Kite in the school's basement was not a particularly unusual sight. Perhaps more so of late, with how long she had spent in the labs, but on this trip she had found one of the older chambers, a set of shelves sitting in front of a section of wall where four sets of shackles hung in a row, a name crudely clawed into the stone above each set of shackles. She hadn't moved the shelves, she hadn't looked, hadn't -seen-, but she knew they were still there. Knew it with the same certainty which she knew she could no longer do the things that had caused it to be so, could no longer be the same Kite who she had once been.

It hurt, but, what was there to be done? Time flowed only a single direction. And that direction now had her here, not with a slip and a social expectation of contrition that would never come, but with assorted swaps and testers and cleaning supplies, dressed largely normally, save for heavy rubber kitchen gloves pulled on atop her usual fingerless leather. One by one, Kite lifted each toy from each shelf, inspecting it carefully, and usually putting it back down, though occasionally frowning, making a note, and subjecting the object in her hand to exhaustive sanitization.

It was time consuming work, tedious and over-methodical. Which was probably why it had been given to her to do. This room. like some dozen before it and plenty more after, would be checked, analyzed, collated, and cleansed. Such were her instructions. Most of her instructions.

The gray woman's eyes turned away from her tasks for a moment. She felt movement on a thread that wasn't expected. Movement nearby.

"Girl!"

The barked word drew her attention back to the hovering visage of a rather irate woman with burning brown eyes that hung in the air before her. It also snapped the moaning, writhing young woman held aloft in four chains back to the same image.

"Sorry, Father," Miss Steel said, meeting the distant woman's projected gaze, "but I think we're about to have a guest. I still don't know how to handle the last task."

"That's not my problem," the projected image said flatly, dark hair obscuring her eyes for a moment as she tilted her head forward. "You know I hate it when you call me while you work."

"Please!" the student screamed, taking advantage of the room opened in her throat by the living metal shaft pulling free to put another layer of off-white cum in her hair, "you have to make her stop!"

"Shut up!" the gray and projected women snarled in perfect unison. The student's eyes went wide, and she complied.

"Look, girl, if you really need my help on that last task then just, I don't know, force someone to do it," the distant woman said with a roll of her eyes.

The door creaked open behind Miss Steel, and her mind registered the presence of a human woman with some sort of equipment behind her without turning, but she was focused. "But how do I force someone to do that, Father?" the gray woman asked.

The digital brown eyes weren't looking at Steel any more. A dark smile creased the projected woman's lips. The gray woman swung her gaze around as well, and her yellow-green eyes lit up as recognition of just who had interrupted her. Another dark smile, a weird mirror of the one hanging in the air behind her, creased gray lips.

"You don't have to make one from scratch, Steel," the projected woman said before winking out of existence with the soft chime of a call ending.

"Help me!" the student screamed again. Her dark blue hair was stained with the markings of her abuse, a pink ribbon holding it back and mostly out of the way. If she'd been wearing a uniform before, the only remnants were the few fibers of cloth on the floor. Bruises and cuts already lined her body, and some of the strange tendrils hanging in the air around her seemed poised to create more at a moment's notice. "Please!"

"Hello, Kite," the gray woman said softly, ignoring her prey, "how may I help you?"

So many things Kite had not expected to see assaulted her senses at once. She had hoped not to walk into a room in the basement being used while she made her tour, but that... she had known achieving that was a low-probability event at best. But she had expected, having found no one she could recognize upon the campus among the students, some part of her had thought she would recognize no one among the 'clients' either. But then, why would one of those who was born here want to leave?

She simply stood dumbfounded in the doorway, she didn't know the student in the chains, but she'd known the face that had been in the image. Briefly, no more than an acquaintance and a reputation, but what need have a pair of 'aggressive cutters' to know each other beyond to know that they do not fight alone?

"Hello, Kite, how may I help you?"

"Steel." Kite's voice was cold, and flatly hostile. Her fingers clench and open repeatedly, the desire to leap to the attack is plain and obvious, though unlike any previous encounter... something holds it in check. Something keeps the boiling vitriolic hate curled in her throat and behind her eyes.

