longer.blue

His voice resounded in her mind. It wasn't what he said. It was what he didn't say. He never fully acknowledged her. He turned into strands of black goo on the ground, a kind of dark mercury, and then he was gone. Had he been there at all? That thought kept haunting her. Had he been there at all? Peni gasped when she woke and sat up, a small puddle of drool on the clear table before her. Schematics for a new type of cannon for SP//dr lay scattered across the table in her bedroom, SP//dr herself on the upgrade table. Her spider was asleep, deep within the mech's core. The empty room pressed in around her. The silence stretched on. A wet feeling on her gloves made her glance down, where that same black liquid pooled onto the tips of each finger on her left hand. "WHOA-" Peni jumped up and shook her hand, trying to shake the black liquid off of her glove. Slowly, she stopped, then, equally slowly, brought her hand toward her face and stared at it. The material of her glove had no strange liquid on it. She turned her wrist, rotating her hand, in case there was any on the back of her palm; there was none. "What..." she murmured, then brought the hand back up toward her and peered at it, sliding the glove off and examining her flesh. 💭Am I losing my mind? Peni took another step back and looked at her room, toward the skate rink in the center, and then out the large windows facing the city. Her eyes darted frantically, hoping, wishing, that she'd see some more of the liquid, just to confirm that she had seen it. There was one way to know for sure. She approached the terminal on the wall and accessed it, then the camera in the mech bay and rewound until she saw herself asleep at the table and waking up. Her gaze was affixed to the terminal as if by superglue, and she watched herself stand up from a table that never held any strange liquid goo. Watched herself examine a clean glove, then a clean hand. "私は気が狂ってしまったのでしょうか？" she asked the empty air, looking around her room one last time before she reluctantly settled down in front of the table. A voice tickled the back of her mind. A distant hunger. Peni whipped around to face the empty wall, then looked up at the ceiling, just as empty as the wall. "Who is- is anyone else here?" The scrape of the chair legs on the floor echoed throughout her room and she turned and walked out of the mech bay, her steps slow and cautious, shadow slowly advancing through the room. "I'm..." she cleared her throat. "I- if someone's here, you better show yourself." Her fists clenched at her sides. 💭Relax. Breathe evenly. Peni sucked in air through her nose, then let it out through her mouth, only for the strange voice in her head to whisper once more. It wasn't truly a whisper. A... a brief touch at the back of her mind. Then, a fleeting brush, a trace of something. A sting, a burning itch—like venom. VEN#M. Peni hugged her arms against herself, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. A clear mental image of the VEN#M mech presented itself in her mind, the mouth opening as it never could in reality. "I see you," VEN#M spoke aloud, a voice gargled through ten tons of gravel and the depths of space. Peni jerked awake on the table in the mech bay, groaning as a spike of pain shot through her occipital nerve and she looked around through half-lidded eyes. Night had long since departed, the rays of sunlight streaming through at a steep angle telling her she'd slept through most of the day. "Was...?" she trailed off, unsure what she was asking, and who she was talking to. It was just her here. Her and her spider. Wasn't it?