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twitchesandstitches · 5 years

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Ranamon Redemption

(Warning, this one gets PRETTY long!)

Another day had come; another conquest, another loot, and it all felt pretty much the same to Ranamon.

A down rose on Treasure Planet, light blooming across cities of actual gold. Not gold colored or gold-plated, but buildings made of actual gold. Windows sparkled, the glass perfect prisms of diamond and sapphire, the streets shimmered in complex netways like liquid chocolate, and turn your gaze far enough past islands that seemed to be huge chunks of looted land masses coated in sparkly things, and you might see that the seas glittered, with an effect similar to what happened if you scattered a number of prisms over a lit flashlight. Hard to say what they were made of, but it was probably very expensive.

In orbit there hang a vast ship, several miles long and bristling with armaments, enough multi-directional engines to make it ludicrously mobile, and all shaped in a fashion to look both dangerous and very aerodynamic. Mostly it just looked cool; so awesome that it was in peril of slipping around from being too cool to stay still in one spot for long. You’d have expected any of the thousands of people present as essential personnel to all have sunglasses and disdainful expressions at the world below. Many other ships like it, though far smaller (ranging from battlecruisers to city-wrecking destroyers to glorified barges meant to just hold loot on their way back from their adventures) floated around, or were being polished back to perfect and getting the gemstone luster plated on again.

Around the artificial planet, every single inch whispered of enormous wealth, luxury, and the fame of having a world so fabulous. The very continents were made from the loot of a thousand worlds (or so it was said, mostly by Vriska Serket herself). The sea, something like distilled wine rendered into a biologically appropriate substitute for water, sold for hundreds a dollars a bottle on the very finest of worlds. And that wasn’t even anything to do with the massive stores of loot occupying the center of the planet itself, like tribute to the mighty Fountain of Conquest at the core, radiating its power to every world within the reach of the Cobalt Stingers, so that everyone knew their name and power…

To the digital being presently encapsulated in material-space via a small and very wobbly robot that managed to resemble her true form by coincidence, it had rather lost its luster a long time ago. The extremely wide hips of the robotic avatar swayed, almost drunkenly, as she stared at the ground, thinking hard. She found it hard to walk and think at the same time. She had spent a very long time - but had it been? she wondered. Maybe she’d only been herself for a few years. Maybe much longer than she thought, all the same. How did you really, in your code, KNOW? But however it might be counted, she hadn’t needed to be introspective for much of it.

She was Ranamon. Some time ago, the fleet of adventurers, rogues, scoundrels and mercenaries she had joined had found themselves, along with their rivals in a nomadic group of hedonistic mutants and outcasts, stumbling into the discovery of another plane of reality made from the flow of information. Everything had a shape and a form somewhere, and the concept of data, the existence of it on a server or through the networks between stars, made life. Her own people called this world, their world, the Digital Realm. They were the digital denizens of it, the digimon, and she was among the mightiest of them all, bearing the power of a long-passed heroine and command over the seas.

Join me, had said Vriska Serket then. The glamorous leader of the pirates, the Cobalt Stingers. It had been a threat, an invitation, and an offer all at once, and Ranamon had been intoxicated by the thought of something new.

I’ve seen so many things, she thought glumly as she walked past a gaggle of serfs polishing the walls and bowing low to anyone who came near on pure automatic reflex. Stars getting up and walking away. Monsters rising out of the dark and screaming at what they found there. Giant robots with great big bouncy boobs!

She tried hard not to think about the next thought coming her way, the dreadful taste of it.

It wasn’t boredom. She could handle boredom, and with the Stingers, you could never stay bored for long.

She fled from the thought, and her flight eventually brought her far from the serfs, all the way to a random bar in one of the underground cities, clinging in the warrens like a chamber of a castle beneath the world. And it shouldn’t be possible for a digimon to get drunk in the physical world, especially not in a robotic avatar, but she fancied giving it a try anyways.

“Listen here,” she said irritably at some point, and the image of those serfs bowing stuck in her mind, itching like a bad wound. “Okay, listen here, just listen. Right!?”

“Right,” said one of the Decepticon racers that hung around Admiral Serket’s favorite doctor. The Stunticons. This one was… Motormaster, a big and tough truck-type femcon with a curvaceous figure that had been carefully engineered to be big and strong. She was regarding Ranamon’s robot avatar with a disdainful air.

“Yeah. So.” Ranamon dimly noted a woman in the background, just barely visible. Blue skin, purple hair, an extremely curvaceous body on par with any of those weird moms from the rival fleet… but none of that stood out on this fleet, either. Ranamon was having a hard time thinking about something besides the weird feeling she was trying to articulate, and she kept flashing back to those serfs. Bowing not out of respect, or fear, but just because she was there, as indifferently as breathing.

Were the serfs mind-controlled? Did Admiral Serket have them chained to her will and set them loose like automatons? Were they free in their own mind but not their wills, raised to slavishly adore their lords in the Stingers to the lowest gunner and boarder? Ranamon had no idea and it got her really going.

