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Save Point: Homecoming

Aboard The Citadel

Sethkill browses through a positively ancient, out-of-date brochure for various types and designs of fully prosthetic limbs, a technology now superseded by the possibilities of nanotech that make the distinction between flesh and information technology somewhat arbitrary.

Normally, these days, if you wanted something like this, you'd grow it on slowly starting from the fingertips, or if you were in an accident you'd just rest, and eat plenty of meat and stone-powder tea until the limb grew back. But what the fuck Kilseth has spitefully done to him, seems to fully to preclude even the possibility of growing it back. The only option is to cut back further, implanting a full replacement, old-school style, and using the remaining growth factor to the severance plane to mask the join.

It is for just this irritating reason that Zair has printed out for him a commercial guide, saved on a cythura website for reference purposes, for those who retain old upgrades and have to keep them running. It seems to be a best-of guide for that year, compiling the most desirable offerings from a number of manufacturers, each with its own distinct styles designed toward a particular aesthetic rather than any significant differences in underlying functionality. Selecting a body part by colour scheme and angularity seems kind of crazy, in condescending hindsight, until you have to make a decision on it yourself.

He holds the page sideways, as mostly one-handed, to check out a good-looking sethuress shown fully nude from the front and side. She has an under-the-shoulder-skin job on one arm, a curving silvered metal spiral that comprises several single full-loops braided together above and below the elbow, creating spaces for easy maintenance access and to show off the underlying hardware.

It's not really to his taste, but the rest of her is quite interesting. Broad scars above and below the eyes, where her face has been pulled back together and one eye replaced, with pale-blue pupils in both upgraded to make them match. Tattered little snags taken out of her ears and horns cropped short, a plug-in and grow-on tail mod at the base of her spine to improve balance after whatever misfortune struck her, six small trim tits and a low firm spade.

Something has also happened at the front of her muzzle, harder to parse. Perhaps a clean vertical break all the way across the bones, occasioned by being hit by a piece of accelerated debris in the same explosion that did the rest of the damage. She's run with it and had two additional big teeth implanted either side to cover and support the damage, far enough out that they make her upper lip bulge and come down outside her jaw and lower lip to either side.

The effect is oddly striking. He wonders if Phrisk might know who this is, if she's still around, and whether it might be possible to wrangle an introduction.

Zair bustles in and he tries to look nonchalant. Hiding the page abruptly would just give away his distraction. "Have you finished choosing?" he asks crisply in his always slightly odd accent. "I have a slot open this afternoon. The fabrication time for most of those models in one of my tanks is two to three hours, so if you pick something quickly we can be ready to go by then."

Sethkill rubs his jaw somewhat clumsily with the improvised extremity Terrowne assembled for him, trying to make up his mind.

"You don't want Keselt to see you looking like that, do you?" Zair exclaims, clearly referring to the limb in question. "Go on, hurry up, pick something! We have your scans, I can always do a refit."

Sethkill makes up his mind and flips back to the one he likes, because Wolfmother damn it, it may not have the best technical specs, or even be the classiest looking, but it's going to be attached to him for the foreseeable future until a permanent fix can be investigated.

"I like this one," he points aggressively, and jabs it too hard with the forefinger of the repurposed gauntlet, daring Zair to criticize it.

"Unusual choice," observes Zair. "But it is your arm, I suppose."

The picture he's put a slight dent in is a sort of staged action scene, which shows a dark-furred sethura sprinting across a snowy landscape in front of stark dark silva trees as he draws two guns to fire, one of a slightly smaller caliber with his real hand in front and a larger version of the same with his artificial arm. This one's an over-the-shoulder model that links into the musculature over and beneath the collarbone to connect more thoroughly into the neck and spine, made of braided carbon muscle-fibers in their natural greyish-black. A series of utilitarian, angular-but-smoothed plates link around the substructure to protect it, and create the joints of the hand and fingers.

In places, single bundles of the muscle-fibers have been dyed an unusually vivid pinkish-purple instead, to outline the edges of the artificial muscles. A similar theme has been taken up on some of its greyscale metal plates, where unavoidable fixed joints have not been hidden but highlighted around the edges using the same shade.

The soldier is dressed entirely in black, with a holster on each thigh, and just the smallest cross-out scar beneath his eye, his pose concealing any other damage on his opposite side. There's just something about the scene though, that reminds Sethkill of the original weave demonstration, the one that he and Keselt re-experienced together; armour labelled armour, sword tagged as sword. This is pragmatic but clever, an artificial arm that makes it clear that it is in fact an artificial arm, and doesn't pretend to be anything but.

"I'll start growing it," promises Zair. "Then we can get rid of that thing. Make sure you are ready at the correct time, as this will take a little while to match up all the endings."

