Weight of the World Ep.13 - Recovery (Patreon)

There was a notable verve in the atmosphere after the day of rest and relaxation… And as a side effect, it also enticed more than a few Forgeborn who had eagerly taken on the burden, or indeed the privilege, of an internal womb. The festivities were more than enough to convince them, even without the pleasant ‘show’ that both Princess Alphi and Seri Vex had displayed for all to see…

...One, however, hadn’t needed convincing in the first place… And now?Her visor flashed gently with desirous words that she couldn’t hold back anymore… WANT… NEED… She scraped her fingers down the sides of her face and leaned her head heavily against the wall…

“...M.U.L.U. Viden…! Your duties need attending!” she muttered to herself… “...No, of course not. Of course you can’t be a mother. You were designed with this space already filled in. No room for… For…”

...She lifted her head and turned to glance over her shoulder. She was currently in her own quarters… which, for a low level elite like her, was little more than a closet to safely deactivate most of her processes and ‘rest’ within… whenever she was allowed to actually rest, anyway.

The door remained closed. Viden could hear the soft rumble of someone being brought up the lift and into the Laboratory proper…

“...Hnnnhhh…”The robot lifted their arm and checked the ‘console’ there. They were about to be late for their daily tasks… Viden had risked that quite often lately. She turned to face her door, holding her hips steady as her mockingly ‘pregnant’ midsection nearly thumped against the wall. She took a step forward… then hesitated…

She leaned her head forward and listened…

‘...assuming a period of rest for you and your Newborn, Seri Vex?’

‘No. No rest, even after a moment as grand as this. Were I on our homeworld, maybe, but…’

...an audible grinding came from Viden’s chassis… She curled a hand into a fist…

WHAM…

...Seri Vex paused and turned her head…

She was moving along the corridor, back towards her personal lab after all that had happened. She had recovered in Osiria’s care. The two celebrated, if only a bit. Even in a situation as dire as this, with a humiliation as dire as what she had suffered, Vex still had her chin lifted. She was beaming with sheer maternal pride... If any doubted the wonder of the internal forges, Vex was a very public and real icon of how desirable having a baby could be. Unlike Alphi, who preferred to keep her ‘stardom’ mostly to the Rangers around her, Vex was one of the faces of leadership alongside the General Sisters… It was no big surprise, then, that the number of internal forges installed had exploded over the course of a mere few cycles...

Vex herself still remained ‘gravid’, at least on the outside. The internal forge’s structure didn’t flatten itself out just because the baby inside vacated. Still, the fact her pod-egg was in her arm instead of inside made her… a bit more protective, or PARANOID than usual…

“What was that noise?”

“...Seems to be an impact within one of the resting chambers. Hard enough to leave a dent, in fact, Seri Vex.”

Vex took the small datapad and stared down at it confusedly…

“...Hm, that’s M.U.L.U. Viden’s chamber. See to it the fool didn’t fall over and damage herself, or the room.”

“Yes, Seri Vex.”

The Scientist dummy wandered off quickly. Vex continued down the hallway, relishing the thought of some private time… She’d had to recover, soak up the embarrassment, contain her overwhelming joy, catch up on work, and now… Now she could simply return to her room and inspect her daughter…

...SHOW HER TO ME…

...Vex stopped cold. She was a hallway’s length from her room… But the voice in her head…

“...mother, I-…”SHOW. HER. TO. ME.

...Vex curled her fingers nervously, then relaxed them. She repeated this unsure motion a few times before she continued down the hallway…

“...you must feel some kinship too, I suppose… But… You know she is mine, not yours, correct…? After all, w-...”Vex’s tentacles snapped out and braced her against the nearby walls as the entire derelict half-spaceship rumbled…

SHOW. HER. TO. ME.

If she were capable… Vex’s eyes would have filled with tears…

“...you, Allma… Even these damn Scrappers… There is no running from an oppressive maternal presence, is there? Hrm. Hm.”

...she continued down the hall, but… walked silently past her room, and further down into the bowels of the lab…

“I don’t feel the need to demand, to direct my daughter’s every move. I don’t feel the need to stare at Seria Cognis’s work as if she would make some violent mistake at any instant. Why is it that I am subject to…”

...she paused, and stared tiredly at the doorway before her… A long, dark walk into a place only she was allowed to be, for better or worse…

“...is it because… You merely built me? Designed me… Created me. Instead of…”

...she traced her fingers across her bulbous middle…

“...the uncertainty allows them to develop in ways we never would have anticipated… Hm?”

She walked down the hallway a bit more confidently now…

“I understand it more and more as I experience it. This vast potential… If we attempt to set and fill the boundaries as simply as fluid within a cup, then we will never outgrow the cup… And if we try, we merely spill over. But these… These newborn… These children…!”

She lifted her pod excitedly as she walked…

“...they have no such limitation… No expectation! They can grow, forever and ever a-…”

Eeeeeevv… vvveeeerrr… eveeerrrr…

Vex froze once more, stood in front of the vast door that remained so tightly sealed… for the protection of she that resided inside, and to protect the rest of the ship from HER…

The Scientist elite mustered her courage silently… and then pressed her hand to a panel to open the doorway…

...Within… The scene had barely changed from the grim show it had been before.

