...but just as many toward perdition

A moment then, to take stock.

You turn the events of the past day cycle over in your head, all of the unique sections in their own way. From the harsh come-down of the early day, to the forward and backward steps of the midsection, to the slow winding down from the moment she sat in the chair to watch her videos to her slumping down into the bed. Each section has within it a series of subdivisions. A being does not need to follow the sun-up to sun-down cycle, nor the days into hours and hours into minutes subdivisions of a natural cycle. The part of her day before she rests is one she calls study, it is comprised largely of things she feels she is obligated to view or read, due to their importance to a culture she has never been part of from a species she has only ever been begrudgingly. And a few things she recognizes as more "base" or low art, but that bring her greater joy.

Even in this small habit, as with any minute but trained action or belief, there exists something of a microcosm. This distinction of duty and fun, need and pleasure, exists as a fundamental concept, not just in her but in the media she consumes as well. In some things, the distinction is seen as a moral one. There is a natural aversion to hedonism, any kind of living which exists only in the pursuit of self-pleasure. You see this in the exercise, the favoring of food and sustenance that weighs nutrition and return against taste. It's interesting, the computer is capable of making sludge that tastes far better than the ones she drinks and eats, but she associates the finer tastes as bearing less value to the body. Even if the nutritional value is the same, viewing food as biological duty, like the release of waste product, leads to a belief that the harsher the duty performed, the greater the antidote. She exists in a system advanced enough that this is rarely, if ever, the truth. However, she will believe it. If you told her that hand cranking the air recyclers would lead to more beneficial air, she may start cranking. Such is this often irrational aversion to self-indulgence founded. On some level, it comes from an aversion to sedentary behavior, but it comes from a perceived need for unhappiness on another.

This glitch, as it exists, is a human error. The lower animals do that which bakes their brain in the pleasure senses without these hangups. If you wished to train a hornoad in a specific behavior, such as eating a certain kind of plant more than another, there are a pair of ways to condition this. Firstly, you could suppress the negative reactions to the plant, making it more biologically beneficial to eat that kind of plant than any other, until eventually, the offspring begin to develop traits that benefit them in the pursuit and consumption of this specific plant. This is a sort of guided evolution. It is a slow, imprecise, and ultimately ineffectual endeavor. You can train certain efficiencies this way, but you can't suddenly make a quadruped walk upright. The second idea is far more shortsighted, simply flooding the pleasure receptors when a desired action is performed. This is short-sighted, only working on the animal affected. It also trains the animal for that specific behavior, not any other. The animal would not come to develop traits that would aid in seeking the plant, it would simply eat the plant until it wasted away in other faculties.

Neither of these imperfect tools work on the human animal. For starters, the genome is too complex and both gestation and life cycles too naturally long to reliably pass desired traits. What little you understand of mankind, mainly from the histories she consumes, is that while you can breed a general trait, making a group of the species taller or have darker or lighter skin over time, there are a great number of dangers in the process. Inbreeding and genetic drift make the work Sisyphean. Additionally, flood an animal with dopamine when it performs a certain action and it will repeat the action, flood a human with dopamine and it will question why the action gets the response it does. The human animal is both too smart to not look into the chemical process and too emotionally dumb to immediately recognize the causality.

Samus, then.

There are reward cycles you have seen work with her. She reacts poorly to a pure pleasure feedback, mistrusts or resents it even. She responds well to results. If she sees an action improving the traits in herself she desires to improve, she may repeat the action. Even after a single iteration of exercising while nude, she internalizes that as a beneficial, if embarrassing, action. Meanwhile, you could induce sharp pain every time she exercises, and it would not steer her away. The exercise does not exist for the pleasure of the process, it exists for the results. The same goes for her job. She is not an inherent thrill-seeker, nor does she enjoy the stress, but the challenge overcome and the financial reward makes her come back. If you found a way for her to make money without putting herself in danger, she would still return to the old job. Not for the love of danger, but for the spite of the lack of danger. It's hard to tell how much more money a non-dangerous job would have to earn for her to consider it not worth turning her nose up at, but you suspect it's more than you have any idea how to provide.