“Okay, seriously.” Motormaster raised a hand, and she waved it indifferently. “Who cares how the serfs feel? They’re serfs!”

Ranamon held a finger up in protest. She paused. “Shoot. Did I say that whole thing out loud?”

“Yep.”

Her finger lowered. “Oh, okay.” She paused again. “I had. I had. I had. I had a point! I don’t… what was my point again?”

An elf in the crowd raised a hand. “Was it that you’re gonna pay for happy hour?”

“Nuh uh!”

“I HAVE LOST INTEREST.”

Ranamon groaned. “Ugh. Just a few hours ago I was dumping a few tons of interstellar currency into the vaults and, and. Ugh. What is even the point of it all?”

“What’s the point?” Motormaster leaned in, looming over her. Metal breasts, soft like flesh and tough as shields, hovered menacingly beyond Ranamon with a sense of weight, larger than cars. “You were in on a huge score! You’re famous! Rich!”

“Yeah,” Ranamon said. “Rich. Famous. That kind of thing.”

Motormaster leaned back again, seemingly satisfied. “What more do you need?”

Ranamon staggered up. “Don’t know,” she said, staggering up and walking away gloomily. “Don’t know anything anymore…”

The bar watched her go for a moment, and after it became clear that nothing more interesting than her oversized breasts briefly getting her stock in the doorway was going to happen, they went back to concentrating on their revelry.

Only the blue woman Ranamon had seen wasn’t concerned with her drink, but instead got up and quietly left, sashaying only a little bit out of sheer habit.

And it would be nice to say that, at this point, Ranamon’s life changed forever.

A chance meeting with a stranger, perhaps. A conversation that opened her eyes to her own doubts, her misgivings. And from there, a better path to take. Leaving the Stringers and using her wealth for a better means, or repaying the damage she had caused-

But no. Life doesn’t really work like that.

Even in a universe of magic, where the laws of physics were so loose that they were constantly slipping away, there were stronger considerations and nothing was that easy, nor free. Guilt is a hard thing to face up to when everyone around you won’t acknowledge such a thing. Society bounces people around, and normality, shame, morals; those are all reinforced by what bounces from one person to another. And in the Cobalts, self-indulgence and satisfaction was the only real importance.

And so, more than a year passed for Ranamon to contemplate these matters. She retreated from active duty aboard pirate-y affairs, declining offers for raids or archeological missions, and she’d done enough that she was allowed to hang back and enjoy the fruits of her efforts. Eventually she’d run out and had to return to work, but that would take many years before she ran out of the goodwill she had earned.

A year, mostly of getting wildly drunk on data-records of being blissfully out of it (Digimon handle substances very differently, dear Reader), and doing her best not to think about anything much lately. Sinking deeper and deeper, ruminating more intently on the problems she was starting to notice, and all the while, the blue woman… observed. Like a spider on the wall.

A year of losing all interest in anything that had once mattered to her. None of it satisfied. People were already getting used to her public rants about how fame didn’t matter, not if those prophecies like the Lapis Lazuli Visions were true about something coming. That all the wealth in the world just didn’t feel fun anymore.

She didn’t know how to admit she wasn't happy anymore, and she didn’t know why. And in the fashion typical of the Cobalt Stingers, she dealt with it by getting even more wrapped up in basic pleasures to block out the bad thoughts.

At some point, she wasn’t aware of having left her private manor near the surface, right next to the network channels in… she didn’t even know anymore. Weeks? Months? She didn’t remember anything. Just… a yawning sense of awful.

There came a knock at the door.

Awkwardly, Ranamon came to the door in a makeshift body; a slender robotic model that felt so wrong to wear, too thin in all the wrong places, and too tall, it just didn’t feel right one bit, but she wasn’t in the mood to bother with it.

A vaguely familiar human woman, her skin blue, looked down at her. Ranamon was vaguely surprised to see eight eyes, spider-like, set into her face, and several additional sets of arms (cybernetic, from the seams, but very sleek), and at this point it occurred to her that it was very hard to see anything of her face past those massive breasts jutting out.

“You are slimmer than I expected you to wear,” the woman said curtly, her voice accented with… Ranamon took a moment to place it, synching up with the local computers and taking much too long, a few microseconds, for shame, to recognize it as a sign of one of the languages of the Gaulic language family. Descended from human… French, she guessed.

“And you are goddamn stacked and I hate you for reminding me,” Ranamon groused. “Are you the data lady?”

“No. I am not. May I come in?”

Ranamon considered. “No.” She shut the door.

The woman outside stared at the door for a moment. “Hrm,” she said, and sidled around the edge of the manor. She found a window, putting all her hands to it, and began to climb straight up it, exactly like a spider.

The manor was not hard to navigate. As she suspected, the owner of this place was not in a condition to move fast, and she prepared her game accordingly.

Ranamon took a long route to get back to a drinking room, and even so, she took a moment to recognize the blue woman sitting in a chair and sipping at a cup of fine wine. “What the heck!?”

