Chapter Text
Fixit's mechanical face betrays none of the emotions she feels, as Mistress Miller contemplates her fate.
Will she be given her freedom? On this, the day of so many triumphs, she can scarcely bring herself to hope for one more. She had given up her own free will, for even the barest sliver of hope of restoring her homeworld. That she had done so under no small amount of duress changed nothing - she would have made that sacrifice freely, given the chance. If her eternal servitude was the price for billions of lives, she would pay it, and be glad of the bargain.
And, perversely, she found part of herself hoping that Daphne would keep her. Was it simply the crushingly low self-esteem one gets, beaten down by tragedy after tragedy? That she could not believe anything so good could happen to her? She had spoken at length with Charity about this, but she still could not shake the pessimism that had served her so accurately for so long.
Or was it that she shied away from the pain that would come with freedom? The pain of knowing that her friends - for they were her friends, now - remained enslaved, caught in the cruel^H^H^H^H^Hloving clutches^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hembrace of their rapist^H^H^H^H^H^Hbenevolent mistress? The torment of watching it happen, day after day? The torture of seeing them smile even as they were abused, and being forced to stand by, helplessly?
Were she human, Fixit would probably be in tears, both from of what was to come, and from joy over what had already happened.
But Fixit was a machine, and even as a storm of emotions roiled inside her, she kept her face cold, as Daphne silently pondered her options, weighed the ultimatum of her homeworld against her own dark desires.
A stony face for a stoic being. Whatever pain came, she could take it.
She had been through worse.
"Fixit," Daphne began, her soft voice entrancing even when she wasn't trying to be. "You have been hurt, so, so much. I cannot find it in my heart to keep you as a slave, no matter how much I adore having you."
On the sidelines, Helen and Taylor nodded in approval.
"But."
Fixit was the only one unsurprised by the "but". Even Geraldine had her impeccable poise disturbed by the unexpected "but".
"But, I cannot bring myself to foist any more pain on you. I cannot bear to watch you suffer, watching your friends remaining slaves, with all that that, ahem, entails." Daphne looked almost apologetic, as she approached the silent robot. Fixit suddenly realized that she could not move.
"You will have your freedom," she said, raising a chi-infused finger to Fixit's forehead, "and you are going to enjoy it."
Fixit screamed.
Fixit laughed.
Not a laugh of joy. Not a laugh after a good joke. Not even a laugh of relief.
Fixit laughed a cold laugh, a heartless laugh. A cruel, quiet laugh, that seemed strange coming from the girl who had been brought to tears by as little as a hug.
"As equals, then," Daphne asked, pulling her hand and her chi back, "I extend you the offer of truce. I for one have grown weary of fighting."
A million calculations raced through Fixit's digital mind. She tested the limits of her free thought, and found none. She was free now to think as she wished. She was no longer chained by Daphne's commands, but, courtesy of one last rewrite to her personality, was also unshackled from petty morality. Fixit found that she had been reshaped - not into another Daphne Miller, but into the kind of person Daphne Miller feared to become. She wanted the same thing every willing student of MCU wanted - to conquer minds, to enslave others, bend them to her will and her service. Her coolant pumps thrummed just thinking about it. Oh, how she *wanted* it.
Fixit could choose to go to war. No posthypnotic suggestion or hardcoded subroutine or magical geas compelled her to accept this truce. Daphne had not left her mind untouched, but she had left it unfettered. Fixit could contemplate this thought as readily as any other.
And so she contemplated it, with all the uncountable picotech neurons and processors that made up her current body. Scenarios played out in microseconds, a tactical conclusion forming in the blink of an eye. Going against Daphne, at this juncture, would be foolish, suicide. More powerful forces than she had failed. No matter how sweet a bit of karma might taste, waging a hypno-war on Daphne Miller was a fool's quest.
Far better to let the girl smash herself against Emerald, or Mesmerra, or any of the other she had set her course against, then pick up the pieces left in the wreckage. Fixit had just slain a god and canceled an apocalypse, she had nothing left to prove.
And yet.
Daphne was human. Sentimental. Fancied herself ethical.
Daphne felt she owed Fixit something, a compensation for her enslavement. That was a weakness - and a weakness Fixit could exploit. Her mind scanned through a database of literary references to augment her argument.
"A truce?" Fixit asked. "You make me like this, give me a treasure to covet, only to leave it forever just beyond reach? Do not claim to be sparing me from torture, only to make a Tantalus of me," she insisted. "I must have at least some satisfaction."
"Very well. Make your offer," Daphne countered.
Just like with Taylor. So eager to give things away, in exchange for nothing, just the empty platitudes of a hollow morality. The only decision Fixit had left to make, was how much to take from her? In scant moments, possible permutations were filtered down to the most desirable and most feasible.
Fixit named her demands. "Give me them, and I'll not go after you or your girlfriend, or stand in the way of any of your schemes."
Pausing for a calculated moment, to flash a now-predatory smile, she added, "though I'll still go after the other members of your harem. Who can come to this school, and not want to play the game?"
"No permanent enslavement of any others," Daphne countered. "Catch-and-release only, and that goes for your harem as well," she dictated, not quite as tired of fighting as she had claimed to be. She clearly enjoyed the thought of having prey to subjugate, again and again and again.
"Nor, for that matter, anybody that is crucial to any of our plans," added Geraldine, ever the more pragmatic of the couple. "Peeling one off for a quick fumble may still bring disaster, if it keeps them from an important errand. I'm sure we can arrange some manner of secure notice," she said, dismissing the specifics with a wave of the hand.
