Soulless Beauty Aorta

DIALECTIC BIRTH

"Fear not the flesh nor love it. If you fear it, it will gain mastery over you. If you love it, it will swallow and paralyze you"

-The Gospel of Philip

PART II: DESTRUDO

Hallways. Elevators. Hard floors. Soft floors. Elevators. Hydraulic tubes. Hallways. It had been a good few hours since their encounter with their first real obstacle, and they all seemed to be content with not talking about what had happened (except for Heather, who was continually praising Gardenia for her bravery as he carried her in a piggyback ride).

Rose finally got up the guts to ask about what had been tugging at her mind for the past couple of hours, "Um, Heather? When we beat that monster, and when it broke through the wall, they were both spraying out some sort of thick, red liquid. It... it looked... like blood but, that's-""Hydraulic fluid." Heather stared straight ahead at the front of the group and didn't look back at Rose when he spoke, showing her only the shoulder stumps of his severed extra arms, now wrapped in makeshift 'gauze' cut out of one of the softer walls of the interior of The Shell. He seemed ready to answer before Rose had even started talking. "Aorta units operate via hydraulics, it allows for smoother movement than mechanical parts. I can understand why you'd be confused." Rose's mind ran wild with what The Shell could even be. It certainly wasn't an ordinary planet.

After resting a while, the group came to another round room with a domed ceiling. This one was far smaller than the last one, and darkly lit, with green walls. A cloudy liquid covered the soft, flat floor, lit from below by trails of neon green light in the rough shape of a ram's head. Above the center of the ram's face, hung an enormous pillar that came to a point at the tip, and at the base of the pillar, connecting it to the ceiling, were four oval-shapes, pulsating, and connected by wires leading here and there in the ceiling.

The pillar began to twitch and vibrate, and from the tip, dripped a drop of thick clear liquid. It made contact with the design on the floor, and it began to vibrate and deform. A round shape emerged from the center of the floor, and ripped backwards, up and away from the ground. It was an Aorta in its default shape and size, bent backwards and covered in transparent fluid.

A small capsule containing a glowing green orb shot up from the floor in front of the newborn Aorta unit. She slowly bent forward, and pushed herself up onto her feet with jerking, shaky movements. She then picked the capsule from mid-air, opened it, and swallowed the orb. Now moving more smoothly, she made her way to a doorway, which opened and let her out. Heather's voice was a whisper as the four of them watched from the edge of the room, "They're... mass producing us...? Was that light she drank... some sort of artificial s-"

Suddenly, Hyacinth let out a cry of intense pain. "Holy shit!" She doubled over, clutching her head with one hand and her abdomen with the other. "Hyacinth! What's wrong?!" Rose panicked.

"There's... someone- FUCK!... in my... head!" Heather reached with both remaining hands to comfort Hyacinth, only for an ethereal, disembodied, soft voice to speak out in a reversed echo, "I see, this is what troubles you." An automatic error message played from Hyacinth's external speakers, 'WARNING, FORCED SLEEP IMMINENT' Hyacinth screamed.