“It’s not a bad vintage,” the woman observed. “I am not sure what you bother with actual wine, however. You can’t drink it, so I presume it is for friends. Not,” She added, “That you’ve had anyone here for some time.”

Ranamon gaped. She tried to work out something to say, in order of relevance: What are you doing in my house!? How did you get in here!? Who ARE you? Are you spying on me!? But what she actually managed to say was, “Does it taste okay?”

“I did say so, yes. But you have fine taste in wine.” She sipped the glass again. “Do forgive me. I didn't mean to make a wordplay joke.”

“...What joke…?”

“Never mind.” The woman stood up, draining the glass in a single swig, and put it away. “My name is Amelie Lacroix. And you are Ranamon; one of the digital beings that inhabits the data networks of the Stinger information servers across all their known worlds. Uploaded into a robotic body to interact with this world as a whole.”

Ranamon blinked. “Okay…?”

“And you first achieved consciousness in a weather analysis system,” Lacroix said, speaking flatly and without interest, and Ranamon did look up at that.

“Wait, what?” Ranamon stared. “How do you know about-”

“Rather,” Lacroix went on. “ You were that system, given further definition by taking in the power of an ancient heroine.”

“I didn’t! I mean, I didn’t mean to, I mean… how do you know that!?”

“You took her legacy,” Lacroix said, dispassionate.

For Ranamon, everything froze up. “I… I didn’t.”

Lacroix’s gaze was absolutely pitiless. “You were a thief in your very birth. And here you are, comfortable and wealthy, in theft.”

Ranamon instinctively rose up, the wind rattling in the bottles - just enough liquid to react to her powers - and then she thought What’s the point, She’s not wrong, and she stopped.

“Y’ain’t wrong,” she muttered, not looking at Lacroix. She sat down on the floor, too tired to argue. Not tired with thoughts like that, though she was well-acquainted with them. Just… fundamentally worn out in ways she was not prepared to deal with.

Lacroix did not tilt her head quizzically. She gave no indication of being surprised or… of anything really, but chilly and inhuman calmness.

“You regret it,” Lacroix said evenly, and at this, something like warmth came into her voice. It was… softer, perhaps. “I think that you have.”

“...Maybe,” Ranamon said guardedly. “Why do you care?”

“Perhaps someone should. And I think that you may well go a long way before you find someone here who is equipped to grasp why you no longer care for this life-”

‘Wait, how do you know I don’t like being like this anymore?”

“I’ve my sources, dear. Trust that.” Lacroix tapped her temple. “They are there when you dream and when you arose. They were there in the dark, and in the glimmering of the power that gave you shape. They know you, as they knew me.” She reached into a pocket of a long and elegant coat-

Cold numbness flew up Ranamon’s phantom back. She started to scoot back.

“”Don’t be afraid.” Lacroix withdraw a small card. She held it out. “It is only a way for you to… get into touch with my employers, we might say?”

Ranamon awkwardly took the card. It had only a simple number on it.

“Call this number, should you decide that you are truly done with this life,” Lacroix said, walking away towards a window, hands in her pockets.

She was gone. Ranamon scuttled over to the door, peeking out to see her, but there was not even the slightest glimpse of her. Only a single solitary purple spider, upon a leaf, staring straight at her. And then, even that was gone; Ranamon wondered if she had imagined it.

Ranamon was left alone, with a card that had a single number on it.

As she looked it at, a slogan appeared in slow, lovely writing: “For when you’re ready.”

Several weeks more passed.

There was a periodic sign of Amelie Lacroix amid the treasure planet, and Ranamon looked for her. She wasn’t sure why. Seeking more answers? Curiosity? Maybe even an accusation of something. Lacroix never returned her gaze, whether across the bar, at one of the dueling ranges, or from a distance of a dozen feet before one of the light bridges connected the decks of buildings measured stories hall, new catwalks and streets instead of gutters and the light bridges connecting them.

The sight of the light refracting through ten hundred bridges, mixing and refracting into something bright and beautiful, struck something in Ranamon. How long had it been… that she just appreciated something being beautiful?

She looked around at the world, of shining diamonds and gold and splendor, so beautiful and lovely that every second was rich… and now, as always her gaze was drawn to the groupies toiling away, smiling in a distant way.

If she stayed, was she any different from them? A servant to someone else that probably barely knew her name. The way she heard it, Admiral Serket had no idea who anyone else in the fleet was. That was left to administrators like Lusamine and Courtney of Team Aqua.

The phones called to her.

Well, she thought glumly to herself. Why not?

“It’ll just be to check out what they’re offering,” she said to herself, ringing up the number through her onboard phone systems. “I’m not committing to anything. I’m not serious about this… really…”

The phone was picked up immediately. “Come to the fast travel train station around the corner, beneath the hab complex,” a calm and tired voice said, with a Cybertronian synthetic twang to it. “A train will be waiting for you. Blue, with a large X upon it.”

“Wait,” Ranamon said. “What is this about-”

“Be there. You may depart, if you choose not to accept our offer, but you will have no memory of what you may see there. Please, do not dawdle.”

The phone hung up.

