෴Raz෴

෴Sia෴

෴Ivy෴

෴Nona෴

෴Dara෴

෴Tris෴

෴Tavi෴

෴෴෴෴෴෴

Senary Storytime

෴෴෴෴෴෴

Sia’s sisters dished up food. They did it quickly and efficiently, serving each other as well as themselves. Raz watched Tavi place the eggs on plates while Nona served slices of bacon to each of them. Dara poured water into each cup while Nona and Tris slid forks around to each place setting. Throughout this Sia sat still looking at Raz, making eye contact when he glanced away from the dance of motion behind her.

Something about the way they all moved together was so smooth and perfect it looked wrong, like chaos choreographed. Everyone one of them moved at normal speed and at the same time. Yet not so much as a finger collided, let alone the food, drinks, and utensils being quickly moved around the table simultaneously. He couldn’t place it but suspected that this movement was connected to the abilities that some of them had.

Whatever they’re hiding, can I let it go or do I have to dig? I’m not feeling very trusting today.

Sia wiped at her eyes. “I have so much to tell you right now, but I’m not sure where you would want me to start. You’re obviously upset, but I’m not sure exactly what you’re upset about. So if you could at least tell me what you’re upset about right now, that would really help, because I don’t even know where to start.”

Raz thought about that and nodded around a bite of bacon. “Well, you could start wi—Oh damn you’re good.” he shook his head, “You almost got me. How about you start at whatever the beginning is.” He paused and chewed. “I want there to be an explanation that makes everything make sense, but if you lie to me, you’ll leave me no choice.” he left the rest unsaid.

Sia sighed heavily. “Are you sure you want the whole story? That could take a while.”

Raz sighed right back at her. “Like I said. I want to trust you. That trust is feeling really strained right now. Why not start with the beginning and we’ll go from there.”

The ladies began to eat. They all ate with a rushed economy of motion at odds with their normal easy way of moving through the world.

“If you want the truth, you’ll need the whole truth, about me, and what I know about my benefactor,” Sia said and then took a bite of eggs.

“You will not like some of what I tell you. But I believe—” Ivy continued.

“—we have reached the point where the cost of distrust—” Tris said and then took a drink.

“—outweighs the risks of telling you everything,” Sia said as she picked up a bite of eggs.

“I guess the first thing you have to understand.” Tavi said, reaching for her glass.

“Is that in the beginning, my life, the way I am now. It wasn’t—” Nona said between bites.

“—something I sought out—” Tris continued.

“—so much as something—” Ivy added around a small bite of bacon.

“—that happened to me,” Sia finished.

“When it all happened, I was a real—” Tavi took a sip of water.

“—mess. After the first few times I—” Dara started.

“—died, it wasn’t so much a case of my finding him, as it was—” Sia said after a drink.

“—a case of him, finding me,” Tris said.

Six heads snapped to look at Raz in unison. They spoke softly, just above a whisper. Each speaking in such perfect unison that the whisper combined to fill the room. “As you can see, I am not like other people. In exchange for my life then, and my power now, I serve my benefactor.”

Her precise coordination unnerved Raz. “Okay, that's kind of weirding me—”

They cut him off. “You asked for this. I’ll tell you the story, my way,” they said as one.

The six of them continued to speak in turns, telling the story as they ate.

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

Back then my name was Serena Gibson. I worked in a local delivery hub for a small private transport company. I was the new kid on the job, so all the shit jobs landed on me. When a big crate full of bags of fine sand or maybe powdered paint dyes broke open just before lunchtime second shift on a Friday evening, I was the one who got stuck with the cleanup job.

No one knew what it was. The sender was a small scale molecular assembly chemical plant. The manager said they were very good about proper shipping and hazard labels, so if it was shipped without any warnings, it was safe to sweep up and we’d call them up on Monday and see what they wanted to do about it.

