Epilogue: New Friends, New Threats

When Elaine woke up the next morning she felt giddy, happier than she'd been in over a year. Part of it was that she'd gotten laid. A much bigger part of it was that she'd been intimate with Alexis, who had not just been great in bed but had also been shockingly fine with her oddities. And the biggest part, of course, was waking up with Alexis cuddled into her side wearing one of her shirts. The two of them had taken quite a while in the bathroom cleaning up before they'd cuddled up and fallen asleep and that had been yet more fun, the simple act of cleaning each other almost as intimate as the sex had been. The fact that Alexis had had awe in her eyes rather than disgust as her eyes had roamed over Elaine's body had certainly boosted her confidence.

Elaine thought that Alexis really was the perfect girlfriend. She was cute – good god was she cute – opinionated, smart, touchy-feely in private and not at all clingy in public. Elaine hated how some couples needed a crowbar to pry them apart and she never wanted to be like that and Alexis seemed to agree. There were the occasional glances and smiles and touches, little gestures of affection, but nothing overly noticeable.

Of course, even with this more subtle behavior Ophelia still smirked when the two of them entered the cafeteria to grab breakfast. Elaine wasn't quite sure whether Ophelia was just that good at interpreting the glances, whether it was the fact that the two of them had showed up together or whether the vampire could smell something nobody else could. Or, more likely, the three of them had talked about things beforehand.

Either way, to Elaine's astonishment, Ophelia made no comment about it and neither did Evelyn. Both of them just smiled. Knowing smiles, happy smiles. It would have shocked Elaine but Evelyn had already told her that they'd decided together to give Alexis priority, so her... three girlfriends – good god that sounded weird to her – were all fine with the arrangement.

**

Cassie was nervous as hell. While talking to Evelyn and Ophelia a little longer the two of them had encouraged him to just come up and ask to join their team the next morning and they had promised him that Elaine wouldn't turn him away.

Cassie even believed that. Elaine did seem like a very nice person. He barely knew the woman and he did admit that a large part of it was that she was very attractive, with a very cute face and an inviting smile. It was the kind of smile that made it hard to believe that the owner was anything less than kind and approachable.

He could be wrong, though according to Evelyn and Ophelia she was most definitely as nice as her smile suggested. Cassie even believed that, but he was still nervous. Even if she did accept him, would she change her mind if she found out that he wasn't actually a girl? Elaine didn't strike him as the kind of person to hate someone simply according to their gender but, then again, Elaine had surrounded herself with a group of very attractive women and only women.

But Cassie couldn't simply hide the fact either because this whole Awakener system apparently required building trust and hiding something that important would be counterproductive to that end. More to the point, if he did manage to win her interest it would certainly come up the moment they decided to get intimate.

He stood in front of the mirror in his room and shook his head. He'd been given a room same as any other Shard Bearer and though it was sparse it was far better than the room he'd been staying in in Albion. And of course it was infinitely better than being stuck in a cell for months on end.

So with newfound access to a nice bathroom he'd gone all out with grooming, the most visible part of which was that he'd styled his hair again. He'd worn it down the last few months but this morning he'd finally done the work of braiding it again. As a streamer he'd always kept it braided and now, after an hour-long shower and a couple hours' work on his looks he finally felt sexy again for the first time in months. The surprisingly cute uniform didn't hurt, either.

He examined himself in the mirror more closely. He didn't really like to think of himself as vain... No, that was a damn lie. He loved the way he looked when he put effort into it. That's why he did it. The fact that other people seemed to like the way he looked when he dressed up was a bonus. Most people couldn't tell that he was a man, even when he didn't put the effort in, but when he did he could turn heads. But he had put the effort in today. Some very light make-up, glossy nails and of course the braided hair completed his look, which was to say nothing of all the other things he'd done that weren't so visible when he was fully clothed. He'd had more than a little luck in the genetics department and so body hair wasn't really an issue for him but a couple months without a good razor, never mind the privacy to use one, had taken its toll on him but even that was fixed now. Cassie no longer felt like a prisoner. He didn't feel like a slob either. He felt like his sexy streamer persona once again, this time wearing a uniform that almost looked like cosplay.

Yeah, this'll do.