About fifteen minutes later, give or take a hurried chauffeuring to the train station in question, Ranamon slunk into the crowd of mingled groupies, pirates, brutes and technicians, all of whom wore some variety of the tight white clothes and pseudo-leathers preferred by the Cobalt elites, and Ranamon felt very exposed in her robot body. No one paid her any interest, though, suspiciously so. Especially as she cautiously approached a small train idling on the monorail, so streamlined as to be like a bullet, and strangely old; age radiated off it like a chill. And there was a large X upon it. Not an ominous kind, just a very discreet set of diagonal lines.

No one seemed to look directly at it. That was strange. Around here, you’d think people would zip straight toward anything novel or intriguingly new, even if it wound up being a catastrophically bad idea or was super suspicious.

As she approached, the doors of the train smoothly opened for her. She stepped inside, not entirely sure of what she was doing.

“Sit down, please,” the same voice from the phone said. She looked around, but saw no one. It was a single cab, of the modern kind that was totally automated, and there wasn’t a conductor that she could see. The voice came from all around, welling out from the train itself.

Ranamon, too off balance to reply, went to the nearest bench. A seat belt obligingly wound around her framework. The train started to go, and she definitely felt a sensation of movement.

This was the point that she no longer really had a frame of reference; the windows chose that moment to suddenly jerk, the view outside distorting like a tub of paints being thrown into a washing machine at full cycle.

The train accelerated, and fired forward far faster than should have been possible at all, and it was moving… sideways? No, down, up. Both, all of those, at the same time, and REALLY FAST, why did she feel like she was turning inside out-

No one saw the train leave, as no one had seen it enter. It was simply gone, though to the sole occupant, it was a much stranger experience.

There was a long moment, perhaps several hours worth of a single moment stretched out much longer than it was comfortable for even a digital entity, as Ranamon experienced dimensions of existence she really had not been programmed to comprehend or deal with in any respectable way. It felt weird, she had absolutely no idea what was going on, WHAT WAS HAPPENING-

“I’m gonna be sick, HELP, I FEEL SICK, MAKE IT STOP!” she wailed.

“Please do not be ill inside me,” the unseen voice said, sounding a bit curious at the prospect all the same. “Hold a moment… you are inside a platform. CAn you even BE ill?”

“Can we please table this discussion until after I stop being about to throw up!?”

“Certainly. We are here.”

And then, they stopped, with such a sudden jerk that it was almost as bad as going that fast to begin with.

Ranamon stumbled down out of the bench as the belt came away, and data streamed out from the little robot. Here, in a space very different from what she had just been in, her information flowed away from the robotic body she had been inhabiting, and it clattered to the ground, devoid of animating force, and then.

Her feet touched the ground. She wobbled, and that was a well-chosen word indeed, to a stop, too dazed to even realize what had happened. “Out!” She gasped, stumbling out the open doors, her legs moving without any dignity at all.

She fell onto her knees outside. Her first sign of something being off was the air, cold and brisk and full of a strange vitality but then… she wasn’t breathing at all. There was nothing to breath, no atmosphere, but the idea of breathing did it for her. Then she realized that she didn’t need to breath at all, so why was she experiencing that?

The third, and probably more strictly sensual one, as her breasts touching the ground. Her actual body! RAnamon looked down and squeaked as she saw not metal and clicky joints, but light green flesh, for the first time outside a computer! She squeaked, standing up as her massive breasts wobbled in front of her, almost toppling her over again. Slowly she placed her hands upon them. Her webbed hands, the blue organic armor of her true digital form right there. Her fingers made little indentations in her spheres, and she squeezed just for the novelty of it.

A bad idea. “Ow!” She whined. Her breasts bounced, in the way that only a bustline as big as sixty percent of a person’s entire body mass can, and she took a few more confident steps forward. She was starting to get familiar with her own body again, and she whirled around, examining herself in wonder. Yes… this was… familiar.

Her skin, moist and faintly green. Smaller than the average human, but obscenely stacked in hips and bust so that she wobbled from every inch with a single step. Blue armor, or perhaps a tight jumpsuit that looked disquietingly organic, clung tight to her hyper-sexed form, two angler fish lights dangling from her forearm gauntlets.

The feathery gills against the side of her face, projecting out from her elongated helmet and the angler lure projecting out behind it, flapped happily. She stamped on the ground, patting herself in wonder. “I’m… I’m here? I’m actually here? The REAL me!? My coding! My everything! My bigness!”

She hugged herself, causing a muffin top of breastflesh to flow over her face, and between her arms, and against her stomach. “I’m here again…!”

“Perhaps I should have warned you, dear,” the unseen voice said again. Now, perhaps more comfortable, it was warming up, with a bit of bounce, and sounded positively jolly, like a gift-giver or a rich and slightly loopy uncle. “We are not in what you might think of as the material realm. The rules are… looser, here.”

