Fiber Optic Bundles of Joy (Part 7)

(Featuring our first story arc sponsor Joe The Englishman!)

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Installment 6 in Fibre Optic Bundles of Joy! Story written by Rabid Badger of FA, illustrated by me !

Rabid's FA is here:http://www.furaffinity.net/user/rabidbadger/

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The cleanup process had been distinctly sobering thing for Agatha after the barrage of pleasures – but then that had summed up her life for the last few weeks hadn’t it? Intense experiences followed by all too brief periods in which to try to come terms with them. She was a little cold, body drying off in the stale recycled air of the station as she floated down a mostly disused corridor, still damp from having essentially been run through a car wash while people scrubbed her with long brushes on the end of broom handles. All that had still failed to do anything about the lubricant that was leaving her ass cheeks sliding around each other and making the occasional lewd sucking noise. At one point she simply glanced to her right, and felt some of the chaotic mess fall into place for the first time in what felt like ages.
“Stop, please – stop and turn me so I can look out there?”

Red’s face appeared on the crest of her belly, head tilted a little, but apparently not feeling rebellious or impatient enough to argue. The majority of the right hand wall of the corridor was window, some kind of transparent polymer that had grown a bit worn in places but still afforded one an excellent view of the light-speckled void beyond it. Agatha stared out, looking for something in it, trying to get a handle on an elusive bit of introspection and insight she could practically smell, but had to chase. Something she could still, at least in her mind, do.

The helplessly expansive mouse’s body quivered a little as her breathing grew erratic, Red’s face plastered in a hazy glow through her belly fur looked increasingly worried as the moments dragged into minutes. Agatha hadn’t noticed. She’d been busy putting pieces together. She wanted to be out in the stars yeah, that was technically something she’d just gotten a step closer to, but was this really how she had to live to get it? Not that she had a choice about the living this way now, right?

That unique brand of pain that wells up in the chest and skull started to bloom in the wake of quiet, ragged breathing.

“..Mom, this feels – what’s, mom what’s wrong? You’re not, I mean this.. it hurts, but you’re not panicking, so I think I know what it is, but why ..can I help?”

“Justgimmeamin-minute.”

Composing herself wasn’t the hard part, it was stopping the deluge – one thing falling into place had started a small avalanche, like things falling off a shelf onto her. She wanted to be out in those stars yeah, she’d wanted the freedom, and the money, which was going to provide more freedom. Next thing she knew she’d lost the ability to even move properly.

Forever.

Something about the finality of that idea actually put a leash on the mental din she struggled with. It was futile to rail against it after all, she wasn’t what she used to be. That wasn’t changing. She wasn’t going to run again, or even walk. She couldn’t work under conventional circumstances.

“..You miss how you used to look, don’t you?”

She started a little at her ‘child’ speaking, blinking out of reverie and into the present, looking for the glow on her body for something to focus on. That had become natural. On some level she was aware that Red wasn’t that face, ‘he’ was a black and gold sphere in her womb the size of a yoga ball with nanotech interfacing spread through every inch of her body, especially the bizarrely repurposed parts – the data storage in her fat deposits coming to mind first and foremost.

“Kinda. I – ugh, sweet Chrome this is hard to wrap my head around all at once. It uhm, it happened really fast and I wasn’t ready for it, at all. It doesn’t – that doesn’t mean I’m not – I’m just – “

She shut her eyes, feeling a shudder run down her body. A glance back out the window managed to somehow calm her a little.

“I wanted to go into space, and get out of debt. I sorta did that I guess – though the only reason I’m not plugged into some diagnostic chamber for life eating and farting all day forever is you breaking us out – so don’t take it lightly when I say I’m really happy you’re with me. In me. Whatever the heck the proper terms to use for that are. And I like the way you get excited, and run off to try things, but Chrome and her plated tits I wasn’t ready for any of this, at all, even a little bit. I just let a dragon pound my ass while I was drugged stupid to pay bills, and the damn lube won’t come off!”

Red’s avatar on her belly adopted a vaguely guilty look, maybe a little embarrassed even.

