Joe opened his eyes—or thought he opened them. Had he been asleep, awake? He didn’t know.

Some kind of workshop swam into his vision, coming into focus. Tables littered with pieces of wood, metal, and plastic. Drills and saws, devices that looked like welders or 3D printers. Across from him, a wild network of ropes and cables tangled around some sort of life-sized doll or robot, suspended it off the ground.

The figure appeared fashioned from wood, with some metal and plastic parts at the hinges, but the form was of a curvaceous young woman. Was it one of those sex dolls? The kind made to seem as realistic as possible, to fool lonely losers into feeling like they were cuddling warm flesh rather than synthetic material.

That didn’t seem to be the case here: this doll body remained unfinished, or under repair, with exposed joints and the grain of hard materials rather than anything like flesh. Lifeless, glassy eyes stared out of a carefully molded face that resembled porcelain or finely crafted polymers. That face was the most finished-looking thing about the doll: brilliant red eyes, staring directly at him, but slightly unfocused. Features that were delicate, even beautiful, though made strange by the uncanny, dead quality of the flesh and gaze.

The doll’s expression felt placid in its senseless stare. It wore a sort of blue leotard, stretched over its wood and plastic frame, but couldn’t see further—other junk littering the workshop cut off his view. The doll-girl had hair in a darker shade of the same blue, presumably a wig.

Joe felt strangely relaxed, or at least his body did—but then he realized with panic that his weightless, floating feeling might be the effect of paralysis. None of his muscles were responding; it was as if he’d been cut off from his body. He realized with a dizzying lurch of thwarted instinct that he wasn’t even breathing.

What is going on with my body? He couldn’t move his mouth or his tongue. But he could still look around, somehow. He moved his eyes left, then right. He saw monitors, more cables, what looked like body parts—no! Pieces of other dolls, incomplete torsos. Some kind of factory?

Something injected me with synthetic curare, he thought. That must be it. Complete paralysis and numbness from the neck down. But if I’m not breathing, how am I alive at all? Something weird was going on. Unable to control his body, Joe closed his eyes and drifted back into memory. What’s the last thing I can recall?

He had been following the most significant lead in the Jayakody case. A 12-year-old boy gone missing, the family in anxious tatters; typical missing-person stuff, but the default assumption—that an adolescent kid probably just run away—didn’t seem to pan out when against the evidence. He’d traced the boy’s phone to the general vicinity of an industrial set of blocks south of Willet’s Point, Queens—a run-down area full of junkyards and disused auto body shops. That wasn’t a good sign.

Asking questions and looking for traces online, he’d stumbled across not one but three other reports of missing people: two local workers, and one young woman whose boyfriend had been searching for her. The boyfriend had thrust as much uncoordinated, frantic anxiety towards his search as Joe had applied methodical professionalism to his own contract. Still, the guy had found an eyewitness who’d seen his girlfriend in this same area.

Something was going on, and he kept the trail hot—but that’s where Joe made his mistake. Curse you, Craigan, he thought. Rushing to be the first one in, even when there’s no prize for coming in first. A bad habit dating back to his years in the special forces; now that he was a lone operator, he should have known better. He should have called for backup, especially when there was supernatural involvement—

He remembered the rest, with an inward shudder that was the only reaction possible, given the absence of any sensation in or control over his body. His last experiences before he found himself here crowded into his mind.

That horrible inhuman face looming over me as I sprawled helpless in an alley. Piles of junk, scrap metal and boxes, illuminated by a pulsing light, shifting slowly in color, the telltale sign of a portal. I’d seen that in videos, but only witnessed once before in person. The face again, gaping from the middle of a bulky, lopsided tangle of limbs, its mouth like a pile of squirming slugs, the enormous misshapen head with its huge, watery eyes…

“I’m sorry,” it had said. “I must do this.” Then a rushing sensation, as if something was pulling me forward, spinning him around. He saw his own shocked, dazed face as if staring in a mirror, and then everything went black.

