-/monster/ Pslime Story: Katia's Infection-
Author's ID: 360c1f

Tiny curls of steam rose from the can of tea clenched in Katia’s hands. The park bench felt cold beneath her, the body heat flowing through her suit skirt lost to entropy forever. Sheets of rain blurred the lights of the city beyond the park’s scattered treetops, smudging the night scene into a dull oil painting. She pulled her umbrella down over her head, hugging its steel stem against the suit jacket covering her breasts and trying to lose herself for a moment in the patter of rain against stretched clear plastic. The warmth of the can was once a welcome pleasure on chilly autumn evenings like this one. A dull spike of anxiety shot through her stomache as Katia realised that she could now only note the heat against her hands as one more sensory input to shuffle, one more thought to notice, one more thing to worry about. Even the richly astringent taste of the frothy tea was nothing more than noise against her tongue.

A gentle vibration from the haptic band on her right wrist and a green glow at the edges of her vision announced that her phone had something to tell her. A flick of her eyes upward materialised the cel-shaded figure of a stylised maid projected at reading distance into her glasses. The little maid bowed, a speech bubble appearing above her.

“Madam,” the bubble read in elegant cursive, “have you enjoyed your evening outing? If you make your way home very soon, you can be in bed by 0100. Perhaps the subway as usual?”

The same message - except the time - as a half-hour ago, and an hour ago, and an hour-and-a-half ago. Katia flicked her eyes to the left and then to the right, clearing her vision. She couldn’t be angry since she’d configured the assistant to nag her in this way, it was just that she couldn’t bring herself to move despite the cold. Her imagination wondered for her what it would be like to be buried alive. It would be cold, perhaps, and the suffocation would hurt - but that would soon pass and then she wouldn’t have to wake up again. Perhaps if she sold some of her things first it’d be easier for her parents when they had to clear out her apartment. That would be best, since they’d still be grieving because their daughter had-

Katia realised that her left hand was next to her, squeezing the slats of the bench hard enough to hurt. Her umbrella had listed to one side and a trickle of cold water was soaking her right shoulder. She pulled in a deep breath. This was normal. She was under a lot of stress. It was natural to be stressed when one just wasn’t good enough to keep the tide of life under control. She’d put on weight and had become chubby recently, which surely would not be helping her mind be healthy. Sometimes stressed imaginations looked for ways out. It was just a brain running on fumes, not a serious plan. There was nothing wrong. She just had to try harder. Things would get better. She slowly untensed her left hand and brought it up to caress her own cheek, sighing as she felt her own skin against her face. She stroked down, leaving a trail of viscous slime.

A jolt of adrenaline followed by a shock of disgust flowed through Katia as she tore her hand away from her face and looked at it. A sticky gelatinous stain covered the lower half of her palm, dark purple in the dim lamplight. Gritting her teeth, she scraped the thick ooze against the bench’s edge but this only served to spread it up her palm. A sudden gust of wind knocked her umbrella aside, her long black hair soaked in a moment under the downpour. Nearly sobbing in surprise and frustration, Katia wrestled her umbrella back above her head and shuffled towards the park gate.

Three cameras identified a woman, 164cm, entering car 5 door 2 of the Ring Line’s clockwise 0012 service and taking a seat on the left side relative to the train’s travel. She was the sole passenger in her visual arc, the system noted, since the two other occupants of the car were sitting together in the anterior priority area (uncontested with no disabled passengers nearby). Age projection 24 to 26, business clothing (black skirt, suit jacket, white frill-fronted shirt) hair damp, inactive AR glasses (no response to individual personal information beacon ping), overweight, gait and blink rate indicitive of fatigue, neutral facial expression, normal skin blush for temperature.

