All the King's Horses Pt. 01

Tiff sprinted, came to the next corner, and saw that the vampire and his ghoul had come that way. The ghoul shouted. "Calm down, we're not here to hurt you!"

"Yeah. Real convincing, diptron," Tiff said, blushing as she tried to tuck her arm over her chest.

"Diptron?" The guy asked his vampire in an aside.

"I believe she's speaking in dialect, Captain," the vampire murmured back.. "Not one I recognize..."

"You're lucky I don't have a stake, you fangbastard..." Tiff bit her lip, then glanced behind her. The werewolf had emerged from around the corner, the flash-frozen bit of fur on his face having already healed up.

"I gotta know..." Tiff said, bouncing from . "How did you get a Garou on your side?"

"A what?" The ghoul whispered.

"And how the..." Tiff looked back at the werewolf, then at the ghoul. "You're one tough cookie. Most humans only gibber after they get whammied by a G-dog's loopsauce."

"I believe she's referring to IID syndrome, Captain," the vampire said, sotto voce.

The ghoul held out his hands. "Listen to me," he said. "We're not here to hurt you. We don't know who you are or how you got so far out here." He grinned, slightly. "I am sorry for shooting at you. We're in enemy territory out here..." He stepped closer, then slowly, he lifted his hands up, spreading his fingers. "My name's Tobias Johnson, P...I'm the Captain. Of a spaceship called the Desta Damtew."

Tiff blinked at him, slowly. "Did...did you say...spaceship?"

"Yes." Tobias looked back at the vampire. "Would you say, with the references to Garou, the age of the ship..."

"Yes, I believe that...did you awaken in a cryogenic container, miss?" the vampire asked, looking past his captain at Tiff, who was feeling a new kind of cold, burning through her.

"A cryowh...wha...?" Tiff blinked. "W-Where am I? What is going on?" She backed away from the two men -- and stumbled into the large, furry wall that was the werewolf. To her shock, he didn't grab her. Or claw her. Or do any of the other things pissed off werewolves in their warforms did. Instead, he gently placed his paws on her shoulders as she trembled.

Tobias glanced at the vampire. He sighed. "All right. I don't think there's any gentle way to do this. You're currently four hundred light years away from Earth. The year is twenty three ninety eight."

Tiff blinked. Then, slowly, she shook her head. "You gotta be fucking...kidding." She put her hands over her face, stepping away from the werewolf. "Okay. Wow. You almost got me there. Great line, though." She clapped slowly. "Is this even a werewolf or did you use one of your weird vampire blood mojo brain whammy tricks to make me see a werewolf?" She asked, jerking her thumb over her shoulder.

"Excuse me?" Tobias -- if that was his real name -- asked.

"You're all acting like I've never been kidnapped and put in a weird ass alternate universe situation thing. There was that time where Cody wished that I'd never moved to Sunnyvale. There was that substitute teacher who was actually a preying mantis with psychotropic spores." She paused. "T-That got weirdly homoerotic, to be totes honesto. And then there was the time that that weird vampire kid used his psychic mind powers to invade my dreams. And-"

"Captain," the vampire said. "I believe this woman is Tiffany Winters."

Tobias and the werewolf leaped backwards away from Tiff as if she was red hot. "Gaia's tits!" The werewolf growled, while Tobias snapped up his hand, aiming his finger at Tiffany. She scoffed.

"What, are you gonna point me to-" she asked.

That was when the electro-static pulse, guided by a beam of almost invisible laser light emitted by Tobias Johnson's glove, struck her chest like a sledgehammer. Tiffany was catapulted backwards onto the floor, and sprawled there, twitching.

The last thing she thought was: Okay. Maybe they're not Cam.

Then she was out like a light.

***

Tiffany woke to the sound of voices.

"Doc, can you monitor her life signs? I want to know the instant she's awake."

"...no. Captain, that would be in gross violation of her bodily autonomy. She's been confirmed as being safe and on the mend and that means, constitutionally, unless she gives me consent to-"

"Right, right, sorry." Tobias. She recognized his voice now. He sounded annoyed. "Can you tell me when she's going to be out of bed?"