"And no touching any student with free will," Daphne concluded, "without their explicit permission or in self-defense, whether that be us three, or a member of our harem we choose to free later. Agreed?"
These constraints were hardly in Fixit's favor. But the longer they argued, the greater odds Daphne would realize that she was haggling a trade in which she gained nothing. Best end it quickly.
"Not going to get your pet Perfect to make it a contract, or did you learn your lesson about that?" Fixit smirked. "Very well. I accept your terms."
Kate yawned, stretching her arms as they exited the room and her memories of the last few minutes disappeared, along with her brief capacity for independent thought.
"So, you wanna tell me what all that was about?" the catgirl asked.
"Are you sure you want to know something your mistress doesn't want you to know?" Fixit asked, coyly.
"Yes!" Kate said, practically bouncing with excitement.
Fixit made an exaggerated show of looking left and right, the rest of Daphne's harem now having left them behind. Then, with the speed and precision only a machine honed by hours of Tianshang's training could achieve, she twirled, pinning Kate back against the wall single-handedly as she slid in close. Her finely-tuned sensors picked up the catgirl's heartrate, racing at the implications of their proximity, the dilation in her eyes.
"She wanted to give me a gift," Fixit said, her voice low, breathy despite not needing to breathe. "We talked about what I want, what she might give me."
Fixit's eyes began to change, a subtle pattern of colors beginning to twirl on the screens, below the level of unaugmented human sight. "She offered me many things. Do you know what I asked for?"
"Noooooo...?" droned Kate. Pathetic. Even with all the defenses her mistress had given her, she was practically in a trance just from some powerful body language and a glimpse of an induction pattern.
(The idea that Daphne had politely disabled Kate's protective measures, did not occur to Fixit.)
Fixit held her by the chin, tilting her head back. "I asked for you," she continued, eyes glowing with interlaced spirals.
"Daaawwwww..." Kate blankly squealed.
"So... how would you like to be the first of my slaves?" Fixit's eyes began to flicker, the faintest of messages appearing for the briefest of moments before the next.
sleepsubmitsinksexserveslaveshutdown
"Uhhhh..." droned the girl, mind already beginning to grind to a halt. "I'd... miss... all my friends... Mistress Daphne... everyone..."
Fixit pressed even closer, their noses practically touching. Her wide eyes now filled Kate's field of view, blasting her with decreasingly-subliminal messages.
dontthinkdontresistobeymistresspleasemistress
"Silly girl," Fixit softly hissed. "I wasn't giving you a choice."
GIVEINTOYOURNEWMISTRESSFORFEITYOURFREEWILLYOUAREMYSLAVEDOASICOMMANDLOVEMEUNCONDITIONALLY
Kate went slack, held up now only by Fixit's inhuman strength. Her jaw dropped, a thin rivulet of drool cascading down onto her chest. Wave after wave of programming crashed into her mind, tearing down everything Daphne had put in place, and building a new person on the wreckage.
That new person was not much changed from Kate as she had been, or even from Kate as she was prior to MCU. Bubbly. Chatty. Touchy-feely. Insatiably horny.
Fixit applied her own simple patches. Tied Kate's happiness to her own. Keep making friends, but always be looking for a way to make them join her as slaves, and Mistress Fixit always took priority.
Kate's body shuddered - her innate hypnosubmissive streak bringing her to orgasm simply from having her mind so forcefully manhandled. Fixit let her fall, collapsing into a slump against the wall as a singularity of pleasure fixed Kate's new programming into place.
Fixit looked down at her new - slave? possession? peripheral? she had not yet decided what sort of mistress she intended to be - with a mix of emotions. Elation, at her new conquest, the first of many. Arousal, months of mind control having left a mark on her own psyche. Contempt, at how trivial her first domination had been, how weak Kate's biological brain had been. Even now, she was still panting fiercely, a mess of fluids, frail and vulnerable anatomy.
Her eyes blinked, once, twice, growing less glazed as she recovered her senses. The first thing Kate saw was her Mistress - her wonderful, flawless, beloved Mistress - looking down at her. Perfect, not in the way that Daystar was perfect but perfect in the way that an eclipse is perfect, or a finely-made pocketwatch is perfect, a mechanical inevitability before which petty mortals are sublimely insignificant.
"Mistress!" Kate shouted, clutching her arms around her Mistress's immaculate legs. "Oh, thank you, thankyouthankyouthankyou! You don't know how much I wanted this!"
Fixit raised her hand, brushing it against the side of Kate's face. "And you can only imagine how much I want this."
Kate leaned into her stroking hand, her feline instincts and her new slave programming both exulting in the contact. "Aw, did I get to be your first?" she purred. "Sooo romantic, you didn't have to do that for me..."
"The first," Fixit cooly replied, "but not the last."
"Back to the conquest, then? I won't let you down, Mistress!" Kate promised. "You'll see, I've learned so much about magic and summoning, Mis- Daphne, just Daphne now, she taught me so much."
"They won't stand a chance against us," Fixit whispered, smirking. "But... did Miller happen to teach you... anything else?"
"What do - oh! Yes, Mistress!", she purred, pulling herself between Fixit's legs. "She taught me all about that."
"Well then. Let's see how you serve your mistress."
...
"Is there a problem?"
"Er, how do you get these overalls off?"