Benn's Picks From Last Year [Part 1]

Hey y'all!

Got the first of my picks for 'favorite submitted prompts that didn't win their polls today! Because it's an extra special wrap up from Doomgender Patreon Year 1, I'm making this post public, so share with your friends if you think they might enjoy it!

~Benn

[April's story that was voted on will come out in a week or so, and be patron only, as normal. The rest of these special picks will be public as well, so keep an eye out!]

The prompt: 80s electronic music geek patches her GF into a rack of synthesizers and plays her like a grand piano

Suggested by: Distressed Egg (thank you for this!!)

~2371 words

 CW: 

• Robot/human
• Prosthetic limb
• Playfully bullying/teasing meaness
• Dragged into a show by surprise
• Exhibitionism
• Immobilized/bound
• A loud crowd
• Corrupted sensory data
• Overstimulation
• Soft wrap up, aftercare mostly implied
• Nerdy supervillain act

~~~

         “You can’t just plug random cables into me like this!”

“It’s not a random cable. It’s output for a E-MU Systems Emulator II synthesizer. It’s vintage.”

“You are deliberately missing my point. H-hey! What’s that one?”

“Mmm that’s a Gameboy.”

“Also vintage?”

“Is there any other kind these days?”

You turn your head away from her with a barely-audible clicking and a harrumph. Despite your protests, you are sitting still and patient while she works. Your casing lovingly opened up, dozens of sensory transmitters unplugged and tied back, their ports open and waiting. She clicks something into one on the back of your upper left arm.

“That one definitely isn’t an audio in.”

“I know. None of them are.” 

“Then why are you plugging audio into them? And like. How?”

“I made an adapter.”

“Answer the first question!”

“I made a second adapter.”

She is screwing a cable into your neck now. You can’t move your left arm anymore now that she’s overridden the signal, but it trembles slightly from static.

“You’re converting audio through me? It’s just gonna get jumbled!”

“I know, isn’t it great?”

She plugs the other end of the neck cable into a handheld speaker.

“Okay, test time. Tell me how this feels.”

The speaker in one hand, she uses her other to push a row of sliders up about halfway. A bizarre rising sensation hits you, floaty light strangeness that doesn’t quite match up to how your actual simulated sensations should feel.

“H-hey, I think it’s leaking junk data into my sensation processor..”

“Oh totally. I mean, it’s not really leaking, per say. Your systems are trying to make sense of improperly formatted information.”

The feeling is still there, implacable, hovering. Your girlfriend has got the biggest trouble-making grin on her face.

“That seems-”

“How about this,” she interrupts right before pounding a chord on the keys of a synthesizer.

Your arm seizes tense and your head jerks back as you sensors explode into light and water and the feeling of the color purple. A distorted, powerful noise comes out of the handheld speaker, rising in pitch as she turns a knob on the synthesizer, smiling as your arm thrashes and your vision artifacts. Then she releases the keys, and you’re left with a sudden dull empty feeling.

“Aaa—zz-hh-wa wa what. Was that..” Your voice slowly tunes back to normal from the fractured noise.

“How did that feel?”

You’re deliberately trying to avoid her eyes so you don’t have to admit how much you liked it.

“Weird!”

“Perfect. I am going to have to strap you down though, can’t have you pulling cords out.”

There’s a shivery little stream of aftershocks of corrupted data that make your fingers twitch every now and then. You’re trying really hard to resist the urge to get breathy.

“Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for the show.. It’s in like, an hour, isn’t it?”

Another big grin and an excited cackle. She literally rubs her hands together and poses like she’s role playing a supervillain. Well. She kinda is. It’s her stage persona.

“What do you think I’ve been doing?”

The bottom of your stomach drops like a vcr in a swimming pool. Then the sparks.

“Though I definitely would be bullying you either way, I mean just look at you.”

“Y-you’re going to use me in your set?”

That horrible, terrified, boiling feeling of unrestrained excitement. You cant help the blush on your display. Betrayed by your own exhibitionism, that jerk.

“I’m so glad you’ve agreed!” She’s practically bursting with the meanest flavor of glee.

“But. You can’t just. That’s..”

“Don’t worry, I got you a modesty curtain. The crowd will only see your silhouette, writhing in desperate overstimulated rapture. It’s pretty cool, it’s got a one way digital display, so you’ll be able to see the whole crowd watching you.”

“It’s inappropriate!”

“Technically, it’s performance art.”

You try to put your face in your hands, but only one arm is working right now, so it’s more of a facepalm. There’s no stopping her now, mostly because you don’t actually want to stop her.

“Alright, I’ve gotta get my look together, then I’ll finish hooking you in.”

She’s behind you now, picking up her outfit bag.

“What’s stopping me from unplugging these cables and escaping?”

“Oh, that’s a good point.”

There’s a loud click from behind you as she deftly handcuffs you to the chair.

“That should keep you occupied for a bit.”

You struggle pointlessly against the restraints.

“Fuck you!”

She gives you a warm grin.

“Oh no no no babe. Fuck you.”

Then another cackle as she walks away. You roll your eyes and smile.

