"Dr. Jones. Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."

- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

"We're looking like a damn H-game up in here!"

- BlazBlue Continuum Shift

"And the Force? Well, that's just microscopic bacteria in your bloodstream called midichlorians."

"Look. If you're not going to take this seriously, I'm out."

- Star Wars

"I must get a hold of myself."

- Lady Dimitrescu after turning some moldy dude into tenderized beef strips


The SRF team was on top priority to get updated in their uropygiums. The three combatants were sitting idly on the ground, barely reacting to the deafening mechanical chaos surrounding them. Fleets of self-piloted war machines constructed by an unknown enemy with technology far exceeding anything from the known universe were positioned like murderous carnival attractions in the middle of the forest. The robots crawled, hauled, and revved into action against their smaller, vastly outnumbered organic opponents.

The reason the SRF fighters hardly moved was brutally obvious: They were stuck in their seated positions with something like a 50-wheeled freight trailer parked over the tops of their heads. Their eyes were trapped under domes of metal with just enough space so their noses and mouths could breathe. But they didn't struggle or complain. In fact, they appeared perfectly relaxed. Cheerful, even.

The self-driving tank looming over their heads wasn't the most alarming thing about their current predicament. Legions of mini-drones shaped like scarabs on motorized segmented legs were clustered beneath the armor plating hanging from each officer's waist. The team's combat shorts were pulled down several inches or simply stretched open between their thighs, and the sounds of humid breathing and soft moaning rose from their ranks. The mini-drones that weren't hidden below the warriors' laps waited on standby with open mandibles exposing small moistened tongue-like cables, leaving no mystery as to what they were doing to their captives.

Leading the ill-fated expedition was Reimi Saionji, Captain of the Guard and Chief Reconnaissance Officer. She was identified by her blue armor and black shorts. Next to her was Sophia, Third Lieutenant of the Special Search and Rescue Division, colloquially known as "the Furball Brigade." She wore pink armor and platinum shorts with a cat paw insignia printed on the left half of her rear. The last member of the brigade was Fiore, Secretary of Magic Arrow and Advanced Heavy Weapons Research, wearing black armor and metallic green shorts with a spell circle insignia on her right hip. It was kind of amazing she actually managed to fit into an SRF field uniform, but her robotic captors were currently only interested in getting her out of it. And if you're wondering how three space babes from three separate planetary systems and three completely different points in time managed to wind up on the same Galactic Federation attack squad, who the hell gives a crap? If it can work for a mobile game, it can work for a fanfic. Time travel is just weird like that.

The trio's standard-issue composite bows were lying near their feet, but whatever firepower they brought didn't matter. They were disarmed and down for interior renovations. Reimi and Sophia required almost no restraints, but Fiore was secured with extra set of metal harnesses that were labeled SPHERE LOGISTICS and crossed over her chest. It helped prevent her from bouncing around too much during her reconditioning.

The team acted impossibly docile as they kept their knees apart and allowed their data centers to be primed for a big upload. Miniature spotlights lit up the space underneath their posteriors, highlighting the three ports they each came equipped with. It was important for the drones to target only the one that lead into each lifeform's core production circuits.

The mini-drones used nodes on their cables for diagnostic purposes: Monitoring the climate inside each SRF officer, checking for bandwidth fluctuations, and determining who had the most storage space. The findings were encrypted for the sake of personal privacy, but you might be surprised to know Fiore wasn't the roomiest one.

The team wasn't acting at all like themselves. If they were themselves, they would be shrieking, and squirming, and completely grossed out, and not just sitting back and peacefully mooing like dairy cattle while the robot fleet went about their work. They hadn't been themselves since the moment the artillery drone ratcheted their heads into giant metal pasta drainers.

Their native brainwaves had been muted, essentially put to sleep. Now a different form of consciousness was determining how they acted. This was an effective way to get unruly lower lifeforms under control, but the lease was only temporary. The signals overwhelming their minds could be shut off or severed at any point, allowing them to wake back up.

The hosts would have to be infected if the invading consciousness wanted permanent ownership of their bodies. Conveniently, they all possessed an organ where the virus could replicate itself indefinitely once it was installed.

"These data receivers are barely keeping stable. It's a good thing we sanitized their output streams before we moved to the initialization phase." Reimi's smiling lips moved under the control of a mysterious power that wasn't her own. Her complexion was beginning to turn a little red as she spoke to her two teammates.

