THEOS {Madness Combat Phobos TFTG MC TW}

Red text flashed across her vision repeating the command, slowly forcing her awake. She brought a hand to her head. Her body was shaky, chest hitching as she ran her fingers across an unfamiliar roughness. She could tell that they were bandages, but she didn’t recall wearing any on her head from her last instance of consciousness, nor did it explain this new heaviness on her face or shoulders. It seems like her head has been shaved: She didn’t feel any stray strands of hair, the various wrappings feeling tight on her skin and scalp.

She did recognize the figure sitting in front of her, if only vaguely. Its features were no longer obscured in stark shadows, the new room that she had been brought into much larger and better lit, revealing that it wore a thick grey jacket, its face obscured by layers of grey bandages under a black-and-white helmet, a single glowing red eye lens attached in the middle of its face. It most likely lacked a proper face like the rest of its kind, anyway. Even with the new details, she recognized its silhouette. It was the last thing she saw before-

She winced. Her right eye twitched, right shoulder spasming from a phantom sensation within the remaining arm stump, her remaining hand shooting up to feel at her face and process the strange mask and its straps holding it up. She noticed that her flesh slightly grew upwards around the stiff edges. A twinge of pain wiggled deep in her brain stem.

“You…” she slurred, voice muffled through the strange single-eyed machination seemingly embedded into her face. She grit her teeth from a remembered pain shooting through her skull.

Even with her own vision filtered through the red haze of her own seeing apparatus, she could watch the aperture of their eye adjust and twitch. Watching them relax to their side and laugh was noticeably off-putting. She was used to their kind being constantly on-edge, so this was an unusual display, especially as they floated one of their own hands over to rub her chin.

“Astute,” they chuckled. “Very astute of you.”

The tension in her chest lessened at this uncharacteristically gentle gesture and she let her head relax into their hand. She couldn’t do much of anything else, especially with a missing arm and a splitting headache. Their hand felt rough, a roughness different from merely calluses or age, but of a different skin structure than that of a human’s entirely, it not stretching as much from movement like a human’s would. Even in her weakened, slowly calming state, she couldn’t help but wonder: What is it? Who is it? That feeling wiggling in her brain stem, like it’s on the tip of her tongue despite it being illogical for her to know.

“You do not deserve what happened to you, Demes.” they bluntly stated as they used their other hand to grab her harness and sit her more upright from her lying position.

Her eyes fluttered under the device embedded within her face. Her mind was foggy, her body tingled numbly like she was swimming in a sea of radio static, feeling heavy even with her lack of hair and an entire limb lost. She mumbled, bordering on babbling, like she was relearning how to make speech sounds, feeling cotton-mouthed for a few moments as her mouth, nose, and eyes melted away and smoothed over under the device. She could still see, she could still make speech sounds, she retained all of such abilities despite outward appearances, retaining her sense of hearing as her ears popped to melt away. Their name, his name… Her head…

“What's your-”

Her voice trailed off with the alignment of her disjointed, fuzzy thoughts. She knows.

“Phobos. Director Phobos.”

Phobos paused. He pulled his hand away from her head, eye shifting and looking slightly off to the side as a silvery grey color ate away at both color and elasticity as it stung its way across Demes’s face, looking surprised. Was it from the contrasting diction compared to her prior grogginess? His eye aperture widened.

“You’re perfect,” he stated, his deep voice carrying a hint of poorly-masked excitement as he stood himself up on his legless feet. “Remain here. I will be just a moment.”

The camera that fed visual information directly to her eyes twitched to follow his quick exit. She was alone again, though at least this place is large and well-lit, not like she would be paying attention to the finer details of her surroundings. It even slightly suppressed her headache and the burning sensation of a black cross marking forming down the middle of her face. Rolling her shoulders and neck, she winced as her jaw popped, skull cracking as it remolded itself and the flesh around it into a more rounded shape, pressure spreading down her neck as it began to shorten and restructure to make her head hunch more forward above her shoulders. She raised an eyebrow under the device, tugging on new fabric. She wasn’t wearing what she last recalled wearing, and not just in regards to whatever devices were hooked up to her, a simple grey sleeveless shirt hanging on her frame with the right hole with her stump sealed over with fabric. Her original clothes were probably too ruined to be salvageable.

Darker grey discoloration, skin feeling almost like clay in contrast to her blood-drained flesh, spread down her shortened neck and ate away at the original tone of her bandage-wrapped shoulders and chest. She reached her hand over her right shoulder to feel what was weighing on her back, rolling her neck and tilting her head at the metal that she felt. Two rounded tanks, almost like an old-school diving suit, though they were aligned horizontally on her shoulders, piping connecting to the left side of the device on her face. She felt lightheaded. When can she take this damn thing off?