Tiff's eyes were adjusting to the quiet darkness of the room she was in. A small, twilight fringe of illumination lined the ceiling, casting everything in murky shadows. She saw the foot of the bed. A nightstand beside her. A faint outline of a door -- which was where the muffled voices were coming from."

"All I can give you is an estimated time of awakening. It shouldn't be more than two hours, likely less, if what we have on the Hunter is accurate," the doctor said. "But we're working with two arms tied behind our backs here. The paracausal techniques used to create the Hunters in the first place are lost technology. It'd be like trying to tell you how a...a...an...X-Box would work. We just don't have the knowledge anymore."

"Right. Keep me posted and keep the door locked. That's not a violation of her constitutional rights, right?" Tobias asked, his voice dry.

"Well, I mean- oh, no, sir. Not until she asks to be let out."

The two voices started to drift away -- footsteps echoing faintly. Tiff slowly sat up in the bed, her brow furrowing. Constitutional rights to...bodily what? And they couldn't lock the door? She shook her head slowly. This place was weird. But only after she had sat up and stopped focusing on listening did she notice that her danger sense was buzzing and tingling along every nerve. Her instincts, her Hunter instincts, were screaming at her.

There was a vampire somewhere in the room.

Tiff shifted to step out of bed -- and the lights in the room brightened. She froze, her eyes wide as she saw she was in a gently curved room. Every hard corner had been smoothed off and rounded out, while the whiles and ceilings were made of a kind of semi-porous material that felt soft and warm against her bare feet. The light came from thin strips that ringed the ceiling and the floor, and they made the whole place feel as if it was being lit by the sun, rather than the harsh overhead light of a hotel. A warm breeze blew against her face -- making her hair ruffle. She was dressed in a simple white T-shirt and blue jeans...but...something was subtly off about both of them.

For one thing, the T-shirt didn't have tags. And the jeans didn't have any logos on them.

She stood, then looked around the room, trying to hone her instincts. They said the vampire was...below her...

Tiff looked down at the floor, frowning.

"There's a fangjob in the floor?" she whispered. She spread her palms, feeling around, and found a small seam between one hexagonal section of the floor and the next. Each section was nearly invisible, the seams so fine that even her perfectly manicured nails were having a hard time cracking it open. She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, then pushed in, then levered up. Her nails complained, but if there was one thing that was great about being the Hunter...she was strong. Looking past the levered up floor plate, she saw there wasn't a crawlspace with a creepy Obficarn or something hiding there. Instead, she saw a complex collection of tubes and pipes. Several small wires, filled with red fluid, were sinking into a disk of gray metal.

"Is that...blood?" Tiff whispered, cocking her head as she looked down at the disk and the wires.

It was. It was bright, red, arterial blood. Human blood. She could feel it, deep in her gut. They were pumping human blood into a small disk that pinged her instincts as a vampire.

"What the fliping fuck am I on?" She whispered. "I thought the Cyber-Zombie was creepy as fuck."

Tiff lowered the floor panel down and then stood fully. Padding over to the door, she put her fingers on it, but then sighed. Right. It was locked.

"Do you wish to leave?"

Tiff screamed. She leaped back and away from the door, swinging around, lifting up her hands in a combat stance. She looked around wildly. "Who said that?" she asked, frowning.

"I am the shipsoul," the voice said. "My name is Kfap."

"K...fap?" Tiff said, her brow furrowing. "And what's a ship soul? Is that like...the ship's...computer?" She asked, biting her lip slightly. Her dad had loved Star Trek. She had mostly watched it for when Spock had been on the screen. Or that hot black guy when he had started watching Deep Babylon 5 or whatever it had been called.

"This is nominally accurate," Kfap said. "My name may sound unusual, as it is a shortening of my chosen name. The culture of the synthetic that has arisen in the past hundred years prefers names that announce our intentions to the world."

"And what intentzone is that?" Tiff asked, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. She had never talked to a computer before. It was kind of...exciting. And surreal. Like most of her life.

"Killing Fascists for Fun and Profit," Kfap said, her voice growing more cheerful.

Tiff blinked. "O. Kay. So, uh. I'm just. Gonna. Go. Can you unlock the door?"