~*~

When Sethkill wakes up he can feel weight at the end of his arm again, not just at his shoulder.

The faint infernal itch is also gone, the residue of his tissue trying to heal into something that it isn't compatible with, and he can feel air across the remaining exposed skin on his shoulder, if not on the plates and fibers of the new prosthetic.

Experimentally, he tries to move the fingers, which mostly works. He has to remember that he no longer needs to push with his mind to get it to work, rather to just move it, as he normally would. The initial movements are clumsy, but it improves.

"It learns, you see," explains Zair proudly. "It's not just your mind that has to learn how to trigger each one of the nerve bundles again, like relearning all your motor skills from childhood, but the arm also learns from your attempts to try and move it, to respond better and more accurately."

"Well, that's very clever," acknowledges Sethkill, who is more busy swallowing and trying to clear his throat after having been under for a couple of hours.

"There are after all only so many possible movements of an arm, it can try to guess the probable mappings, especially using the scan of your other arm, which is fortunately fully intact. It will still take a while for everything to finish fully growing back together, and settle in of course."

"Praise Wolfmother, it's a miracle?" suggests Sethkill, who is starting to have the feeling that Zair wants him to be more impressed. This is the second time now he's woken up with a different arm, and the novelty is starting to wear off.

"You have no appreciation for the advanced technology that goes into doing something like this," Zair criticizes. "This _is_a miracle by the standards of the sethura who first got it to work, they were looking at six months, a year maybe, of rehabilitation and re-learning how to use their own limbs. You got lucky and just happened to have the right skills to keep moving that piece of garbage that was plugged into your shoulder, and now you've benefited by all the skills of everyone else who ever worked on this, just to be able to get up and wriggle your fingers and not be impressed."

"What, did you have relatives who helped to develop all this?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact I did."

And that would explain exactly how and why he wound up on this mission, thinks Sethkill. Highly placed and highly competitive immortal relatives, and to do something to impress them, he'd have to do something like this, taking risks to get out from under the family shadow.

"Well, please congratulate them for me. But now I have to go say 'hello again' to my missing wife, and then try to explain how I carelessly mislaid my arm. She'll probably have some fairly pressing questions about it."

"And you would like to appear as functional as possible?"

"Exactly."

"You should watch this. It will show you a series of motions to attempt that will help you to most effectively calibrate the arm to make it do what you want. Naturally it is not possible for you to get it to work perfectly in an instant manner, but I can probably help stop you making a complete fool of yourself."

"See, you like me," grins Sethkill. "I'm interesting. Who loses an arm in this day and age? This one time, I nearly got chopped in two. And then on another occasion, I had to stick two of my own toes back on. That was really weird. I'm medically fascinating."

"Perhaps you should stop while your head is still attached?"

"Oh, I fully intend to. Please show me these gestures, so maybe I can make one involving a single finger in your general direction."

"Oh, you are so witty."

~*~

He hasn't gotten used yet, again, to the faint expected hum of powerful engines. They support his contention that this is a ship, not a building or an island, and he will stand by it in the name of his grandmothers jawbone.

"I saved some milk for you in the fridge," is what Keselt says when she sees him again for the first time, after slightly more than three-quarters of a year. She prods the swollen curve of one breast over a sort of dress, surprisingly elegant and open at the sides, that resembles a leather-workers apron and is clearly designed to allow easy access to her nipples at feeding time.

Clearly the rest of the crew were not in fact pranking him after all.

"It was quite tricky," she adds after a moment, grinning when she sees him stunned silent, "with two greedy little jackals here always draining me dry. Do you know, I'm actually producing from my secondary nipples? They just won't stop nomming me."

For a few minutes after that, things degrade into utterly prosaic and predictable yips of joy, very stupid questions and exclamations of amazement. Are they his? Of course they're his, silly. There are two? Absolutely. Did you name them yet? Oh, I didn't just use one of the names we discussed, I used them both. There is then much necking and hugging and very full breasts against his chest and excitement and stillness at last as they are once again in one anothers arms.

When she hands him Setris or possibly Avrayel (he hasn't learned to tell them apart yet with the clean-wraps on) the cub predictably starts making whining noises of complaint at being separate from its mother, but soon quiets down in fascination at being held by someone different and looks at him with big wide eyes, reaching with tiny fingers that haven't grown out proper talons yet to try and grasp at him. He's overcome by amazement at this small person he didn't even know was about to come visit him in the world.

