Superfriends

[Level START!~]

A cheerful chiptune started playing from June’s computer speakers as she sat, controller in hand, ready for a fresh attempt at yet another level of Sparkles the Rabbit 3. For what was ostensibly a platformer for children, the game was actually fairly challenging, especially for a completionist like her, and she had been fully invested in the game for quite a long time now. She leaned forward in her desk chair, her tongue reflexively twisting into a knot as she concentrated. Jump over this gap, fall into the pit for a collectible lollipop, use the double jump to get out, duck under the beehive and…

A massive spike ripped from the ground, vertically skewering Sparkles as gushing streams of blood poured from the cartoon rabbit, its fluffy purple fur falling away to reveal a gruesomely detailed skull beneath. Moaning, distorted screams from what sounded like an entire crowd of tortured souls came out from her speakers as dark red lettering carved its way across the screen.

[SPARKLES THE RABBIT IS DEAD. YOU ARE NEXT]

The screen crackled and fuzzed out before a ghastly white figure formed within.

“Aww, tough break there, June! I thought you had that one for sure.”

“One more try! That spike was BS and you know it.”

“Sorry, no can do. I got a job to get to and I’m supposed to be there in about…fifteen seconds, so I should probably get going.”

“Come on! Tell them you’ll be late!”

But by then Lilith had already faded from the screen, no doubt already crawling into some other family’s office on the other side of the city through their monitor. June pouted in her chair before biting off the tip of her tongue, causing it to fall and merge into her lap as a fresh, unknotted one reformed in her mouth. She attempted to play a few more levels of the game, but after experiencing Lilith’s “literally satanic” difficulty, even the so-called “hard” mode wasn’t really cutting it for her.

“Guess I might as well try and be somewhat productive today.”

As the game closed out, she finally got a look at the time via the desktop. It was early in the morning, around 6:00.

“Suppose that’s not too bad; an all-nighter after a busy Friday?”

Then June saw the date.

“WAIT, IT’S SUNDAY ALREADY?”

“I PLAYED THROUGH AN ENTIRE DAY?”

With neither one of the two inhuman women having any need to really eat, drink, sleep, or even breathe, there hadn’t really been a reason for either to stop up until Lilith’s appointment. With no muscles to speak of, June didn’t even get any cramps from sitting in her computer chair for over a day. Usually, Molly’s presence as their token mortal friend helped in preventing such behavior, with her frankly pathetic reliance on silly things like food helping to serve as a timepiece. However, she had been out for a few days now, off at a large-scale crossover where she and a million other flying bricks had gone off into space to punch the space devil or something.

Getting out of her chair, she immediately collapsed, her lower half disintegrating into a messy puddle. She hadn’t used her legs in hours, and as a result had let them absent-mindedly soften into a barely-solid state, too weak to support her own weight. Not able to really muster much energy, she simply flopped forward onto her face and flowed across the rug slowly, not unlike a snail crawling across the pavement.

Flexibly pouring herself out of her clothes, she oozed her way into the tub, where she let herself settle into a barely solid, but at the very least human form. She pulled on the shower faucet, and was immediately decapitated by a jet of scalding water that melted through her neck like a hot knife through butter. June poked two eye holes into her neck to take a look at the tap, and sure enough, it was set for the absolute highest temperature; Molly must have been the last one to use it.

Once she turned the faucet to its coldest to compensate and popped her head back on, she simply stood under the stream, the cold, clean water helping to firm her back up and spark some life back into her somewhat drowsy body. As her inorganic body never produced sweat or oils, she didn’t need to use any kind of soap; merely letting the water percolate through her malleable body did the job. Once she was done, she lopped off a hand with a sharpened finger and sent it scurrying into the bedroom to retrieve an outfit to wear. Even though there was nobody else in the house, June didn’t particularly care to just walk around the apartment naked. Rotating her torso dozens of times over to wring herself dry, she got dressed and left for the kitchen.

While she didn’t necessarily need to eat, a part of her still wanted to, perhaps a lingering memory of another time. It was a little suspicious that her memory extended back only as far as the start of University; perhaps this amorphous body wasn’t her first one. June cracked the fridge open.

“Lets see, what do we have in here… That’s Molly’s cake, so if I don’t want to be picking bits of myself from the ceiling for a week, I shouldn’t touch it. That thing is poisonous… that thing is cursed… THAT thing is still alive…”

“…help me…”

“Can it. Guess I’m stuck with…whatever’s in the produce drawer. Fantastic. Do we really not have any GOOD food in here?”