Ranamon looked up - in her own body, no platform, just HER - and saw only the train. She stood upon a platform in what looked like an empty void. No, scratch that. She saw a city of sorts, but barely any people walking across… she squinted. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of… no way. Platforms? Mile-long platforms, or perhaps islands floating freely in the void, connected by streamers of vibrant light. Perhaps surges of intense magic, so strong they had become a stable force. In the distance, she saw a small castle, floating around between several other platforms in a way that reminded her of a power core. Perhaps it was… fueling this place, somehow?

She looked away from the strangely shaped islands floating in the dark, and turned to the train. There was no conductor coming out. It was just her. “Okay, am I alone here? Are you… somewhere else? What am I supposed to do?”

“Hold a moment,” the voice said, and it was definitely coming from the train now.

The train… stood up. At least, that was one way to put it. She stared up in alarm as the train shifted forms and transformed into an entirely new form, reformatting itself and moving into a more humanoid configuration. She felt silly; she knew Transformers! She should have expected that! She hadn’t been in a remote controlled train, she’d been inside a Transformer!

The train, interestingly, shed it’s kibble. Most Transformers had elements of their alt form, but she knew that the ones in the Endowed Fleet, rivals to the Cobalts, had engineered a way to allow Transformers to assume entirely new ones on the fly; perhaps this one had gotten the same trick. The cab, the wheels, the underslung rail riding gear all disappeared into its body, exchanging itself for the signs of a born flier. Integrating engines, antigravity pods, a streamlined appearance and jet projectors all along the limbs that were quickly materializing.

It was a lot larger than many Transformers she had seen, too. Broad all over; the hips were very slim, but the arms and legs were huge. The chest was extremely broad, almost like a flat screen, and something about that was very worrying to her. There were no faction decals, brands or insignias. There were a few places which looked like there had been… at least, before they had been scorched away, most likely by this robot’s own hand.

Only one hand, at that. A huge and powerful set of claws, indelicate and badly scarred at the wrist. The secondary form of an old punishment practiced on ancient Cybertron; empurata, mutilating a Transformer’s body and replacing their parts with crude, clumsy replacements to publicly shame them and render them unable to act outside a given function. The other hand, though, was a mass of tools, a shifting and whirring bulk of micro-tools to accomplish any task, but it was also very clearly a massive cannon.

A flat broad chest. Empurata. A cannon-arm, and a distinctive bulky frame. She knew this Transformer.

Thousands upon thousands of horrified aliens knew his name. MAny more had seen his pitiless eye, before they were lost forever in his labs. Their pieces and parts scattered, bloodied bodies abandoned on the floor, entire worlds used for experimentation so horrendous and cruel that it was said even the legendarily vicious Mindfang thought they were too inhumane to even think about-

And now, staring down at her, was a head that had suffered the fate of primary empurata. His head removed, cut away, scarred and mutilated and placed back, all ability to expression emotion stripped away from it, cut down to the very framework. The living metal was a mass of burns and blade wounds, and a single large eye stared down at her.

“Greetings,” he said in a surprisingly cheerful voice. “We were not introduced. My apologies, I am-”

“Shockwave.” She took several steps back, trying not to upend herself with her own overlarge assets. “Oh God. You’re Shockwave.”

“...Ah.” He stared down at her. His tone was very soft. “You know of me.”

He’s a fucking MONSTER. He makes that maniac Grimlock on the Endowed Fleet look reserved and calm. He’s the one who turned Grimlock and his flock of monsters rabid! He melts down organic planets and uses them for fuel! He’s tortured people to death just to measure the sounds of their screams! He’s made parents eat their own children in psychological games just to test how far people are willing to go to survive! He stitches people to one another after turning them inside out, he replaces living metal with wood, he fills people with parasites, he’s done so many evil things that actual DEMONS are horrified by it. He’s defined what the world ‘cruelty’ actually means and, oh god, I AM ALONE WITH SHOCKWAVE.

It WAS A TRAP, he wanted a Digimon to cut up and do things to, I’m ALONE WITH SHOCKWAVE.

Ranamon raised her hands. “Don’t step any closer,” she said, keeping her voice level, the terror rising in her and putrid-sick. “I’ll put a hole in you. I still have my powers here, I can absolutely destroy you, you sick freak!”

Shockwave stared at her. “I doubt that you can,” he said eventually. “My people are incredibly hard to put down. We can be cut open, melted down, ripped apart, exposed to the emptiness of space, have our minds fried with electromagnetics… and still, we just cannot die.” A faint horror came into his voice. “Processors, cut open and exposed to the world. Spark champers removed and replaced with progressively more incapable fuel systems. The body slowly shuts down as it is damaged, one piece at a time… and yet, no matter how loud we want to die, we just cannot. Not without certain terrible means that, I believe, are not available to you.”

She paused. Something wasn’t quite right here.

”Cosmic rust. Total bodily failure; destroy all the organs of a Transformer simultaneously, and perhaps that will kill us. But do it even slightly wrong, and we won’t die. At least, not right away. We will live. No matter how much we deserve to die.”

Ranamon’s arms lowered extremely slightly. ABsolute terror was slightly fading away in favor of bewilderment. “Oh. You’re… not Shockwave. Are you?”