A wave of panic threatened to engulf Joe Craigan. If magic was involved… he could be anywhere. Anything could have happened to him. He could be anywhere; he might be off-world, somewhere on the other side of one of the inter-dimensional portals that had been cropping up everywhere during the last dozen years. Plague of the new century, worse than any kind of foreign invasion. His body—what could have possibly happened to his body if…? Dammit, he was still staring at that creepy female doll; he couldn’t even stop staring at it. Somehow, his eyes weren’t getting dry enough to force him to blink. Could he even blink?

Experimentally, he closed his eyes and opened them.

The life-sized puppet girl across from him blinked as well. He blinked again, twice. So did the doll. With alarm, he realized his view of the doll’s torso cut off… because he was looking in a mirror. Whatever was going on with his body… he was looking out of the eyes of this doll.

Was his own body in suspended animation somewhere? His ocular nerves hooked up to the doll? He tried to turn his head. Stiffly, slowly, he saw the neck of the doll move as well, as if long disused. It wasn’t just his eyes connected to the girl of wood and plastic. Was his whole nervous system wired up to this thing? He tried to open his mouth, to make a sound, and noticed the jaw pieces of the doll strain. As if from far away, he heard a small, strangled noise. Was that his voice?

“Oh good,” said a voice somewhere nearby. “You’re awake.” It was an odd, squeaky, child-like voice. Something out of a cartoon. He tried again to move the doll’s neck, but couldn’t see who’d spoken. The workbench he was sitting on—that the doll was sitting on, rather—was strewn with junk, screws and pegs and scraps of parchment, large plastic capsules and wood shavings.

“Down here! Can you twist your neck that far? You’re pretty tangled up.” Joe willed his neck, or whatever neck he was using, to pivot forward. Something got in his way, restricting his range of movement. He tried to speak once more and heard a muffled noise. He could cry out, at least—it was a strange relief to hear himself at all, and he continued trying to talk, though his efforts produced only garbled noises.

“Your jaw must be wired shut,” came the chirpy little voice. “Try stretching. Really open wide!”

What the hell, thought Joe. Some cartoon character’s telling me what to do. But what do I have to lose? He clenched his teeth, or clenched the place that felt like where his teeth should be, then strained to pull them apart, sensing something—his jaw, feeling all wrong, popped open. Expecting pain or dislocation, Joe winced—but no pain arrived. He rolled his jaw and saw the doll body’s jaw shift in the mirror.

“What the fuck?!—What is—” Joe swore, unleashing his frustration, then stopped as he heard the resulting voice. It was monotone, inhuman, and in a much higher range than his own: the voice of a speech synthesizer. Whatever, he thought, I’m stuck controlling this puppet. Detached, he watched himself wobble his ersatz body’s eyes, brows, and jaw in the mirror.

“Where the fuck are you, motherfucker?! What have you done with my body?” Joe had always been one to curse a blue streak when frustrated, and this situation was as far from an exception as possible.

“Slow down there, lady,” said the other. “I ain’t your enemy. Matter of fact, I’m as stuck here as you are. My goofy voice didn’t tip you off, huh? I’m missing my body, too.”

Joe listened to the weird little voice. It had a Brooklyn accent, underneath the cartoony quality. Was it possible someone else was in the same fix as he was?

“I’m not a lady, despite sounding like a call-center AI girlbot right now. Name’s Craigan, friends call me Joe. Who are you? How’d you end up in here?” Joe was having a hard time getting used to his uncanny new voice; he could emphasize words, but everything he said came out in the same girlish pitch.

“I’m Reshy,” squeaked the other voice. Joe imagined it might be even less pleasant to always sound like a theme park mascot. “I… I guess I’m having a hard time remembering much. Maybe it’s the size of this body. Oh wait, you can’t see me. If you can swivel your head to the left and look down….”

Joe attempted exactly that, wiggling the doll’s head. Locks of straight blue hair fell across his vision; he succeeded in turning slightly, then with an effort, bent the head forward. A wire or string of some sort snapped, and his chin dropped.

In front of him was a pile of old plastic tubes, some sort of piping; atop that pile was an odd little figure, which looked as if someone had sewn it out of burlap. A floppy piece of yarn served for hair, with two unusually shaped buttons meant as eyes. The thing’s limbs looked floppy, like a child’s stuffed toy, but one of them lifted limply and gave a small wave. Joe watched in horrified fascination.

