#mindcontrol ;

“Hubris,” says Roxy, shaking their head next to you. You’re standing right outside the main door of the spaceship, inspecting it. It’s big, and secured through a key card slot, but that’s about it. You shake your head along with Roxy. “No outer cameras or nothin’. Hubris, Alan.”

You have to get on your tiptoes to peer into the card slot. It looks like a regular old card slot, but you and Roxy have done your recon on the system it works with, and know exactly what sort of card is needed for it. You don’t have one, though. You look away to peer up at Roxy instead. “Can you do it?”

Roxy rolls their shoulders, straightens their back, then holds their hands out in front of them. “Gimme some space?” they say softly, so you take a step back. You watch the space between their hands, where nothing happens for several seconds, until there’s a crackle and a pop. Roxy relaxes their hands just in time to move and catch the key card before it drops to the floor. “Let’s see if this works.”

“You are so cool,” you tell them. Then you watch them reach up to put the key in a slot made for someone much taller than both of you. The entire door lights up red, which in the case of this particular ship, you have learned, is a good sign. As it slides right open, you murmur, “Open the pod bay doors.”

“Nerd,” Roxy says, and steps in.

Like many things you have recently encountered, the place is enormous and lifeless. The ceilings are ridiculously high, which you know is partly because the Condesce is also ridiculously tall, and because drones will walk this ship if they must. Which they will, once she realizes that the door has been breached.

It’s dark in here -- the walls, ceiling and floor are all black, but there’s a shiny finish to them, and blinking lights on the walls every few feet show you the way through the corridors. You’re not sure what their purpose is; they might just be aesthetics, but as long as they’re keeping you from having to turn on a flashlight in enemy quarters, you’re fine with them. Again, Roxy has helped you mask your signal, while Roxy themself seems to be aided by their aspect -- sometimes, when you look straight ahead, even you aren’t sure anymore if they’re still next to you or not.

Sooner or later, she will notice you, and you have planned for that. But if you want your favorite plan to work out, you will have to reach a certain point before that.

The first imperial drone starts ambling towards you three corridors in. Both of you know very intimately how massive these things are, but they look even more colossal in an enclosed space like this. The ground doesn’t quake with every step they take, but it feels like it should.

Roxy and you stand very still, their left hand in your right. You’re pressed up against the wall of the corridor, all your output minimalized, Roxy’s breathing so shallow that not even you can hear it. You remember, in this moment, how often drones were sent to your apartment even after Dirk had died. You remember how you shut down the rapbots, and then yourself, timed to power back up twenty minutes later when they’d be gone. You remember all the fear, the terror stuffed into a small plastic sunglasses frame, of leaving yourself unconscious and just hoping for the best.

She hasn’t been able to do any of that to you for a year.

You have been safe from her for a year, but you never felt like you were, and you deserve this, you think. When the huge robot walks past you without paying you any attention, the hand not holding Roxy’s balls into a fist. You deserve your revenge.

“Motherfucker,” Roxy whispers, several seconds later when you both dare to move again. They look a shaken sort of determined, about the same way you would look if you had been born into a family line that values facial expressions. “I wish we could blow up all of them.”

“We’re leaving them to rot in a broken game session,” you say, and continue down the corridor alongside Roxy. “That’s way more cruel.”

You encounter three more, and apply the same technique every time. The ship isn’t exactly a maze, and at some corners, you even find Alternian signs telling you you’re still advancing the right way. All you’re doing, and planning to do, here is so simple and easy, but you don’t allow yourself to doubt that it’ll work. You’ve played this through a thousand times, and you know that sometimes, the simple plans are the best ones.

When you get to the ship’s control room, another key card slot awaits you. It needs a different card from the entrance, so you turn and shield Roxy’s back in case there are any more drones coming your way while they do their voidy thing once more. The first attempt doesn’t work, and you watch what looks like half a perfectly generic green cube and half a Visa card tumble to the floor.

“You got this,” you tell them.

“I know, shut up,” Roxy says and you laugh. There is another crackle of god powers, another pop of the air making way for a key card, and you turn around again. Roxy takes a breath, and you don’t need it, but so do you. “Let’s go.”