Studying, as she did before flinging herself down on the bed and letting her eyes slide shut to the hum of the ship engines, is not a dangerous action, but she views it as a unique hardship. It's a challenge for her to stay focused and sit idly. She feels results, even intangible ones. The study brings her closer to this idea of humanity she has, but it will always feel like she is performing. The Samus that you inhabit and the Samus that she can hold an image of in her mind are two different people. She's been building the second one over time, ever since coming in to the Federation. It was harder then. Even speaking their language, she was an outsider. Unnaturally tall, stiff-voiced, speaking too literally. She can joke now, talk back, flirt, use metaphor. She will never shed the alien life, but the alien image can be softened. For some people, she wants the image of the alien woman. For others, she wants the image of something softer. The alien woman and the bounty hunter, both images she can hold in her mind, are masks. She wore the mask of the Chozo when she was an outsider among them. Now she wears the mask of the human as an outsider among them. Solitude, that thing which both human and Chozo are said to loathe above all else, remains the exclusive logical endpoint.

She doesn't loathe isolation or solitude, there's no mask to be worn there. Or at least, wasn't, until she got the computer. She's been trying to wear a mask at times around it, but the mask slips more often now. If it were anything else, animal or plant, there would be no need, but this thing talks like a human. Perhaps that's the whole point, to make her a little more comfortable letting the mask slip. It's hard to say if anybody would really want the Samus without the mask, she doesn't want to find out, but there's nobody she's truly afraid of losing to ill reception. It's an illogical fear, one that if a single person sees that secret face, the whole of the galaxy learns about it. Like the universe conspires to share the secret, once one ear hears it. It's illogical, but it was like that once.

The Chozo, because it always comes back to the Chozo, were social even beyond human standards. A culture that spoke as much through pheromones as it did words, one where secrets were few. She had been impossible to read with their usual metrics, so they would coax confessions from her with kind hands, but when one knew, they all did. Testing poorly with one mentor and the other mentors knew your weaknesses. The obstacles always raised to the level where they would pinch and bite the hardest. It was an amazing environment for cutting the fat, honing the weakest parts of the whole. They were masters of punishing the blind spot, honing the human animal into a weapon. She had been a child.

Not all of this is spoken. Not every human relives every trauma that shapes the reactions they have. But these are deep-laid roots that carry nutrients to every branch of the tree. Finding a single vein can make it easy to trace the origin, with the right prodding. That and the fact that the mind never truly stops talking while awake, it makes an hour of watching a film into an hour of reading reactions and finding roots, if you know the right questions to ask.

You have a bond with your host, one that's foreign to you. It's almost... sympathy.

Your initial reading of her was cold, analytical, based on the things you needed from her. On a conceptual level, you are not that far separated from her concept of a sickness. You are a virus, one that spreads through contact until it overtakes local populations, with the hope of spilling out forever from local streams into the sea of the species. When you have the universe covered, what then is your goal? Who will you, the end of the evolutionary question, weep to when you find no worlds left to conquer?

You take a moment, then shake your intangible form. These sorts of melancholy are unlike you. Even when you had a seemingly inescapable residence in the lowest points of shame in the galaxy's evolutionary experiments, you never felt sympathy for biological life. You wonder if perhaps the moods of your host, complex and uncontrolled as they are within her, might be beginning to affect you. If true, just another reason to find a way to rewrite their behavior to your will. Perhaps the pseudo-sympathy existed merely in your mind as a way to justify what you intend to do as mercy. When she works as a willing host, she will have no time or will to lament the errors of her Chozo guardians.

She enters a period where her dreams begin to take tangible shape, rising from the fog of insensibility into a state where she can perceive. These areas are both blessing and curse. Tonight, they will be a foothold.

As the image begins to form out of the sights and sounds of indistinct colors, you push them to a shape that you desire. In a very short time, your capability to control what she sees in her dreams is drastically improved. You are still susceptible to the harsh snap-backs of when you push too far, but you no longer merely suggest with sentences, you sculpt with mere words. Finding the empty spaces and infirm material easier to work than waking and pointed thought.