“Hi there,” said Reshy. “I can’t move so well in this body, but it’s still good to talk to someone else. Maybe we can… help each other?”

Joe grunted. The noise emerged as a buzz of grinding static. “What’d you have in mind? This body I’m in… or receiving input from, at least… I’m all trussed up. Your body—I don’t even understand how you’re moving!” Joe admitted.

Magic, Joe realized. This is obviously some bullshit magic. Goddamit. He wasn’t exactly a bigot about the supernatural; as a P.I. he’d found it necessary to deal with many supernatural creatures, even humans who dabbled in magical arts. Still, he tried to avoid the stuff if he could. Too unpredictable. Unnatural, by definition.

“Magic,” said Reshy, confirming the obvious. “This whole place runs on a combination of advanced technology and magic. I think your body uses both; those joints are wooden like a puppet’s, but you have some pieces that look like robotics.”

“Could you stop referring to this weird mannequin as ‘me’ or ‘you?’” Joe growled the words out, but they emerged from the synthetic voice box as smooth and girlishly monotone as every other word he’d said. The kind of voice that’s only good for giving directions and asking how she can help you, thought Joe with a shudder. “I’m going to get reconnected to my body. Maybe there’s some way to disconnect you, or me, and we’ll wake up as ourselves again?”

“I’m not connected to anything,” said Reshy. “And even if you had an off switch, would you want to risk flipping it? I think I might know where our bodies are being kept… so I’d suggest getting them back first.”

Joe stifled a burst of excitement. He needed to be back in his own body, out of this thing. But there was more going on here. He narrowed his brows menacingly—or tried to. In the mirror across from him, he saw the position of the doll body’s thin, arched brows curve downwards in a delicate expression of melancholy concern.

“You know something about this place, huh? Mind giving me the details… and telling me how it is you came by them?”

Reshy stared up at him, saying nothing for a moment. Then the little toy spoke again. “I guess I can see why you wouldn’t trust a strange sack puppet. Especially since I’m having trouble remembering some of those details myself. I’ve been here a while and had some chance to investigate… slow going though it’s been.”

The little sack toy picked itself up and wobbled on unsteady legs down the pile of pipes. “Look, maybe it’ll help if we get you out of there. It can’t be pleasant, all tangled up like that.”

Joe hung in place, frozen for a moment, trying to decide whether to trust the sack puppet; if it really had information about their location or the creature he’d encountered, he needed to find out everything it knew. That held true regardless of the puppet’s identity. Still… something troubled Joe’s investigative instincts.

“Tell me what you remember about how you got here,” he said, peering down at Reshy. “But start with who you are.”

The little sack puppet tilted its head. “Fair enough. I guess it might be easier if I begin at the beginning and just tell the story in order. My name is Reshy Gupta, short for Reshmi. I’m not actually a sack doll; I’m a twenty-six-year-old woman. Graduated from NYU; worked as a freelance puppeteer for a few years. My partner and I lived in Brooklyn, where I was doing a little leathercraft to pay the bills, craftwork.”

Reshy Gupta sat down, looking for all the world like someone’s idea of a toy for a pauper child. “The job came in through a shop I work for sometimes, Ritual. This guy—I remember he was an older white guy, with a goatee and a tailored suit—gave me a briefcase full of instructions and samples to help him set up his next party. They were having a Halloween bash for charity, and they wanted some elaborate leather accessories and costumes… supposedly.”

Reshy slowly clambered down the pile of pipes, with slow awkward movements of shapeless limbs. As she moved, Joe saw something glinting like metal in the back of the puppet’s head, peeking out from the folds of burlap; some kind of magical device, maybe?

Maybe the puppet had more than just the mind of an ordinary person inside it, or maybe it was circuitry that connected Reshmi Gupta to her puppet body. As Reshy moved, Joe strained his own trapped limbs, feeling cables shift and swing.

“Whoa there!” Reshy exclaimed. “Don’t snap off one of your joints! I think I can figure out how to get you down from there. Wait, what was I saying?”

“You got a job doing costumes for a Halloween party. So, this would have been what, over a month ago?” Joe stopped struggling against the tangle of cables and wires.