Much later I learned that the buyer paid for and requested hard-case BSL-4 biohazard markings and packaging. My cynical guess is someone at the chemical plant looked at the carefully assembled list of inert and near inert ingredients and decided it didn't need that. I don’t know what they did about that shipment, because by Monday I was dead.

I spent the rest of my shift being given all the scut work they could find for me. They’d call me on the radio and tell me to do some little thing one place. Then I’d be halfway across the property when they’d radio with another job I needed to do next, that was right back where I had just been. Before getting the first job done four more would have come in in four more places across the property. What I mainly remember about my last day of normal work was wishing I could get my work done faster, and feeling that the only way I could do that was to be in more than one place at the same time.

I went home from work early Saturday morning feeling like I was dying. I was. A quick shower before bed was all I had the energy for. It was just about one in the morning when I fell into bed. I woke up nearly thirty-six hours later. I’m not sure if it was the smell, or the sticky, gritty, feeling of irritated and chemical burned skin that woke me up. The first thing I realized was that I’d soiled myself in every possible way. I was covered in my own puke, I’d pissed and shit the bed.

If you’ve never slept in your own bodily wastes, you should try to keep it that way. Even my sweat was awful. It stank like rotten lighter fluid. Looking back, I’m pretty sure the only reason I didn’t choke to death on my own vomit is that I sleep on my side with that body pillow you like to make fun of. It was about then that I realized how thirsty I was. If I could have moved, I’m not sure I could have talked. My nose and mouth felt like cracked deserts.

As I lay there realizing how nasty my bed and I were, at that moment I wanted nothing more than to be out of that bed and into the shower. The first time I tried to get out of bed an aspect of me ended up halfway down the hall toward the bathroom.

I was still on the bed, but I was also down the hall. I couldn’t exactly drive both bodies at once. I could feel them both, but driving one meant the other just stood still, or fell down, as I found out later. Just feeling two sets of entire body sensory input nearly overwhelmed me.

Something more was wrong. The me standing in the hallway was somehow stuck. My arm ached, a sharp throbbing unlike anything I’d felt before. I was still lying there all sticky and gross on the bed, but I was also trying to pull away from the wall that had somehow gotten stuck to me. When the me in the hall yanked hard enough, my arm came off the wall. More precisely, my arm came off, at the wall. When the part of my arm above the elbow that wasn’t inside the wall ripped away from the wall, it hurt in a way I can’t even describe. I almost passed out right there. With how much blood started spraying, there was blood everywhere in the hall pretty quickly after that. I think I made it to the kitchen before dying.

Actually, instead of telling you all the gory details, I’ll just say that by the end of the day, I’d died more than a few times in that apartment. Every time I tried to get out of that bed, I teleported. Most of the time, I appeared with my body overlapping something.

Throughout it all I couldn’t seem to move the body on the bed that I was thinking of as the real me. It felt like I couldn’t quite remember how to move that body.

Sometimes I tried to get up and I couldn't move, and no new copies of me would appear. When that happened I felt even worse, and probably would have barfed again if I’d had anything left in my stomach. There wasn't much rhyme or reason to it, but I realized I couldn’t just do it anytime I wanted to.

I learned to clean them up when one of me bled out while trying to help me up. I passed out and fell on top of myself. I thought I was going to suffocate under it. I couldn’t breathe or move and I just wanted it to be gone. It vanished as soon as I wished for that. That’s how I discovered I was able to make those aspects disappear in a big flash of heat and light. Lucky for me it was more like light and warmth, since that first one I got rid of was right on top of me.

I couldn't make them all go away. I still don’t understand the rules, but in general I can only do it when they’re alive or very recently dead. Nowadays I’ve got a lot more practice with recently dead selves than I ever wanted to have.

I don’t know how long I might have lain there in that filthy bed trying to move around the pile of my own bodies before my paralysed body on the bed died, but I was lucky enough that I didn’t have to find out. My benefactor came looking for me when the shipment was reported as a loss.

By the time he’d arrived, I had managed to create a few aspects that didn't appear with too much body overlapping with the apartment in the teleport. Once I had one with two hands, I could tie off missing limbs.