The monitors in the vast, cavernous chamber were lit with various images. Vex’s keen eye caught glimpses of Osiria, Jorien, Willow, Alphi… Everyone. Precisia kept an eye over everything, despite seemingly not having eyes of her own…

The Forgemother’s midsection was pendulous for how heavily it hung below her suspended body. Even in the dim light of the monitors, Vex couldn’t quite see it all for its size, while behind of course…“...M-Mother…”

...Vex stared in silent, stunned horror… The foolish Forgemother Neptune had implanted almost a dozen more wombs into her ever lengthening, snake-like ‘body’ of cables… Disturbingly…

...more than a few of the Forgeborn who gestated in those bulbous, transparent cases were… eerily similar in design to Vex herself…

Precisia’s form slithered like an eel in its hole. She raised herself to face Vex, who tried to tell herself that the observation booth she was in would be more than sufficient to hold back Neptune… despite her being the very Forgemother who had designed it…

“...Show. Her…”

Precisia’s voice was strained, but not weak… In fact, it was a bit overly manic. Seri Vex had rarely seen this much energy… Yet, she hesitated. After all, she’d presented Seria Cognis to the Scientist Forgemother so long ago… but Precisia was far less unstable then, and Seria Cognis wasn’t a tiny, vulnerable pod in Vex’s arm…

...still. Vex remembered the care and intelligence that the Forgemother once had. She wasn’t sure if it was the years of service that had cut her down, or the fact that the ship that was technically her body had crash landed and torn so violently… Or even, perhaps… The fact she’d grafted dozens of wombs onto herself. The implications were worrying, but Vex quickly pushed them aside to instead focus on the idea that Precisia was damaged and draining herself an unusual amount. No need to worry about the effects of the Internal Forges… The very idea was stultifying, given how many Forgeborn now held them...

...The head Scientist moved forward on her tentacles, and lifted the pod gently. Precisia leaned as close to the glass separating them as she could, the cables rooting her body to this chamber stretching with tension as she did…...The pretty little blue pod pulsed… Each time it brightened, it showed the silhouette of the Newborn tightly curled up inside. Vex couldn’t help but stare with pride and awe… And Precisia, in turn, shuddered with excitement…“...grand… daughter…”

“...She’s my daughter, mother…” Vex said, with a surprising amount of iciness. She pulled her pod to her chest safely again, her eyes narrowing… “And she has nothing to do with you… Or whatever it is you’re planning…”...The Forgemother stared down for a few long, painful moments… Then she suddenly withdrew and retreated, coiling around herself to deeply inspect the wombs festooned across her form…“Mother.” Vex called, but Precisia was lost in her thoughts. Vex thumped a knuckle gently against the glass to get her attention… To no avail…...Vex turned and left the room, hurrying back down the hallway with the pod clutched tight, as if she was a mother fleeing a fire with her child…

“...no…”

Vex stopped only when she got back to the doorway of her personal chambers. She trembled… but lifted herself straight…

“No more. No more… You’re barely born, and already… In so much danger. Allma, Precisia, and… And…”

...she clenched her fist… Then swept forward and snapped her finger to the panel next to the door to open it…

“...All Forgeborn could burn for all I care… If you aren’t safe… Then I have to assure you are safe.”...The Vex looked back, an expression of sharp determination on her face, just before the doors closed, and she was left to her own devices...

Outside, it had turned to night. The stars over Ova glinted and glimmered… And Alphi stared up at them with distant fascination, and a gentle smile in her eyes…

...lantern flies fluttered about in the gloomy murk of late summer. Their gentle beacons were just as beautiful a sight as the shimmer of the two pods in Alphi’s arms…

...And already, a third could be felt wedged inside her. She hadn’t invoked it, demanded it, or made a mistake. Just like her other two, it had simply… appeared.

A destiny she could not escape from, granted by her mother…

“Hahahaha...~”

...Willow stepped up and fell to a cross legged sit next to Alphi. She was of course ‘redressed’ in her cloak and armour, yet was still as bright and sunny as she had been at the springs…

“A queen indeed, indeed...~ Look at you, Alphi… Showing all of Ova who is the superior Forgeborn, as we knew you would…”

Alphi took the compliments and affection with an idle nod, and a content sigh… But of course, her contentment and Willow’s enthusiasm were both lingering pleasantries from their brief moments of respite. Soon, they’d begin asking heavier and darker questions once more… Such as; how were they going to sustain Alphi’s rule if she continued to pile more and more pods into her chamber, until even the Caravan burst open with their number? They’d need something unthinkable to Ranger-kind; a base of operations. A static place to build upon and care for the children…

...A nest!

...The only question now was whether it would be on the eventual barge back home, where they would be coddled and cared for until they returned to the homeworld… Or…

...perhaps here, on Ova? The thought was unspoken, but crossed the minds of both Willow and Alphi almost simultaneously. Mentor and student were in good sync already, thanks to Willow’s wisdom and Alphi’s intelligence...

...But even as they silently enjoyed their last few moments of idle rest, and asked mundane questions to themselves about maternity… They perhaps missed some far more important questions they SHOULD have been asking…

Why hadn’t the Scrappers attacked yet…?

...why were there so many of them, even so long after they’d crashed upon the surface of this world, when their numbers should have been dwindling with no ‘material’ to supplement it?

...What was Forgemother Gaia’s intent when she created these Internal Forges… Was it simply academic curiosity…? If so… Why hide her work from the Scientists AND her fellow Rangers…?

...and lastly… Most damningly…

...What was that shadow that briefly flew across the moon, bringing the most dire omen from their distant homeland across the sea of stars…?