Desks, chairs, and flat metal tables with straps hanging off the end of them. The windows lined the entire opposite wall and were softly glazed, he could barely make out what appeared to be infrequent movements and a dim blue light trailing through the glaze into the room. He could not quite make out what was through the window but it was enough that it was moving, he did not have to guess. The sterile and undisturbed nature of the room sent a strange ripple of pleasure down the back of his neck. He was not entirely sure why. He shivered and shook himself with a smile. He picked her up and set her down on one of the metal tables closest to where he entered the room. He swept the rest of it. Directly across from the door he entered through was the wall of windows. What he, now guessed, were surgical tables lined up side by side, 6 of them in a row near the middle of the long, narrow room. On the un-windowed walls were metal cabinets, desks, chairs, and scientific-looking equipment. Several of the desks had the semi-disassembled circular tubes of the prior room on them. Besides the door behind him, there was another door across the way, splitting the frosted glass, and two more, each on the other walls. In the corner to the side of the glass, he saw what he was looking for, a Terminal.
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Placing her hand on the Terminal was not difficult, although she was really starting to annoy him with her seeming lack of “will to live.” Having to cut her open YET AGAIN and shocking her alive YET AGAIN on his short trip to the Terminal the activity was quickly finding itself on the bottom of his list of “things he wanted to keep doing.”
USER INACTIVE. Submit Personnel Body to Processing.
He was quickly tiring the entire expenditure as he debated shocking her alive again. Her hand slipped limply off the pad and he laid her on the ground. He had not bothered sealing her shut this last time in small admiration of his foresight. He tried his revival trick, aka the electric heart massage, and her heart beat once, twice, and then stopped again. Cursing her weakness he jammed and wedged the Zappa directly in her chest cavity next to her heart and started liberally applying the rest of the Medjel into the wound. Finally, he was able to seal it completely. He waited as 15 seconds mechanically ticked in his head, then started to shake her violently back and forth. He could feel the electrical current traveling through her and passing into his hands.
He had to use his left hand to drag her right into contact with the handpad. The screen started to scroll through checks and populated. His taps changed nothing on the screen. He tried placing the Terminal disk into the slot on the Terminal.
His chest rested against her back, his right hand holding her underneath her arms and he held the back of her left hand with his as he started using her finger to poke around on the screen. Through an impossible to-describe electrical sense he felt her die again as the screen just started to populate. He quickly shook her back and forth and her heart continued to beat. This was, quite frankly, getting ridiculous. Looking at the screen, interesting enough though, he thought.
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(*&@$(^%… Welcome Personnel B-5429! Personnel moved from Home-Brew Iterant SI control to Local AI Control. Personnel File linked to Local Terminal AI. Terminal AI has Access to an Expanded Network!
Improvised Pace-Maker detected.
Integrate into Cardiovascular System? Y/N
Very carefully he selected Y with her finger.
The series of shocks that ran through her body was strong and pulsing, coming in waves, building. Even his solid electrical affinity started to run into issues. His Affinity bought him a second to decide whether to stay electrically connected to her for the entire process or let her go before the process bound them together. He prepared to release but as she shook harder and harder he noticed a second charge starting to violently rip out from her chest right where the broken Zappa sat next to her heart. Maybe he would level up his Version of Electrical Affinity with this, as he held onto her and slammed both hands directly over the electrical corona spreading off of her chest.
He woke up with a twitch still holding tightly to the woman’s chest. He softly groaned then looked to the Terminal screen. The room felt comfortable, even if it still kept a tiny bit of its chill.
Complications resulted in increased Nano-Trace cost.
He mentally shrugged, as long as it wasn’t coming out of his balance.
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[https://i.postimg.cc/yxCHSWyc/Screen-Shot-2022-09-04-at-9-53-45-PM.png]
He halfheartedly tried to process the information but he had seen plenty of unnecessary text from the AI so far. As the list populated he looked at what he was really curious about.
[https://i.postimg.cc/x8GSGY67/Screen-Shot-2022-09-04-at-9-55-11-PM.png]
He ignored the new listing about her heart. He had entirely too much contact with her heart over the last half hour. It worked, she wasn’t dying every minute anymore. Good enough for him. Her “Zappa” brand heart? Well, she could take that up with Zapp Killa himself. Hell, she could even join him. Jack wasn’t sure if he was going to thank or hurt the man yet.
He was impressed by her Agility, Dexterity, and Senses though. She could keep up with him and fill in some gaps (Dexterity) that he didn't want to fill himself.
“Terminal, what’s Grit?”
Grit is a metric of a Human’s mental fortitude.
