Alien AutoDoc Arm Appliance

That said, my lack of seeing her didn't push down my interest in what was going on with her (Lara, not Dr. Haverton) and whether I would ever get to have 'intimate time' with her, which I really wanted because I was suddenly super, super horny.

Of course, I didn't know what to do about her, but I was feeling really chipper and energetic since I'd gotten better from being out-sick (really, getting enhanced), so I probably had some overconfidence from that.

So that's the background.

MY major lesson for the day? Never, Ever play piano with an Alien AutoDoc Appliance in your right forearm, when you don't know how to (even temporarily) disable it.

I kept getting the buttons popping up in my vision and I could barely look at the music, which (believe me!) was needed since I didn't have the piece memorized and it wasn't as simple to play as it looked on paper.

I think, some percentage of the time I was playing, I was actually pressing buttons targeting girls in the choir, even the girl who sat behind me when I had to scratch my back because she kept bumping her knee there.

Ug.

Nothing much happened as a result of this, it was just super irritating for a while, but then I had lunch and things went back to normal.

At cross-country practice, since I'd been sick, Coach Clayton wanted me to sit out, but I didn't feel that bad. Really, I was itchy to get going again, so I snuck out and did a quick 3 mile route near campus by myself.

It felt fine. REALLY fine. I felt like I was flying, super easy and light on my feet and having a great day.

Running back, I found I was coming up behind the girls cross country team, at least the slower ones, since I could run way faster than they could.

Deciding to try out my arm, I aimed at the group of them and managed to carefully select, 'info'.

The AI said, "Delay. Target limit reached. Info available in..." the ticking glyphs translated to 2 days, which was fine by me, it was an idle curiosity.

Later, at home, I worked on my homework and found I had an easier time of it than I thought I'd have.

My teeth felt weird and my jaw was sore. After effects, for sure.

== Chapter: Wednesday ==

Missy wasn't in English.

Dr. Haverton wasn't in Chorus, and to any outside observer, a huge percentage of the soprano section of the chorus (not just the Sopranos, but some of the alto's, too) were out sick.

Lara wasn't there, for sure.

One of the Alto's was a music major and had directed before, so she took over.

Since we knew we were having trouble with the Mendohlsson, we worked on that some and frankly it was better. Since we were freed-up about asking questions (usually not wanting to seem stupid), we clarified some stuff and did better.

About halfway through, she had us switch to some songs we knew already as review and we had fun with them.

Just after dinner I got a text from Missy, wondering how I knew she looked bad. She said, "Lucky u said idea. Uber home 2bed fast. Tot collapse. SUPREME effort. Slackerz got gr8 ideaz."

I think she thought I was a slacker or something. Typical Missy.

Replying with carefully chosen words, "I was sick recently too. Sleep, aches, Brown pee. Doc said important to drink water until not dark anymore."

I got a thumbs up.

Thinking about it, the idea of getting a text from Missy seemed odd, at all. This one, looking at it, almost looked like she was thanking me? Still, saying I'm a slacker in the same sentence as trying to thank me? That was exactly her speed.

Giving up on that interaction, I got back to homework. My calc 3 seemed confusing. We were using a website that let the teacher assign homework problems and show the next units to cover.

After I'd done some of the problems, I looked back to the website's to-do list and realized I could trigger a test over fundamentals, so I did that.

I didn't do well at all.

This made the math website set up a really long to-learn list. Great, I thought, more work. Still, the idea that it was telling me what I needed to work on make some sense and I was happy I could know that.

It's odd to say, but I kind of zoned out and just started working the list. About 3 hours later, I realized I was caught up again and ready to work on that night's homework, which I got through with no problems.

It was past 10 pm and I was hungry!

Usually I'd have a bowl of cereal as a snack, but for some reason I got out a bag of frozen peas, heated them in the microwave, and poured apricot yogurt over them. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, until I got done eating and put the bowl in the sink. I was complimenting myself for being so inventive and it hit me, that should have been disgusting but it was really delicious.

Back upstairs, I opened my (hardcopy) chemistry text. I'd requested a deep knowledge base from it, and it was still counting down.