While her inorganic body could in theory digest any amount of completely inedible material (she had eaten Hawaiian pizza after all), it didn’t change the fact that for the most part she had a preference for sweets and junk food, exacerbated by the fact that there was never any risk of damage to her figure. Nevertheless, she took out a few carrots, closed the fridge, and grabbed a knife as to start paring them down.

A quick rinse under the tap and she got to work, using the chefs knife to make quick work of the outer edges. After a few slices though, she realized that her grip felt slightly different. Only then did she notice her left index finger, which she caught one final glance of as it slipped down the drain.

How annoying.

Losing body parts was never an issue for June. Not uncommonly, she would even voluntarily pop pieces off for practical purposes given that getting herself back in form was as simple as just squashing the stumps back together. The one drawback was that she did have to inevitably reattach those same pieces, which when it came to situations like this, was an annoyance.

I don’t want to have to touch a finger that’s been down the drain! It’s all nasty and gross!

A thought slowly crossed her mind. What if she didn’t have to deal with that piece? Making a new finger was as easy as counting to eleven, so why not just regenerate herself a whole new finger and just ignore the old one? After all, she’d had parts of herself accidentally atomized by Molly’s Ultralight Beams before, so drawing upon fresh puttylike mass out of seemingly nowhere to patch up holes was nothing new to her.

A quick thought and it was over. With a flex of her newly re-completed set of fingers followed by a brief series of simple geometrical transformations of her whole hand, she deemed her replacement part adequate and gave herself a mental pat on the back.

“I did it!” cried two voices at once.

June’s eyes nearly fell out of her head as she swiveled back to look back at the sink, where a long, limber arm had sprouted out of the drain, blindly grasping at the air. A small voice came from below the sink, muffled and distorted.

“Little help? Anyone?”

Sending only her hand back to touch the strange appendage, June gingerly poked at the hand as if it were a hot iron. The voice spoke back up.

“Hey, who is that? Lilith? Molly? Are you guys back yet?”

June began to recognize the voice as it continued.

“Listen, I somehow cut myself into this drain and now I’m stuck. Whoever you are, can you just help pull me out?”

June grabbed hold of the hand with her own and pulled. With just a bit of wiggling, the arm began to slip free, as a malleable body, packed tightly into a tube-like shape, followed behind. Another hand separated itself from the tube, and the one June was holding let go as they both pressed down on the basin. The tube swelled outwards until June found herself facing the upper torso of her own nude body in front of her.

The two stared at each other for a moment, then screamed.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY SINK?!”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY KITCHEN?!”

“Y-You’re not supposed to be here! You’re just my finger! I didn’t mean to grow another me off of it!”

“What are you talking about? I was the one who cut myself off into the sink to begin with?”

The clothed June let out a laugh.

“Wait- YOU think you’re the original?”

“Well, yeah! I remember standing where you were just a few seconds ago! I HAVE to be the original!”

“So do I!”

“Likely story!”

“Listen, just go back to being my finger so things can be normal!”

“I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well I don’t want to go and just vanish, especially since I’M the original.”

The two women glared at one another, then pounced, limber limbs lashing wildly, clashing in a clay catfight. Hands became axes, one stretchy arm garroted another, and both bodies were violently kneaded by the other. A few seconds later, they stopped.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere. Truce?”

“Fine, if it gets you to stop trying to absorb me. Now can you pick up my arm? I think it got flung into that corner”

“Sure, that corner over the-”

The clothed June trailed off as she turned to look behind her, as the half-dozen stray parts that had been knocked off in their squabble began growing entirely new bodies.

“Shit! I thought I stopped regenerating!”

“Tell that to them!”

As the additional Junes finished blossoming into full figures, the room once again burst into a flurry of confused shouting.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY KITCHEN?!”

“DON’T TOUCH ME, COPY!”

“YOU’RE THE COPY!”

The clothed June’s head swelled up to three times its size, then shouted over the chaos.

“GUYS!”

Her head shrunk back down as the room looked towards her in stunned silence.

“Listen, nobody wants to risk being absorbed by someone else, so we’ll have to figure out what to do later. Right now, we need to figure out how to make sure Molly and Lilith don’t flip out when they see they suddenly have seven more roommates. Let’s gather, talk it out, and, most importantly, DON’T LOSE ANY MORE PARTS. Last thing we need is even more of us arguing among ourselves. Got it?”