A microsecond auction was conducted for a young professional non-intoxicated female-sex individual travelling alone from a business district, and after a moment six screens nestled in the train’s upper right corner shifted to advertisements for sportswear (aspirational/independence angle), perfume (sexual leverage angle), subscription vingette-style AR immersion drama (crime, instance focus on villian with dominance/murder signifiers angle), plastic surgery (professional advancement/power angle), premix stimulant-cocktail (group female social/sexual adventure angle), and state political candidate (immigration focus, other-race male of similar age making direct eye contact including same-race female in background looking at male; feedback on second factor to be fed back to A/B test cohort). A ten-second testing window confirmed gaze direction and travel but failed to note emotional responses in line with buyer objectives. Further auctions on 30-second intervals yielded similar results except for cold medication which gained a weighted interest factor of 0.58, and so auction objective was shifted from a short-period stimulus objective to a long-period speculative conditioning objective in order to sustain per-screen revenue rates.

All Katia knew was that the usual flood of advertising was making her feel worse than usual. She had no interest in any of these things. She didn’t want to jog in a pair of predictive gel shoes or seduce a CEO or ride along as a serial killer’s girlfriend or change her nose or take designer drugs with her slut BFFs (of which she had none) or vote for whoever was going to bring a population of whatever-the-fuck-he-was into the city-state. When she had reached the station bathroom ten minutes earlier, bedraggled and miserable, the purple sticky patch had already disappeared from her hand. It must have been washed off in the blowing rain. Back in the present, Katia closed her eyes to block out the adver-tainment that had just started playing across three screens directly in front of her. What would she do with the no-doubt handsome men she met together with her slut BFFs anyway? She couldn’t remember feeling sexual desire in months, and even the last time was what she’d describe as “routine” - she had played with herself more to prove she could still get wet rather than because she’d really needed to.

Katia woke to her alarm in a tangled sweat, panting. The pale light spilling around her curtains told her that the sun was only just up; the days were getting shorter. Her body felt as though it was being slowly roasted. With a groan, she reached up and pulled the curtain aside. The light flooded into her room, revealing a sad pile of clothing, a dusty vibrator, several soft toys won long ago, her crumpled duvet thrown off, her AR glasses on their charging plinth, and some cheap metal shelves holding clothing and sundries. Katia reacted to the light with a strangled yell, then desperately funbled at her duvet and pulled it over her head. The light hurt. Why did the light hurt? She needed it to be dark. She was thirsty. She needed to drink. She needed to lie in a cool bath and just suck up all the delicious clean water.

“Flu. That mus’ be it. Got the fuckin’ flu.”

Katia was sick more and more these days with colds, coughs, attacks of weakness, lethergy. She chilled herself so much last night that she must have shot her immune system to bits and finally got a bad case of flu. That explained the photosensitivity and the fever.

“Firs’ thing, Kat. Call in sick.”

With an anguished yelp she managed to claw the curtains shut and drag her futon to the wall opposite the window, crushing a pile of clothes in the process.

“’Attention, Sveta.”

A soft ping from a speaker on the shelf confirmed that her assistant program had recognised its command and was now listening. Katia dictated a quick message to her team lead, letting him know that she’d be out sick for the day and included the usual apologetic noises. She’d learned the hard way that failure to properly genuflect would lead to “gentle attitude coaching” about team spirit and contribution ratios. The monster behind the mask, the strangling hand in the velvet glove. She whimpered at the thought.

After a few minutes of lying on the futon sweating and panting, Katia managed to crawl to the kitchen and pull a bottle of cold water from her refridgerator. The cool fluid felt like utter bliss pouring down her burning throat, and for a moment she simply lay on the cool vinyl floor panting. This was worse than any flu she’d had before. Staggering to her feet, she ripped off the oversize cotton shirt she slept in and stumbled naked to her bathroom. A showerhead and modest tub greeted her, and she wasted no time in turning the water up as hard and as cold as she could manage. She was vaguely aware that she had her mouth open, tongue lolling out as she tried to catch the shower of water in her mouth. After a few minutes her head cleared enough to switch the water flow over to the tub and she pulled herself in, letting the water fill around her.