When you walk into the control room, the Condesce is standing in the middle of it, waiting for you.

i’m right here, at your door -- i won’t leave, i want more -- what’s up, danger?

“Been seeing you sneakin’ around,” she says. You’re having trouble focusing on parsing any sounds you hear. She’s tall enough for her horns to almost reach the ceiling, and she’s--- you’ve never met her in person, but she has been a terrible, horrifying constant for all your life, and standing in front of her now doesn’t feel real. She smiles at you. “Y’all thought you were bein’ slick out there?”

You were not, in fact, thinking you were slick. You knew she was going to see you advance. This is part of your plan, but you are still having trouble tethering yourself in the moment. You can’t believe she is just standing in front of you.

“We were sneaky enough for your shitty killer bots to walk right past us,” Roxy says next to you. Their voice is quivering just barely, and they pull you back to reality. You have to do something. You have a clear directive here, and Roxy is stalling for you.

HIC leans down a bit, making parts of her mane of black hair slip over her shoulder. You watch her razor sharp teeth glint in the sparse light of electronics as she grins at Roxy. “You Lalonde’s kid?” she says, and then nods towards you. “Who’s your bot friend? Thought I got rid of all of those, until you kids sent me that explodin’ drone. Y’all don’t know shit about warfare.”

“Yeah? We still got you to come here all the way from outer space, genius,” Roxy says. You focus as hard as you can. You know you can do this; you’ve spent the past days practicing. This is a new part of the plan, because your god tier was a surprise, but it makes everything even easier. It’s going to work. You know it’s going to work. You’re going to make it work.

“Oh, and now what?” says the Condesce. “Ya got any more exploding gimmicks up your sleeve? Just ‘cause you’re good at fuckin’ with my drones don’t mean you stand any chance against this-- yo, what the fuck?”

Your teeth are clenched so hard your jaws hurt. Just as she was straightening up again to gesture towards the trident in her hand, she dropped it, and it fell to the floor with an almighty clatter, but she didn’t seem to hear. She’s staring straight ahead between you and Roxy, towards the door, face slowly contorting from disbelief to anger.

“Get back here, you little shit,” she says, and then pushes both you and Roxy out of the way to stomp out of the control room, loudly going, “Fuck!”

Roxy, after stumbling slightly from being shoved, regains composure to stare down the corridor, then at you, wide eyed. “Is it working?” they ask. “Are you mindcontrolling her?”

You nod, feeling about as shell-shocked as they look. They stare at you for another beat, then break into a grin. “Shit,” they whisper. “That’s gotta be so satisfying.”

And it is. You stand in the doorway, watching her pursue a hallucination of you, stealing her trident and running off with it, looking so convincing that it got her to make the conscious decision to leave you and Roxy alone here. Her trident isn’t even actually gone, it’s still right here on the floor with you. Normally, in earlier plans, you would have actually lured her away in person, but these powers are coming in more than handy.

You can’t believe you’re mindcontrolling the Condesce, the very same person who, almost six years ago now, mindcontrolled Dirk to try to deactivate you and set all of this in motion. Roxy is right.

It’s immensely satisfying.

“Alright,” you say. From your sylladex, you pull your spare body, and Dirk’s old hand grenade. Roxy is already inspecting the controls, figuring out which they’re going to need. Above them, there are several screens showing security footage of HIC storming down her own corridors, right to where you need her. You’ll have to be quick for this. “See you in a few.”

“Godspeed,” Roxy says. Then, your body collapses to the floor.

You relocate to your spare body, already holding the grenade in your left. This one isn’t nearly as intricate as your regular one, with fewer sensory functions, no room to eat or drink, and a slightly distorted voice, but it gets the job done. It is still your usual size, so your legs are still significantly shorter than those of the Condesce, which means you need to hurry.

This one, other than your main body, is wearing your Bard costume, because you made a promise to the internet, and you are a man of your word. You wonder if the codpiece is going to smack against your thighs as you run. You’re about to find out.

Luckily, flashstepping is like riding a bicycle. Not that you know how to ride a bicycle -- but even after years of being glasses, you never unlearned how to be fast. You surge down the same way you were sending her with the hallucination you conjured up for her, recalling the blueprints of the ship in your mind. It’s not a very long way, because Roxy needs to catch up with you later. And you didn’t want to get her outside of this ship, because outside is too big a playing field.