At one point I just stopped everything and looked around my apartment. The place was littered with my bodies and sprayed with enough blood, most horror movie scenes would have felt it was a little excessive. The metallic smell of fresh and drying blood alone had gotten so strong it was overwhelming the vomit and shit smells in the bed.

Seeing all that was bad enough that a big part of me wanted to just sit against the wall and stare off into space forever. I could actually feel the lure, the appeal, of just letting go and finding a happy place in my mind to go visit forever. If I hadn’t still felt the drive to get out of that nasty drying pool of vomit and shit on the bed I don’t know what state he would have found me in.

I thought about calling someone for help, but by that time my place looked like a slaughterhouse full of dead girls that looked like me. I couldn’t think of anyone I could call and have them see that. I could barely believe it, and I was living through it.

It took all of the selves I had been able to make to get my body on the bed to the tub. I still couldn’t really control more than one body very well at all. I’d reached the point where they didn’t collapse when I stopped driving them, but I still could only move one at a time. Despite that limit, I could still feel from all of them.

Giving myself a bath was an odd almost out of body experience, but also one of the least unusual things that had happened to me that day. Halfway through the bath one of the aspects collapsed. The tourniquet had slipped off her ankle, and I hadn’t noticed among all the other sensations. I was able to make her disappear, but I didn’t want what I was thinking of as the original, the real me, to drown in that nasty bathwater, so I was just in the process of getting what I thought was the real me out of the tub when the doorbell rang.

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

The doorbell rang. The sudden sound, immediately after Sia told him about a doorbell ringing brought Raz to his feet in a rush, looking at the sisters in confusion.

No. Not sisters. What is she then?

Ivy got up and started clearing the table. Nona got to her feet. “I’ll get the door.” Raz heard the water turn on. He looked over to see Tavi filling the sink for dishes. Raz hadn’t seen her move. He blinked and Dara was over by Tavi, setting up a dish drying rack. He sat back down next to Sia, and realized that Tris was across the room cleaning up the stove from breakfast. He looked over at them, and back at Sia. Tavi turned off the water. He glanced back just in time to see Nona appear in her seat, with a box in hand.

She passed it to Sia, who accepted it without looking and passed it on to Him. “It’s your new shoes,” Sia said. She looked at the box with a sad smile. “I know you’re feeling upset, angry, vulnerable, and who knows what else right now. Maybe being fully dressed will help.”

Raz couldn't argue that. By the time he was done tying his shoes, the women were done with the dishes and back at the table.

“That certainly explains why you never bother with a dishwasher.” he muttered.

Sia nodded and shrugged, “Well, we’re not always all here, I just don’t like dishwashers. It’s wasteful to run a dishwasher for just me, or even just me and you.”

Raz stood up and paced around the room. “So you’re saying you’re all one person?”

“Yes, but also no.” they answered as one.

“Well, that explains something. And you can just make them all poof away?”

I guess that's why resuming the analysis activated for both of them.

“Yes, I can remove my aspects. That's what I call my individual physical manifestations. What does it explain?” one of them said.

He thought fast. “How much alike you all look,” his gaze flicked to Sia and then back to the rest of them. “How many of these aspects are there?”

“I’d rather not say.”

He sat back down. “Why not?”

“I don’t want to lie to you, but I’m not going to answer that,” Sia said in a level tone.

Raz clenched his fists and then took a deep breath and forced himself to relax. “I’m trying to trust you here, giving you the benefit of the doubt because I figure if you wanted to hurt me you’ve had plenty of chances before now. Will you tell me why you don’t want to say?”

“It’s how I stay safe. As long as one of my aspects survives, we all survive. Let’s just leave it at this. There are more of my aspects than you see before you,” her lips pressed into a flat line.

Raz could see that she’d said all she cared to on that topic. “Ok, let's move on. Let me see if I understand all this. Those women who chased me last night. Those were both you?”

They nodded.