I decided to help by opening to the beginning and reading it like a novel. The problem sets made sense, and I could see on the teaser-questions (it had easy, medium, and hard questions at the ends of chapters) where some of them were trying to trick me.

Chem was fun, but I was getting tired.

Settling into bed, I read some manga (I liked anime and manga), jerked off (again, no porn, odd for me but I had sharp mental images of Lara... PLUS - for some reason - the girl who turned piano-music pages for me. Odd. Still, I cleaned up and rolled over to sleep.

== Chapter: Thursday ==

My energy level was increasing, I could tell. The AutoDoc's fixup must have done good things, I figured, I was fairly bouncing around as I walked, I had to control it or it might seem like I was on drugs or something. I just felt Sooo Good.

During classes I got distracted, though, I'll admit. Since I'd gotten caught up with calc 3, I decided to work ahead on my tablet during class and made some really good progress.

In physics we had an experiment to do, which didn't make sense at first until I went back and skimmed through the chapter again. My lab partner, Angela, did one of the steps wrong but I caught it and we got the "right" answer. This was unusual but it had helped to review the material to see where they wanted us to go with the ideas.

Angela, I should mention, was not anywhere close to being attractive. She wore a lot of black clothing and was definitely 'big boned', as they say. She had muscles, too, I figured, since she was on Track with me but she threw discus.

After physics lab we had physics class, where we worked on our write-ups. Angela was working next to me, so triggered my AutoDoc. I wanted to see a quicker version of the 'info' view, so I chose "Dive" as an experiment.

Dive turned Angela into a glowing outline in my vision. Above her head, in alien script, a huge amount of info displayed, and as I watched it updated itself.

The way the AutoDoc worked, I was discovering how to use it better the more I used it, and I realized I wasn't using it anywhere near its potential. Angela's primary display color, the writing, turned ugly and red, so I concentrated on what it was showing.

As I looked, the alien words re-focused. They didn't turn into English ones as much as I started figuring out what those words meant.

Angela had several problems, it showed, but it asked me to get my arm closer to her to diagnose faster.

We were sitting facing each other, and the class was busy talking through the write-ups so I could move around. I got up and came around to look at what she was writing, putting my arm on the back of her chair right next to her.

The display on her health stats went into fast-mode, and I could understand a lot of it but it was really just going too fast.

Standing there wasn't working. She wasn't working on anything interesting, so I went and washed my hands again, something I could always do in a lab. Since the sink faced the class, I could do it and watch her at the same time.

The display over her head, even from across the room, kept ticking over fast, tons of info showing and then condensing.

Some part of flexing my arm to wash my hands triggered some sequence of button pushes, and I realized I'd pushed the 'Realize' button, and I didn't even know what that did.

My teacher asked me why I was taking so long and I finished up and went back over and sat down.

Closing the display, I got back to the work and we finished our write up in class, something we almost never were able to do. I was kind of proud of myself.

In Chorus we still had half the class out sick including the prof, so I played piano again and tried to carefully control when I was triggering anything. The longer I used the 'muscle' and not my arm muscles, the better I was at not doing the wrong thing. Still, it took concentration.

Cross country practice was back to normal workouts, getting ready for our final meets of the year.

That night was a repeat of the previous nights, working and working away on homework, losing myself in it and then having a giant third meal.

About the only thing not back to normal was my digestive tract, which insisted on dumping out massive quantities that didn't correspond to what I'd eaten. There was no way that even my large meals could generate that much output, and it was a 'digestive distress' situation since my abdomen was rumbling all the time.

Going to bed early as a treat to myself (before midnight) I watched an anime, Monster Musume, a harem-comedy where protagonist has to deal with a variety of girls that were all monsters - a snake lady, a spider-lady, mermaid, lady centaur, etc. - who were oddball and non-human, but wanted to "mate" with him and were competing for his attentions.

He managed to get them settled and working in the same direction. It was really funny, and it reminded me of some other harem-comedies I'd seen and liked.

Of course, this led to me bringing up some porn and jerking off, but, ya know, gotta do what ya gotta do. After I finished, I was going to go to sleep like normal, but I got caught up in another episode of anime (an old series) and then found I wanted to jerk off again.

