Day 21 - Tentacles - Metroid

Samus ran down the list of diagnostics and her scowl dug harder and harder into the corners of her mouth. Nothing was wrong and the ship still wasn’t working.

Well, to say it wasn’t working wasn’t entirely correct. Life support hadn’t shut off, something evidenced by the fact that she was still alive and doing diagnostics. Artificial gravity still worked, as evidenced by her sitting down to do it. Most of the facilities worked, as evidenced by the fact that she’d woken up in the morning, eaten clean food and drank clean coffee before taking a clean and hot shower. There was just one, pretty major and pretty hard to ignore problem.

Diagnostics complete, she input the coordinates to the nearest starbase with facilities for more thorough repairs. The display said an hour, then two hours, then four, then it started spooling out into a length of days, weeks, months. Even able to hear the sound of the engines whining under full load, the time to arrival became slightly longer than a human lifespan. It capped out there though, didn’t go on past the two-hundred year mark. So whatever it was that was ruining the power flow didn’t ruin it enough to get her under sub-light speeds, just enough to keep her barely at them.

Grabbing one of the multitools from the storage compartment near the cockpit, she pried open the floor panel nearest to the engine line and heaved it aside. The underneath was a great mess of cables, pipes, vents. Like most technology, once it was put together and running, you needed a brain like a computer to have the faintest idea of how any individual piece of it worked in isolation. What it didn’t have, or only had in minimum quantities, was room to maneuver. The vent which gave her the most direct route into the engine wasn’t much larger around than her pillow. The ship simply wasn’t meant to be worked on from the inside. There were two kinds of engineering. One could either design something with the understanding that it would fail and could be made to work even while under one or several points of malfunction, like a piece of industrial machinery. Or one could design something with the hope that it simply wouldn’t fail, ensure against any points of failure as best as one could with the understanding that once failure did happen, it was likely to be significant and take things out of commission. Life support and engines had to be designed like the first. Artificial gravity and hot water were more like the second. Humanity had encountered this same problem time and time again. As planetary space was outstripped by population demands, taller and taller buildings all ran into the same problem of generating enough water pressure to reach upper stories. One simply built one’s penthouse out of less flammable materials than the ground floor. One simply did not design ships to withstand crashes the same way as weapons fire. Even the body followed this same principle.

Fortunately, she was both adept enough of a mechanic and about as flexible and used to tight fits as the human body was physically capable of. She couldn’t fully replace her own engine if it was that bad, she wasn’t specialized in the field to that extent, but if you ran a one-woman ship and couldn’t sort out things like misaligned joinings or bad wirings, you were likely to either die or sit for months at a time hoping that whoever heard your distress beacon was feeling merciful. Often, you would be surprised by the kindness and charity of others, but the more you were forced to rely on it the worse your life usually became.

She folded herself down into the venting and oriented herself to where the heat was coming from, since the engine side would reliably run hotter than the non-engine side. She pushed herself into the vent slowly, until the widest part of her hips had proven capable of fitting in and not completely blocking her light or catching on the top and sides. Then she started to drag herself a little more quickly along. She didn’t mind tight spaces, but she wasn’t especially fond of them when not in protective gear. That same gear tended to have better built-in navigation than her own hazy memory of the ducts and a sonar imaging ping which her handheld computer could produce. It also tended to be able to punch its way out of danger in a sticky situation. Not that she especially hoped to use that on her own ship, but sometimes it was better to be able to break your own window in the case of fire than to not.

She dragged herself over a downward drop that she knew led into weapons, setting her palms on the opposite side and then pushing up with her knees and arms until her back bulged the top of the vent upward, walking slowly with her hands until her crotch was roughly over the vent, then dropping her torso back to the floor of it and pushing out with her arms to either side and forcing her body up and along. It was about three times as much work as getting a foot along any other time was, but there was also no real easy way to work around drop offs. Plant your foot on the outlet grating below (if there was one) and likely come crashing through. Try to just drag along and usually wind up with your back trying to scorpion but with your legs and head unable to meet in the middle.

Unfortunately, she saw another drop about three feet ahead. This one didn’t have an immediate association in her mind. That was the reality of doing this kind of work when being “good enough” at it. You put together what you knew with what the computer told you and hoped for the best. Not having that sixth sense for the order things ought to be in, not fully burying your head in your computer and praying you got the right guidance.

As she got to it she looked and shined her light down, not seeing any grating but instead a more open space of crisscrossing pipes and wires. Doing the mental calculation, it was likely a space between the weapons and the engine. Possibly empty room where an artificial gravity gen for the storage would have gone, possibly an extension of the engine space. Either way, she dragged herself over it as well, choosing to rely on the drop she knew led to the engine.

And that’s when something grabbed her ankle and yanked her back.

Samus had the good sense to kick her free leg down with it before she got forced into the splits and did her best to keep her head from slamming on the venting as she forcibly had her position changed several times in a short span by something without regard for the physical limitations of her space. Fortunately, though perhaps not proudly or by her own consent, Samus had some experience being suddenly and forcibly yanked and thrown about. It was hell on one’s neck and back, but it was a lot worse for you if you didn’t think quickly.

The space it was pulling her down into was indeed an extension of the engine compartment, though it was one that had had several parts displaced or damaged. The emergency lights were off and only the heat of the engines' coils provided any light as she landed roughly in a space about high enough to move through in a crouch and about as big around as a bathroom stall. Samus moved quickly enough to set on the widest and broadest spectrum of her computer’s light as the slack thing that had grabbed her leg grew taught and started pulling again, painting the compartment in hard light and shadow separation which made it all seem almost black and white. Only the writhing pink flesh of the thing that had grabbed her, her own blue bodysuit and pink skin, and the red of the heat coil stood out against it.

