"Vored" to d​eath

“Welcome to Heated Subject, take a Bite of today’s discounts in the back” you hear Poison rattle off in monotone as you enter. They don’t look up from what they were doing before, and the opportunity to meet your gaze passes as you disappear behind the tightly packed clothes racks. You reappear at the start of the checkout line, where you are pleased to find no one in front of you except for the raven-haired beauty behind the counter.

Even with Poison’s thicc thighs hidden from view, you can’t help but admire the upper half that’s still visible. In general, their appearance is captivating to you. The choker you’d love to snap some day. The frilly dress and shawl combo that looks incredibly soft and hugs their curves, all black of course. The way their bangs draw your eye to the bar across their nose ridge. Every time you see them, you mentally catalog every piercing in case the set ever changes. They have a septum ring, snake bites, earrings in the usual place, three more rings in the upper cartilage of one ear, an industrial in the other, and a brow stud on the side opposite your mom’s.

Upon glancing up to look at you, they immediately drop their head back down into a concealing palm. “Oh, it’s you. Please forget what you just heard. I have to say it.” You put your hands up in defense. “Don’t worry, I come in peace.” They shoot you a suspicious look, bracing for your declaration to become the setup for a pun. A few do streak through your head– “piece of illegal meat”, “or should I say don’t furry”– but you’re already cringing at your own thoughts too much to say them out loud.

“So, what did you come to show me?” Poison asks.

You lean over the counter to get a closer side-by-side view of your phone. “Alright, check this out.” You swipe-unlock to reveal the mock screenshot you already pulled up in advance. “These first few dozen lines are just instructions for how to unpack the rest…” You explain, pointing to your various thesaurused copies of ‘complete’ and ‘success.’ “...but then it crashes when it gets here.” You swipe to the next screenshot, which displays “Unpacking error. Initialisation timeout.”

Poison turns to look at you. “I’m gonna be honest, I have no idea what any of that means.”

Deliberately trying to confuse them, you explain, “Think of it like an egg. Sometimes it’s fertilized, sometimes it’s not. The app is the fetus.”

They wait in silence for a moment before they realize you finished. “... What?”

“Okay, so an APK is just a compression file. It usually has an app inside, but theoretically it could not. Like a chicken egg!” You start gesticulating wildly, hoping to ‘accidentally’ catch a nail on one of the frills on Poison’s dress. “So this APK egg– AP Kegg if you will– definitely had a chicken fetus in it, and it was all ready to hatch on its own, but as it was hatching under the sun of the installation button, someone came along and smacked it, causing an installation unpacking error, AKA stillbirth.”

Poison raises their arms in frustration, finally causing the snag you were trying for. “Violet, what the fuck are you talking about?”

You slide your snagged hand onto Poison’s skin. They glance down at the contact. “The beautiful magic of computer egg science!” You can feel the bullshit running out so you switch the topic up. “Oh shit, I think my hand is caught.” You grab onto the snagged thread so Poison can’t get to it first. Thankfully, you don’t have to stall in this position, as you immediately feel the haptic feedback disperse through your hand.

“Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is unless you can re-download it and get a cleaner copy, this is probably the end of line.”

Your friend looks genuinely saddened by this news, as if a plan had fallen through. You’re worried you disappointed them, so you crack the door open a bit to throw them a bone. “If it’s really important, I guess I could try a manual hexcode repair, but that would take weeks to do and still have pretty low odds of success.”

Poison waves off your concerns. “No, don’t worry about it. It probably wasn’t… It’s not that important.” They glance at one of the ceiling cameras. “Anyway, I’m probably gonna get in trouble at this point if I don’t get back to work, so… have fun at the mall?”

They don’t want to hang out with you when their shift ends? You should have expected that. Why would you think you were in their good graces enough to be worth spending time with off-campus?

Feeling dejected, you head off to sulk, and maybe at least see what their kink is. Your new “Kinksense” power didn’t really provide any clues.

Author’s Note: As I was writing this chapter, I realized that it pushed us just over 10,000 words in Violet’s story! The full harem is nowhere near complete, but thank you for sticking with me this long. I hope you’re enjoying it so far. I have lots more fun planned for the future ;)