Ingen non-Terminus

As a nice lil' treat, we've got a short story plus illustration prepared for us by Rabidbadger to illustrate one of the various houses/factions within the university, The Rendering Pit! On today's menu we're looking at Ingen non-Terminus, whose desire to exceed the limitations of their birth body takes them to strange and amazing places, only accessible through the technological advances of The Pit! Read on, to find out more <3

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Kaylee stared hard at the small, chrome sphere on the cafeteria table. It wobbled a little, mostly when she started getting genuinely furious, desperate, or anything else properly intense. Nothing else though, not yet. A fact that was growing maddeningly frustrating for the diminutive chinchilla – it had been hours, she should’ve been studying by now, but the failures had grown hooks in her mind and she wasn’t inclined to endure the pain of ripping them out. But it had been hours, her friends had all gone to their next classes, her tablet was constantly reminding her she was late for hers-

She reached over and shut the reminder down, trying to wrestle a hold on the swell in her chest, but it slipped loose. A rush of something that flooded into her arms, leaving her slamming them down onto the table. It made her tablet bounce – and if nothing else, that made the sphere move a bit. It also left her staring at her arms, the left one was just fine apart from some minor scarring across the back of her first two fingers, and the back of her hand. The rest one’s was more extensive, and ended just before where her wrist ought to be. Her eyes unfocused from the sight, catching instead her own reflection in the sphere – exhausted, entirely spent.

The first sniffle of many had worked its way through her cute little nose when she was startled by a metallic clink. Her eyes snapped open, the sphere in front of her had moved. Four sharp points had broken off the surface on jointed legs, and lifted it up like a little spider, exactly how it was supposed to do. But she hadn’t been trying to make it move – nor, she realized, was it responding to her now. Instead, the bauble moved over to her tablet, producing two more limbs (blunt this time) and starting to slowly spell something out on its surface.

“…Come to classroom sixteen delta. Bring the ball with you.”

She blinked, trying to make sense of it. There was someone wirelessly controlling the sphere, she knew that much. Kaylee had been trying to do that herself, but while she could make contact she had yet to get it to listen to any commands. Someone else in the area must have been doing the same thing, and with far greater proficiency. Someone who had just invited her to… something. She’d have to figure that out, it seemed.

The scarred chinchilla tucked her tablet under her mangled arm, and plucked up the sphere with the other. The Rendering Pit’s campus was easy enough to navigate for the most part, good signage made up for the dodgy layout, but what can you do about layout when you build a fringe college out of abandoned spaceship parts and use a large asteroid as the foundation? Still, her back hurt a little by the time she found the wing she’d been directed to –the nurse had told her to stop slouching and that would get better, but concealing some parts of herself under the school’s robe uniforms made it necessary.

She still stood up straight when she saw the hallway before her. There’d been a handful of other students she’d seen here and there since she arrived that startled her in appearance, all of them were far more heavily modified than she expected to be common – and most of them were more than a little overweight. It seemed like all of them were here in this one place. People with multiple limb replacements, eye replacements, people clearly operating loader waldos mentally – all making it look easy. Kaylee squeezed down on the ball in her hand, and checked the door numbers. One and two, side to side – which meant sixteen was at the end of the hall.

About two steps down the hall she realized she’d forgotten to slouch, and her robes slipped down, leaving the lightning latticework of multi-hued energy burn scarring across the right side of her face fully visible. Kaylee froze, glancing about with her good eye.

And seeing nobody paying any special attention. One or two people who did meet her eye looked sympathetic, and smiled, but otherwise they seemed content to go about their own business. Something she found fantastically relieving all things considered. Soon enough, Kaylee was at the end of the hall, raising her hand to knock on the door of room sixteen when it just opened on its own. Inside she saw what looked primarily like a quaint little apartment, though one corner did have a desk full of small robotic components that had something looking like squid full of latex fingertips tapping away at a tablet – another had handwritten letters with a small drone sporting a quill point scratching away at some paper – and at the far end was someone casually sitting in front of a viewscreen watching some old movie with a bunny in an archaic police uniform.