“..I may not be trying all that hard to remove it, it ah.. kinda feels nice.”
Agatha’s own blush was not something she was aware of, but her AI progeny tracked it just fine.

“It feeling good isn’t the point!”

She hadn’t meant to shout – the echoing of her voice in the halls quieted her down a bit afterward. The blush for entirely different reasons in its wake. Agatha took a slower, smoother breath. Eyes going back to the windows.

“Sorry about that. I know we had to do it – hell I kind of had to agree to Yaela’s offer given the debts I was in, wouldn’t be surprised if I’d have ended up in a brothel or something if I failed to pay those for much longer. This is probably a better result than that.”

She gave her fingers an experimental little wiggle – roughly all she could do at the moment.

“Probably.”

***

Joseph Otterman was running behind schedule – not by any fault of his own. His ‘superiors’ had failed to inform him they were getting a shipment in earlier and had set all the new hires to loading the new oxygen tanks – and then the day supervisor had called in sick, so nobody at all was around to instruct the little peons on how to properly operate the docking mechanisms for the tanks – or the bulkheads – he hadn’t understood everything over the intercoms in his bunk but it sounded like they couldn’t even get the blasted doors to the loading bay open.

“Cannot believe I’ve been asked to step in for someone else’s cock up..”

The man moved quickly at least, Joseph was lithe – fit, ready for anything. The otter was stomping through the corridors from his bunk, having slid near instantly into the dull blue work suit the station staff used (which he filled out nicely if he said so himself – strong – but his bore the orange shoulder patches of management – already rehearsing the dressing down he would give the imbeciles who were calling him up, the demands he’d make of the payroll clerks for overtime and grievances thanks to this unacceptable state of affairs.

“I am too important for this, I’m senior manager for third rotation for the entire station and they have me coming in off-shift to cover someone’s mistake like a common stevedore.”

Joseph rounded a corner toward one of the final hallways between him and the loading docks, there was shouting ahead but not the worrisome sort, nothing familiar. Nothing he had to worry about, some idiot with idiot problems. He wasn’t perhaps paying quite enough attention to where he was going, was the otter. All he knew was someone nearby was muttering to themselves and some idiot had left a hover cart full of what looked like taupe insulation floating in the air halfway down the corridor.

“Arse is probably skiving, honestly. Don’t know why they can’t see it. S’plain as day.”

***

Agatha had a brief cry in the corridor after the shout, just a few haggard breaths really – but it did the job. She felt the warm wash that came after it, but the silence around her was a touch awkward and unexpected. Blinking her eyes clear, she turned her head as best she could – until the bulbous collar of fat on her neck got in the way of it.

“R-Red? Are you, where are you?”

She couldn’t make out the luminous visage of the AI sharing her body anywhere, not even the orange dot he usually represented with when he was dormant. There was also a faint buzzing sensation originating deep in her belly that she distinctly did not like, but could not exactly place a reason for. There were sounds in the distance, someone grumbling and yelling – kind of. They sounded angry whoever they were, but it didn’t distract her long.

“Red!? Are you, is something wrong, what-“

The buzzing grew in intensity, and then abruptly ended – immediately followed by the orange dot appearing on Agatha’s belly, just by the horizon where it crested out of her field of view. It stretched into thin line, which promptly distorted as Red manipulated her fur and skin to vibrate and speak for him.

“That felt.. that was like the probe at the Cloud station. Mom, I think they’re here for us!”

Agatha’s entire body went cold. This experience had grown in intensity since her time before meeting Yaela on account of having a lot more skin to feel the chill with than she once did. She stared down at the line, lip quivering, staring out the window as if hunting for some sign of the incoming enemy, hunter, whatever the heck they were sending.

“Can, can we – is the – can we run? Is the ship ready?”

Red’s little dot bobbed up and down, good enough for a nod she wagered, but just as she was feeling the maglev plates shift to get them moving the room shook violently around them – an odd experience to have while hovering and thus not actually experiencing the rocking explosion that the station had just suffered. That was the first sign of trouble, the lights going out was a good second one, the third was the static crackle that crawled across her fur and left Agatha feeling distinctly nauseous and cold – and heavy.