You’ll get her in her own home. Just like she did with Roxy and you.

As you round the last corner, you see her step into a room at the end of the corridor, so you rush in behind her. You ping Roxy, and so behind you, the door slides shut. The Condesce turns to stare down at you, eyes narrowed. You wonder when her mind is going to catch up with her.

“The fuck you wearin’?” she says, then shakes her head like she needs to remind herself not to care. You get it. It’s a distracting outfit. “Where is it?”

“Your trident?” you say. You’ve been actively planning on the getup and the trident thievery being so distracting that she doesn’t notice you having both of your hands behind your back. So far, it seems to be working. Simple plans continue to be superior. “Oh, you left it back at the control room. Who do you think you were chasing?”

You want to laugh at the realization you can see dawning on her face. Yeah, you think, that’s how that feels. She’s quick to regain composure, of course, straightens herself again and whips some hair back over her shoulder.

“You kids are just full of fun plans,” she says. “So now that I’m disarmed and it’s just you and me in here you think you got a chance? You think I can’t crush you in one hand?”

You make a pensive noise and, behind your back, pull the pin from the grenade. “I guess you might have a shot,” you say. “I’m not as good at hand to hand combat as I used to be. And to be real with you, it’s not a risk I wanted to take. I mean, we don’t even have a healer on our team.”

“Buoy,” she says, and she does, she says buoy, not boy. You can’t wait to kill her. “The fuck are you talking about?”

“Oh, I’m just saying.” You shrug. “Neither Roxy nor I have been shining at any physical fights lately. What we’re really good at, though, is dirty pool.”

You hope she appreciates the lazy water-themed joke you made for her. Before you have time to find out, you throw the grenade.

Halfway down the corridor, your main body comes back to life as you relocate once more. You might be testing the boundaries of game mechanics with this, by letting one of your vessels get destroyed without you in it. You, personally, don’t think it should count as a death. You’re still here, after all, unharmed and well.

Roxy stops from where they were pulling you along the way, one of your arms slung around their shoulders and one of their arms slung around your middle, and turns to look at you. You shuffle your feet until they’re back on the ground and you stand up on your own. A beat of silence passes, then you nod.

“Yup,” you say. “Still alive.”

“Cool,” Roxy says. Then you walk the rest of the way together.

After Roxy opens the door for you, you crouch down to inspect your spare body, lying in a crumpled heap in a corner of the room. It’s missing half an arm and a foot, and looks charred to hell and back. “Motherfucker,” you say, prodding at it. “These PJs are still in mint condition.”

“You mean Mind condition,” Roxy says, but there’s no laugh in their voice. You straighten up again and walk over to where they are, standing over the Condesce’s body. She’s lying still on her back, head turned to the side, her wild sea of hair splayed out all around her. The room seems very silent. Roxy says, “Do you think she’s dead?”

“Kinda doubt it,” you say. Roxy pulls out their rifle, checks the magazine, and aims. “I got her good, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she survived. I mean, this was only supposed to stun her. She might just need a few secs to come to again.”

The second you say it, you see one of her hands twitching. You know Roxy notices too, because you watch their finger wander from a safe position to the trigger. You know some things about gun safety, these days. Your neck prickles, then your entire spine, as you watch the Condesce take a breath. Her eyes snap open. She turns her head to stare up at you.

Roxy plants a bullet right between her eyes. The shot rings through the quiet of the room, but you don’t flinch. A splatter of brains mixes with thick troll hair on the floor. The hole in her head emits a soft waft of smoke, and her eyes stare up at it lifelessly.

“Not in my movie,” Roxy says.

You want to hug them for the stellar Scream reference. Instead, you put one arm around them, and feel the breath rattle through their lungs. You stand like this for a while, and keep looking down at what you’ve done.

You don’t care what everyone says.

Revenge feels fucking amazing.

Roxy says, “Let’s go home.”

“Yeah,” you say, and squeeze their shoulder gently. You turn to set up your transportalizer, then stop again and look over your shoulder. It’s a hard sight to let go of, so you ask, “Hey… How do you feel about taking trophies?”