You conjure and shape a long but narrow hall, Samus in the center at the entryway, with a prize on the other side. In the hall, on her left and right, you conjure every face she has burned into memory, both those with and without attached names. You push her down the hallway, priming the brain the whole time with words to encourage the raw emotional responses to each face. Some she sees with disgust, some with distrust, others amiably. You proceed, ignoring the ones she feels nothing but distaste for and casting their visages back to the mist of incorporeality. You scan down the faces to measure her reaction for each. You look for the one that summons the feeling closest to what one might call love. Whether it be pure physical attraction, or deep affection of platonic value.

There are few faces she feels no antipathy toward. Fewer still that she feels any affection toward. To most, she feels neither strong like nor dislike. Their existence to her is like that of another species, neither the generally-liked Chozo nor the generally uneasy humans. Eventually, with great struggle, you can piece something out of the faces. You make a figure, somewhere between gender and species. It has the size of the mighty Chozo, the tenderness of the Garians, a face somewhere between the beautiful admirability of Gany, with the softer and less accusing features of a number of nameless faces from cheering crowds. When you finish, you present it to her, but she reacts with a sort of disinterest. The issue is that the components that you've put in are all people and things that are real. This thing is too interdivided between the source materials, too recognizable but too alien at the same time. You admit defeat, stripping away several of the more extreme features, leaving you with a sort of amalgam of human faces with traits she finds pleasing, plus the very softly animal interest of the Garian. The androgyne is soft, with large expressive features that are easy for her to read. She accepts this one, likes it even.

The hallway dissolves, the prize at the end was always her new companion, and any thoughts otherwise were wrong. In the place of the hallway, she's in her ship, feeling safe at home. She rises from her bed and steps to the bathroom, tossing away her clothes and letting the water pour down from the faucet onto her. She hears the door open but doesn't look to see who came in. Her visitor is a longtime companion on the ship, there's no need. She feels their soft hands brush over her back, rubbing in pleasant-smelling oils. Some part of her feels embarrassed, but you batten it down, heightening the sensation of the gentle hands, playing up the heat of the moment.

Samus stirs in her bed, shifting in place, the emotional response starts to break through. Her gentle embarrassment, but her desire for the hands to stay against her body. She's safe with her companion, even if what they make her feel is making her body respond in ways she would oppose in waking hours. Her mouth opens slightly.

Her partner comes a little closer, hands moving up her back to her wide shoulders, finding the creases in the well-developed muscles. She can feel the soft canine ears of the Garian brush against the back of her neck occasionally as her partner presses their face close to whisper comforting things in her ear. The words, the shower the hands, all seem to press her with velvet softness down, down, down...

She shifts in the sheets, body reacting on its own. Her nipples have begun to stiffen, rubbing almost imperceptibly inside of her skintight suit when she shifts, only adding to her growing discomforting excitement. There's an aching itch low in her stomach, at the border of her waist. It moves down slowly through her core and between her legs until it's her most private and self-denied womanhood that seems to burn with the itch. She groans softly in her sleep, an unsuppressed but weak "Hmph!" that breaks the silence of the room but meets no response.

The care and steady slowness that you, and by extension, her partner, work with are as important as they are persistent. You never push past the point of comfort, finding a place where you can comfortably cause excitement but never pushing beyond or risking changing until the back and forth kneading of small hands becomes mantric to Samus. With each step of the process, when repetition breeds comfort, you take another creeping step forward. The window of what will make her object slowly slides thin, but never shut. You could throw it all away with a single rash decision, but you work as though thawing the ice around something irreplaceable and fragile. The hands trace the shoulder blades time and again until they slowly work their way under the arms, only at the absolute boldest even brushing against the side of her breasts. What elicits a gasp slowly works to becoming accepted, then you take a step forward and start again. Eventually, the majority of the massaging stroke slowly evolves to squeezing and kneading the soft mounds. She accepts it, a transgression earned with exceptional patience and hard work, and it provides far faster and more dramatic results in response.

The crotch of her suit begins to stain dark blue as she leaks into it softly, the burning itch becoming beyond what she can bear. The single moan elicited before slowly evolves into the slow breathing of sleep becoming shuddered in and out breaths. She stirs much more frequently, and her muffled noises break the silence far more often. Even if all of the conditioning in the world has trained a pain response to touching her womanhood, you can elicit the desired results without needing her input. Once the seal is broken, it can never be repaired.