The discolored flesh continued to overtake her normal skin as she gripped her right arm stump. The previous weight on her back was suddenly relieved at that last thought with the sound of disconnected piping and undone straps, feeling almost like some kind of switch was flipped in her spine. She grunted as she stood herself up on her feet and stretched back as her breasts flattened into nothing. She heard the heavy pack being placed elsewhere, followed by Phobos chuckling and rubbing the back of her neck, her sighing and leaning into it to let it combat the strange prickly numbness stinging her shoulders and the length of her left arm. Numbness, and yet she still felt stinging, feeling, in her missing right arm, in her right hand.

“You’re recovering faster than I anticipated!”

His deep, distorted voice resonated in her ears, in her chest, in her own throat, even. She cleared her throat as her semi-groggy senses processed it, all without processing her own voice’s new deepness. It was soon a growl that rumbled in her chest, clear even through the device implanted on her face, a content rumble as she leaned into Phobos’s massaging.

“You’re so much better than what she thought of you.”

She paused. She chuffed as her flesh burned with the consuming grey, her body shape padding itself into being more uniform and feeling her hips crack to compress themselves into fitting the unified body shape. She was more focused on figuring out who he was talking about. Than what who thought?

“Who are you referring to?” she questioned in a dramatically deepened voice that she did not question now having, turning her head on her inhuman neck to look at Phobos. It was a comfortable voice, it felt natural out of her mouth, it tasted familiar in her mouth and ears.

Phobos rubbed her shoulders while holding various objects in his other hand which he soon placed on a nearby table. It appeared to be another jacket and set of shoes like his own, along with an identical helmet.

“Who was it that you were searching for before?”

There’s an awkward silence between both of them, not even broken by vocalized discomfort from Demes as her left arm shook from stinging and numbness, shifting flesh returning to a silvery color like her head on her hand. Her hand wasn’t numb like the rest of her arm length, even her right hand that was supposed to be gone wasn’t numb like her arm.

“The one that you couldn’t find while everyone around you was cut down?” he hissed, body language growing tense, distortion intensifying with his own vexation.

She sighed, feeling her pants and stance shift with the melting away of her legs. Flesh bubbled and stung, flesh and bone melting down almost like wax held to a flame, yet her body carried with it strength and poise as her remaining feet moved up under her torso.

“The one that thought that she could call you a nobody not just behind your back-”

Demes’s left hand shook in both rage and pain, fingers of it merging together while her palm both thickened and widened, remaining fingers squaring out as it fully morphed into a four-fingered hand, clenched in a fist as she turned to fully face Phobos. She didn’t even notice the movement of her hand completely disconnecting from her wrist with a spurt of blood and half-dissolved flesh. The length of her arms, even the meager stump of her right arm, fell away as a meaty, bone-filled slop to the ground, blood splattering any clothing close enough to the splash zone. The flesh and muscle of her shoulders smoothed over, muscle definition useless without arms to move, and yet her hand floated beyond all logic.

“-but directly to your face?” He let out as a growl, his voice steeped in rage as he gripped the sides of her face with both of his hands.

The devolved flesh twitched with its own newfound life, rippling and distorting like stretched polygons and crested with arcing red electricity. The mess of meat and bone slowly took a properly defined shape and structure as it pulled itself out into four square fingers connected to a wide palm before being enveloped by grey skin as it solidified into that of a right hand, feeling coming to it as it floated to her right side. She shook out the hand to cast away any remaining numbness. A static writhed within her mind and clouded her thoughts.

Clouded his thoughts.

No.

His thoughts are clear now. He’s full of energy. He’s full of power. He remembers this.

“Ansz Emi.”

His voice dripped with enough venom to kill a whale. Bile almost dripped as heavily from his mouth with the churning of his stomach, a bitterness biting his tongue, his insides twisting to dissolve away any sexual organs to leave him physically sexless. He managed to restrain himself from throwing up. Best not to embarrass himself in this state of his.

“She really thought that she could deny you your godhood?” Phobos spat.

“You mean our godhood?”

He leaned against the table, running his fingers over the duplicate helmet. There’s a long silence as he placed his head within the helmet, checking its size before putting it back down and beginning to discard the useless human pants and change into the new shoes and jacket.

“Bring me more bandages. Help me adjust my lens rim, please.”

Phobos rooted through his own jacket, opening it up and revealing rolls of thick grey bandages and various small tinkering tools. It was unspoken. Unnecessary verbalization shouldn’t be necessary between your mirror image, after all. They both worked quickly, wrapping bandages around his entire head save for his single synthetic eye, switching out the normal lens rim to a darker one that matched the helmet. They may be two bodies, but their minds, his cultured S3LF, strengthened by age… They are all but one in the same.