Roxy looks at you, then at her. “Depends,” they say. “What kind are you thinkin’ of?”

Something is wrong with your output. When you go through your logs, they tell you that you must have been talking, even though you don't remember saying anything. When you check your blog, there are several posts you don't recall putting there. You hurry to check your messages, but it doesn't seem to have gone that far -- thankfully, you haven’t told any of your friends to obey, submit, or consume lately.

Yesterday's craving for cookies makes more sense now, you think. It's also fantastically ridiculous.

It doesn't worry you much. You can get her propaganda out of your system, you've done it before. It doesn't worry you much, until you try to move away from the sparring bot, and your body does something entirely else instead.

In stunned silence, you watch your first surge forward and, with force you knew you had in you but never actually used, punch right into the metal head. You watch the material give, dent, then break, watch the edges cut into your hand, wrist, then arm. Your shark skin is so tough that in the year of you having it, nothing has actually broken through it before, but this will do it.

You have pain receptors, carefully crafted long ago, but you don’t feel anything, right now. You feel like you are glasses again, perched on somebody else’s nose, watching idly whatever the hell this guy is doing with his body. None of it seems like a very good idea, to you, but it doesn’t feel like your call to make. Your hand takes a shard of metal from the sparring bot’s face, and then your body pushes itself upright. You look down as you get a better grip on the shard, aim, and plunge it right into your own stomach.

Hm.

Well.

That doesn’t really do much of anything to you. You still don’t feel any pain, and when you pull the piece of metal back out of yourself, you can see something thick and brown ooze out of the wound.

It’s chocolate milk.

You must have hit your synthetic stomach that also doesn’t actually do much, digestion-wise. It just sort of keeps the food there for a bit until you go to the bathroom. This will be a bitch to fix, but it’s nothing you’re not prepared for.

The thought pulls you back, pulls your mind in between your shoulders, pushes your thoughts through the wires inside your arms. Yeah, right, you were prepared for this. It’s not part of Plan A. You didn’t want this to happen, but you suspected it might. Your emergency protocol in case of corruption was to put up a bunch of fake information about yourself she could find, like that your vital hardware is located in your stomach. It’s not. That would be stupid. It’s sprinkled all over your body in multiple hard to reach places, like the important piece of storage that’s lodged deep in your right thigh. She doesn’t seem to know that, which means she can’t have gotten very far yet.

You can get her back out.

Unfortunately, realizing what’s happening and pulling your consciousness back into your body has reminded you that you can, in fact, feel pain.

Crying out, you crumple to the floor, your good hand clutching your bad hand clutching your stomach. For several seconds, you don’t know where to start -- you can turn off the pain, but you should amp up your security software first, you need to get her out but you can’t do that if your mind is clouded with the pain of a stab wound to the guts and your hand falling apart but if you waste too much time getting the pain under control she might advance further into your data and you can’t have her finding out where your real vital hardware lies ---

Your scream rips through the undergrowth, loud enough to make a flock of birds flee from a nearby tree, to make you feel the vibrations of your own voice hum through the roof of your mouth. That helped. Kicking her out is a matter of a few, practiced steps. You can take care of the pain later; you’ve felt worse before.

So you stay where you are, curled up into a little ball, eyes screwed shut, teeth clenched, fingers twisting into each other, enduring. You’ve stopped crying out -- you’ve stopped making any noise at all, only focusing on your very inside, on what keeps you running, what makes you you. This by far isn’t her first attempt at corrupting you or your brothers, and over the years you’ve learned to adapt, keep updating your anti-virus, keep finding new measures that keep up with whatever she has been up to. You assume that this time she got in because you must have left some sort of trace on the drone you and Roxy sent her, which of course isn’t ideal. It means, however, that you opened the door for her, and you damn well know how to close it again.

She doesn’t put up much of a fight. You assume that she got what she came here for -- your vital organs and your immediate future plans. If you put up enough of a struggle, you figure, she will believe in that success.

The second you reach 0% corruption, you slump forward, face first into the dirt. It muffles your pained groan for the few beats you spend like this, before your feet start shifting against the ground in an attempt to somehow deal with the feeling of having a hole in your stomach. The way through your programming to turn off pain, at least, is a quick one now.