The mouse’s eyes went wide as she felt herself fall, landing with an abrupt and shocking bang on the station floor – wobbling and quaking through her entire form. She felt waves of motion crawling up and down her body, like someone had jumped off a shelf onto a waterbed, and she’d swallowed it. Red, once more, was silent for the moment – though someone else in the vicinity clearly wasn’t.

***

Joseph lost his footing, though it wasn’t his fault. Really. The floor jumped violently out from under him, how could he be blamed for that kind of thing? Explosions, in space – Chrome almighty! What kind of useless idiots – then it occurred to the otter.

The new hires were loading oxygen tanks and probably installing new CO2 scrubbers.

If those exploded –

“Oh god, the whole station could be proper fuc-“

The expletive on Joseph’s lips wasn’t hard to guess, but he promptly found the air knocked from his lungs. Not due to escaping atmosphere or anything so dramatic, but rather just from weight – he felt a pervasive and crushing weight all around his body, especially his legs. In the dark as he was, and with his head having banged the floor on the way down, Joseph wasn’t terribly sure what he was dealing with just yet. The magnitude of what he felt like he was under probably meant no lifting it, but he made an effort to pull himself forward – planting his elbows (strong arms – I can do this) on the station’s deck floor and pressing, pushing against the weight – an inch or two of budging later he felt his feet lodge against something, and all movement stopped.

“Bugger. Damn insulation all over-“

Joseph reached an arm back, and felt not the thick rubbery fibers that went into insulating a space station, but fur- coating something soft – something his hand sank right into. His face scrunched up a little, squinting through the dark as he tried to make sense of this, but without the lights?

“HEY! CAN ANYONE HEAR ME?! IS ANYONE THERE!?”

***

Agatha heard that shouting again – much closer this time, louder – grating. She winced a little and tried to look around for the source, momentarily forgetting that she could not and would never again be able to look at anything other than what was broadly speaking right in front of her, and couldn’t change that view without the help her artificial offspring and his appropriated technology. The second sentence Joseph screamed from somewhere underneath her left buttock she heard far more clearly than the ‘hey’ he’d begun with.

“Ow! Chrome – yes – I can hear you!”

There was a squirming sensation under the broad expanse of her ass cheek, half panicked, but she felt feet on the other side of the major crevice where ass met what used to be her thigh before it became a formless reservoir of adipose. He wasn’t pulling free of that any time soon.

Joseph almost sounded relieved – but simultaneously indignant.

“I seem to be – ungh. To be underneath something, which I can only assume was in YOUR lev-cart before this mess happened with the power, so if you would please be so kind as to GET IT OFF M-“

The lights flung back into life at that moment. Agatha could, at least, see that she was right where she had been – but about four or five feet lower – and that the orange dot on her chest was back, flashing in a pulsing rhythm where it had been before. Perhaps, she hoped, Red was just rebooting and all was well?

Joseph on the other hand saw that he was not, in fact underneath a big pile of insulation, or clothing – he was underneath a monstrous pile of rodent rump. Something that drug the edges of his face down in a queer mix of horror, disbelief, bemusement, and maybe just a little bit of humor for the sheer absurdity of it all. He ended up blinking at it for several moments – not that Agatha could tell. She simply worried about the flashing light, and the ominous rumbling in her gut. That pressure erupting would, perhaps, be a bit ruder than even she could handle as far as humiliating herself went. Just maybe.

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? This- this is- YOU’RE THAT BLOODY GREAT HEAP FROM THE STATION TABLOID!”

The light flashed rather faster for a moment, but Agatha had shut her eyes and was unaware. She felt her skin crawl, thinking it from the shame more than anything else. The otter was violently struggling again, fighting against the immense weight on his lower body, but she knew he wasn’t getting any closer to free. Joseph’s legs were lodged in the folds of her own formless, former limbs.

“AND I’M UNDER YOUR GREAT FAT ARSE!? GET UP YOU COLOSSAL-“

The light ball zipped across Agatha’s fur, centering in the swell of her left buttock before it rapidly expanded into a vaguely vulpine shape, jaws bared, eyes a hollow black, and casting a great deal of crimson radiance all about the otter’s face.
“STOP YELLING AT MY MOTHER!”