“I am.” The robot turned his eye towards her. She had seen pictures of it. The photos of the multiverse’s most evil criminal scientist and torturer were always the same: pitiless, heartless, utterly without morality or the hint of any feeling whatsoever. Nothing but logic, cold and empty.

This was anything but empty. The eye was wild, moving this way and that, his entire frame continually shuddered like some awful emotion was trying to tear him apart from the inside out, and though he was quiet for a moment, his body language suggested a mind that was screaming if only it could find a voice big enough for it.

“You remember me as I was,” he began.

“I was Senator Shockwave, a long time ago,” Shockwave continued, voice marginally under control. “Idealist, reformer. I was, i tried to be… good. And then, the Functionalists took my mind from me. They cut it apart and sliced away everything from me but my ability to think logically, and they taught me what cruelty really was. And then, and… oh, yes.”

He spread his arms mockingly.

“Yes,” he said again. “You know of what I became. A true monster. An evil upon the multiverse, exceeded only by young Megatron.” His tone became soft and weary.

Distantly, Ranamon thought that she had heard that Shockwave had disappeared some time ago, after the formal dissolution of the Decepticon Empire. She had assumed he had gone to unknown worlds, to inflict his special brand of scientific curiosity upon all unfortunate enough to meet him. “What happened to you?”

Shockwave turned, rising out of whatever deep pit he had been in, and pointed. Ranamon turned to see a vast blue shape regarding them politely, floating in the vast abyss around them. A huge shape, beautiful and terrible at once, and inexpressibly sorrowful; perhaps mourning for all existence. A vast curtain of white light fluttered around a beautifully alien face, and enormous, kissable lips measured in miles, the rest of the giantess so massive that she was exerting her own gravity, little planetoids around her, and her body was… big. And curvy, really very curvy. Unbelievably massive breasts even larger than Ranamon’s in comparison, hips almost wider than this giantess was tall.

And, nestled between her interstellar cleavage, there was a massive blue diamond. A gem core.

“Oh my god,” Ranamon whispered. “That’s Blue Diamond! I heard she vanished after she was freed from the clutches of the Emperor of Destruction!”

“Megatron, yes,” Shockwave said, now apparently calmed down. “I… met her afterwards. When I was still that thing I had been remade into. And she made me feel…” he trailed off.

“Feel what?”

“Everything. Everything I had ever done. The true enormity of all those lives lost by my hand, the horrors of the things I created. She made me feel the pain of it, and made it so that I could never forget again who I truly am.”

Shockwave began to walk. “Come, little one. We have plenty of time to discuss matters with our patron, but it is impolite to keep an appointment waiting.”

Ranamon hurried, glancing back again at the intoxicating sight of Blue Diamond. The giant gem looked so… serene, and she had always heard that Blue Diamond had her heart broken long ago. And yet, she looked… at peace?

In a strange way, so did Shockwave. “May I offer you a lift?” He transformed again, this time assuming a cylindrical craft approximately the size of a jet fighter, the design somewhere between a baroque rocket and a very fancy plane. He hovered above the ground for her, politely.

“Um. Sure.” She climbed aboard, and the two took off towards the castle… or whatever it was… she had seen earlier.

They parked within it, departing into the depths of the castle, and Shockwave assumed his biped form again as they came to some kind of shabby office within it. As they waited to be seen, Ranamon asked, “Where exactly are we?”

Shockwave looked thoughtful. “An interesting question. A good answer may be another question: where are we not?”

She blinked. “Um. I don’t think we’re in the material plane: I was breathing in something but I’m a data entity. I don’t have lungs or a metabolism. I can feel all kinds of magic around me, so… the magical realms, maybe? But then things would be more hectic and it’s just kind of… empty here? Are we outside, in some other lost realm?”

“Good reasoning! But no, not quite. We are nowhere at all.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Think of it like this!” They were both sitting down now, and somehow their chairs were just big enough to seat their wildly disparate sizes. Shockwave sounded downright enthusiastic, like a gentleman professor eager to be teaching again. It was surreal given his reputation. “We are in a place that is defined by not being anywhere else. We are quite literally outside reality; a special pocket realm, outside the multiverse as a whole, maintained by powerful divine influences. From here, it is possible to access any point in the multiverse, particularly the mortal universes, but time does not pass for us, nor do most normal laws of physics.”

Shockwave went on like this for a while. Eventually three figures appeared; a tall man in a super cool black outfit that was mostly body armor and longcoat garb. Beside him was a giant woman, apparently human and over fifty feet tall, nonchalantly stepping around him. She wasn’t wearing much, and had a lot to keep covered up; breasts bigger than her entire upper body, hips wider than a doorway her size would be, powerful thighs suitable for her frame, Covering her modesty was a pair of micro shorts, in red, a spangly bikini, and a short jacket like something an old school jester might wear but updated for the times.

She was also, apparently, very pale. She leaned over, breasts almost bouncing into the ground, and the other two had to dance away to avoid getting caught. “Heya, doc! You borin’ a newbie?”