The puppet did not answer; instead, she stumbled down the mound of pipes, floundering like the clumsy doll she resembled. At one point, she nearly toppled over, but righted herself. “That’s right,” she panted. “But when I got to the address, it was this place. Or the outside of this place, anyway. It didn’t look anything like the pictures online—like the pictures they’d sent me. Just a warehouse, some old factories.”

Joe managed to nod his body’s head. “Yep. That’s where I got ambushed as well. You think we’re still in the same set of buildings?”

Reshy put her hand behind her burlap head. “Not really, no. We’re somewhere else entirely… either that, or it’s a lot bigger on the inside. With… another outside. You’ll see when I get you out of there. Pretty sure portals are involved.”

She finally reached the bottom of the mound of pipes. Joe wiggled so that he could crane his neck—damn, it was harder and harder not to think of it as his neck, his body—and see what Reshy was doing. There was some sort of tablet or screen-based device lying on the floor near where Reshy stood, as well as an industrial lift control, connected to a long cable.

“You can probably guess what happened next,” Reshy was saying.

Joe quirked an eyebrow. “Why don’t you tell me? I mean… you’re assuming we got here the same way?”

“I saw that thing bring you in here, dummy. The giant monster, with all the tentacles and extra limbs, oozing everywhere? I didn’t see it grab me, but it definitely smelled the same, and felt like a garbage pile falling on me.” Reshy shuddered, clearly recalling the experience.

“Must be some kind of demon,” Joe mused. “I’ve heard that of demons like that, no fixed form, oozing and changing. But it’s not my area of expertise. Listen: I’m a private investigator. Veteran of special ops, black belt in jujutsu, and a marksman. If you help me out, tell me whatever you know about this place… I’ll make sure we both get out alive.”

Reshy stood over the green button of the lift control. “You promise? I think this button will release the top clamp holding all those wires together. But you’d better bring me with you… this tiny body is practically useless.”

“Yes,” hugged Reshy, although with his new voice-box, the word sounded more like a computer assistant affirming a user choice. “I promise, okay?”

Reshy hopped onto the button and pressed it with all her miniscule weight. With a faint creaking, the assemblage of wires and cables holding Joe’s body suspended in the air began to sway and shake.

Joe was still—he wanted to help, but it wasn’t like he could do much right now. Reshy was doing most of the heavy work, her face contorted in concentration as she struggled with the controls. She jumped up and down, and a buzzer sounded. A clamp popped open, and suddenly Joe was falling, still tangled in a mess of restraints and wires that were rapidly loosening, falling apart. Joe tried to twist, free himself, but his entanglement made it nearly impossible.

Then suddenly Joe hung by his wrists and neck from the cables; he couldn’t breathe. Does this body need to breathe? Maybe not. Strands of wire and rope suspended him from the ceiling like a crucified puppet; the suspension was dragging his body apart. His limbs contorted in four directions, and although Joe had little sensation from the arms and legs beyond an awareness of awkward positioning, he could sense joints popping out of place, dislocating. As he struggled to get free, he could see that his body was falling apart. With a crack, one of Joe’s arms detached itself from the doll body, and the rest of him went swinging to crash into a table, then tumbled to the floor. Everything dissolved into static.

KrakenRiderEmma

Welcome to SYNCHRONY::OVERRIDE — a novella-length series set in the same universe as Succubated! by the Nine-Thousand-Year-Old Demoness, taking place in an alternate reality where the world's been overrun with portals to other dimensions, bringing magic, supernatural creatures and high technology into a world that resembles our own. The story of Joe and Reshy won't overlap much with what's happening in Succubated... for now! Please check the main page for notes on tags and genre, as this story is a... different sort of LitRPG / System story!

Your feedback is more than welcome, please leave a comment or review and tell us what you're interested in seeing in this kind of story... this one's still in progress, so we'll take your feedback into consideration!

New chapters will be posted frequently for a few days, and then as often as we can. Like our other stories, this story is the product of a human-AI collaboration between Krake and RiderEmma. See our profile page for more details or if you're not sure you want to read AI-generated fiction!