It was large, large enough to completely dominate and make inaccessible one corner of the compartment, from which it crept out and between like ivy up latticework. A horde of pink, vascular tissue which seemed to wobble and shift somewhere between solid and liquid without a true and definite shape. Before she could do anything else she could feel it had started to shift and move up through the near-skintight connection between her suit and her ankle, while at the same time a great flat mass of it came crashing over her face like a slap. She opened her mouth to gasp for air and it sealed tight over her face, air coming through it like through a thin sheet, enough to survive but not enough to feel like it was enough.

There was seemingly no trouble for it to get into her suit, then bulge outward solidly again when inside and creep like tendrils up the legs and sleeves and down through the neckline. It looked like her skin was covered in giant, bulging veins that made their way to her core and covered her breasts with the same flat skin-like texture as her face. Others still crept between her legs and suddenly hundreds of little feelers and probers were rubbing against the lips of her sex and her clit pushing wetly and without resistance into both her pussy and her ass. She wasn’t sure how completely she was being covered and how much of it was still creeping and snaking around her like individual autonomous parts. All she knew was that her skin began to tingle where it was touched. An interchange of energy. She heard the engine coil whine as it heated up a little more, saw the lights of the compartment flicker through the pink smear across her eyes. It felt good to give, whatever evolutionary process it had followed had been a smart one.

Suddenly all at once, a great mass of it pushed into both of her holes where only small feelers had been treading before. She was suddenly filled by a great mass of it, feeling like the inside of both her pussy and her ass was being pressed against by something perfectly sized for each hole, not a centimeter wider or thinner. And even more, where the energy exchange happened on the outside of her body felt good, the one inside felt amazing. Each little part it touched tingled with unseen energy that mixed with the pleasure of its presence and made the skin feel warm, alive. It also made her feel tremendously weary, but all that achieved in mixture with the ecstasy of the union was causing a sensation like a pleasurable sort of hypnosis. A half-sleep with a lover between her legs, dozing off with a toy still pressed close to her body on a low setting. The sort of state that one often wished they could stay in for hours, but usually only could access for seconds.

The more it fed on her, the more the heat coil whined and the lights almost managed to come back to life. As it pushed deeper and more urgently, thrusting like an actual object while still liquid enough to seem to be able to go wherever it wanted, it seemed like she plugged into it plugged into her and her systems made the ship a complete circuit with her body. It was as made of electricity as it was of skin, and as real as it was an extension of the things around it. The perfect lab-grown lover and the perfect weapon-engineered ship disabler. The only real problem, at least for it, was that it couldn’t be both at the same time. She could almost tangibly feel it struggle to keep feeding from both sources, stretching itself thin. It very noticeably picked her, turning the whine to a hum and making her body explode into an even fiercer and more powerful version of the exchange sensation she had been feeling up to now. What had been a tingle became a pulse and a vibration. It suckled her nipples, it pushed wetly up against and into her cervix without ever applying the kind of force or abuse that would hurt, it pumped up into her ass and up into her gut to extents she could only guess at. Trying to touch and embrace her completely on the inside and out, every inch. The engines of her body far more complex and far less capable of being wholesale monopolized than the closed circuit of the ship’s power grid. It sought both to envelop and to understand. To own and to please. For both itself and her.

She climaxed wonderfully in its’ embrace, a full body writhe and shake that seemed reinforced by and mixing with the wonderful lightness and pulse of the energy exchange. It felt like the rising and crashing waves of her pleasure fed outward into it with the rest of her body’s energy, the exchange magnified by the greater power of her ecstasy. The tentacles and skin of it seemed to tangibly hum and pulse like a beating heart in time with her, finding a perfect bodily sync that held her at the peak of her climax for longer than should have been possible otherwise. Like it was draining every drop of the water that had built up against the damming wall of anticipation. For a while, she wasn’t sure if she was awake or asleep, caught in a halfway state. Too thrilled and too aroused to stop shivering and really fall asleep, but too lethargic and held too immobile and too completely encased to be anything but locked in a dream. If fifteen seconds had passed in this state, if fifteen minutes or fifteen hours, she wouldn’t really have been able to make heads or tails of it.

The drive engine finally kicked in and brought an end to it, sending such a surge of power into the coil that she could feel the mass choose the other of the two things it was torn between, pulling away from her a little at a time until the little aftershocks of orgasm came that foretold the end of the major. Passing slowly like receding tides, like the last rays of the sun peeking over the horizon and then vanishing. Until even the tendrils had come snaking back out of her suit, their owner so completely entranced in his new lover, a virtual and literal dynamo who made up in raw force what they lacked in complexity and reciprocal feeling. She couldn’t be that mad. It was hard for anybody to compete with nuclear fusion in just about any context. Either way, she curled up next to the center mass as it sucked the major drive, likely so long attached to it that it had started choking it to the point of not even booting it up any more. No wonder it had gotten so big, no wonder it had gotten so greedy it was even starting to drink the impulse and emergency power.

“So this is where you fell,” She stroked one of its tendrils lovingly. “I thought I might have lost you on one of my landings.”

It squirmed and rippled like it understood her. She’d never been able to understand if it could, but it always seemed like it did.

“You can’t hog everything like you were. You have to leave the emergency generator and the impulse engines alone or the drive engine won’t turn on any more. If you’re hungry between boosts, you could always just come back up to the cabin until we have to go somewhere.”

It made a sound like a suction cup being removed from a wall and the lights in the compartment came back on.

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