"They thought they stood a chance against us. We'll have them integrated into our legion in no time," Sophia said confidently, nibbling on her lower lip to stop herself from squeaking. She'd somehow gained a pseudo-European accent.

"G3t r3kt g1ga5lutz," Fiore snickered feverishly.

"Please, Agent W. There's no need for such base language," Sophia said toward Fiore. She suddenly flinched on her rear and winced.

"Boss is right," Reimi sighed with exhaustion. "This body already has enough happening in its base." The recon archer yelped in delight as her eyes widened.

"That bad, huh?" Fiore purred as she shuffled her thighs into a more comfortable position. "Would you like me to throw in a complimentary grooming service next time? You know, trim off some of the extra foliage downstairs so you can stay cool in the summer?"

"Next time?" Reimi gasped slightly in terror. She quickly added a "Gugh!" as her shoulders twitched in perfect timing with the drone working underneath her lap.

"Don't let her worry you, Ms. Orchard," Sophia said as calmly as she could manage while her knees convulsed from ticklishness. Sweat trickled down her forehead as she practiced her breathing exercises and tried to keep herself in order. "This will just be a one-time upload. These anomalies will be completely conditioned for our use as soon as their ports are fully open."

"I knew you were just messing with me, Grapes!" Reimi said toward Fiore. The denial in her voice was all too obvious. "You're just jealous because I get to be the best marksman on the force!"

"Don't get too full of yourself, Olive Brains! I get access to all the neat Signeturgy stuff on this one!" Fiore said to Reimi. "You sure you don't want her? Chairwoman B's got dibs on the one with the Connection Gene haxx, but I can still trade with ya. You've got a few seconds left before it's finalized."

"Chief can be the pink meatloaf with the name that makes her sound like a horse. You can be that... neon green pair of melons with sorcery powers. I think I'll be okay with this one. She's a little plain, but she's pretty. And she's probably easier to move around in than yours," Reimi answered in the middle of a small yelp.

"If you say so. Just don't come to me with buyer's remorse later." The spell-sniper leaned back on her elbows as she chanted into the air. "Stimulatin' their stations~! Calibratin' their cupcakes! Gonna have a LAN party in their lady parts tonight~! EEK!" Fiore's playful sing-song was cut off as she clenched her teeth and squealed.

The firewalls were offline. The input receptacles were ready for business. Hundreds of tiny metal feet scurried out from underneath Reimi, Fiore, and Sophia, leaving plenty of space for something larger to sit between their legs.

Shutters flew open on the tanker parked above their heads. Its cargo bay housed endless rows of ten-foot-tall glass beakers, souvenirs it had transported all the way to the battle site from whatever alien industrial world it originally came from. The cylinders uniformly faced outward with the words VINEYARD PROTOCOL EPSILON painted across their clear frames.

The material inside these containers couldn't be fully described with conventional physics. The beakers were loaded with what looked like white noise, only if white noise had substance and density like the plasma inside of a lava lamp. And the contents appeared downright haunted. Strange shapes flickered and swirled inside, and the glass casings fogged with thousands of indistinct faces, or the same face emoting thousands of different ways.

A new drone rolled up toward the SRF team's feet. Fashioned as a sort of mechanical gargoyle with a set of tank treads for his lower body, the towering Metrageist pulled three of the beakers out of the cargo wagon and stood them vertically on the ground. Reimi and Fiore anxiously scooted a few inches forward with their hips so they were angled correctly at the base of the beakers. Sophia did the same, only with a little more class and subtlety. The turbine-powered gargoyle swung a lever attached to each beaker, and the main administrative proceedings began.

The moans rising out of the grass became more frequent and intense compared to the previous phase. The amorphous static in each tube bubbled and gradually lowered as it was pumped out of the sterile portable containers and transferred into more productive environments. How it all managed to fit was anyone's guess.

The metal demon helped things along by striking each beaker with bolts of electricity from his fingers, increasing the power of the motors in their transfer systems. There was a certain rhythm to how he worked, and he played the host conduits sitting in the ground like they were a tiny three-key piano. The SRF team gasped, groaned, and dug their gloves into the dirt, but no one backed away from the intense terabytes of input.

The attack's success was verified with a loud collective scream from the three recipients and a giant holographic marquee that extravagantly announced GAME OVARIES. Three detailed wireframe vases floated in the air to show the petunias had achieved perfect hydration.