Falling asleep, I wondered if the monster ladies had special vaginas. Like, would the centaur lady have one between her front legs, or on the back? Would monsters in general have, like, tongues inside that could stimulate even more?

And, if girl-monsters had that, what would guy monsters have? Some kind of special cock that did things inside them to drive them wild? Or, if they had super-long tongues, could they give super-good oral to the girls?

Fun stuff. I slept, dreaming of being surrounded by women.

== Chapter: Friday ==

Friday was a repeat of Thursday. Not much to report, just classes, practice, and homeworks (yes, on Friday, I wanted to get caught up in all my classes, even econ, which was so boring it defied physics).

== Chapter: Saturday at the Races ==

Saturday morning we had our conference cross country meet. Conference level is the smallest grouping, but it was intramural so we competed against 4 nearby colleges - a couple of Catholic colleges, an auto-fixup technical college, and a community (county) college from the next county over. They weren't great, but we were bigger so we were favorites, if there was such a thing in IM meets.

We always do stretching, a warm-up run for about 10 minutes, and a little more stretching before a race. Coming back from the warm up to our base-camp area (populated by the assistant coach and whatever girls, frosh, and soph guys weren't running then), I got a big surprise.

Standing next to one of the coaches was Missy.

She was dressed in sweats, too, though upscale ones, looking bored and scrolling on her phone.

I ran with 6 other guys and we always warmed up together. As we got there, she looked up to us and singled me out by pointing. She didn't look happy.

Brian, a teammate with nearly no tact, said quietly, "Hey, Kev, Bitch patrol."

I split off as the other guys started taking off sweats. It was cool but always good to get used to the temperature before a race. You don't feel it more than 30 seconds into a race, no matter how cold it is, but for the first bit it can be hard if the wind is high and it's below freezing.

"Kevin."

We walked off to the side, away from the group. I was getting stares. This almost never happens. The women's team even noticed. Everybody knows, no talking before a race, nothing substantive. It's a high-focus thing, you gotta get your head in the game.

I stopped, "Sorry to say missy, you ... uh, you really have crap timing. Can this wait?"

"What?"

"I'm about to race. Pistol is ... 11 minutes."

"You're not running yet."

I realized she might have no way of knowing, but it was still rude. I didn't have patience for her. "Listen. You're profoundly clueless, I get that. Utterly self-absorbed. We have to get our heads into the race. No interruptions, it's a thing. Find me after the race. Don't care what it is. Someone dying?"

"Uh... No." She was stunned, I think, to be told off.

"Then find me later. I'm getting ready now. It's a team thing, too. We'll be done in... fuck, maybe 20 minutes, it's 3 miles. Oh, then I'll warm down, and we can talk. Got it? Meet you here, say, 10:30, maybe, if it's urgent."

Her acceptance of this said something, and she just said, "Okay."

I walked back to my area and started to strip off and get my racing spikes on.

Brian wanted to know what was happening, of course, and I told him she and I were working on a paper together and she had crap timing.

Dave, a quiet guy that doesn't usually say much, added, "Brave guy, Kevin. She's, like, captain psycho asshole bitch."

I burst out laughing, I didn't expect that from him.

"Uh..."

Tom, being overly serious, told us to focus and quiet, and we took that.

I did my final stretches and bounding (jumps straight up, bouncing, nothing serious but gets you limber), and we went over and lined up, then got started.

The race itself went pretty fast. I could tell one of the better guys on my team was having a bad day since I passed him, but the course had a loop and went through woods.

Our coach, she always said, "Speed up in turns and on the narrows, there's an instinct to slow down, so force the speed there," and "Arm swings drive cadence."

My legs and lungs were burning, like any normal race, but I felt pretty strong and kept pushing the pace to keep it at 90% pain.

All of running is pain management, dressed up with a little 'strategy' that includes running behind people to let the wind hit them first, and timing how far back from the finish line to do an all-out-sprint.

I didn't see the race clock as I came in, and I was really happy because it looked like I won, out of all six teams. Coach seemed pretty happy, so I just walked on through past the finish line and hoped I'd done well.

The second place was quite a ways behind me.

She came up and (being a coach), told me to keep moving and that I'd done well. I asked her what the time was and she said her stopwatch wasn't right so she was checking.