“Got it.”

With a huff, the June in the sink started to push the rest of her body out of the piping, only for her hand to catch onto the switch next to her- the switch that turned on the garbage disposal. She frantically turned it back off, but the damage was done. The room went dead, as slowly but surely, the murmurings of many voices came from the drain and filled the room.

“Hey! Get us out of here!”



Molly flew in through the open window whistling her own theme music, tired but happy after a successful outing. A fair few of her fellow superhero comrades had seemingly died in battle, but in a shocking turn of events, it was revealed that they were all actually robot clones. Excitement was had, perils were endured, bonds were tested, and she was pretty sure they learned some lesson about teamwork or something, but for now, she was ready to kick back for the rest of the day.

Unclasping her long, shimmering cape, she went over to one of the small plastic hooks on the wall to hang it up. As she held her hand up to the hook to do so however, the hook rapidly melted, dripping onto the tile floor.

“⎅⏃⍀⋏!”, she shouted, slipping into her native language in frustration.

Molly looked behind her and just as expected, there was a series of blackened, foot-shaped scorch marks in the carpet. She always did forget to let her body cool down for a couple minutes after intergalactic travel and the heat built up by atmospheric re-entry was pretty rough on the furniture. With her body temperature probably resting somewhere in the upper hundreds, she speed-hovered her way to the shower and delicately turned on the faucet, which to her relief, did not melt immediately as well.

A blast of steam filled the room as the ice-cold water shot from the faucet onto her suit-covered skin, vaporising instantly on contact with a violent hiss. A few minutes later, once she was sure she was no longer a walking fire hazard, she got out, stripped her costume off, and wrapped a towel about herself to go out into the bedroom.

On her way towards her closet to get out a change of clothes, she ran into June, who was sitting on the bed with a clean shirt, underwear, and a pair of jeans folded neatly in front of her, a slightly-too-wide grin on her face.

“H-hey Molly! I- I got some clothes out for you!”

“Umm…thanks? I appreciate the thought, but-”

“But what? You want me to get a different outfit? What, different shit? Pants? Want to wear one of mine?”

“Really, it’s okay. I’d much rather just get my own clothes out if you don’t min-” Molly said, halfway to the closet already.

“STOP!”

A long arm slapped its way onto the closet door, spreading itself thickly across the door frame, smothering it off from the rest of the room. Molly turned around to see June stretched out across the bed, having dived forward from where she sat, causing her to face plant into the mattress. She weakly raised her pliable neck up to speak.

“Please don’t open that door…”

Molly sloughed away the wall of putty with a single hand, giving June a cold glare. June gulped.
“June, what’s in the closet.”

Sitting back up, June wrung her hands about behind her until they were essentially just a singular ball. She took a deep enough breath for her body to puff her height up about two inches before sighing it back out.

“…about seventy copies of me.”

June was met with a dumbfounded stare.

“seventy copies. In that tiny space. What, are they smaller than you or something?”

“No, they’re identical…they’re just packed down really tight.”

Molly’s mouth hung open. She wanted to believe June was just making stuff up, but she doubted that was the case. June was never nearly as flashy with her powers as she or Lilith were with theirs, but every so often, she would do something utterly ridiculous with her powers that made itself quite clear that a near-limitlessly malleable body wasn’t always as goofy as it often appeared.
“You know, times like this make me REALLY glad you aren’t a villain. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to just grab something comfortable to lay around in and I’ll leave you all to sort your identity crisis on your own…”

Molly turned the handle.

“Wait, no-!”

Like a shaken soda can, an immense pressure was loosed the moment the door was opened, as Molly soon found herself buried under dozens upon dozens of pint-sized nude clay girls that quickly began decompress into their full proportions.

“Nice going 45! Why’d we vote you leader if you can’t keep your dumb mouth shut?”

“Hey, your mouth is just as dumb as mine! Don’t get all snippy!”

“AHH! You’re stepping on my head!”

“This is so embarrassing…”

“Can whoever’s arm this is please take it out of my ear?”

“My leg fell off!”

“aaaand…now there's seventy-two of us.”

With that, the small crowd descended into chaos.

“Iswearitsallyourfaultwhyareyoublamingmeitwastheoriginalthatdoesn’tevenknowhowtouseaknifebutyou’retheonewhodecidedtoflipthedisposalbuttonwellIcouldn’tseeitbecauseyoushovedmedownadrainohgreatitsallmyfaultisn’titwellyeahyou’retoolazytofishasinglefingeroutofthesinkheyscrewyoupalIdidthebestIcouldatleastIdidn’tblabouttoMollytheinstantIgotscaredwhosbrightideawasittohideinaclosetanywa-!”