Then, in an odd moment, the Terminal AI spoke unprompted.
Magno-Tube Detected… Nano-Trace Detected. Insert Nano-Trace.
He looked down at his pockets. He tried to pull her hand off and he tried to cancel out of the screen. Nothing worked. He gave up and inserted the half-full canister.
You’ve Advanced your Personnel Level to 10!
Allocation Available: 5
Well, he hoped that she didn’t have other plans for her Allocation but he was not going to have a repeat of the last hour-plus. In a flash of righteous-feeling anger, he was damned tired of keeping her alive and if he was going to be forced to use HIS Nano-Traces to boost HER Allocation he was going to make the decision for her.
Reviewing the sheet again before Allocating her points he realized was uncomfortable having her Grit stay that low and adjusted his initial plans. He didn’t need her dying on him but he also didn’t need her freaking out and bringing another horde of crabs on his head or having her have a fit once she saw what a hatchet job her surgery had ended up being. He also had no idea how her Constitution Advancement or her BioElectro-Zappa Heart would affect her. He slapped two points into Grit bringing it to three and then jammed all three remaining points into Endurance bringing it past the boost at 5 to 6. Her body should finally start helping him keep her alive. It was its damn job after all, not his.
Right behind her he faintly felt the waves from the Endurance 5 enhancement wash through her, her heartbeat grew stronger along with the electrical impulses coming from it. She thrashed awake with a scream. Jack’s left hand was carried with hers as she flailed, the residual Medjel’s stickiness binding their hands together. Trying to rip his hand off of hers unsuccessfully he got his maimed right hand and wrapped it over her mouth. He almost immediately lost a finger for his efforts but held on. As his, now single-fingered, hand held on to cover her screams he instinctively rammed his body, and her head, towards the edge of the Terminal screen. She slumped down unconscious and he finally got his left hand free from the Medjel stickiness.
Taking a deep breath in and out he, in a calm he didn’t want to feel, spread around some of the Medjel that was already on his right hand over the final remaining knuckle where his index finger used to be.
Her Skill List had appeared while he was busy losing another finger. ANOTHER. His middle finger looked lonely.
Dodge Improved! v.1.8 -> v.3.0
Your lateral fast twitch musculature is significantly improved. Corresponding improvements in balance accompany v.2 upgrade.
Level 3 Quantitative Upgrade: Your lateral musculature forms a small, direct connection to the nerve cluster in your stomach. This results in occasional preternaturally fast dodges guided solely by your gut!
Scaredy Cat! Newly Acquired! v.1
Sure things looked bad and you most likely would have died along with them, but abandoning your comrades? Fear hormones help direct blood flow to the muscles in your legs. Energy Calculation is divorced from Endurance when cortisol and adrenaline levels reach extreme levels. Reduces Energy total. Energy Recovery penalties are offset by [Non-Standard] Kustom Heart. Extended use of the skill results in increased Nano-Burn.
Wall Jump. Newly Acquired! v.0.5
Humans are adapted to jumping off the ground but that’s not enough for you. Now, if you have to jump off a wall this will make it easier. Provides a small amount of flexibility to where your center of balance is located.
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Don’t worry about how it works, Jack. You wouldn’t understand even if I tried.
Lulled into a sense of repetitive actions, aka keeping this chick alive, this was a shock that finally broke through the cold fugue. On one hand, the Terminal AI had helped tidy everything up for him and for all he knew, was responsible for keeping her alive at all at this point. On the other hand, its tone had grown uncomfortably familiar. He didn’t want to think of these things, so he didn’t. He continued after locking it away. He just wanted to get to his own Upgrades as he continued to flip through.
Slide. Newly Acquired! v.0.2
Not usually enough to be its own skill, you’ve done this enough to your Body that it has somehow optimized for it. Smaller pores on your legs and a slightly reduced friction coefficient of the skin on your legs.
Cannibal. Newly Acquired! v.0.1
Not normally recommended but consumed in small amounts you have the capability to greatly accelerate healing based on what type of tissue you consume. Missing some flesh? Eat some flesh. ACL tear? Snack on some juicy muscle and ropey tendon. Must be raw and freshly extracted. Nano-Trace must still be present in target.
He blanched a small bit at that one. At least his finger had gone to a useful purpose, he thought sarcastically.
Good Patient. Newly Acquired! v.3
He tried and failed to hide a grimace as he had a strong feeling how this one had leveled up so high after newly acquiring it. He did feel somewhat justified in his… surgical efforts that her Skill ranking was so high. Come on though, she was a TERRIBLE patient.
Some real wackadoo decided to play around in your insides, a lot, probably more than was strictly necessary. Surely it was for a good reason.