Joseph’s mouth shut just as fast as his eyes snapped wide open. That bit hadn’t been covered in the tabloid report after all, but the face simply glared at him while he heard two voices above – the screaming one and the mouse.

“Mom! I think this was the Cloud, I’m trying to get the maglev working again but some of the hardware fried and the nanites have to fix it before we can move, so-“
“Even if you get them working after an explosion the station halls go into lockdown unless you’re security or maintenance.”

Naturally his mouth hadn’t stayed closed long – not when someone was talking about a topic Joseph knew about and could correct them on anyway. He had briefly forgotten to squirm and struggle, but upon seeing the death glaring visage in front of him immediately shift to something more personable looking, albeit curious and critical, he started doing so again. Somewhere above he heard the mouse and – well, the image looked like a fox, but that couldn’t be biologically correct, right? He heard them speaking, sounded like the fox was trying to reassure her their ship was ready, and-

“So we need you, is what you’re saying. We’re a sitting duck unless-“

“I am not sticking my neck out for some simulated intelligence and a mouse who has clearly been sucking down nutrient paste by the gallon if there are-“

Agatha’s face went bright red – she could see it in her reflection. Both as a result of what the otter was saying, and because she felt her guts churning ominously. Clearly the otter noticed that too because the sound of an oncoming storm when he was pinned directly underneath the ass that harbored it apparently sobered him quite rapidly.

Red had never really lost his composure to begin with.

“I am not simulated, sir – and I promise you, if we can’t get out of this corridor you won’t be going anywhere either, and the Cloud won’t be inclined to leave witnesses.”
Joseph Otterman glanced toward the way he’d come in, there was an eerie silence in the station – he should’ve heard announcements by now with the power back on, maybe even seen people coming this way to find him, but nothing happened yet. At all. He felt a stirring around him, possibly the maglev plates trying to fire up again. Something a lot more noticeable with him not thrashing so much, though his legs were beginning to get quite numb. Unsurprisingly.

“..What do I get if I help you out of here? Can you keep me safe through this?”
Despite Red’s face being sprawled out over the fur in question, Otterman planted his hands in Agatha’s ass and pushed again, trying to coax himself free – but to no avail, they simply sank in up to the wrist. Agatha’s eyes shut as she tried not to admit to herself that it felt kind of nice having someone down there massaging things a bit, not so roughly nor extremely as recent attentions tended to be. As to the face Joseph had his hands in, it smiled – and he could not help but picture the grinning vulpine visage with little horns on it given the nature of said smile. Agatha meanwhile began to feel a curious warmth in the skin at the crest of her belly.

“You want my help now? That’s a rather quick change of opinion sir. See, the issue is – I only help people I can trust, and I only trust people in the crew – which right now is mom and I. Now I hope you don’t mind but I’ve checked your work record and salary information, so-“

“You went poking around in my personal information!? What the hells possessed you to do that you great, luminous, ass-pasted-“

Agatha’s tail swiped to the side, which lashed it across Joseph’s mouth, possibly on accident. Maybe. Probably not. She was too busy staring at that wet-warm feeling spot on her middle, it was turning an odd shade of gold and looked like it was developing a visible bump there.

“Red, what- are you doing that, what-?”

Her son seemed to be altogether focused on the otter below them however-
“I did – and I can offer you triple that salary for the foreseeable future, though I suggest you make a point of swiftly getting over any issues you have about privacy. That’s in addition to getting you safely off the station and onto my ship with us.”

Otterman looked about again, he thought he heard noises nearby this time – metal scraping – something that might be screams, he wasn’t sure. Could just be more metal noises.

“I even drew up a contract.”

The otter centered his gaze back on the ass cheek currently smothering his lower body against the deck, the fox’s face had vanished and instead something that looked like an ancient parchment scroll covered in standard text, which was currently auto-scrolling through its contents just as fast as he could read it, and with what looked like a wax seal at the bottom that read ‘boop snoot here to accept’.

