"Why are you so nervous?" Being strangled stifled Sword's outburst, at least for now, and let her recede. Let battered and far too bruised hands hang limp, though still clenched, still eager to strike again. To Analyzer, the metal claws tugging at her skin were just data. Painful data, but ignorable.

" 'You have failed the test!' 'The test had no meaning!' 'Your task is pointless!' " Another round of that hollow, mechanical giggle, "Hope is a prerequisite for despair, and the latter can be no greater than the source it quashes. Foolish, then, the damned one who permits herself more than the merest slivers of the poison. Though i must say, it's truly heartwarming to see you foundering about looking for something to do."

The gray woman released the chain in her hand. The spiders went still, their clawing feet stopping where they were on Kite's. Steel dug the heel of her hand and grimaced in pain and frustration, her anger tinging her cheeks a faint yellow under the gray. She sighed and took half a step back.

"Does it occur to you, little pink thing, that maybe I'm bored? That I'm growing sick of this job but unable to quit?" One acid-yellow eye burned as it fixed on Kite's face. "I mean, after all, what am I without this place? What is this place without me?" Steel gestured around the concrete walls with her other hand. "I can't leave, not without someone else to tend the fires. So I try to make it more refreshing. I stop reading minds like books, give myself a challenge. I try to live up to the legacy I've inherited, sow fear and chaos and see what I can draw out of the sheep sent to me for shearing." The gray woman shook her head. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. Except maybe you're one of the few creatures here that will understand." She sighed and looked over purple hair at gray walls under dim light. Everywhere was gray or some shade of it. Everywhere but the student standing naked and scarred in a pool of still, mechanical spiders. "Do you ever ask yourself big questions? Of course, not, you've proven you don't care. Well, let me share one with you." Analyzer tasted like paper. It looked like Sword was taking a break from the ineffective beatings, which left Steel room to be a bit more grandiose. "Why humans? It should be pretty obvious to you that you're not alone in the universe. So why you? Why your species? Maybe there are other schools, other preserves, where we hunt the females of other creatures. But think of the overhead!" Steel gestured at the ceiling vaguely. "Surely that would be inefficient to do for every species of sentients that our taskmasters find interesting. So why humans? Why you?" The gray woman turned her attention back to Kite and smiled darkly, then looked down over the spiders covering the floor. "You're super-organisms. At least, that's why I'd want to study you so close. You're super-organisms made up of super-organisms that look like megafauna and pretend to be individuals. It's the same fascination your species has with the more obvious colony-creatures of your little mote of dust. We get one of you off on your own, and you panic or you fight worthlessly or whatever it is you do before you finally break and yield under a stronger hand. But, ah!" The gray woman shook a finger at Kite's nose. "Get a million of you in one place and you build structures that scratch the heavens! Rub two colonies together and eventually one of them comes up with fire that can rob your planet of all life in a matter of minutes! Armies of little pink things, smashing against one another for resources, no single troop able to comprehend any true idea of what's really going on around them, but surging forward madly towards a goal worthless to themselves but immeasurably important to the colony. Make peace with your neighbors and your consciousness booms! One of you learns a thing and the others start learning it and the hive-mind grows stronger, more brilliant. Your kind has spread so cleanly across your planet that it's starting to look like a single colony, feeding and housing itself and creating noble sacrifices of its members for the benefit of others and churning in a roiling, messy ball of chaos on your tiny, insignificant dust mote." The gray woman stopped and tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Why, when else can you really study the individuals parts of a super-organism, separated so cleanly from their mass? Never! They're usually too small! But, oh, your kind, your kind are big! And you can communicate like you're individuals! It's so intriguing, scientifically."

The gray woman smiled, clearly overly pleased with herself, and nodded once at Kite. "You're probably waiting for me to make a point." A gray hand snapped out and clutched like a vice at Kite's forehead, thumb and pinky crushing painfully at her temples. "Let's see what the brain of an ant looks like." The gray woman started harvesting data from Kite's minds, raking memories, fears, hopes, everything encoded on the fatty tissue and electrical charges that made it up. The process involved dragging each of them across the student's consciousness, running over a lifetime in hearbeats, as the gray woman sought the last few things the purple-haired student held any hope for and any fear of.

Rape and torture have ever been my constant companions as i walk in shadows. i know them better than i know myself.

A lifetime of violation, mostly. Hopes formed, and rose, and died, and were resolved. Hope of acceptance, hope to build something meaningful, hope to simply carve out a niche where she could pass her time in a reasopnable modicum of peace. That last was very shortlived, and in fact briefly achieved, and she found that peace and solitude were on the whole rather boring and unengaging.

Fears were a bit more esoteric, but similarly dead. Those she had valued were long gone, her capacity to influence their fate having ended, in many cases, with being forced to sell them.