“And the one I took down?” He looked at each of them in turn.

“It doesn’t really matter, we can all experience it. But it was me.” Dara said.

Raz looked at her and then glanced at the others. “Are you ok?”

In answer, she lifted the loose shirt up far enough to expose a purple and red bruise in the center of her chest. He took in the bruise before his eye was drawn to the exposed delicate lower curve of her breasts and the edge of her areolas before he pulled his gaze away to see them all looking at him with barely suppressed knowing smiles.

“It was a good hit, knocked the wind right out of me even through my armor.” Dara let her shirt fall back down.

Sia grinned. “And yeah, I know what you like. I’m trying to play straight with you because I’m very aware that we could probably short circuit this whole conversation if I got naked and turned this into an orgy scene.” she grinned insouciantly. “But, that wouldn’t really solve our situation.”

Raz couldn’t help but imagine that for a moment.

“But we shouldn’t do that right now. If we move on to having that kind of fun right now, We’ll have to add the sex and harem tags.” Tris muttered under her breath.

“What was that?” Raz looked at Tris.

“Oh nothing, just thinking aloud,” she said.

“Anyway,” Sia continued, “I’m trying to work out whatever is concerning you.”

“Well, how about the obvious? Why were you trying to capture me? Do you work for Braithwaite?”

The girls suddenly burst into laughter. They all laughed individually, out of sync like normal people. Sia finally gasped to a stop and got control of herself.

“I’m sorry for laughing, I just hadn’t even thought of it like that. I guess chasing after you with all our gear wasn’t really the best look.” She wheezed out several more laughs.

Tavi spoke while Sia laughed. “I think you already know we don’t work for him. You’re asking us directly so you can lay it out on the table and see how I respond, but if you really for one second thought we were on his side, you’d be long gone.”

Sia finished laughing, “But without even thinking about it too hard you know that idea doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

Nona spoke up. “What I’m getting at, is that we weren't there to capture, or recapture you. We were there to rescue you.”

“Not that you seemed to need much help.” Dara said.

Tris spoke up. “So why didn’t you answer when I called out to you?”

Raz put his finger a few inches from his face. “Nearly took a bullet to my face. Muzzle was that close. I couldn’t hear a thing for a while. Too bad though. Wish I could have heard you. I wouldn't have minded getting a ride out of there. It was a very long walk.”

They looked horrified upon hearing that. “Oh, thank god you weren’t hit. No wonder you didn’t stop when we were yelling at you. As for Braithwaite, we definitely don’t work for him. If we did, I suppose we’d be out of a job.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“He’s dead,” Sia said.

A wide smile came over Raz’s face. “I know you’re not supposed to say this kind of thing, but that's awesome. Dying couldn’t have happened to someone more deserving. I honestly hope he died horribly.” He pumped his fist, and then looked at them again. “So, how do you know he died?”

Sia told him about the battle against the giant enhanced chimera.

“Now, I will admit that some of that was secondhand. I was out of it for most of that fight.” Sia finished.

“I might be able to get you footage of it, if you want, or need to see it for yourself,” Nona added.

“What do you mean by ‘out of it’? Did something else happen?”

Several of them laughed bitterly. “Yeah, you could say that. That big chimera had a sonic attack that knocked a lot of us on our asses. It hit me harder than most.”

“Huh. I thought that asshole Doktor Midnight would be the one who got him. I guess being eaten alive is a fitting—if much quicker way to die than I would have chosen for him. I thought I would be happy, but right now I’m sort of wishing I’d been there to see it.”

Or killed him myself. Or killed them both.

The girls sighed as one. “Yeah, so, I guess that's the next thing we need to tell you. You know how I mentioned being saved by my benefactor?” Tavi began to mumble a bit.

“Maybe I should tell you the rest of that story.” They looked nervous again.

Are they, well she, lying?

[The only subjects that showed raised vocal and body language stress are the benefactor and the exact aspect count.]

[The rest of what has been said appears sincere.]