He made his way to the cafeteria where he found Elaine and her entire group having breakfast together. As he entered the cafeteria he just saw the tall brunette, Abigail he thought her name was, sitting down with a tray and he noticed that she seemed to hold herself apart from the others a little. It wasn't just that she was the only one of the group who wasn't in a relationship with Elaine, she also seemed to feel out of place. From the body language of everyone there it was clear that only Abigail felt this way, as the others seemed to try to get her to sit closer. The other thing Cassie noticed was that Elaine and the blonde Alexis were glowing. He'd never seen it being quite this obvious before but the two of them must have had a really great time last night from the way they behaved. And they weren't even clinging to each other, which made it even more impressive that it was so obvious.

He took a deep breath, then put on his best social media smile and approached the group.

**

The way Elaine saw it, the biggest problem of her current group was going to be getting along with Abigail. The woman clearly felt left out but Elaine had no idea how to fix that. Abigail didn't seem to want any sort of relationship with her and their discussion after they'd first met had put a damper on all of that anyway, but without that Elaine didn't really know how to build a rapport with the beautiful brunette. They didn't really seem to share any interests and had little else in common other than a desire to kill Outsiders. She resolved to make time for Abigail, but with the looks Evelyn and Ophelia were giving her she was pretty sure her free time would be in short supply from now on.

As she thought that she saw someone approach their table. It was the cute waitress she'd saved from the Shoggoth, except she looked different. The first thing Elaine noticed was that she had her hair braided and it looked amazing like that, the frazzled bangs framing her cute face and the voluminous French braid flowing behind her.

The second thing she noticed was that the woman wore make-up. She already looked very pretty without it but now she looked absolutely stunning.

The final thing she noticed was that the woman was wearing the Shard Bearer uniform.

“Hey”, she said as she reached their table, cutely waving from the hip.

“Hey”, Elaine said with a smile. It was really hard not to smile at the blonde. “Cassie, was it?”

“That's right!”, the girl said excitedly. “You remembered!”

“Of course I'll remember a pretty woman”, Elaine said. “That uniform looks great on you.” She was laying it on a bit thick but to her shock her... girlfriends didn't seem to mind. Hell, Evelyn and Ophelia looked positively thrilled.

“Thank you”, Cassie said. “They gave that to me and told me I was, what did they call it? A Shard Bearer?”

Elaine felt her eyes grow wide. “Wow, that's great news. Have they told you how things work here?”

“Yeah”, Cassie said. “They said I needed to find myself an Awakener to join.”

“That's right”, Elaine said. “Did you already choose one?”

Cassie fidgeted and it was beyond cute. “I was going to ask if you all would have me.”

Elaine looked at her teammates and was greeted by a round of approving expressions. Even Abigail, who was so very reserved around them all, seemed fine with it. “If that's what you want, we'd love to have you, Cassie”, Elaine said and the blonde's face lit up like a Christmas tree. “Would you mind showing us your stat screen?”

Cassie blinked at her, then said, sounding a little unsure: “I would, but I don't know how.”

Elaine gave Cassie a gentle smile and let her eyes flick down to Cassie's neck. She wasn't checking the blonde out, she was merely trying to find the CARD wrapped around the slender throat. When she did she gave a tiny nod and then explained to the cute blonde how to open the stat screen and then how to share it.

Cassie's eyes widened in excitement at the explanation, almost giddy at what he might find there.

Elaine could understand the excitement only too well and so she let the cutie gawk for a minute before the screen opened up in front of her vision.

Elaine frowned as she read through everything. She looked from the screen to the cutie in front of her, then back at the screen.

“Something wrong?”, Cassie asked, a hint of smugness in his voice.

“There seems to be a screw-up with the interface”, Elaine said. “Says you're male.”

Cassie chuckled. “No, that's all correct. I am.”

Elaine looked at Cassie again. A gorgeous face, a slight figure with an ever-so-slight roundness to the chest, shapely legs and long, silky hair. And then she noticed that something was off. Right there, the slight bulge of an Adam's apple on the throat.

And finally Elaine felt like smacking herself when she realized why Cassie's hairstyle had seemed familiar. She--- no, he, had copied Astolfo's hairstyle.

“I would say I'm sorry for deceiving you”, he said, a grin in his voice, “but I never did.”