Her internment in NICE Labs is a mess of chaos, the memories are mostly fragments, only part of any given file was storen her brain, the junk data turned into tumultuous flashes of sound or image as her mind tried to interpret without the rest of the system. But one is clear, looking down on a vast chamber where thousands of ex-students hang in their bonds, each rigged with dozens of stimulators, milked for their souls. The Power Room. Kite had not been an occupant there, but had been the room itself, her hands, her fingertips by proxy stroking and teasing, exhorting pleasure and pain alike from the shells and mindless spirits of former women to whom it had long since become one and the same. And breaking down and breaking in the new additions, term by term, who graduated unexceptionally enough to sell or further study.

There remained only one sliver of hope, and only one fear. Dawn Portman had been returned to Earth. Head Girls who completed their tenure were allowed some modicum of true escape. Maybe, just maybe, when her Owner's escape came, her possession of Kite would be recognized, and she too would go. But this hope held no great value, she thought it far too unlikely that it would ocurr. And all Kite truly feared was to disappoint her Owner.

"Well, that was interesting." She tried to hide it, but even Analyzer was hurting from being so vigorously mugged in memory lane. There was nothing to feel from the other two, Analyzer was the only one who'd stayed conscious in the surging tide. "Still, now you have that the answer from earlier is that i was being deliberately obtuse, and DO think about the 'big questions,' i just like-" she flicked the dangling leash for emphasis, "yanking your chain."

"Why humans? Well, i don't know if the interbreeding has any bearing on things, there have been three live births on campus i know of." That didn't need the gesture, Steel would KNOW what Kite meant. "Countless natal terminations. You'd know better than me, do nonhuman sentients around the universe interbreed that easily, or just when fucking humans? Hopefully you'll forgive me my skeptecism that this place is about studying isolated elements of a human hive consciousness, the mere fact that we're, what was your delightfully lurid term? Lambs being sheared for slaughter? Embarking on a deliberate process of induced neural pattern change to produce a lifeform saleable as a consumer product does not share much in environmental variables with producing actually viable data about neurosocial function." It was an odd way to have a debate, standing naked save for chains before one's torturer, but every piece of Kite could never run from their kind of fight, and Analyzer's was debate. A stray curiosity flickered through Analyzer, the Flame had fought magic, Sword fought in body, she herself in logic, as kitten grew under Miss Matsumoto's grip, what would be her battlefield?

"No, to do THAT, they would want to control sociability, rather than obliterating anything we cannot build in an instant before using it, they would want to observe prolonged microhive coconsciousness, foster more sporting clubs in order to actually have meaningful competetivity to observe as 'pocket wars' and the innovations which emerged from them..." Analyzer trailed off, suddenly smiling, "Perhaps though, that is why instead of selling us off across the stars, the Labs sent us back out for Miss Matsumoto to claim us. My final term paper was on analysis of microsocial emulance as a tool of functional optimization. Applying it to people instead of imaginary particles of data would simply require a bigger computer."

"Yes, that's it exactly!" the gray woman said, more excited. "No one cares what a million or a thousand or even a hundred individuals do together because we can observe that with telescopes, or even unaided from low enough orbit. It's two or three or four of you acting out non-mating behavior alone that's intriguing. Or the way we can feed false information into the hive-mind on a micro scale to keep most of the population from discovering the truth. Or the way you can be taught to accept a new colony, a new order." She punctuated her points by jabbing a finger into the air between herself and Kite. "That is unique among your species, if you'll believe it. None other breaks quite the way yours does, none bends so perfectly to control from an outside mind. It's like you need an external intelligence to guide your own, even if it's a reciprocal relationship with another human." Steel nodded and tapped her chin, pondering the implications of her own words for a moment. A dark grin slowly spread across her lips. "Like you have with your current controller, really. The three of you didn't seem to know proper peace before you found an intelligence to bond with and submit to. It's a pity you can't do that for yourselves. Oh, but there's an idea!"

The gray woman slammed the heel of her fist into her palm and smiled, her eyes glittering. "An experiment! What if we move the external intelligence into the same minds as its subservient intelligences. There's probably not enough room for four in there, but I can definitely be assured that the hardware available will be enough to run you at full capacity, Analyzer." Miss Steel smiled, pleased with herself and the idea. "And, if anything goes wrong, we can get you politely graduated and sent home with the face of someone high up in society, rich in wealth and influence and ready to do great wonders for your species. Yes, this seems like a win-win for everyone. I can see nothing at all wrong with it. Shall we proceed?"

"You can see nothing at all wrong with it?" Analyzer scoffed amusedly, "And you accused me of being deliberately obtuse. Correctly, but that is entirely beside the point. Or maybe above it? Below? Curcumscribing it in some manner devoid of contact, regardless."