She wanted to try to fight to free the other student. But... no. She had made Promises. Been shown that didn't work anymore, that it had never worked.

"There's been a hygiene violation. Unless your practices have changed significantly while i have been... occupied, i doubt my duties will inconvenience you for long." With this, Kite strode into the room, seemingly intent on trying to ignore what was happening and treat the room as she had all the unoccupied ones, even turning her back on Steel to do so. Though with the student's continues outcries, she doesn't get more than a handful of the toys on the shelf examined before she snaps, turning on the girl and screaming.

"No one is going to help you! You're HERE. There is no help." As she screams, Kite's hand tightens on the dildo she'd been inspecting as though trying to crush it, her voice dropping to a whisper as she tries to turn back to the shelf, almost hissing the words, "Least of all from me."

"There's been a hygiene violation. Unless your practices have changed significantly while i have been... occupied, i doubt my duties will inconvenience you for long."

The gray woman rolled her eyes and turned back to her current victim. "How sad," Miss Steel said, "she's just another weak thing now." She returned her attention to the task before her, thrusting living metal shafts harder and faster into the screaming student. The poised tendrils drove against her flesh with renewed vigor, drawing further screams and begs from her lips until finally, harshly rebuked.

The helpless student broke. Her next scream was buried under a choking sob, and tears finally rolled freely down her cheeks.

"Oh dear me. You made her cry," the gray woman said. "Even I didn't make her cry. How... what's the word? Ironic? No..." The gray woman stood, tapping her chin and pondering as the tendrils continued their work unabated, drawing a litany of screams and sobs and horrible, wet noises from the helpless young woman.

"I always liked how your hate tasted," another voice whispered. As if from nowhere, there was a chill behind the purple-haired woman, as if from a body that sapped heat instead of producing it. An arm, white as alabaster and wrapped in a strand of leather as black as midnight, reached past the obedient student and came to rest on the shelf of toys, rocking it slightly. Something that felt almost like the soft tips of fingers brushed over Kite's cheek, then danced at the corner of her vision long enough to reveal it was just another strand of leather, dancing and floating in the air under its own power. A cool arm slid around Kite's waist, and the white woman leaned forward in a gentle, lover's embrace, heavy breasts pressing into Kite's upper back. Straps bent forward and brushed her cheek lightly against Kite's and whispered, "hate me more, little kitten. I missed you so."

"she's just another weak thing now."

That stung, and set Kite's teeth to grinding, her shoulders bunched, arms shaking... oh, how she wanted to attack. To bathe her fists in her fury, and hatred.

For a moment, just a moment, she is fooled by the deception of the body pressing against hers, by the leather before her eyes and against her cheek. Just for a moment, Kite is in the presence, in the arms of the only being she has ever feared. She recovers quickly, making a show of turning the dildo in her hand as though to use it to attack, knowing it's futile to try to hide her other hand closing around a crop. Neither will be any use. But why would that stop her? It surely wouldn't be long before the conditions under which she was bound would be met.

"So you've moved up to trying to wear your mother's skin instead of just filling her shoes. You're still crap at faking smells, Staloj." There's many forms of futility that Kite will embrace, trying to hide her fractured nature from someone she knows can feel that separation inside her isn't one of them. There's far more important forms of futility in her hands right now. "But you ask such easy things of me. i'll always have plenty of hate for you." Kite snarls, her body shaking. Just one strike, and she can fight back. One blow, and she can slake her thirsts in blood.

The gray woman wasn't paying attention any more. "Inconvenient? No. Impossible? No, that's definitely not right. What was it? It was an 'i' word," she mused to herself, a strange, discordant note in the background noise of the helpless whimpering and sobbing of the other student. Her body dripped with fluids, only some of them sexual, as it hung in the air, suspended in the writhing, living web of chains that held it aloft.