The woman on the couch looked like a fox, maybe. Mostly, anyway. She had the tail for it, but the rest of her was almost universally red furred rather than sporting highlights of white and black, so it seemed likely she was either dying her fur or had some cross breeding in her lineage. There was some color to her though, blue hair for starters, andher ears had it on the inside, something downright rainbow-like and dancing through the whole visible spectrum from moment to moment. Similarly, on the woman’s right hip was a patch of luminous fur that seemed to be almost like a tattoo of her student’s badge. Then there were the eyes, the right was a luminous blue with streaks of white, and no other features – the left sported a bizarre electric purple diamond shaped iris, with a gold slit in the center. This canid, like all the rest of the people in this wing, was visibly heavyset – large breasts hanging loose, a belly that was either comfortably plump or visibly pregnant (probably the former), and broad hips – which ended in fuzzy stumps, sporting silver rings around them. Her shoulders, too, ended immediately at the torso.

The woman turned her head and smiled, as a burst of movement riled up around her – three hands – two with five fingers, one with three, one that looked rather claw-like all popped up into the air and waved. Afterward one set itself on the remote panel on the couch, the claw one hung itself off a hook on the wall, the three fingered one began giving the canid a neckrub, and the last ‘normal’ floating hand (all a dull gray hue) patted the seat next to her.

“Come on kid, grab a spot by Massey. Who is the hand, by the way – I’m Rosalind Kreutzfeld.”

Kaylee looked around the room in a bit of awe first. She counted six – eight, if the quill and the squid were also among them – free floating prosthetics that she was pretty sure this woman was controlling in parallel. The chinchilla did step in toward the couch, etiquette was hardwired into her well enough to manage that, but processing what she was seeing was taking a bit out of her.

“I hope you don’t mind that I was looking through the practice ball. Spotted a ton of signal bombardment and zeroed in on it.”

Kaylee only half processed that. It explained something, sure, but not the thing she was actually worrying about.

“Y-you – you’re controlling all of these?”

That got Roslind grinning a little.

“Mm-hm. Eight at one, plus the mobility rings. Working my way up toward another soon I hope.”

Kaylee stared, stammering through the thought she had that was defying her need to put it into words.

“But- that- even one and I-“

Massey, the currently unoccupied hand, came up to put a finger gently to Kaylee’s lips.

“I know. You’ve been fighting tooth and nail to move even one. It’s like that at first. Like trying to teach a baby to pick a lock. Starting out the hard way is good though. I have a half dozen systems in me that make it easier to wirelessly usurp any mechanical system, but I started out with one of those little chrome shits too.”

She stared down at the lifeless orb in her palm, then back at this limbless virtuoso beside her.

“If you want? I can help. And when you’ve got the basics sorted out? We can help you figure out a hardware suite, if you don’t mind sparing a bit of your figure to house the driver software for some of it. Just understand, we tend to go all-in when we find something we want to excel at, or need to as the case may be.”

Kaylee blinked a little at that.

“Who’s we?”

The red canid grinned, the fur in her ears cycling through a riot of color.

“Me and the folks out in the hall. Student Organization three, Ingen non-Terminus. Choice, without fear or boundaries. The only things we frown on are giving up, and getting complacent. Anything else goes. And if you want to see what you can do now that you’ve got a good reason to look past what you were born with and move on to something a bit less limited? We’d be glad to have you.”

The chinchilla blinked slowly at that, then turned about again. The scratching of the quill, the thing with dozens of fingers typing away, one of the hands was even bringing a strawberry over to deposit it in Rosalind’s mouth. Then, her eyes went back downward. To a lifeless chrome ball, and a blunt, scarred mess where her arm used to be. She took a slow, steady breath – during which time she pointed a thought at the ball, and watched it quiver a little.

“…Alright. I’m in.”