Elaine had to agree. He had in fact never called himself female. He just let people come to their own conclusions. As she stared at him she noticed that he was starting to get nervous, as if he were worried that she was going to be mad at him, so she hastened to say:

“Well, you're still very welcome, Cassius.”

He cringed, as in he actually curled in on himself and scrunched up his face. It was too cute. “Please, just Cassie.”

“Alright, then welcome to the team, Cassie”, she said and he smiled, then nodded.

**

Subject 259 stared at the blank field on her computer screen with a mixture of consternation and triumph on her face.

She was tasked with logging communications and signs of life for covert operatives her creator had placed around the Americas, specifically those involved in Operation Seedbed. Normally this work meant checking if the tracking devices of the operatives in question still recorded life signs. However there were a few people, or people-adjacent beings in any case, for whom this was not a reliable option. Blessed of Shub-Niggurath, for example, could be destroyed so thoroughly that the tracking device could be ruined and they would still be fine. As such, operatives like this had to check in regularly with the base from time to time. And it was Subject 259's responsibility to take those calls.

And now Jason Fuller, High Priest of Albion's cult of Shub-Niggurath, had missed his last two check-ins.

Subject 259 felt conflicted about this. On the one hand she cheered every time an Outsider cultist or another Outsider abomination died, but on the other hand the fact that one of their operatives had stopped responding meant that she would have to inform her creator about it. In person. And talking to the bastard was the last thing she wanted.

Her creator had purged the individuality, or at least the will to resist, out of most of his creations but somehow Subject 259 still had these rebellious thoughts left. She couldn't actually act on them without endangering herself and everything she held dear but at least she was able to hate him for what he had done, was doing and would continue to do. He had been bad enough from the start but now that he'd taken up with these Outsiders he had become even more deranged. Subject 259 had already hated having to speak to him before but now he was spending more and more time in his workshop and the things he was working on were so vile she wanted to throw up just thinking about them.

The brain implant that would trigger all of her pain receptors if she slacked off gave her a warning message to get back to work and she tapped a few AR buttons to inform it of her duty to leave her desk and tell her creator about what she'd found, at which point it quieted back down.

And so she got up out of her chair and gave a sigh of relief, the wings on her back fluttering after having been squished between her back and her office chair for hours, and made her way down the corridors to her creator's workshop. 'Workshop' was a bit of a misnomer these days, though. Once upon a time he'd been working out of a small workshop but nowadays it was more the size of an aircraft hangar. He'd recently gotten an obsession with making impractically big constructs and only a space of this size would suffice.

Subject 259 did her best to hold her breath as she entered the hangar. The thing currently under construction was a twisted abomination of cybernetic components, artificial limbs, magitek and mostly rotten flesh. Yellow Wraiths with bulky, chromed sensor arrays jammed into their air bladders were sending pulses of necromantic energy into the thing, not to control it but simply because whatever her creator had engineered would tear itself apart unless continually supercharged with the energy that had animated it in the first place. From the inside of the thing came distressingly human-sounding moans and groans that morphed into pained squeals as the sound of a drill rang out. In response to the squeals of pain a man began to cackle. It was a loud, deranged mad scientist cackle that once upon a time would have made Subject 259's fists and jaws clench up. He'd let out that same cackle every time he'd 'fixed' something about her as well. These days, however, the sound barely got an eye roll out of her. She had a job to do and she couldn't do it until he'd finished cackling. She'd seen the way he reacted to having people interrupt him during it and while her body barely even resembled the one she'd been born with anymore she still didn't want to find out in what ways he'd mutilate her for pissing him off, especially now that he'd gotten obsessed with messing with Outsider subjects. She had no interest in getting a graft of the Black Goat and neither did she have any intention of being turned into a ghoul or zombie.

So she stood there, bouncing on the balls of her feet, until her creator poked his head out from inside the abomination's open chest cavity.

“Professor?”, she called out.

“259?”, he asked, squinting at her. “What is it?”

“Jason Fuller, the Blessed in charge of the Albion cult, has gone offline.”

He frowned and she could all but hear the gears in his mind turning.

“Investigate”, he barked. “Find out what happened and report back.”

“Of course”, she said and the implant in her brain forced her to add: “Master.”

 

The End Of Book One