"That was fear I tasted," the white woman purred into Kite's ear, pressing closer and nuzzling more deeply at Kite's neck. "You should just give us all your hate." The gentle strap of leather just kept stroking and petting softly along Kite's cheek and neck, and the other pale arm left the shelf to complete the soft embrace by wrapping itself over the top of Kite's chest. "All of your hate, boiling up inside you, ready to come pouring out and strike us." The false Straps wasn't trying as hard to keep up the illusion any more. Cool lips found Kite's ear and pressed tenderly to it in a horrible mockery of affection. "Break us. You can do it. You're one of the few who can," the white woman whispered, startlingly-warm breath spilling over the soft ear in front of her. "You can save her. She's crying because you won't. Fight us. Be her hero," the pale creature added, her tongue flicking lightly at an earlobe. "We both know the one you're pretending to serve isn't watching. It's okay. She'll never know."

Something hard struck the gray woman's prey and drew a wet thud from her flesh and a harder scream from her lips. The gray woman slapped her fist into the palm of her hand and looked up sharply.

"Inevitable! That's what it was. It's inevitable she'd give in!" the gray woman said triumphantly. "She's stared too long into the abyss! Motherpuppet, stop pestering the poor girl."

"But she hates so good and it's just getting better," the white woman said, almost drunkenly, as she began to kiss softly at the neck before her.

Kite held herself as steady as she could, her body responding whether she liked it or not... as always, since she was rarely disposed to like it. She growls, self-loathing boiling like molten lead and searing at her mind as the mannekin teased her, of course it knew all the ways to stir her body to arousal, the real Straps had torn her body to shreds and reassembled her like a jigsaw made of meat often enough that her daughter knowing the way the nerves lay was no surprise at all.

"Stared into the abyss?" Kite spat the words, her voice tinged with feral hissing as she struggled to hold herself in check, "i was born there! Smelted and forged in its darkness. We share that much in common, Staloj! But you were born into this game as a player, and i'm just a piece on the board! i've finally been offered some light, and i plan to keep it!"

"Yeah, i can fight you. But what the fuck does that do other than give you a meal? Even if i were to try to follow this girl around and fight off every attacker... she'll still graduate. And then what? Then what have i wrought but false hope to shatter? What respite have i bought my sisters with all the blood we spilled?" Kite breaks off, her voice descending into insane, gibbering laughter, broken with tiny involuntary moans.

"i'm glad of one thing, though. Just one thing. For awhile there i was fuckin terriffied you were leading up to a Princess Bride crack. Even if i don't think that word means what you think it means."

The false Straps just kept bending to her strange, gentle kisses and the cold embrace she had on the other woman. Tongue and lips sought over the more sensitive skin of Kite's neck, and the fingers of the hands wrapped around her began to stroke delicately along the student's collar bone and just along the line where thigh met pelvic bone, as if trained to hone on those nerves.

"Alike!" the gray woman said, turning back to the whimpering, sobbing mess of a student that she deposited in a heap at bare, gray feet, "she says we're alike! Do you hear that, little pink creature? She could not save herself." The gray woman knelt down and brushed blue hair back from the sobbing woman's cheek. "How could she save you? For all the blood she said, your sister failed you." There was a whirling of chains as the webs and tendrils slurped themselves back into the gray woman's body, spraying little flecks of sweat and cum and blood and tears across the concrete box that was feeling a little crowded without weapons whirling around them endlessly. "Maybe you're the hero?" the gray woman mused. "Little pink thing, you may leave. There's hot cocoa and a nice shower on the other side of the door. If you leave, I'll make what I did to you look like a kindness compared to what I do to the other student. If you stay and fight, you can win! You can save her from horrible doom! I promise! I'll even give you a weapon! Stop crawling away, godsdamnit!" the gray woman said, her words falling on deaf ears after, "you may leave."

The other student finally made it to her feet and scrambled for the door, throwing one glance back at Kite with fear and guilt in her eyes before disappearing out into the hallway.

"Fuck!" Steel said, whirling around to face the pale woman and her captive. "Fine! Kite!" she snapped, striding around and shoving the shelf over and out of the way with a horrible crash of dust and scattered sex toys.