[Improve host abilities to increase confidence.]

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

So, like I said. I’m laying there in the water. One of my aspects just collapsed, and I’d managed to make it disappear so I wouldn’t end up buried in my selves. My original body was being lifted out of the tub by my other selves.

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

“Hold up,” Raz interjected.

“What is it?”

“Which one of you is it?”

They all cocked their head to the side in confusion. “Which one is what?”

“The real you. Which one of you is the real one?”

“Oh right, I should have known. Everyone who knows about me asks that eventually,” they all shrugged. “Don’t know anymore. There is no real one, well, what I mean is, we’re all real.”

Raz glanced at Sia again, “But, what about—”

Sia held up her hand to stop him. “Is this where we play that old game, ‘one of these racks is not like the others’?”

Ras shrugged, “Well, you’re all so alike, the one difference does tend to stand out.”

Sia arched her back and thrust her chest out in an obviously contrived stretch. “Stand out? I don’t know what you mean. Can you be more clear?”

She rolled her shoulders and watched him try not to watch her. “Actually, I’m pretty sure the little extra oomph to my girls here is all your fault,” she gestured to the other selves, “We all wore the same size clothing for everything before you and I started dating.”

Raz looked at her quizzically. “So, you’re saying that I somehow gave you…”

“Bigger boobs? Yes, but actually no. I’m sure I did it, but you may have caused it. I know boobs are a hot topic with you,” she winked at him, “and that is related, but let's come back to this later. I need to finish telling you my story.”

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

So like I said, I’m struggling to get my paralyzed, slippery self out of the tub with several bodies that aren’t in good shape themselves, when the doorbell rang.

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

The doorbell rang.

There it was again, so subtle he almost missed it. The women all tensed up again.

Nona got up, “I’ll see who it is.”

Raz heard the front door open, and saw them all relax again. Sia looked at Raz with a wry expression and got up. She took a jar of peanut butter out of a cupboard. She met Nona at the kitchen door and passed her the jar.

He heard her making small talk for a moment before shutting the door. “The lady across the hall?”

They nodded. “Who else comes over to ‘borrow’ random food items even though we live right down the street from a grocery store?” Tavi added with a catty tone and an eye roll.

Bee, what are my debuffs like right now?

[Current conditions:]

[Distress (psychosomatic) level 20 (-15% resilience)]

[Eustress (psychosomatic) level 10 (+10% mood)]

[Anxiety (emotion) level 20 (-15% stability)]

[Tired (physical) level 10 (-1 stamina)]

[Overprovisioned (capacity breach) level 50 (+100% upgrade cost)]

I swear those look just a bit different every time.

[You are seeing the slight differences in the extrapolated effects.]

[This snapshot of negative conditions is generated each time you ask, and may be improving in overall accuracy as real-world data is collected.]

Nona sat back down. “Let's see if we can get this story told now.”

Sia turned to him and began again.

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

So anyway, I’m there in this apartment full of dead me’s barely managing to get my paralyzed, slippery self out of the tub with several bodies that aren’t in good shape themselves, when the doorbell rang.

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

Sia stopped talking and all six of them looked in the direction of the front door with a glare, as if daring it to ring.

“Good.” she grunted before continuing the story.

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

At first, I almost sent one of my selves to answer the door. Then I realized how bad the place smelled, and how hard it would be to explain all this. So I ignored the door and put my paralyzed self on the couch. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so after a moment, the doorbell rang again.

≻ ≻ ≻ ≺ ≺ ≺

The doorbell rang again.

Sia slapped her hand down onto the table. “Are you fucking kidding me? Who is it now?!”

Nona got up with a sigh and went to the door.

Raz heard the door open and watched the five women in front of him stiffen. No one of them revealed this in the same way, but each of them showed an increase in tension. He watched them go from slightly tense to the edge of fear in the space of a few seconds.

[Caution, high energy source detected.]

“Who’s here?” he whispered.

She leaned over and whispered into his ear.

“The guy I work for.”