The release of hormones and energy from even circling this precipice is unparalleled with anything else she's ever given you. You want to follow this road where it goes as much as she does.

The partner's hands slowly go from brushing over her nipples to squeezing and pinching them as you pull them away from her body. Both in dream and reality, she has to bite her lower lip to keep from crying out, but in the dream, she fails and whines for her partner. The partner behind her slowly shifts, becoming larger than her. In this moment, you emphasize how much she desires not just to be pleased by her partner, but to be the small, the subservient, the submissive. Even if it might have prompted the snap-back before, an idea alien enough for her to reject, she begins to lose the will to resist it. At that moment, the teasing and playing is both too much and not enough. She wants it to stop, to let her go back to thinking and feeling normal. But more than that, she wants to follow the shimmering inexplicable feeling it's building to. She doesn't even know how to describe what she wants it to make her do, what it is that it's taking her to that she wants to follow it to, but she wants to follow it all the same. The urge to find the shining endpoint, the prize at the end of the hallway, growing more radiant and the will to turn away from it more unimaginable as the hands play with her. The hands are leading her there, the pressure keeps mounting down, down, down. One of the hands follows the pressure, ready to go with it down, between her legs.

And she remembers the pain.

It's knife-like in her mind, cutting through the haze of pleasure and longing, made all the more intense by how sharp the programmed response needs to be to cut through the intensely built fog. It feels like a blade has fallen through the roof of the cabin and cut through her left eye to the back of her skull. In a single moment, she shocks from mid-dream to fully awake. The sudden explosion of consciousness pours salt into the wound, making both the leaving and arriving sensations more real.

Her whole body jerks like she's been shaken, each muscle inside of her seizing at once. She gasps for breath, trying to pull in air to soothe the mind-splitting headache. She grinds her teeth, reeling as the roof of the cabin spins down toward her.

"Are you alright, Samus?"

And as quickly as it arrived, it leaves. Leaving her stunned in bed, unable to explain any of what has just happened. You, of course, were there, you remember the sensations of it.

"Fine," She mumbles out, feeling her stomach heave slightly.

She slides out of bed, burying her face in her hands for a moment and pressing down on her eyes. She's snapped to by the warm wetness of her suit clinging to her body between the legs.

You're shocked that it's this bad, both in terms of what happened and her reaction to the signs of her arousal. On the surface level, at this moment, she shows what borders on complete ignorance of her own body's reactions, like she's lived thus far sexlessly. Like the thing between her legs exists as a faucet for her urine, and nothing more. On a deeper level, the idea that even dreaming about her or somebody else touching her sex is... troublesome. How deep did the Chozo need to set their roles to beat the man-animal out of the man-animal? Did it even benefit them? Did it benefit her? Was she a faulty first experiment, or the result of a prolonged process to create the most neutered man-thing possible? No matter how you cut it, it reflects poorly on them, and the fallout of it damages her.

She puts a finger between her legs, rubbing against her lips through the fabric of her suit, accepting the pang of pain that comes with it. The fabric has allowed the fluid through almost unimpeded, likely designed to preserve body moisture by letting the armor filter it like the other waste products. As a result, her gloved fingers come away slick, and when she pulls them to her nose she heaves a sigh of relief that belies greater confusion.

"Well, it isn't piss."

She heads to the bathroom, then strips off the garment. When she notices the wetness hang strand-like and sticky between the skin and the cloth, she reaches down and touches it again. The pain response is a little less harsh, but still an ever-present issue. She brings the slick fingers to her nose again, then considers tasting the mystery fluid briefly.

"Is there something I can do to help you, Samus?"

She nearly jumps out of her skin, then bends down to wipe her fingers on the now-tainted suit before finishing sliding out of it. "I'm fine, Adam."

The computer doesn't close the channel for a moment, like it considers asking more questions, but seems to decide better against it. You hear the distinct fuzz of the speech synthesis fade back away. You shriek for a moment as cold water cascades onto you again, but luckily she seems as put off by it as you. You haven't earned yourself another dogmatic torture session, but her mood remains absolutely foul until she steps out of the shower.