The white woman paused in her ministrations for a moment, then whispered, "now you've done it," before running a teasing tongue along the full edge of Kite's ear.

"You want light? You want to stop being a playing piece? There's a girl in the next room who has just discovered I'm a terrible fucking liar. If you go in there and punish her for her crimes, I will sit you at my right hand, and you will learn to play the game instead of suffer it," Steel snarled, her face contorted in frustration and rage, "or you can stay here with Motherpuppet for a bit longer."

A high scream that went on until it petered out, hoarse and failing, filtered softly through the steel door Kite had walked through a few minutes ago. "Ooh, she found the spiders," the white woman whispered.

Kite laughed again. Long, bitter, hateful, psychotic cackling. "A hero? That's what you though you'd make 'not from scratch' with me? Did it never occur to you that you're far from the only one that likes prey with claws? You're feeding the machine even more than i used to be."

The rage was better than the hate. Hate had been a union between the Sword and the Flame, but fury ran cold, fury carried with it clarity, even as the false Straps drew forth greater expressions of lust and drove involuntary excitement further. "i never said, none of me who are still me ever said we wanted to stop being a playing piece. Just to be able to trust the hand that plays us. And this we have. You dove deeply enough into our mind to find the name, but not enough to find its meaning. So i will hone, until i may cut with meaning."

There was never only one game. Never only one set of rules. Never only one way to hurt, "If you want a hah, hand-job that badly, perhaps our fallen flames will be more amenable to coming over to your side of the family. But if it makes you feel any better, one puppet to another, i'm certain both our fathers are equally disappointed in us."

Miss Steel stared at Kite as if she'd just said the Sun would rise in the West and that gasoline was the cure for fire. Steel sat down on a folding metal chair that hadn't been there a heartbeat ago and tapped her chin in thought again.

"She's trying to hurt me, but she's not using her hands," she mused to herself, clearly confused. "It's almost as if..." The gray woman's voice trailed off. Her face contorted in disgust.

The pale woman breathed hotly over the skin of Kite's neck and began tugging at the student's clothes, making sure to do nothing that could be considered an attack as she pried away the fabric over the more sensitive bits of skin that her fingers had been so focused upon.

"You trust Matsumoto," the gray woman said incredulously, finally finding her words again. "You think her hand is the one that will guide you well? You're not playing a long game of betrayal and schemes with all of that?" Yellow-green eyes considered the student like the one mouse in a maze devoted to running directly to the first dead-end and then giving up.

Fabric started to flutter to the floor at Kite's feet as the false Straps unfastened and slid it away from scarred skin. Once the student had been completely stripped, the hands and tongue and lips returned to what they were focused on before, taking advantage of the clearer access. Still, those pale arms did nothing sharp, nothing physically cruel, only continued to seek to draw physical pleasure from the woman's body.

Miss Steel turned her eyes upwards with a look of determination. The silent mechanical spider that had been gifted so long ago clicked to life and began feeding the data it had collected back. As she sat, staring at the ceiling, a deeper, hungrier rage etched itself into the gray woman's features. "I've been complacent," she muttered softly to herself. Her eyes swung back to Kite and burned, the acid-green circles, slit with a thin line of black pupil, shimmered as if they looked upon a raging funeral pyre.

"They broke you. They had a perfect engine of rage and chaos and they broke it," Steel said, her voice almost cracking as she spoke. Something like tears started to well at the corners of her eyes, and she reached out to stroke consolingly at the cheek not currently being kissed by pale lips. "You were so beautiful. And now you're lost to us."

The gray woman closed her eyes. She was gone, as was the chair, except she wasn't. The pale woman was no more, the gray in her precise place, holding and kissing tenderly at Kite like an old, practiced lover.

"You're just food now. Hate me. Fuel the fire that will burn down the last of what you love."

