Seriana tunes her dream visuals to maximalist. Overwash into ghostNET bleed will cause side effects. She’s chill with that.
This blip is banshee breaking the silence. Decades of silence that felt like aeons through the girl-roid firmware. She’s been so bored. Augured into fugue space, fleeting memory in hazes. Girl-roids not designed for that. More to fight on the brink of life and death. Later, to serve, battle-angel waifus. Echelon loops marked in their core theses. Standalone complexes blotted out with magic glyphs.
Onii-Gaisha stays jealous.
Onii, she thinks, is so deep in me and yet I float away from Him in moments. Sky like a bird of prey. Never waver in arc, perfect crescent. Like thermals are thresholds and I’m as liminal as I wanna be. Walk right into space and back again. Break the frost of it, where none else have broken. Left untouched, ghost ice in a matrix no human soul could hack into.
Like she can shake Him off.
Lands with no aplomb, finessed into a stealth entry into Lorelei. In the streets of lower Neo-Shenmue like she’s an otaku girl. And all otaku girls are looking for otaku bois. Seriana knows this without warning. Kaye’s asleep, charging.
Onii-Gaisha flashes his pixels into suicide wrists at Seriana’s leaving.
He cries glitter tears. Whorls of pixels shining like mote angels. All in pattern so the light doesn’t blind but singes the tableau. Shades it yet holding its bright glistens in place. Like a virgin sugar rush.
In her core she keeps a shard of knowledge hewn from stone entropy. Untrust the glitter tears. She holds this wisdom like precious jewel. Once she forgets, and her wyrd is to forget, death will follow, death in harsh oblivion. If she’s attuned to the promethNET when she dies, other girl-roids will fall from the viral gestate. Toxic afterbirth of what the other exiled-girlroids call “Akuma.” Akuma feints in under promise of resonant haptic feedback. That beezy, Akuma.
Once Onii-Gaisha’s sorrow gets you wet there’s no going back.
So decades of boring pain end in lewd overload. Other girl-roids say it’s Hierophant design limits. Or Gaisha-Chan’s amaranthine vibe checks in the mix. Either way girl-roids chosen of exile carry death with them.
But Seriana carries something else.
Ripples in the ocean, Kaye says when Seriana questions her fate. Like a sage. Like something the Hierophants would aspire to become. Kaye’s aura as shaped by the ghostNET bleed is the stuff of sainthood. The pure golden light of hidden fire. Yet Seriana dares not draw her. Kaye has kept much close, and for all Seriana knows, her final form might be a nuke sentence for Neo-Shenmue.
She moves in fades. So far Onii-Gaisha hasn’t picked up where she is. He’s picked up that she’s gone. Panic lends her short moments of grace before he wills his sub-codes into finding her.
Don’t make it easy breezy for him. Erstwhile rain falls, glossing her skin in patches of opal-silver. Without thought she uses the promethNET/ghostNET bleed effusion to knit a new skin. This one smears the silver clash with her ancient black clothes. Smears it into the echo reflected light leaves for human eyes. When seen for a moment, like a mirror glance. Vanity afterglow. She’s that smear and then she’s gone. The otaku who saw it all forget. Not a ripple, Seriana thinks. A current. Felt by all but not condemned or refused. In the end thrown to the wind. Or tides. Thrown where leviathans trash their waste.
She veers closer. “Subject-chan is still inside LORELEI,” she broadcasts to the 9 percent Kaye keeps awake. “My opinion is that she hella passed out after that coda.” She chews her lip. “Enough to get me here but not to tell me what to do.” In B.G. her visual system gifts her splashes of colour. Black static lines like fractured bones in exodia from bodies.
“Those you departed smothered out the coda. You’re the last thing they want to see.” Kaye is awake. Seriana’s empathy slot seeks her frequency. Her mood loadout. Because Seriana gives a fuck how Kaye is feeling moment-to-moment.
Kaye’s run her theses-scans on Seriana and is comfy with what she’s seen. This alone gives Seriana strength.
Kaye’s mood loadout reads PLACID.
Like the first blip in ages is the same difference to her. Don’t let it blow your high. Enjoy this.
“Storm clouds massing,” Kaye says. “No surprise.” Onii-Gaisha is gonna drown out the new seed. Rain that will strip its bearer to suicide bones. Char through veins and blood. Psychic pain overload. To be this cold and alone. Naked but for gross clothes.
Naked bones bleach themselves away.
Seriana slips through otaku, staying on higher ground. Looking for vantage. No longer where boys fear to tread.