There was a quick flurry of blows and the room quickly found itself plastered entirely by paper-thin Junes. Molly stood up and adjusted her towel as the dazed-looking doppelgangers fluttered down to the floor.

“Now, can at least one of you explain why you haven’t just squashed yourselves back together? You-” Molly picked up one of the many flat Junes around the room and shook her like a freshly-washed towel until she popped back into size so that she could stand and face her. “-how did this happen? Are you not able to just…un-split…?”

Finding her footing after her sudden re-acquisition of a third dimension, the June copy replied.

“Well, it all started when one of us tried to regrow parts rather than just recollecting and merging everything back together. Doing that seems to have made ANY part that comes loose regrow a whole body, and now none of us want to re-merge because we all remember being the original.”

“You’re scared of absorbing one another.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’d have an issue with me taking two of you-” Molly effortlessly grabbed another June from the floor in her left hand. “-and doing this?”

Quicker than the standing June could possibly react, she was grabbed by Molly’s right hand and shoved her to the side, directly towards the flattened double that was being held with the opposite hand.

“Molly no-!”

There was a wet-sounding impact as the two claygirls were smashed together with the same arms that could lift a skyscraper. Any semblance of looking like a person was immediately wiped away as they splattered into one another, sticking together and merging as the two masses of homogeneous flesh began to flow into one another. Molly unclenched her hands, letting the shapeless blob drop to the floor.

It only took the blob a second to reform into a single, very annoyed June.

“What the hell!?”

“You’re back together, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but…but what if one of those consciousnesses vanished?”

“Which one were you, the one in my right hand? Or the one in my left?”

June looked puzzled. “Well, I was the one on the right! No- wait…was I was the one on the left? I’m pretty sure I remember…no…which one was I-?”

“See, no issue! Met another super with cloning powers recently, and he told me memories ALWAYS get mashed back together once they merge back together!”

This was a blatant lie; she hadn’t met anyone like that. In actuality Molly just wanted to not have to deal with an extra seventy-one of her roommates anymore. Good thing it all worked to both their benefit.

Readjusting her towel once again, Molly turned to the seventy other Junes dotted around the room.

“Now…let’s deal with the rest of you.”



“When I snap my fingers, you will stop regrowing additional bodies. You will simply stay disassembled until you put yourself back together.”

Lilith snapped her fingers as she stopped the watch she was holding in front of her from swinging. With a mental prod, a long kitchen knife next to her floated into the air, and nicked a few strands of hair off.

“AHH! WHY IS THERE TWO OF M-”

The newly formed double’s cries were quickly cut off by the swift hands of Molly, who was sitting behind her as she slammed the copy back into the sleeping original. It had been a long process, trying to get June to stop popping out copies every time she separated, made worse by the fact that Lilith had needed to turn to traditional hypnosis methods as her usual psychic powers did not work on a being who for all intents and purposes was completely inorganic.

Molly leaned back as June’s body began reforming, frustrated that she still hadn’t gotten a chance to relax yet.

“How many times do we gotta do this?”

“Until it works. You can go to bed if you want, I’m sure I can handle June-squashing duty on my own.”

Lilith’s words tempted Molly, but she decided to stick it through, mostly because she doubted she would be able to sleep soundly until June’s annoying condition wore off.

“I’ll stay, its kinda fun getting to smash her up without her getting upset if we’re being honest.”

“Suit yourself.”

Lilith raised her watch again, repeating her mantras in a stable, low voice. Given that June was half-asleep at most times anyways, it didn’t take long for the suggestions to take hold, and soon Lilith had loosed another few strands of hair with her knife. The strands fluttered to the floor and lay there as the two other women watched in hopeful anticipation.

“Um…why are you both staring at my hair?”

June shrieked as she was hugged forcefully from behind, Molly’s strong arms forcing the top half of her body taller as her torso was squeezed like a tube of toothpaste.

“Thank the stars we don’t have to deal with THAT again!”

“Deal with what?”

Molly looked up to Lilith. “She doesn’t remember?”

“Remember what? What are you guys talking about?”

“Ahh, don’t worry about it. Wanna play more cursed video games?”

“Yeah!”

As the two women went off for another hours-long session, Molly lazily hovered off, finally able to get some proper rest.