bother you to know that some such as he or I can outlive you by hundreds, if not thousands of years?”

Dirk stopped soldering and looked up at her. He did not reply. She just stood there, several steps away from him, while the sun set in the purple sky behind her, a silhouette of a feminine figure standing out amidst the strange infinity of this ocean, stranded on some forsaken moon. It had gotten darker and the light from the sparks that his multitool had been casting were beginning to blind him. He was unable to make out her features, but he could still make out her icy eyes as they stared at him and paralyzed him.

“That your life is so fleeting, your mortality so palpable? Do you not even pause to question why?”

“No,” he said.

“You should,” she said, and was suddenly so close next to him that their foreheads were almost touching. Instead of feeling warm breath brush over his skin with those words, they were carried by a cold air that swept across his face like the winds of this ocean. He was mesmerized and must have lost time for her to have suddenly appeared so close, he thought. She began to hear those thoughts. He fidgeted uncomfortably and leaned back a few inches when he knew for sure that something or someone was invading his mind.

“St—stop that,” he stammered.

The sorceress smiled eerily but said nothing. She slowly rose to her feet from where she was kneeling in front of him, standing back up straight. Inmate Zero-Zero-Zero-Zero-One slowly began turning from him, keeping her gaze locked onto his eyes and continuing to probe his mind. She looked sultry to him, and his thoughts were racing back and forth in between confusion over how attractive she was while scaring the living daylights out of him and how to attach the power cell without damaging the actuator.

When she had turned fully and broken eye contact, he felt how that mental connection faded and she left his mind alone. She found it interesting how he truly had not once questioned how she did what she was capable of or how magic worked or why she or Shahan were immortal. Some part of him simply accepted these unnatural things. The residual thoughts and memories she had absorbed revealed to her that Dirk’s mind was still clouded with something like a drunken rage. How he had managed to break into the Avidya Prime prison and liberate her with no planning seemed more miraculous than anything. Perhaps his plan had worked by virtue of being so abysmally stupid. But he had done this recklessly suicidal thing in a single-minded attempt to exact vengeance on Shahan. This final thought amused her to no end.

The foreign thoughts dissipated, and she stared off into the sun setting on the horizon. The purple shades of the sky grew darker by the minute and with the cloud of his feeble-minded thoughts fading from her mind, the situation at hand grew clearer to her. Behind her, Dirk blinked and just stared at the back of her head, dumbfounded. He narrowed his eyes and began to understand fully what had just happened.

“Will you tell me what your name is now? After violating my mind, it seems like it’s the least you can do.”

A long silence followed and was broken by three syllables when she replied, “Kjalla.”

He had heard many of the other names like Scourge, Wandering Genocide, or Worldslayer. She was disappointed that people had not come up with any new ones in the meanwhile. But the stunned silence on his behalf suggested that he had never known her real name. Shahan and his lackeys must have been thorough in scrubbing her name from historic records.

“You shouldn’t dally,” she said.

He was about to ask what she was talking about before she spoke again, “When night has fallen, that thing down there is going to come up here and want blood. If it gets you first, I might be able to save you.”

She barely turned her head to look back at him from over her shoulder, glancing just from the corner of her eye. The silvery white of her iris chilled him to the bone. She whispered, “If it gets me first, well, you’re doomed. Right now, I don’t have the capacity to keep your body from falling apart until you are sufficiently healed if I need to save my own hide.”

His mouth opened because he wanted to say something, but the words never came. Instead, the serene texture of sounds of the waves lapping at their vessel’s wreckage was interrupted by a sharp splash. He could see the silhouette of something like tentacles—or rather, something that gruesomely reminded him of loose, disembodied intestines—as it whipped out from the ocean’s surface and wrapped around Kjalla’s body in an instant. Her face had displayed surprise, or so he thought, for it had happened too quickly. Before he could blink, she had skidded and slid across the cruiser’s hull and disappeared into the ocean water with another loud splashing sound.

In a trance-like shock, he continued to solder the scrap parts. Sparks fizzled from the adjoined pieces where the multi-tool fused them together, casting his shadow against the rocky spire behind him.

It felt like the winds had suddenly dropped in temperature. The cold sweat erupting from the pores on his forehead chilled him as the sun set fully. The purple sky turned pitch-black. How long had she been submerged? Seconds? A minute? Dirk felt a sharp pain flare up in his right arm. It throbbed, and he gritted his teeth.

His right hand started cramping up. He looked at it and watched with a growing sense of dread as blood began seeping from his fingernails.

—Submitted by Wratts

[kindlecomparedinfo]

This smart prosthetic ankle adjusts to rough terrain

Prosthetic limbs are getting better and more personalized, but useful as they are, they’re still a far cry from the real thing. This new prosthetic ankle is a little closer than others, though: it moves on its own, adapting to its user’s gait and the surface on which it lands.

Your ankle does a lot of work when you walk: lifting your toe out of the way so you don’t scuff it on the ground, controlling the tilt of your foot to minimize the shock when it lands or as you adjust your weight, all while conforming to bumps and other irregularities it encounters. Few prostheses attempt to replicate these motions, meaning all that work is done in a more basic way, like the bending of a spring or compression of padding.

But this prototype ankle from Michael Goldfarb, a mechanical engineering professor at Vanderbilt, goes much further than passive shock absorption. Inside the joint are a motor and actuator, controlled by a chip that senses and classifies motion and determines how each step should look.

Po 3D prints personalized prosthetic hands for the needy in South America

“This device first and foremost adapts to what’s around it,” Goldfarb said in a video documenting the prosthesis.