"Firstly, as you have noted, we are indeed loyal to Miss Matsumoto. It is not our place to affirm such an experiment. It would be hers, or that of whomever she answers to." Steel was not the only one who liked jabby fingers of emphasis. Hereditary, perhaps?

"Secondly, existing data contraindicts viability. It was before even your mother's time, i suppose, but an entity going by 'Lord Abrion' transplanted himself into the cranium of on Chitose Makinawa after a regrettable incident involving my sister, a frozen fish of some variety, haddock is suspected but it may also have been cod, and a twin-rotor VTOL with which he was attempting to be dramatic. The incident is regrettable only because there weren't any parts left that were big enough to study... And it put her at three to our two, well, two to one, then, but still playing catch-up." Analyzer smiled fondly recalling it, "If you took a copy of my filing system along with our memories, index 447, section seven. Chitose's capacity to function in any form decreased notably, and did not recover, to the point where i believe 'Lord Abrion' was in the end treated as a neural abnormality and nothing more, trained along with her for sale."

A thoughtful pause, "For the best, really. Without his machines he fought so poorly in her body that several students took her attempts at forcible sexual agression as reason to vent their frustrations on her. On the other hand, i learned how to stich up much more severe wounds."

"Thirdly, we have been four before. The Flame once filled the role that you describe. It went poorly, i think everyone can agree. Except her, obviously, as she's floating around as a gibbering goop-flinging spectre of some kind. While kitten has grown significantly under Miss Matsumoto's collar, i suspect we could fit a fourth of some description without undue difficulty."

"Fifthly, and probably most significantly...me? Graduated? Sent back to earth with power and wealth and influence and no leash i respect to follow? Perhaps in its own way a reward, but not one i think anyone would like to see me given. Oh i would perform great wonders for my species, to be sure." Analyzer laughs hatefully, slumping forward to a hunched posture as she cackles, "Awesome and terrific acts upon the earth...perhaps some few would be spared, evacuated by the universe that finds us so cultivatible as tools and toys. But most of the billions of ants would burn...You of all beings here should know. We like it here. We have no fondness for earth or the megacolony of humans that writhe upon it. We stare up at foreign stars and revel in that we are home, a galaxy away from that place and its filth. ...really would like to get a spectrometer, identify a few stars, do some triangulation, know exactly how far from earth we are, put the number of lightyears as candles on a cake, perhaps?"

"See? I knew you had some beauty still in you! Imagine the look on everyone's faces as their doom comes crashing down on their heads!" The gray woman giggled ecstatically at the mental image. "Oh, if I could just enter low orbit, I could get enough of a taste of your species to last an eternity! Which it would have to, I suppose, given the impending extinction of said species." Steel clapped lightly and made a little girlish squee at the thought. "Just think! No more treaty, no more victims, no more anything! You'd end all human suffering! We could truly call you a hero then, couldn't we?" Miss Steel pushed her hair back with one hand and sighed wistfully.

"Of course, they'd never allow that," she said, resigned. "No, I think you and I will have to find some other theory to work upon tonight. You've touched one I hadn't much considered, I admit." The hand that snapped previously for Kite's head instead sought her throat. The gray shorts that served as the only covering for the gray creature's lower body melted back into her. Something silvery hung between her legs, long and tapered down to a rounded point at one end. It wavered, curling up on its own power and seeming to sniff the air. "I think, my dear Analyzer, that I shall fuck you until you're pregnant."

"No, no, no." Analyzer sighs, "You just HAD to say it would end all human suffering, didn't you? Completely ruined that revenge fantasy. Had the Seismic Interdictor half-designed, anyway. Now i will have to work out how to integrate some sort of psycho-spiritual containment mechanism, contain and abscond with at least SOME of them in order to run some kind of torture simulator on the disembodied minds. Or perhaps-"

Analyzer was cut off mid-pontification by Steel's hand closing once more around her throat, her eyes following the wandering tip of what looked like an ovipositor of some kind more than it did a phallus... "Really? Following in your great-grandfather's steps now?" She was more nervous about it than she let on, she had not known Steel, or any of Steel's predecessors to make idle threats... and at last she was aware, NICE Labs had not bothered to reassemble the tattered remnants of what was once her womb.

"That's what's wonderful about you. You're always thinking of us," Steel said, sighing happily. "A whole species psychically trapped in torment. We could end galactic hunger." A hand reached out carefully, fingers catching lightly on Kite's skin as they traced over the scarred flesh. "And really, you should know by now that we've all been caught in this dance, this awful spiral, so long that repetition is inevitable. I mean, how many ways can we abuse this wretched body?"

The chains were back, swirling through the air. They caught limbs and forced them wide, stretching Kite like a canvas. Fingers continued to trace over damaged skin, brushing past a nipple briefly in their journey.