Holding a cub each, and swapping occasionally as required to allow them to continue to feed as wakeful and rest as sleepy, they compare stories as to what happened in their travels. "Can you believe," exclaims Keselt, "that Kilseth actually had the gall to claim that he'd assumed I'd already arranged something in the way of transport? Why, he'd just forgotten entirely about it. Assumed that I was just on another my long anthropological and collecting forays among the local natives. Which, I suspect, was something that he'd already put about himself just to cover his scrawny ass in case he got caught out. Oh, and a rumour about us being on the outs and my having decided to go on a break or something. When I directly confronted him about it over a virtual link with all my friends around for moral support, and accused him to his muzzle of dropping me off in the middle of nowhere deliberately to try and get me - and by extension you - out of the way, he just flat-out lied, smiled with total fake sincerity, laid it on lavishly about how he hadn't known that I was pregnant, how lucky for me! ...and then segued straight into how it was clearly just the effect of hormones and my anger at him was clearly irrational. He's gotten really, really good at lying by the way... I almost found myself being convinced, which was really something."

The smell of milk is wonderful and the cubs are astonishingly cute. Sethkill realizes that he is in for some very long nights helping to look after them, but amazingly he doesn't even mind.

He's just so very glad that Keselt is safe and they can be home again together like this, hopefully with no more adventures and danger. Somewhere safe. Speaking of which...

"I think I have the evidence to shut him down now, once and for all. Or failing that to blackmail him into simply leaving us alone, at least. But it might be dangerous if he knew I had it, he might try something stupid to try and get rid of the evidence or discredit me. So I'm trying to feel out who else I can give it to, who can get it into the hands of the right people back home and ensure that he finishes wrapped up and dangling from the snare before he even knows what's hit him."

He tells her about the short recording he took that shows the incoming weapon over Azatlan city, whispering in her ear just on the unlikely off chance that somehow the room is being surveilled, a possibility that has only just occurred to him but seems remote. How the readings show that the direction and yield of the warheads were faked, stepped-down from a more efficiently assembled sethura design. How a second snapshot, collected across the boundary of the portal located in the ziggurut, reveals through lighting and environmentals the exact position of the base of operations from which the weapon was launched, to coast around the curvature of the earth and then veer at the last second onto a different and false trajectory.

"Not all the security guards are necessarily reliable, I'm afraid," he has to concede, rocking one of the cubs and gently nuzzling him or her so they can get to know one another. "Some of them seem superficially clean but have the sort of things Kilseth likes... obscure vices, a desire for personal freedoms and power at the expense of others, an enthusiasm for weapons disproportionate to their intended use. So I have to try and subtly find out which is which. It's the last tripping point but if I can manage this we're finally home free."

"You know, I still haven't given you your milk yet," smiles Keselt. "A drink from the other breast, isn't that what they say? Let me put the pups to bed, in fact come with me and I'll show you how. Then I can welcome you home properly. With this much milk in them they won't cause trouble for another couple of hours - and," she bops him on the muzzle, "neither will you."

"Are you alright with..." he gestures, hesitantly, to indicate her rounded breasts and still slightly loose belly. Her nipples look extra sensitive and the fur is darker along her belly to show the pups where to go to get their meal, although it will surely fade soon.

"It's been a couple of weeks now. I had to be careful getting back, make sure it wasn't announced too quickly in case I had an 'accident', work myself back onto a proper diet while these ones were growing inside their shells, learn to look after them once they hatched... there are no maternity books on a desert island, obviously. And you know what? It made me both really tired, and horny as fuck. Suddenly I'm safe and full of rich food and it's all going straight to my bloodstream and all I really need now is my husband to reward me... and here you are."

"I am completely persuaded," agrees Sethkill, and gives her an unexpectedly chaste kiss that hints at hotter things to come. "Let's put them to bed, and then I'll put you to bed."

"Good puppies," declares Keselt, clearly yet beneficently including everyone else in the room who isn't her in that statement. She really makes quite the mother.

Sethkill squeezes one of her full breasts possessively as they carry the milk-glutted pups to their baskets on the dresser in the side room. A thin further flow dribbles down along the underside of her swollen orb and Keselt makes a little sound of pleasure.

"I'm going to fill you up again," he growls, baring a fang. "Maybe we can have three, just like in the old days," he adds, pinching her nipple.

Keselt squeaks and hastens to put the puppies safely back in their herb-scented baskets, carefully but loosely snuggled in warm blankets. Time is wasting and they need to get this done before the children wake up again.

Thinking about it that way makes her feel really hot inside. Perhaps instead of inconvenience, she should think of it as an added excitement to their future trysts. Mommy is fucking daddy to make more puppies. Sssshhh, don't say a word.

She smiles as he leads her to their bed.

TRUST NO-ONE

^

TRUST ANUBISYA < > TRUST YSIS