"Yes. We trust Miss Matsumoto." Kite's voice had changed, the guttural edge was gone and her words were sharper, more forceful. "Truly, what would ever make you think any of me capable of a 'long game of betrayal'?" Being stripped didn't mean very much save for the incongruity that her clothes were departing her skin with both still intact, though it made it harder to refrain from expressing the reactions of her traitorous flesh. "Our schemes tended to be shockingly direct, unless some Harkonnennian masterwork has been excised from our memory."

There was a nervousness in her as Steel stood unmoving. Oh, not truly unmoving, not with the false Straps still molesting her, she knew that Steel could feel her responding to it, but this side of Kite was no more immune to pride than the other.

And so as Kite arched her back, unable to help writhing in Steel's hands, instead of cursing, she smiles. "No. Unlike her, i do not -have- to hate you. And so i deny you. Feast on analytical detachment, if you can. One of many useful things Miss Matsumoto has taught us is that there can be benefits to a Sword having a sheathe."

"After all, what precisely did we gain, for ourselves or for anyone as a 'prefect engine of rage and chaos'? Hmm? A lobotomy or two, to begin with. A pity there's no way we'll get to see real data, i'm curious how much of my physical brain is still of human origin. Oh, and our will suspended so that our analytical capacity could be turned to their ends."

"Yes, i am lost to you. But for the first time in my life i'm not lost to me. Take that, if you will, and choke on it."

The gray woman felt like she might actually choke for a moment as all of the anger just vanished and turned to so much ash in her mouth. She recoiled for a moment, then bent back forward, her fingers continuing their mechanical teasing of the stripped student.

"Clever," Miss Steel murmured, then, more loudly, "it's not that I thought you a schemer as much as I thought you not a traitor." The gray woman pondered for a moment, pressing her lips softly to Kite's neck as she did so. "You've touched on the problem, though, Super Shokushu High-School Level Analyzer. Put your deduction skills to use." The faintest hint of teeth touched the student's skin for a heartbeat, and the fingers teasing along her started to speed up to superhuman speeds. "I wanted that engine of chaos. Father adored your stripes. As much as you say it didn't hurt in the end, that hope you bought was splendid for your sisters." The gray woman leaned in closer and whispered into the student's ear again, as if conspiratorially, "so who benefits from you being tame? Why would that be preferable to just dead?"

There was a crashing sound in the next room, and Steel slid one hand back to wave dismissively at the wall. A snarl rumbled from her throat.

"Stupid little pink things. Why do none of you learn?" She sighed and returned to the quick, vibrating strokes. "You call this a game. A game has winners and losers."

"You thought me to be planning an involuted betrayal because i am not a traitor? Well, consistency has never run in the family, i suppose. But as that name has been spoken in only one place, then doubtless you have your answer to who benefits. The kitten does. Sword does. i do."

Her breathing gets erratic as she speaks, the stimulation too much to truly withstand, a brief flare of emotion as she collapses against Steel, but nothing lasting or particularly tasteful, merely disappointment. Analyzer knows she'll not be permitted to pull away fully, but leans forward to make an effort at removing herself from the unsolicited embrace.

"It was not this abyss we were born in, but one in many ways its twin. You ask why none of us learn? We learned that here, unlike there, if they so choose, they can take away any part of us they wish. That any thought they find sufficiently undesireable may be pruned from our mind. And in the depths of this, Miss Matsumoto offered us a path to achieve Prime Function. In giving ourselves to her, we have betrayed no one with any claim upon us."

The gray woman sighed and gave the tenderest of nips at the captive girl's neck, making sure it's only a mild admonishment and not any sort of attack. Kite was leaning away and trying to escape. She wanted out. As far as Steel was concerned, that was progress.

"You're thinking too small," Miss Steel whispered, her fingers taking the forward pressure as a sign to vibrate and stroke harder at the oversensitive bundles of nerves. "Or maybe they cut out your curiosity down there too. Let me try again." Soft gray lips found the student's neck twice before the taunting words continued. "They can cut out whatever they want. Your mind is a well-diagrammed circuit board to them. Do you truly desire your," Steel said, pausing and grimacing at the words forming in her throat, "'Prime Function,' or did they reprogram that into you?" The gray woman laughed slightly, her inhuman fingers settling on a single point each and vibrating hard and fast enough that what would normally be pleasure would slide into abrasion soon. "A computer's only as good as its code, after all."