Improved natural healing factor. Better adaptation to ongoing surgical and post-operative effects. Shortened post-surgical recovery periods.
Level 3 Quantitative Upgrade: When still and prone while taking damage your brain recognizes reduced amounts of pain, bleeds less overall, and organs will enter a low-consumption mode. It’s like cryo but you’re awake. Also being sliced open.
So Level 3 huh? He’d have to work on reaching that, the upgrades seemed pretty powerful.
Electric Constitution! Newly Acquired!
You’ve taken electricity, internally and externally, directly to organs and from different sources at the same time and somehow, unbelievably, have survived. In fact, your Body Constitution needs it now in order to survive. Your heart will produce electricity on movement, and your Energy Recovery rate is now directly tied to electrical stimulus. Remember to carry some batteries.
Energy Total is now governed by a calculation of Agility, Dexterity, and Internal Charge.
Warning: Possessing an Electric Constitution may result in the internal current traveling outside of the body.
As he read the warning he felt it as he detected a faint electrical current inside her that had been building and one of them jumped out into him. Dammit that kind of hurt, it was surprisingly pretty strong. He wasn't sure how he would have handled that shock before he had his own Affinity.
Itch Resistance! Newly Acquired! v.0.1…v.0.2…v.0.3…
Perhaps jamming tons of hyper-itchy Medjel into someone’s chest cavity wasn’t the best call. Regardless, you did it.
Itch Resistance will continue scaling until v.2.
Sitting through the odd waves pumping through her body as her Skills Upgraded he had a bit more compassion for the state she must have woken up in originally. The itching, the pain, THE ITCHING, the electricity. He would most likely not knock her out again.
That being said, he also wasn’t about to let her scream and run around and do who knows what while he had his hand trapped at the Terminal during his upgrade. He picked her up as her hand slid from the pad and as he carried and shook her as much as he could in the walk over to the nearest table. In the short distance he felt an odd dissonance like his brain was chewing tinfoil, it washed and crackled in his head as he strapped her to the table and clinically looked her over while trying to ignore the static vibration in his head. The electricity from her Enhancement had sealed and healed most of his wounds. The fact that he had stopped bleeding and the shocks had chased most of the Cold out of his Body.
Still, it would take longer than that for him to fully warm up.
Strapped in and finally “Alive”, he could look at her without having to wonder when he was next going to have to electro-massage her heart.
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She was a little lean but sporting lithe and compact musculature. She was much healthier looking after he pushed her Endurance to 6. Her leg looked surprisingly good, he didn’t know if it would be a different length by the time it was done healing but at least the bandages and split were holding. It was up to the Medjel now.
Finally, he brought his eyes to his emergency surgery on her chest. He had had to apply lots of Medjel to keep sealing it again and again. Medjel was very quick to seal and provide stability to serious injuries. After being applied it immediately attempted to stabilize and prevent further damage to the area by locking onto flesh and hardening. After its initial efforts, it would release a burst of healing factor in a burst of itchy madness and then slowly release itching pulses that he assumed continued to rejuvenate the body’s natural healing factors. It healed wounds well, based on the progress of his own, but nothing he had put Medjel on had fully healed either. It was slow. And itchy. The Medjel was still working on his thumb wound from the original crab. It was rock solid. His shoulder was as well although that one was healing faster than his hand.
The butcher’s surgery he performed wasn’t going to scar easy on her regardless of any boosted healing factor. Certain areas that were cut repeatedly were little better than ground meat. He turned his head to the side. Huh, it was in the shape of an upside-down heart. Not cute enough of one to make a joke of it though.
The worst of the future scars were going to be when he had to carve around the semi-hardened Medjel seals. If it had been just a little too long he wouldn’t be able to just lift the flap and if he had tried too hard to cut through them he could have easily sent the blade back into her heart again. If he hadn’t partially glued it and her breath had sucked the flap into the heart and lungs he’d be several fingers short of being able to solve it.
The cold reflection of it helped him process the last hour or so. Going through it he saw that he made the best choices he was capable of doing. Regardless of anything else, she would be still alive to complain about it so whatever he had to do at the time was the right choice.
His eyes drifted towards the other parts of her chest, surprisingly she still looked mostly alright there.
His eyes worked their way back to the scar, it definitely could have been done a bit neater next time.
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The first thing she did was crack her eyes a fraction. Above her was a large, compared to her, and the strange man she had slid into earlier. She had no concept of how much earlier. His hair was an extremely dark brown, nearly black, and standing upwards with loose curls, the strands of hair were topped by golden tips. It looked ridiculous.