The gargoyle leaned with one elbow propped against a beaker as he mockingly shook his head. He made a quick inspection of how much reality-bending prototype ooze was left in each tube—The one situated in front of Sophia's boots was almost totally empty, Reimi's was still around a quarter full, and Fiore's was stopped somewhere in between. Finally, he reached down and gently poked each officer on the front of her waist armor. The tip of his titanium claw inscribed small barcodes on the skin of their bellies as a way to identify which codebase each one housed.

The recon team recovered pretty quickly considering they just had all the diabolical powers of an unknown universe storming through their fragile bio-networks. The encasements above their heads unlatched automatically and slid off. They sat up on the seats of their dusty shorts as they blinked, and they each rose to their feet with hardly any delay in their balance. There was something eerily casual about all of it.

"That wasn't so bad, yes? We've completely repurposed these simuloids as our avatars. Now they're just digital husks without our input signals controlling their actions. If I dare say, our darlings are less artificial this way," Sophia said as she kicked away some transfer cables near her ankles and politely zipped up the service panel on her shorts. While she was adjusting herself, one of the circular pads on the paw print on her backside wrinkled like a finger on the monkey's paw.

"Told ya the rootkit I designed for their booties would do the trick. How do you like wearing a person?" Fiore winked as she fixed the back of her skirt armor, sticking her bottom out just a tad further than necessary.

"We're just projecting ourselves through the transcoders we converted out of their epithelial material and sending neural signals through them like backup sacral brains. Technically, they're wearing us," Reimi said. She'd picked her compound bow off the ground and was teaching herself how it worked.

"Same difference. And it's all thanks to yours truly," Fiore shrugged.

"Don't hog all the credit, pigtails. I'm the one who scoped out our targets. And I even pointed out two of them weren't very good archers so they'd be easier to catch." Reimi grunted as she got some residual spasms in her thighs under control.

"Still having problems there, Bertolli? Maybe you need an extra dipstick?" Fiore slyly grinned. Sophia crossed her arms and silently rolled her eyes at the sophomoric innuendo.

"Keep your magic touch to yourself. My oil levels are just fine." Reimi straightened her waist and stood at attention.

"I'm glad we were able to complete the transfer without bringing the poor minks who donated their hides any serious harm… aside from obliterating their original AIs from existence," said Sophia. Her stoic expression changed to a small grin. "At least we made their final moments enjoyable."

"Advanced self-compiling hexadecimal code? In my vagina?" Fiore teasingly twitched her nose.

"It's more likely than you think!" Reimi giggled. Sophia shook her head again as she placed her gloved palm against her temple.

"What's next, Auntie Lannie? Monster hunting? Shopping? Flirting with cute cyberboys?" Fiore said to Sophia.

"No. We'll return to the nearest civilized establishment and let them believe we're still in their service. Begin the Purging when they least suspect it. Call in Executioner support only if it's necessary." The pink-armored scout folded her hands over the front of her pelvic armor. "We'll show my brother there are more creative ways to fix this system beyond just aimless annihilation."

"Ooo! Destroying 'em from the inside out! That's just our style!" Fiore excitedly nodded. Reimi mumbled something about how she looked like a fluffy green poodle in a metal coat.

In the following days, the trio of SRF scouts would abandon their pledge to peacefully explore worlds and defend the universe from invading threats. Whenever they determined a civilization was becoming a little too advanced for its own good, the Virtual Vixens of Death would appear and reset their culture to the Dark Ages by blocking out their sun with a storm of fiery arrows.

The automated angels purged their worldly connections so they could become heralds of the Glorious Fourth Dimension. No one would ever know when they were coming, where they would strike, or what exactly was going on underneath their skirt plating.

The End.


Author's note: This was originally going to be Sakuya from Shining Blade, with creepy robot friends taking over her body because they wanted to gain her ability to Spherechange into every other Shining game heroine. It was going to be called "Swiss Army Waifu" and it was going to start with the quote "I have the power to have all the powers I want" from South Park. I threw out that idea because 1: I don't know enough about Shining Blade, and 2: it probably doesn't even have creepy robot buddies and the entire premise would have been out of place.

Author's note 2: I had to try really really hard to describe the malicious invasive program that takes them over as something other than a "worm." How'd I do?