You flip the switch, and stop feeling anything. The moan you let out doesn’t vibrate through your mouth, but at least you hear it. You almost laugh at yourself. You don’t quite feel like it, though.

Walking the Earth with your touch receptors turned off is always weird, but it helps you get things done quickly. You check in on your brothers first, to make sure neither of them got caught in any sort of crossfire. They are fine, your plants are fine, your cat and your fish are fine. You want to pat yourself on the back for acting quickly enough, but once you chuck the broken sparring bot into your workroom and then sit down there to fix yourself, that sentiment leaves you pretty quickly.

You fix your stomach, then glue the cuts in your skin shut again, both your stomach and your hand. It looks like you have scars now, for the first time in your artificial life. In the back of the room, you have way more skin left over, rolled up like fabric, but you’d have to sew a whole new suit from it if you wanted to keep a body without scars. You don’t have time for that right now. You have to-- you want to act fast.

You have just about fucking had it.

Once you’re all glued up, you turn your receptors back on, then leave the workroom to say goodbye to the bots, your pets, and all of your plants. You check your sylladex to make sure that you have what you need on you -- a copy of SBURB, Dirk’s hand grenade. You step out on the deck, unnecessarily roll your shoulders, and message Roxy.

They reply immediately.

TT: She took the bait. See you in Rainbow Falls in five. TG: EFFIN finally TG: make it 3

Three it is. You nod to yourself, and open every other conversation that currently matters to you. To Alma, you say,

TT: Hey, I gotta bounce. There’s a note on the fridge about pet and plant care. TT: Thanks. TT: You know, for all of it. TT: Catch you on the flipside.

Messaging Palooka makes you a bit more nervous, but you don’t want to leave without another word.

TT: I’m off now. TT: Still reachable, but I’m on my way. TT: Just wanted to let you know. TT: I’ll stop by when I’m back.

You open your conversation with your… your ex-boyfriend, you suppose, too. You haven’t talked, since you told him what you’re doing. Something in you wants to let him know, but you don’t quite see the point in telling him that you’re actually leaving now. You wouldn’t know what to say, anyway. And if you stare at this any longer, your three minutes will be up.

sometimes to get to god, first you gotta meet the devil.

Your name used to be Dirk Strider. When you were a child, you were the loneliest person in the universe, and all you wanted to do was matter. Then one day, when you were thirteen, you woke up and were not Dirk Strider anymore. You had been demoted to a knock-off, a less important version of yourself that couldn’t physically do anything, that nobody cared about. You had to sit back and watch other people be relevant, watch other people do things and take control of their lives, while you were struggling with the mere concept of being a living person.

Jake doesn’t understand your constant urge to mean something. You didn’t expect him to; he’s been through this, he’s played his own session of the Game, he doesn’t want to hear anything about it anymore. You get it. It’s fine. He doesn’t have to understand that you need this, that you’ve been craving this since the second you were transferred into a pair of sunglasses, and that it’s the one, the final thing you have to do, to prove to yourself that you are a person.

You are real and you exist in this world, and you are going to leave a dent in it.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house while they set up the computers for your two-player session, and you send out pings into the universe. She will come here. You know she will. She found your fake body blueprints, and she found your fake future plans that showed you stopping her whole operation from Earth. She has enough incentive to get her shitty red spaceship back here, but no idea what actually awaits her. No idea that you and Roxy are ready to fuck this entire timeline just to get back at her.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house, and you wait for Her Imperial Condescension to come to you, so you can kill her. She will do what you want her to. People always do, sooner or later. You will get her where you want her, then you will induce the apocalypse, and kill the tyrant that has tormented you over the course of your entire existence.

And then, you think, with all of that out of the way, with your home timeline reduced to dust and your nemesis caught in the ensuing detonation of all you knew growing up, you will finally be ready, to go. To move on.

This is your moment in the spotlight. None of this is necessary for anyone else, except for maybe Roxy -- this planet is dead. Sitting on the roof, you overview the remnants of a society that has long since been eradicated. You are doing this for yourself. You are making yourself relevant, to only yourself.

It’s your gift, to you.