Joseph looked at the contract, then back to the corridor – those sounds were absolutely getting closer, and sounded distinctly unpleasant. Trying to follow the language on it, he was almost sure he was getting the gist, but that damned image on this mouse’s ass was doing this on purpose – toying with him – the rodent probably had a control setup for the face up by her hands or something he suspected. No matter. The otter was pressed for time, but if the three times salary was true? He could always amend the contract later, find the legal fallacies, or just hire a lawyer with all that money and figure out how to stifle the rodent or even get free of it and sue her when he was safe. Maybe he’d even end up with her ship?

The otter leaned forward – boop snoot. He was relatively certain he understood that to mean what he immediately did, touching his nose to the red circle on the contract. As much as he loathed the idea of directly touching this heaving pile of flesh’s hindquarters with his nose he nestled it ever so gently up to the target area just the same. This would work out, he promised himself – he’d survive today and worry about tomorrow when it happened. The contract image rolled itself up an vanished from sight.

Agatha stared at the small golden orb, it was about the size of an eyeball – and irregular in places, before it contracted visibly to more marble-esque dimensions. It should’ve been rolling down her belly based on gravity, but it lingered in one spot, and then popped four little spindly legs out of its sides. The ball-spider-thing then began crawling across her body, over her chest, across one shoulder. She turned her head once more as much as she was able, which was still very little, before speaking to her son (who she was quite confident could hear her, avatar or no).

“Red, what the hell is that thing?”

“The signing bonus.”

Joseph felt a little left out of that conversation, at least until he saw the small golden ball walking across Agatha’s body toward him. It crested each flabby fold of her back, set out on a journey over her ass, and then perched right above his face – almost seeming to be staring at him. The otter looked a trifle confused. Signing bonus?

“Wha-“

He’d opened his mouth to ask the question of course. The little orb doing a swan dive in which its legs melted back into its spherical mass, hurtling down his throat was not in any way expected. It wasn’t exactly horrible, the little thing kind of melted on entry – feeling like a lozenge more than anything else – or like swallowing chewing gum. Joseph put a hand to his throat, coughing weekly, but also finding himself feeling a strong rush of cool, recycled air flooding his legs as the maglev panels underneath Agatha finally flared to life and hefted the behemoth of a rodent into the air. Granted, his first attempt to stand up didn’t go so well, tingles and sparkles all up and down then nerves in his legs being the only thing he could feel made them a trifle clumsy all things considered, but once he got past the initial throat irritation he could at least add commentary while he struggled to get himself upright.

“The- the hell was, *cough* what the blazes did you just do to me you great, glowing-“

Red’s face reappeared on Agatha’s rump once more, just as Joseph was successfully finding his footing, gazing on at the otter with a raise eyebrow. Joseph, for his part, found that his indignation melted away immediately, though he could not justify to himself why.

“I’m upgrading that outdated basic nanite infrastructure, it won’t hurt, and should honestly help with a few things. No developing aches and pains later on in life, that kind of thing. Details aren’t important, we’ll do those later. For now? Climb on mom’s belly. I’m gonna be going fast toward the ship and if you’re riding on front like a figurehead the doors will just open up for us. Got it?”

Joseph felt a curious fluttering in his belly, and felt very full for no adequately explainable reason. He also found his feet were busily ambling toward the front of the mouse, who was hovering just barely above the floor – doubtless to make his climb easier. That, at least, was considerate. Getting up wasn’t as easy as it could be nonetheless, as he put a paw to the mouse’s belly it sank in a good three or four inches – enough that he could feel the flesh pressing in on his wrist, like it was trying to flow back over top of the intruding extremity. With some awkwardness though, he managed to sprawl himself more or less into a stable place atop the crest of Agatha’s phenomenal gut. Face down, hands gripping onto folds of flab, feet dug into divots of adipose, unsteadily gazing at the mouse’s face for the first time since this insanity began mere minutes ago. She looked worried, and confused, but also somewhat resigned.

He found himself thinking he knew precisely what that was like right now.
Agatha’s body lifted itself higher, tilted gently forward, and with a buzzing cry of Allonsy! from the AI face (which had appeared on the front of her dangling gut) Agatha began zipping down the corridor toward the first set of doors, beyond which they now heard the very clear sounds of conflict.