It turned out I'd run the (5k) in 17:05, which was a "conference" race record, though it wasn't our college record. That record was some insane 15:58 thing where some guy just barely got in under the already insane sixteen minute mark.

Still, it was good enough for First. The question in cross country isn't who you beat, to my mind, it's whether you ran as fast as you actually could run. I had run nearly that fast, probably, so I was happy enough. I usually didn't win races, but I had a bigger peak than most people, too.

Peaking is where, when you're working out heavily week after week, once you taper off to do lighter workouts for a week or so, your times start dropping nicely. The trick is not to taper too much too soon, or you don't do well in the races afterwards. It's cycles of hard/easy, forcing your muscles to do hard stuff but letting them heal stronger, then repeating that.

Coaches have to have an intuitive sense for how each runner is doing and help that runner find their own optimal patterns. It's not easy.

Going back to our area with the team, we were in good moods; we'd come in second in the conference (it depends a LOT on how fast your slowest runner is), and we were happy about that.

I looked around and Missy wasn't there. My mom or dad sometimes came to the meets, but they didn't this time. I didn't mind, it was kind of a distraction to have them there.

We did our thing and got on the bus, back to campus, into cars, and home.

Missy was waiting in her car by my house when I pulled in. Our town wasn't that big, and I guessed she'd looked up where I lived somehow.

She got out and came up to me. I didn't know what she wanted but I was tired from the race and super-super-super hungry. "Hey. You want to talk, follow me, I GOTTA get some breakfast."

She shrugged and followed me in.

Mom was there (dad and my sisters were out), making some kind of potato salad for a church thing, she said. We chatted after I introduced Missy as a 'friend from English class' and Mom just kind of rolled with it. I didn't usually bring home people, much less girls, and even the fact that Missy was there didn't seem to phase her.

Missy seemed to be willing to follow me anywhere. As I walked, she kind of stayed near me.

I grabbed a banana, an apple, and then a yogurt from the fridge, and motioned to Missy to follow me, "Mom, we'll be downstairs if you need us."

"I'm headed over to the church for the rummage sale as soon as I finish this, it'd be great if you could stop by and help. Your father and sisters are already over there."

I begged off that I was tired from the race and had a ton of homework, which had the advantage of being the truth.

My bedroom had shifted to be the basement when my older sisters got to be too violently antagonistic to share a room. I liked it plenty - a bedroom with a door, a kitchen of my own sorta, a bathroom with a shower and big jacuzzi we kept covered because it usually smelled, etc. The people that owned the house before us had fixed it up pretty nicely.

Of course, when I'd moved down there I had to go through all the boxes and help mom and dad pitch out a bunch of old stuff, put the remainder into the crawl space, and scrub the accumulated dust and grime from ten years of being a storeroom. I'd only done a halfhearted job at that; there was a thick layer of dust everywhere and the place needed a different paint color. Two walls were painted with deep purple and black stripes for no real reason and I'd been too lazy to paint them.

Missy looked around like she was disgusted with the whole setup, which made me laugh out loud.

Hand on hip, she said, "What??!?!?"

I was still laughing. "You're turning your nose up, you're hoity-toity fancy clothes and no sense of how real people live. Get off your horse. This is a nice room, and it's mine. Bigger than a dorm room, for sure. Don't like it, leave. I have no idea why you're here anyway."

"I don't either."

I stopped and set down my gym bag next to the washing machine in the partially-separated laundry area (yes, a utilitarian room). "Ooooookay?"

She just watched me as I got out my cross country locker contents (for the week) and put them in the washer.

"I think I'm pissed at you, but I'm not sure why."

"I did something"?

"You made me sick."

"And... how do you figure that?"

"You told me, right before I got sick, I was gonna get sick, and have brown pee. I totally did. That's NOT a normal symptom. Ergo, you did it to me. So... I'm pissed."

"You don't sound pissed."

She paused, contemplating something.

After a minute watching me, she said, "You won the race."

I smiled widely, "Yeah! I did. Very cool. I haven't won many times. Usually I'm more middle-of-the-pack." I looked at her. She was leaning against an old kitchen chair I kept there to put laundry baskets on. "You didn't come here to tell me that."