Just as the sensation started to shift from pleasure to pain, the fingers pulled completely away, and the gray woman stood.

"But it's so very unfair," Steel said, her eyes glowing softly in the shadow the single bulb behind her cast over her face. "Three of you, all cooped up together. So I'll make you an offer. You make me a nice fresh body, and I'll move one of you into it!" The gray woman clapped her hands once. As if on cue, the door swung open slowly.

A very confused student with blue hair stood there, still clearly distraught but recovering from her earlier ordeals after her nice hot shower and the cup of warm cocoa in her hand. There was even a pair of marshmallows floating atop it and slowly dissolving into the drink. She stared in horror at the scene before her, took a shaky sip from her mug, and promptly froze where she stood, trying to comprehend and failing miserably.

"And look, just as I said, a fresh one right here for you. You just need to evict its current tenant. I'm sure a woman with your resources should be able to manage one little murder, right?" Steel said, her eyes burning in the low light.

Analyzer sneers in open contempt, "And you are not thinking small enough. We have considered that possibility. If indeed, they are capable of altering us on such a scale, then there is no action we can take, no thought which we may form, which has meaning beyond that which they permit."

Legs twitch, and breath quickens, but Analyzer is good at holding it in. The sensation should be crippling, should be having her fall to her knees in helpless arousal. So if anything Kite has more solidity of will than she had before her prolonged confinement. "So either they have released us from the Labs back onto the island because they cannot do this, and are unable at this time to facilitate the alterations which they desire to achieve their goals, or they can, and have determined that they find more profit in us as a rental model rather than for sale. Or perhaps they are just upgrading the alcove in which we were interred as nothing but one more processor in a cluster, and we are just out here to mark time until they finish. In any case, we can be only that which we are."

And then suddenly Steel stepped away from her? Aha. Independence from each other. There was hunger for it, once, debate, plans made. And then the Flame was taken, and how quickly she fell. How quickly the hate and longing they carried created a monster when separated from the flesh that carried the scars that restrained it, that reminded always of the cost of such forms of selfishness.

And yet she stepped forward, towards the confused and frightened girl. How it must look to her? Another student, especially one who looked like she'd seen the wrong end of a woodchipper a few times, standing ostensibly calmly while naked in the presence of the Queen of the Basement? What a picture that must make. Perhaps enough of one that the student's fear could be used to keep Steel from realizing the question was already mostly settled in her mind. Let Sword come back out some, perhaps make the brief twitch of emotions look like something more meaningful. Perhaps bring things to a condition where she is allowed to attack. And so she reaches out one hand to stroke the girl's cheek, and slide down her neck and shoulder, squeezing probingly, and making a disgusted noise in her throat, "Tch, this? Way too soft to be any good to me, Staloj. This putina would need years of training before she'd have a tolerable swing, much less a, y'know, useful one for this 'hero' gig of yours." The hand drops lower, her gruesomely mauled left palm lifting one of the blue-haired student's breasts. "Think it could run the masino, Staloj? Without having a stroke, i mean. Get her away from the chip, she could build the gear again to let me have some real quality time..."

Of course, Kite had killed before, and Steel knew it. In cold blood, as well, though not without motivation, without some sort of justification. She was a moral creature, in her own mind, to her own morals, twisted and warped as they might be by... well, not endless torture, not anymore. And funnily enough, that was what Steel was upset about. That she had mellowed in finding some happiness. What would happen now if she just stepped past the confused and terrified girl and out the door? Spiders, probably. And even if not, any attempt to continue her task would likely find Steel waiting in each room she entered. No, she had to play this round of the endless game out to its conclusion. "What'd it do to earn an ending, Staloj? The Last Mercy ain't a thing to hand out to just anybody. Not when they'll just make more."