“I do not bore, Doctor Quinzel,” Shockwave said loftily. “I educate! There’s a difference but not much of a distinction, perhaps.”

“Hah.” She stood up. Her hair was pulled up into two huge pig tails that dangled down to her waist, dyed alternating colors of red and blue. The overall effect was of zany cuteness. “Don’t forget, we got an appointment tonight. Therapy session pronto, ya hear me?”

“I hear you.”

Doctor Quinzel - Harley Quinn, as Ranamon would later know her - skipped away. The other two figures approached; Ranamon gaped at the taller of the pair. “Amelie Lacroix!”

It was her, and she raised an eyebrow. “Ah, so you decided to come. Good work.”

“Told you she’d take us up on it,” said the other guy smugly. He was wearing a mask that sort of looked like a skull, and a lot like a very stylized barn owl face. He stuck out a clawed hand to Ranamon. “Gabriel Reyes. My call sign is Reaper. When we’re out in the field, I make sure you don’t die horribly.”

Ranamon shook his hand. “Uh… field?”

“...Hrm. She doesn’t know?” Reaper, or Mr Reyes, directed this to Shockwave.

Shockwave nodded curtly. “We are here about that.”

“Right. Well, Waller will see you know.”

Behind them, a door opened. In between explanations about the people they had met (‘Miss Quinn used to be a fearsome villain, but reformed after rethinking a very bad relationship she was in’ ‘Mister Reyes helped found our group here, he was once human but was empowered a long time ago, and made contact with some strange entity that was interested in this whole affair; Zarathos, I believe was the name of it’ and ‘Miss Lacroix; a custom made clone series designed to be physically perfect superhuman soldiers, she was programmed for assassination but once she was freed of it, she sought to make amends), Shockwave gave her some quick instructions.

“Be polite, don’t waste time, and don’t mess about. Miss Waller does not approve of that. But be honest, even rude, and she might approve. Just don’t lie to her, she will know.”

“Okay,” Ranamon said, more confused than ever.

“And bear in mind. If you choose to walk away, no harm will come to you. You will return to where you were, just fine, no harm done to you, but you will have the memory… ah, removed. To be safe, you see.”

“Seems fair,” Ranamon said, in a bit of a daze.

She expected to see an ominous and foreboding figure, perhaps a demonic entity of some sort, but it was nothing more unusual than a robust and heavily built human woman. Dark-skinned, broad featured, her hair cut closely to her scalp, every inch a consummate professional.

Her broad expression was grim, even dour. “Ranamon, I believe,” she said curtly, as Shockwave stood there politely. “Please. Feel free to sit down.” She glanced up, expression softened slightly. “Senator. Feel free to sit, or transform into a more comfortable position.”

He shifted mode into his flight form, laying down on the ground contentedly. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Very good. Now, Ranamon.” She went through a heavy dossier, and put it on the table in front of her. “Take it, if you wish.”

Ranamon did so, nervously. “What is it…?”

“Your life, in fact.”

Ranamon opened it. A word right from her thoughts was on the top of a page: ‘I’m so tired of feeling like… nothing.’ “What the heck!?”

Ranamon rifled through it, Miss Waller studying her without any apparent expression.

Ranamon read from the beginning, for it detailed her early life as an In-Training Digimon and Baby. Then, the way her powers had mingled with the ancient force of the heroine AncientMermaidmon; her evolution into her current form, and the vast powers she had developed.

The dossier wasn’t general facts. It detailed her thoughts. Her memories were on open display here, her ideas, idle things they were, written down as plainly as text. Even cross-referenced with events that had led to her being affected by them, and other parts of the multiverse that criss-crossed and influence her own life, and how she affected it in turn…

She read onwards. To her joining the Cobalt Pirates… and her crimes as part of them.

Her growing dissatisfaction, her weariness, her emotional exhaustion. Her desire to be part of something better, to do something that mattered…

All of it so very detailed, precise and knowing. It was written in a way that she couldn’t argue with it, truth radiating from it like heat from a summer-day stone. It simply was. It would be foolish to dispute it.

“We are in contact with certain… shall we say, forces,” Miss Waller said calmly, perhaps aware of exactly what she was thinking. “That have an interest in the multiverse’s safety as a whole. Powerful entities that give us abilities, and information on people like you.”

“People like… me?”

“People who have done terrible things,” Waller said flatly. “Unforgivable, by many standards. And who want to do something better with themselves, all the same.”

Ranamon looked down, into her deep cleavage, for lack of anywhere else to look. That got her pretty good, she had to admit. “Yeah. Like me.”

“Yes.” Waller didn’t smile, but she did seem to approve. “You see, the powers who entrust this mission to me, and in turn approve all those whom Reyes and his allies scout out, can wash the board clean for you… so to speak. If you act in their name to make the multiverse a better place, to genuinely save it, and pull it back from the absolute mess it has become… then we can give you what you want most.”

Ranamon sat back, stunned.

