Mother invades their dreams

The medical bay hummed with cold, mechanical life — the sterile whir of diagnostic equipment, the distant beat of the ship's engines shivering through the deck.

But within the isolation chambers, one by one, the infected began to falter.

It started with dizziness. A stumbling gait. Slurred speech.

Then their limbs grew heavy, clumsy, as if weighted by invisible chains. The world around them blurred at the edges, colors bleeding together, voices growing distant and underwater.

Their vitals spiked erratically — heart rates hammering against strained ribs — then plunged into a slow, unnatural rhythm.

Monitors blared warnings.

Doctors rushed to intervene.

They didn’t understand.

Not yet.

One by one, the infected fell limp against their restraints, ****, their bodies twitching with tiny, fevered spasms.

But inside their minds, they were not sleeping.

Mother was waiting.

The first to fall—Mara—drifted into a darkness that pulsed warm and inviting.

The sterile walls of the medical bay melted away, replaced by a vast, humid expanse—an endless, throbbing landscape of slick vines and blooming, fleshy petals.

She stumbled forward, naked, her body glistening with sweat, her thighs already slick from a heat she didn’t understand but welcomed with a ****, aching need.

Around her, the vines moved—slow, patient, hungry.

Soft tendrils brushed against her skin, caressing her hips, her breasts, sliding between her legs with teasing, featherlight strokes that sent shivers of pleasure coursing through her body.

Her mind reeled—half-aware this was wrong, wrong—but the sensations drowned out thought, replaced by primal need.

Above her, a great, shadowed figure loomed—Mother—not as she had been, but as something vast, unknowable, blooming with mouths and tendrils and eyes that blinked wetly in impossible configurations.

Mara fell to her knees, spreading herself without shame, without thought, trembling with anticipation as thick, glistening vines coiled around her wrists, her ankles, lifting her, exposing her, offering her up.

The first vine pressed against her slick folds—and when it entered, she screamed, not in fear, but in feral, wanton delight.

Mother crooned sweet, wordless lullabies into the humid air, thick with the musk of sex and blooming, rotting flowers.

Fertilize. Multiply. Become.

In another pod, Idris twisted in his sleep, face contorted in a mixture of agony and ecstasy.

In his dream, he was pinned against a wall of living flesh, vines threading through his limbs, sliding against his bare skin, forcing his thighs apart. A sweet, cloying scent filled his nostrils, drugging him, eroding the last of his resistance.

Something wet and slick pushed against him—coaxing, teasing, claiming.

Inside his mind, a voice whispered:

"Give yourself. Be seeded. Bear new life."

And he obeyed.

His body bucked helplessly against the invading touch, overwhelmed by a pleasure so intense it fractured what little of himself remained.

Every infected mind was the same.

Each dreamscape a twisted garden of submission, of breeding, of eager, slavering surrender.

Mother's vines wove through their thoughts, wrapping around their identities, squeezing, shaping, transforming.

Their dreams bloomed with grotesque beauty—orgies of flesh and vine, bodies merging with roots, bellies swelling with impossible, fertile bounty.

And in every dream, they begged for it.

They pleaded to be filled.

To serve.

To spread her.

Mother watched from the depths of the escape pod, her mind nestled safely inside the circuitry, feeling her new children slowly, sweetly, slipping beyond the point of no return.

Soon, they would awaken.

Changed.

Devoted.

And the Starfire would not be a salvage ship anymore.

It would be a nursery.