"Besides, I'm not ready for a true heir, so you needn't worry overmuch." The tendril squirmed and coiled, then struck like a serpent, driving itself hard up into the trapped woman. "We'll be doing something a bit different."

Even dangling spreadeagled from Steel's chains, her limbs clenching against the tension, Kite would not be Kite if Analyzer could resist a question like that. "Depending on discretionary tolerances of delineation, discrete variants number between two-three-six and, oh, call it fifteen hundred."

Her skin was slick with sweat despite the basement's nigh-perpetual chill. Instinct drew a brief moan from between her lips at the abrupt penetration, followed by a bitter chuckle, "But if a girl can't turn to her relatives for new experiences, wherever could she possibly look?"

The gray woman moaned softly, watching the gray thing thrash itself back and forth within her captive. Hungry fingers sought flesh and found it, pulling and squeezing haphazardly at whatever they found without much care whether it was sensitive to the squeezing or not. Yellow-green eyes shivered slightly as they took in Kite's trapped form, suspended in the air, a modern-art piece on the suffering of woman.

"Look to your villains," Miss Steel said through a half-drunken haze. She took a step forward and let her meandering hands drift away from the bicep and belly they were kneading at. "A girl needs villains. Voluptuous villains vacillating on very, very, very veryveryveryvery vivacious vixens." Gray hair spun outwards with a hard shake of her head. Steel blinked twice, clearing her head. She'd forgotten what a slow, savory meal was like. Fingers dug at Kite's hips and pulled her hard down onto the writhing shaft as the gray woman slammed her own hips forward, impaling her prey with an irritated growl. "You could at least be polite enough to let Sword out to play. She tastes better."

"Villains?" Analyzer tried to laugh amidst her body responding to the wriggling tendril inside her and Steel's frenzied groping. "Food, shelter, medical, recreation, education, and all the electronic componentry a girl with her own soldering iron could ever want, for a price that only bought 'food' back on earth. AND Sword can get away with fighting back here in ways that would just end with a bullet there." The chains jingle as Analyzer twists her shoulders rather painfully in order to shrug. The statement needs it to be right. At least Kite knew that while she might have been the introduction of devouringly psychotic hatred into Shokushu's omnimorphic bloodline, that the synchronicity of a penchant for being dramatic was entirely coincidental. "That does not sound very villainous to me..."

Further teasing was interrupted by the more intense thrust violently jerking Kite about in her bonds, tearing forth a brief scream, "i am not doing anything to hold her in. -Someone- knocked her for a loop with enough force that she did not even stir while we relived the events that severed she and i from the original kitten and formed us in the first place. Who might that have been?"

"Clearly, your new Masters aren't your villains," Steel said, rolling her eyes again before the flesh recalled her attention. "Gimme kitten, then. I'm hungry and you taste like cardboard." A deep rumble built in the creature's throat, something between the purring of a housecat and the sound of pouring a steel drum's worth of ball bearings down concrete steps. Gray fingers dug harder at pale, scarred flesh. "Though I'm hungry enough to keep eating cardboard for a bit," the gray woman added with a slight chuckle between hard thrusts. The tendril squirmed and lashed harder within Kite, feeling over her folds and coiling itself up within her. With one more hard shove, the tapered tip of the thing forced its way past the barrier of Kite's cervix.

A shudder rippled through Steel's skin, creating tiny waves in the smooth grayness that arced outward from her hips. She sighed, contented for now, and relaxed her grip on Kite's flesh. A gray hand shot into purple hair and clutched harshly, yanking backwards. Something smooth and round was transferring up through the tendril, working its way deeper into the scarred woman.

Kite rolled her eyes, "Give -YOU- kitten. The true fluffy innocent with no concept of fear or anger or hate? You will puke on her! But if you are certain, never let it be said we are not compliant with duly constitued authority..."

The change in Kite would be hard to see for one who wasn't used to her, used to looking for those subtle hints of flicker between Analyzer and Sword. This wasn't subtle. As Steel's fingers gripped and kneaded and dug she could feel the muscles beneath go slack from the coilspring-of-murder state she usually kept them in. And certainly the warm, giddy smile was an expression few had seen upon her face. Three, now.

"Who're you, miss?" Kitten was interrupted by the undulating mass Steel had shoved into Kite's much-abused sex, emitting a strangled, half-mewling moan, "Oooh, the others woke me up for a sex game! But where's Mistress? Shouldn't Mistress be here if it's sex-game time?"

Kitten's ecstatic babble continued until that forceful shove cut off her words with an agonized scream. Kite's body was well used to far worse pains, but Kitten had experienced little of them. She whimpered as Steel tugged her head back, snivelling her words, "Please, Miss...i don't think i like this game. Can we play a different one?" And yet, no anger, for that belonged to Sword. No fear, as she lacked imagination enough to be afraid, that belonged to Analyzer. Just a polite little toy.