~~~

After she finishes going over the plan for the show, she moves to finish her setup.

“Wouldn’t this have been easier without the cape?”

“I don’t need things to be easy, I need to look fabulous.”

She’s dragged your chair into position with you in it. A raised platform behind her, with two big support screens on either side of the stage set up to mirror the footage of your silhouette. Now she’s running so many plugs into you that she needs color coded cable ties to keep track of them all. She’s screwing something into your chest at the moment.

“Are those sunglasses new?”

They’re red and each lens is shaped like a knife.She has them propped up on her head so she can see better while she works.

“Oh yeah, ordered them custom.”

“They look good on you.”

“Aww, thank you.” She shoves another cable into place that makes your torso tense up with a whirr.

Looking down, you see every sensory transfer port filled with homemade adapters and cables and you can’t really move anything except your  head anymore. You can hear the chatty rumble of a crowd forming on the other side of the curtain. 

“This is a pretty big venue huh.”

She looks up from where she’s sitting.

“Bigger than the last one, definitely.”

You nod nervously.

“You’re gonna do great,” she says warmly.

She gets back to undoing the clips on her prosthetic. She has a standard model that looks fairly unassuming that she usually wears, then the one for performances. It’s sharp and thin and metal, not really comfortable to use all day, but she loves the look. She’s gotten really good at balancing on it too.

She stands up, packing her bag away under her setup of synthesizers and controls and a few of those weird plasma orb things that track your fingers when you touch them.

“Alright babe, you ready?”

“Do I have much choice,” you ask with a grin.”

She flicks her sunglasses down over her eyes with a deft motion.

“Of course not, fool. You are at my mercy.”