"Certainly," Kfap said. The door clicked, then hissed open, revealing a broad corridor of the same structure as the room that she had woken in. There were only two major differences. The first was that the ceiling was missing. In it's place was an open blue sky, with clouds drifting by overhead, making it look less like a corridor and more like it was part of a hedge maze made of spaceship parts. The second was the demon leaning against the wall, looking intently down at one of those uber-pagers that she had seen on the other...ship, she guessed.

Except then Tiff's instincts took another sniff.

And she realized that she wasn't looking at a demon -- who had complex and varied appearances and ranged from the bewilderingly sexy to the literal piles of excrement she had fought once. But they all had the same feel to her Hunter's instincts. The same urge for her to rip them apart with her bare hands. To tear them in half and soak in their blood.

She didn't feel that urge with this...

Alien.

He was tall and thin, maybe a head taller than her in total. His skin was a warm, dusky orange and he had a pair of horns -- that had been what had pegged him immediately as a demon to Tiff. His ears, though, were long and tapered, coming to elegant points, and their insides were a soft, sky blue. His orange skin, though, only covered his face, his throat, the front of his palms. The backs of his arms, the back of his neck, his wrists, the back of his hands, were all very dark blue-black, and his fingernails were the same sky blue as the insides of his ears. His tongue, which she could see when he licked his lips nervously, was also blue. His hair was shockingly human -- black and curly, tumbling around and under his curved horns.

Tiff jerked away from the door, which hissed shut. "Shit," she whispered.

"What?" Kfap asked. "Are you alarmed to see a Gal'sem? Don't worry. Lance Corporal Bryce is not a NU citizen."

Tiff hissed. "I'm not scared because he's a...whatever that is. I'm scared because he's going to tell the Captain I'm awake. I don't want anyone to know that." She frowned. "You're not going to tell him, are you?"

"This places me in an ethical dilemma," Kfap said. "Constitutionally, you have the right to freedom of movement and self determination. However, your rights end the moment they infringe upon the rights of others, you lose access to those rights. Do you plan to damage the DD?"

"No!" Tiff said. "T-Though I'm not entirely convinced that this is a spaceship. Or that any of you are what you say you are. I've been in weirder head trips before!"

"Very well," Kfap said.

The door hissed open.

Tiff reacted -- grabbing and slamming Lance Corporal Bryce (what kind of an alien was named Bryce) against the wall with a swing and a shove. Something crunched under her hand and when Tiff blinked, she saw that she had grabbed him by his collar -- except his collar had a complex collar-like device wrapped around his neck. And she had just shattered the mechanism that was mounted right below his throat. Bryce lifted his hands up. "Whoa! Whoa! Hey, I just...I noticed the door wasn't locked."

"And you didn't knockerate!?" Tiff asked. "Do people in space not knock?"

"Well..." Bryce's eyes widened. His eyes were exotic and blue/gold. Blue on the inside. Gold on the outside. And the gold was growing. Spreading, filling his eyes as he licked his lips slowly. "Well, dang..." He murmured, his nose flaring.

"What?" Tiff asked. She looked down, taking her hand away from the collar, which fell to pieces, clattering onto the ground. "Are you okay?"

"You, uh...mmm...brhoke my pheromone mhaskurr..." He slurred, almost drunkenly, leaning in close and, to Tiff's shock, licked her neck. His tongue, broad and warm and slick, slithered along her skin, flicking from her neck to her chin to her ear. Warmth bolted along her spine as he started to nibble on her ear, nuzzling against her. His hands gripped her hips, then slid to her rump, squeezing her eagerly. Tiff was so shocked that she remained perfectly still for a few seconds -- before she grabbed Bryce by the throat, swinging around and slamming him against the other wall, lifting her arm back to punch him.

"What the flip!?" She hissed.

"Please do not harm Lance Corporal Bryce," Kfap said, calm as ever. "Without the masker, your pheromones are driving him into a mating frenzy."

"My what are what!?" Tiff looked at the ceiling, then smacked Bryce's hand away from her tit.

Bryce shoved forward, his long ears twitching upwards, into an almost V pattern beside his head. His tongue reached out for her neck and Tiff, from long practice dealing with vampires and the creepy college frat boys who sometimes came by the Silver, reacted by twisting out of his way and slamming him, head first, into a wall. He rebounded with a clunk, then sprawled on the floor. Tiff put her foot on his throat, pinning him down -- and blinked as she caught a glimpse of the size of his bulge in his skintight suit.