His eyes were amber, brown and yellow. His right eyebrow was snipped in half in a jagged and scarred line. Any other features were tough to make out as he was absolutely drenched in blood, fluids, and pieces of unknown flesh. Most of it looked like crab. The worst part was the pearly white and wide maniacal grin stretched across his face.
She followed the path of his eyes and determined that he was intensely staring at her tits. She felt a spike of fear shoot up her spine and she lurched and strained against her bindings.
Shit shit shit, she thought, he had tied her down. She was trapped with this psycho and now he was looking right at her with a dead flint in his eyes. She tried to scream but couldn’t even open her mouth. Her eyes shot wider in horror as she continued to struggle.
“Shut the fuck up!” the insane man hissed as he swooped towards her face. He threw himself across her body and slapped a single-digited hand across her mouth. His missing fingers across her mouth did not calm her down.
“Look at me. Look at me!” She met the eyes of the sick grinning freak that had tied her up.
“Listen here you crazy little brat I’ve been through way too much with you…”
He is calling ME crazy? She internally scoffed. HE was craz… what was this itching feeling in her chest? It crawled deep in the middle like something was about to burst out.
“I’m only going to say this once. You’ve been dead set on dying the last hour and if you bring any of those disgusting crabs anywhere near this room because you can’t be quiet I’ll make sure to leave you gift wrapped for them before I leave. You are riding hard on my very last nerve. This place seems safe for now. Did you understand what I just said?”
She murmured unintelligibly. He nodded.
“That’s the Medjel, it’s covering your mouth and no I won’t remove it. Nod if you understood what I said.”
She nodded.
“Are you going to be cool?”
She hesitated for a second but didn’t see the usefulness of it at the moment and nodded again. The man sighed and slowly pulled himself off of her.
She had taken the moment he wasn’t lying on top of her to try and address the terrible itching crawling and building in her chest, she lifted her head and looked at the source of the itching and saw the scar, saw her bare breasts. She had no plans to stay in his company as she started fighting against the restraints again.
The sharp crack and sting as the back of his left hand smacked against her cheek and temporarily overwhelmed the itching and centered her. She looked at this freak with smoldering eyes, at least he got a shock when he slapped her. She thought he might have been blushing but it was hard to tell through the blood and viscera covering his face.
“Listen I didn’t want to have to do that but I will again if I have to. If you’re wondering why your chest is all carved up that’s because I had to operate on you.” He looked like he was thinking again as his eyes stared emptily at her chest. His gaze was drawn to the desperate itching motions her hands were making.
“Oh right, the itching is because I pumped near every drop of Medjel I had left into your chest. You should be grateful if anything, you even got a skill out of it. You already have Itch Resistance leveling up to v2 right now.” This idiot how had he gotten her Itch Resistance that high? He must have filled her chest like a balloon with the stuff.
She saw his eyes drift slightly off from the scar as he stared at her breasts again. She made a noise to interrupt him. His gaze didn’t move. She gave him a loud, angry hum as he finally realized where he had been looking. He guiltily cleared his throat as he looked back at her.
“And obviously I wasn’t going to operate through your shirt.” His words were fine but there was something seriously unhinged about this guy. She could sense it right in her gut. The broad shining Smile plastered on his face did nothing to dispel her misgivings.
He looked around.
“And if you remember, you know, between all the dying you’re so fond of, you brought all of those crabs right to me, so we didn’t have a whole lot of time.” He met her eyes with a flinty stare that settled her further. “Look, I’m going to the Terminal, I don’t want to hear a single sound so you just lay there quietly and I’ll untie you after that.”
With that, the strange man with frosted golden-tipped hair and the creepy smile walked away from her. She looked again at her chest. The scar was a layered, ugly thing. It’s like he was cutting into the same area over and over again. She tilted her head a bit to the side. It did kind of look like a heart, a real ugly one. With that, she started to try and quietly worm her way out of the restraints while keeping the corner of her eye trained on him.
That could have gone worse, he thought to himself with no small amount of pride. He felt justified in it, after all, she had to be alive in order to freak out. Actually saying words to another person instead of letting them float around his head left him tired in a completely different way than Low Energy or Endurance could measure. He felt like he had used up all his words for the next few cycles. At least the room had finally warmed up.
He turned back towards her and she stopped squirming. He pretended not to see her trying to get out of the restraints. Maybe it was a good thing, it would keep her heart charged up. He wasn’t worried about her escaping, after all, he had used three tables worth of straps when he tied her up.
He inserted a full Magno-Tube into the round port next to the Terminal and looked at the screen.
Welcome, Jack.