“You can walk up slopes, down slopes, up stairs and down stairs, and the device figures out what you’re doing and functions the way it should,” he added in a news release from the university.

When it senses that the foot has lifted up for a step, it can lift the toe up to keep it clear, also exposing the heel so that when the limb comes down, it can roll into the next step. And by reading the pressure both from above (indicating how the person is using that foot) and below (indicating the slope and irregularities of the surface) it can make that step feel much more like a natural one.

One veteran of many prostheses, Mike Sasser, tested the device and had good things to say: “I’ve tried hydraulic ankles that had no sort of microprocessors, and they’ve been clunky, heavy and unforgiving for an active person. This isn’t that.”

Right now the device is still very lab-bound, and it runs on wired power — not exactly convenient if someone wants to go for a walk. But if the joint works as designed, as it certainly seems to, then powering it is a secondary issue. The plan is to commercialize the prosthesis in the next couple of years once all that is figured out. You can learn a bit more about Goldfarb’s research at the Center for Intelligent Mechatronics.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176395 https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/this-smart-prosthetic-ankle-adjusts-to-rough-terrain/ via http://www.kindlecompared.com/kindle-comparison/

[someonestole15]

Break the locks and get out...

...Easy, right?

Target was last seen running through the containment area, heading east. That message echoed throughout the facility, their last sighting of me. I had managed to hide my trace before they picked it up, leaving me in the dark amongst them. I am not sure what they use this place for, I can only guess. The hallways seem different and the air is clean, where am I?

Some of the liquid still remained inside my servos and actuators, slowing me down. My scanners were off balance, messing up my scans of the area around me, so they were no use. Most of my synthetic skin had corroded away, leaving my chassis exposed, my arm was also out of action, so if we still feel like using the cards, I got an ace high and karma has a straight. A slight smirk made its way to my face.

“This can only end well.”

I raised my right hand, the armor plates inside had been removed, allowing me to see right through it. Cables and tubes crisscrossed throughout, carrying information and coolant between my pump and the limb itself, some of the cables had seen better days for sure. I lowered my hand and checked my chassis, armor plates removed and most of the covers removed, leaving my coolant pump exposed. They had certainly done a number on me, who knows when and how long I had been up here. What about Valkyrie? What about the others down there I had given my word for?

Stopping would only result in complete failure, so that isn’t even an option at this point. Hiding and sticking to the shadows seems like the smartest option once more.

I slowly made my way around, keeping my exits open so if they would find me, I could duck away. Passing patrols of security droids were easy enough to avoid, but the human/cyborg guards were more difficult. Light on my feet due to the removed armor, I could easily get across the open hallways, but of course my resistance was nonexistent. 1 round, it ends, right?

I passed several rooms that reminded of the cell they had Ella in, but they were either empty, or the window was blocked off with a steel plate. I passed by an area filled with offices. Low security, easy to get around. I passed an open door and heard a voice inside.

“So, do you have him under simulation?”

“No sir, he managed to break out, but he is still here. No escape pods have been launched and the hangar is under lockdown. Guard patrols are doubled and the motion trackers are active in those areas. If he tries to get out, we will know.”

“Loose lips sink ships, Captain.”

“Nobody else across Phobos knows of our plans, Commander. It is safe with me.”

Phobos… the moon orbiting Mars? They have a station out here? Can’t keep track of the signal, it jumps around before I can see where it came from. The captain disconnected from the call and walked over to his desk. I slipped away before he had a chance to notice me, I now knew where I was.

Phobos, and only 1 way out.

[ilianakonna-blog]

This smart prosthetic ankle adjusts to rough terrain

Prosthetic limbs are getting better and more personalized, but useful as they are, they’re still a far cry from the real thing. This new prosthetic ankle is a little closer than others, though: it moves on its own, adapting to its user’s gait and the surface on which it lands.  Your ankle does a lot of work when you walk: lifting your toe out of the way so you don’t scuff it on the ground, controlling the tilt of your foot to minimize the shock when it lands or as you adjust your weight, all while conforming to bumps and other irregularities it encounters. Few prostheses attempt to replicate these motions, meaning all that work is done in a more basic way, like the bending of a spring or compression of padding.   But this prototype ankle  from Michael Goldfarb, a mechanical engineering professor at Vanderbilt, goes much further than passive shock absorption. Inside the joint are a motor and actuator, controlled by a chip that senses and classifies motion and determines how each step should look.     Po 3D prints personalized prosthetic hands for the needy in South America        “This device first and foremost adapts to what’s around it,” Goldfarb said in a video documenting the prosthesis.  “You can walk up slopes, down slopes, up stairs and down stairs, and the device figures out what you’re doing and functions the way it should,”  he added in a news release from the university .  When it senses that the foot has lifted up for a step, it can lift the toe up to keep it clear, also exposing the heel so that when the limb comes down, it can roll into the next step. And by reading the pressure both from above (indicating how the person is using that foot) and below (indicating the slope and irregularities of the surface) it can make that step feel much more like a natural one.      One veteran of many prostheses, Mike Sasser, tested the device and had good things to say: “I’ve tried hydraulic ankles that had no sort of microprocessors, and they’ve been clunky, heavy and unforgiving for an active person. This isn’t that.”  Right now the device is still very lab-bound, and it runs on wired power — not exactly convenient if someone wants to go for a walk. But if the joint works as designed, as it certainly seems to, then powering it is a secondary issue. The plan is to commercialize the prosthesis in the next couple of years once all that is figured out. You can learn a bit more about Goldfarb’s research at the  Center for Intelligent Mechatronics .