It felt so comforting and cool that Katia found herself unable to think of anything else except staying there for as long as she could. With a final burst of hard-won lucidity she managed to shut off the flow before sinking as low as she could, nostrils just above the surface. She felt as though she were melting into the water, feeling herself warm it even as it cooled her, currents and eddies blending into her, entering her, dissolving her. She was no longer burning up but was cool and smooth, no longer a shivering woman in a small tub but a ripple in a lake, no longer quite what she was, not sure what else she might be, and above all not certain if she cared.

Hours later, Katia found herself standing naked in her kitchen, dripping. A trail of water lead back to the bathroom. A part of her recoiled at the mess, but her body simply opened the fridge and grabbed at a carton of milk. She pulled back her head and drank all that was left. She watched herself consume the single sad stick of celery, the block of hardened cheese, the pouch of artificially-flavoured nutrition gel, and the packet of premade salad. The fridge now empty, she moved on to finish her last packet of biscuits, scooped out the last of the peanut butter with her fingers, tore up the half-baguette she bought the day before yesterday. She managed to sit down in her desk chair, still naked, before blacking out again.

When she came to she was slumped over her desk, right breast squashed against the edge of her keyboard. The harsh neon color of the light coming from the curtains told her that it was evening again. Shakily she rose to her feet, returned to the kitchen, and drank deeply again. She felt better. Much better. Weak, but she felt relieved. Peaceful. She pulled in a deep breath. The air was musty. She pulled open a window and the sound of rain and traffic washed in on her together with a bewildering mix of scents. Exhaust, her own sweat, smoke, rain, oil, plants, metal, dust, ozone… all hit her at once, the intensity of the experience forcing her to stagger back a few steps.

She found her way back to her futon and collapsed on to it. She just lay there for a few moments, before she realised that she was feeling peaceful. It was weak and mixed with confusion, but against Katia’s recent experiences it cut through. She hadn’t felt this way - or anything, for that matter - for months. It was as though she’d suddenly rediscovered a forgotten limb. Exhausted but with a tiny smile, Katia again drifted off to sleep.

She become aware that she was lying in the middle of a forest clearing, impossibly tall trees rising to a twilight sky above her. Soft grass caressed softly against her nude back. She tried to pick out the constellations that her father had taught her as a little girl but somehow the sky had nothing she recognised. Her whole body felt so relaxed and warm and comfortable, she was nearly melting into the ground and floating up to join the stars. Inside her she felt her heart beating, and something else… a throb between her legs, beating in time with her heart. She felt lonely down there, empty, she needed to be touched. Unbidden, her hands tried to move to assist but found themselves frozen in place. But of course they were! She was sleeping. You couldn’t move while asleep, that was just common sense. Her nipples throbbed, painfully erect in the crisp forest air. Her skin was so sensitive, the grass felt so good, and her pussy was so, so lonely and empty.

“Please… I want to be here too.”

A small voice from nowhere in particular, soft, girlish and innocent. It must belong to a kind person, Katia thought, nobody mean can have a voice like that. She giggled, amused at her own naivite. Why not reply? This was a dream, after all.

“Come on then,” Katia replied, her voice far away, “I want to meet you.”

Katia became aware that she was looking at herself from above. Out of the grass around her flowed an irridesent deep purple liquid, clinging in a thin film to her body. It pooled across her belly button and then spread up to envelop her breasts, eliciting a surprised yelp from Katia as she felt the fluid cap over her painfully hard nipples. It stopped halfway up her neck, leaving her face and hair untouched. Meanwhile, her legs and crotch were covered over so tightly that Katia could see every crease and fold of her pussy. Neck to toe was sealed in the wet shiny liquid, clinging like latex to every curve and joint of her body. Katia giggled. She looked sexy! She never looked sexy. But here she was looking so good and feeling so comfortable that she just wanted to go back to her body.

She sank back into herself and just luxuriated in the feeling of being tightly held. But who was this person who wanted to meet her?