And she pulls the screen shut around you.

~~~

A tech holds up a hand, counting down silently. Your girlfriend bobs her head in time with silent music. Three, two, one-

She hits a switch and her other hand is on a slider and the beat becomes audible, a pulse in perfect sync with her motions. Insistent, crunchy sound that gives your chassis a instant tremor of reverberation. It gets louder, as the main curtain opens slow. The stage is dark, and you can see the whole crowd through the filter of the screen that surrounds you, just behind her setup, raised.

The beat rises, and you can see people swaying along, hear the cheers and claps. They can’t see you. Yet. Her finger hovers over a button. A second passes. A slider goes down, the beat hangs for a fraction of a second, then, roaring as the lights come up and the music starts, synthy beats and soaring electronic noise that comes together in a beautiful cacophony of sound and rhythm. She holds her hand up, holding a pose as the crowd cheers.

Her hand’s dance across the controls, modulating the beat and making it sing before lowering it to a hum through which her voice can be heard. She’s got this incredible posturing nastiness she puts on for performances.

“Look at you all!”

Cheers and fists in the air.

“Scoundrels and outcasts the lot of you, here to bear witness to the latest triumph of the greatest supervillain to grace this rotten world with her presence!”

She spent a long time perfecting that cackle.

“That’s right! The world’s first and only PhD in musical brainwashing, the unstoppable, brilliant Doctor Knifeleg!!”

Screaming and chanting from the crowd. Someone yells “We love you Doctor Knifeleg!” She stalks around the stage, grinning and raising her hands while the ominous thumping beat grinds along.

“Are you scared yet? You should be! Terrified and enraptured by my genius and skill. And I think a demonstration is in order.”

You kind of yelp as she gestures back at you and the lights go on behind you. Gotta remember your line.

“What do you think of all this, my little test subject?”

“I’ll never surrender to a criminal like you, Knifeleg!”

Nailed it. She turns back to the crowd and switches off the amplifier for your voice.

“Soon the world will see the fate of those who try to oppose me. What do you say I give her the performance of a lifetime. And, with a little help from my brain-to-beat cognitive rewriting machine, this goody two shoes will be transformed into another one of my wonderful, obedient fans!”

She gives the crowd a moment to yell an impenetrable expression of excitement, and rests her hand on a comically oversized level. She looks back at you, pushes up her sunglasses with the other hand, and winks.

“Lets get this started!!”

The switch slams down and your head rocks back as she starts hitting keys and working controls like a starship captain dodging asteroids. The music is loud, but that’s nothing, it’s inside you, it’s thrumming through you like geyser of feelings that humans don’t have language for and colors that have no earthly name. Endless layers of sonic texture made manifest as touch and sensation. None of the cables are actually hooked to your cognitive processors, but that hardly matters right now, in this delirious moment of overstimulation so far beyond the range of human experience that you’ll only ever be able to speak of it in the vaguest metaphor and remember it as a dull ache of want.

The crowd roars.

They love it.

Their eyes.

They watch you.

And not only that, they hear you. The are surrounded by you. Your ecstatic cries and screams of delight beyond language are filtered through homebrew audio processing equipment and massive speakers as you shake the room with your digitally translated voice, music made of compromised sensory elucidation. 

You didn’t expect to be this poetic while you writhed and moaned in front of a crowd. Maybe the skill and passion with which she plays with you as her instrument is granting you more eloquence. You certainly feel like you’ve touched something grand.

How long will it go on? Who knows. Not long enough unless it’s forever, and you doubt it will last forever. The music goes through phases, and the crowd dances and you know they’re watching and you can’t help but smile.

The crescendo nearly breaks you completely. Every vent on your chassis pumps hot air as you battery reserve drains down and down from the sheer effort required by attempting to make sense of what you’re feeling. With a final, raucous scream of ice bright sound, it ends, and the lights drop. The crowd holds it’s breath.

Your head drooped forward, panting and shivering, white noise impulses tingling under the plating of your synthetic skin. You can’t see straight, but you make out the spotlight on her, as she walks towards you.

“Did everybody have a good time?”

The roar is somehow louder and muffled at the same time after the moments of silence.

“Why don’t we see if our little test subject enjoyed herself!”

Oh right, your lines.. It’s really hard to hold onto anything. She flips a dial, and your labored panting comes over the speakers. Your voice, unmasked.

“What do you have to say now, subject?”

Getting your own chain of operations under control is a real struggle.

“Wa-zz-ah ah.. W-w-wa-w-whatever you’d like me to say, Doctor.”

Cheering from the audience as the the wrap up music kicks up. It’s not routed through you, so you can’t feel it. It’s weird not being able to feel it. She strikes a pose with one leg (the pointy one) up on a subwoofer.

“Thank you all for being here, I am Doctor Knifeleg and no one can stop me from taking over the world! GOODNIGHT!”

~~~

It took her three hours to finish tearing her setup down and getting her equipment to the car. There were two venue employees helping out, but she’s always real particular about how the equipment needs to be packed.

She didn’t let you help at all. She sat with you for a while after she finished extricating you from her setup and got you plugged into an outlet. You could have helped after the first hour, you insisted, but she was having none of it. She walked you to the car, you slumped on her shoulder, still shaking, her with her cane for extra support. You were exhausted.

And you still are, lying on the couch plugged into your actual charging cable. Your girlfriend comes out of the bedroom in her pajamas. They have little knives on them.

“Did the low power light turn off yet?”

“Looks like you’re good babe.”

“I don’t think I can mooooove”

“You got scrambled bad huh.”

A pillow hits her face.

“Didn’t affect your aim though.”

“Who’s fault was the scrambling?”

“Pretty sure you agreed to it,” she smirks.

“Whatever.”

She sits down and pets your shoulder.

“Sounded like you had fun.”

“Shut up.”

“Looked like it too.”

“Shut up!”

“Wanna help me again sometime?”

“…”

She arches an eyebrow.

“..yeah.”

“Perfect!”

“I want more lines.”

“I can do that.”

“And a cake.”

“You can’t eat that.”

“..still want it.”

She laughs.

“Fine, I’ll get you a cake.”