Waller tilted her head. “It differs from person to person. A new start, for some. Perhaps you want a new life, somewhere in the multiverse, where you can start over, clean of your mistakes. Or maybe you want some troublesome curse removed. And maybe you just want nothing so materialistic, just an opportunity to fix things.” Shockwave radiated a bit at that. “And of course, there is always the option to remain with us, and be a part of an organization that wants to help and is equipped to do so.”

Ranamon stared blankly. “You want me to work for you? And I can… help people?”

“Help people? In a sense. You’d be helping the multiverse. Which is comprised of people so… it works out the same way.” Waller smirked faintly, crossing her fingers. “The conditions are simple. Work for us. Every mission you participate with turns the multiverse closer towards safety and long-term happiness for everyone. That, in turn, wipes away a bit of the debt you’ve accrued towards fate and whatever doom you may have visited upon yourself. Continue to do so, working for us in good faith, and eventually… all the evil you’ve done? You will have paid for it. If you can stick with us.” Her expression became cold. “Provided you are sincere. And believe me… we can tell.”

Ranamon gulped. “And… if I die?”

Waller smirked again. “Well. That might be a bit of an impediment. But we can work around that. It won’t slow us down, or you. Believe me.”

“...What would I have to do, if I joined you? Like, kill anyone!?”

“Perhaps. If they deserve to die. Or are evil enough.” Waller contemplated this. “Or if their deaths serve the multiverse as a whole. But we don’t do that sort of thing lightly. The tasks given to you are highly individual; hard to say exactly what will happen. I’d imagine something like what you have already done, but not for the sake of greed or just doing piracy.”

“Ah…” Ranamon thought about it.

Eventually, in very level tones, trying her hardest not to think about everything she might be leaving behind - all her friends, the comforts she was used to, but then was it even worth anything anymore? - she said, “Um. I have a question, miss.”

“Feel free. This is a recruitment interview. I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”

Ranamon tilted her head. “You know in advance anything I might say, don’t you?”

Waller’s expression did not so much as twitch. Walls and stone had more emotion than she did. “I can’t see the future.”

“No, no, I don’t mean that. What I mean is… um.” She took a moment to gather her thoughts and the vague idea she had floating in the back of her mind. “Would you have reached out to me at all, if you weren’t absolutely sure I would probably say yes? On the spot?”

Waller stared at her for a moment longer. Her mouth twitched at one side, very slightly, in the manner of someone hiding a grim smile. “Well, well. You’re more perceptive than you let on.”

“Would you?” Ranamon pressed.

The human was silent, for a time, her expression not so much blank as refusing to admit even a hint of whatever she was thinking, or feeling.

Waller than spoke, and Ranamon was not at all exactly the most perceptive of Digimon but nonetheless she still felt a shiver go up her back, the watery portions of her body freezing solid and unfreezing so she could move. This woman, she sensed, was very dangerous, and when she spoke now, there was a sense that every word was being carefully chosen, weighed for effect, and deployed as strategically as a single well-placed shot.

It was impossible to say how much of anything Waller said was an honest truth, or what she believed Ranamon needed to hear.

Nevertheless. She was involved in some serious stuff right now.

“That depends entirely on who I invite down here,” Waller said. “Perhaps I would bring in a wildcard that would like to do the right thing more often than not, and I would hope for the best possible outcome. And as I’m sure you’ve been told, there are safeguards to protect us if that does not pan out. But… well. Known qunatities are the best possible option. I am always sure before I ask someone down here.”

Ranamon noted that this wasn’t really answering the question; at least, she would have preferred a more straightforward answer. But that was likely the best she would get, from the impression Waller gave off.

Ranamon smiled faintly. “Well… okay. I guess you know me better than I know myself.

“I’ll do it.” And Ranamon stuck her hand out.

Waller raised an eyebrow. “...Hrm. That was quick. You sure you wouldn’t rather have some time to think about it, at least? Not even a minute to consider the ups, the downs, the possible traps at play here?” Her tone was challenging, daring: go on, I wanna see what you’ll do.

“No.” As she said it, Ranamon felt… freed. Like anything bad from here on out honestly didn’t matter that much, compared to what she hoped could happen. If it was a trap or not… who cared? If anyone here was being honest or not, did it matter that much? This felt like a good thing she was getting into,

The first good thing she was doing in a long, long time.

“I’m in,” Ranamon said. “I’m joining up, I’m signing for it, I’m all yours. Okay? A chance to make something better and actually do something worth me?” Ranamon said, grinning. “Count me in.”

Waller stared at her a bit longer than was strictly necessary. Then she grinned. She shook Ranamon’s hand.

“Welcome to Task Force X, Ranamon,” Waller said, with pride.

#queued #this took a REALLY long time to do and im not entirely clear why #but then writing more serious things can be more difficult than comedic or lighthearted things #i was intending on writing some more stuff with Shockwave beforehand to be kind of foreshadowing for him and make it a bigger shock that he #was Good now from an in universe POV #but i figured i was waiting on posting this long enough #i actually had this done for a while #just being lazy i guess??#crossthicc AU #my writing #fics #digimon #ranamon #widowmaker #overwatch #task force x

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