“Well?” Katia asked, “Where are you? I want to meet you.”

“I’m here,” replied the voice, so very close to her now, “I’m with you.”

Katia giggled. Of course! Her new clothes could talk because this was a dream. She could move her hands now and luxuriously stroked them slowly down her body. Had she lost weight? She felt much firmer and less flabby, no wonder she looked so good in the purple liquid.

“Ooh!” yelped the voice, “That tickles! But it also feels good. I’m Sylvi! Hello!” The liquid pulled in around her, giving her a full-body hug.

“It’s nice to meet you, Sylvi,” said Katia, “and that felt good for me too. I’m Katia. Hmmm…” She idly explored her covered vulva, a little disappointed that she was no longer able to do anything except press against her hard clit through the liquid layer even though her pussy felt so hungry.

“U-um! Katia, I-I-”, Sylvi’s voice paused for a moment before continuing, “I can help you with, you know… If you want…”

Katia giggled and stretched her arms back out to either side, lying spread-eagle on the soft grass. It was a dream - why not let the nice voice help her with her achingly empty pussy?

“Sure. Sylvi, right? I’d love your help.”

“O-Oh! Oh! Thank you!” The liquid gave her another full-body squeeze. “I’m so excited! This is my first real time, you know.”

The liquid suddenly began roiling and pressing against Katia, holding her tight and yet softly massaging her. Her breasts were being held so firmly and her nipples were being suckled by what felt like two little soft rubber rings. Her waist was squeezed gently, what felt like two firm thumbs pressing into the hollows of her hips from the front, making her womb throb with each heartbeat. Her buttocks were spread apart and a pleasent pressure applied against her anus, gently circling and pressing just enough to make Katia feel deliciously naughty, bringing back sun-drenched memories of girlhood experiments with her soft toys. Her pussy was spread and caressed, the occasional pull and sucking sensation on her clit only serving to make the ache deep within her only more pronounced.

“Ah-ah, ah! Sylvi! This is amazing!”, Katia’s voice slipped out between wet moans.

“Ehehe~ I’m happy! I learned your body so I could make you feel this way. I- um, I…” Katia felt a pressing against her slick entrance, practically humping back against the liquid to encourage it into her as Sylvi continued, “I… can I stay? With you. I want to. Please! Let me?”

Katia’s hands grabbed into the earth, bracing herself with handfuls of grass as she worked her hips, lewdly humping the air. It felt so good that she couldn’t even feel herself breathing anymore, her skin and womb and arse and pussy were her whole exitstence. What was this silly Sylvi even asking? How could Katia allow her to leave after they’d shared this?

“Au-ngh! Yes! Yes! Of course! Stay! Please! Please! Sylvi! Stay!”

“…I….I…” A tiny happy sniffle. “…thank you, Katia.”

Katia’s legs rose into the air, her body completely open. She felt the liquid suddenly drain down, uncovering her neck, uncovering her breasts, uncovering her feet and flowing up her legs, all of it flowing up into her pussy, filling her, completing her, pressing so deliciously and completely against her womb that she pulled her head back and screamed, her body shattering into a thousand of a thousand tiny pieces as she came like a burst dam, her core exploding and yet so wonderfully whole, full, complete…

Katia woke to her alarm in a tangled sweat, panting. The pale light spilling around her curtains told her that the sun was only just up; the days were getting shorter. Her body felt light and supple, the feel of cotton against skin sending waves of delight through her. The light flooded into her room, revealing her crotch clad in a pair of plain-cut irridescent purple panties, connected by thin strands to a nearly see-through bustier, connected by a single strap to a soft choker around her neck. Still in her post-dream, post-orgasm haze, Katia brought her fingers up to gently feel the band enclosing her neck. She felt a soft pressure against her left ear before her new night-clothes gave her a playful little squeeze.

“Ehehe~ Good morning, Katia! Sylvi is so excited! Let’s look after each other, okay?”