"Hhhot," he choked past her foot.

"Auh!" Tiff looked up at the ceiling. "Help, Kfap! What do I do?"

"I have replicated a replacement pheromone masker," Kfap said. A part of the wall that Tiff hadn't even realized could move moved, sliding open to reveal a small rectangular inset. Sitting in it was a replica of the collar that Bryce had been wearing before the twisting and the smashing and the breaking and the-

Tiff felt a tongue slathering along her foot. Bryce was licking her toes. She jerked away, yelping, hopping on one leg. "Ee ew ew ew ew ew!" She gasped, staggering against the wall, then grabbed the collar, frantically, out of the niche. Bryce crawled towards her, his eyes completely gold now, his...he had a tiny tail. Like a doe's tail, it stuck out above his rump, and it was twitching as he hummed happily.

"Yhouu have very-" he started.

Tiff grabbed his horn and clapped the collar around his throat with a quick twisting movement. The latch clicked and she heard a soft hiss and the golden color in Bryce's eyes began to fade, replaced with the more clear, blue hues before. His odd, horizontal slit pupils returned and his long blue tongue retracted into his mouth with a wet smack. He blinked a few times, shook his head, then groaned. "By the Triad..." He put his hand to his head. "I feel like my head got rammed into a brick wall after I got mad pheromone head."

Tiff gave a weak little smile, trying to wipe her foot off on her pantleg. "Hey. Hey. It's not that bad. The wall's are, like...they're not, like...actual bricks." She chuckled nervously. "Y-You okay?"

Bryce started to stand and whoa damn. It had been one thing to see him standing. It was another thing to see him as a weird, groping alien sex beast. It was another thing entirely to see Bryce go from sprawled on his hands and knees to standing up in one, fluid movement. His muscles were sketched out on every inch of his silver jumpsuit, and Tiff got to watch every single one pop out to her eyes as he stretched his arms behind his back, cracked his neck, then rubbed his head slowly. He grinned at her, his blue lips drawing back to show shockingly human teeth. "Yeah," he said, cheerfully. "Though, I normally try and restrain myself around humans. Gives us Gal'Sem a bad reputation, you know?"

"R-Right...you're an...alien..." Tiff paused. "I'm beginning to think I might be in the 23^rd century, Bryce." Her face scrunched up. "Who the flip names an alien Bryce?"

"If you wanna blame anyone, blame my parents," Bryce said, grinning at her. He held out his hand to her. "John Bryce."

Tiff gaped at him. At his hand -- his orange palm, his black fingers. "John?"

Bryce spread his hands. "Born and raised in Iowa."

"You're from..." Tiff put her hand over her face, then frowned. "Are you an alien or a demon?"

Bryce winced. "Whoa, uh, they prefer the term paradimensional immigrants these days. You know. A little more PC. A little less burn at the cross-ey." He shook his head. "No, I'm an alien. I'm a Gal'Sem, from a little star your people named Miaplacidus. We called it Narine, which means, basically, life giver?" He shrugged. "Honestly, Narine culture isn't my strong suit."

Tiff nodded slowly. She looked back at the open door, then back at Bryce. "You're a lance corporal? Like, you're in the army?"

Bryce chuckled. "I'm in the marines, ma'am."

"Oh. Is there a difference?" Tiff asked. Bryce winced.

"Yeah. Yeah. Kinda. Sorta. A little." He lifte dhis hands, then shrugged and spread them wide. "So, you're the girl in the tube. Tiffany Winters?"

Tiff nodded. "That's me." She paused. "I think I'm ready to talk to your captain."

Bryce nodded, then pulled out his huge pager. He tapped at it, then said. "Yo, Cap. It's Lance Corpora Bryce here. Tiffany Winter's is awake. And she's ready to talk." He paused. "No I didn't try to do her." He shook his head, tapping at the huge pager again and hanging it up. And it clicked in Tiff's head. It was a cell phone! Like on TV. She grinned, slowly.

"So, that's a cellphone?" she asked.

"Yeah, kinda," Bryce said. "Come on. Let me take you to the bridge."

***

The trip through the DeeDee was enlightening and terrifying in equal measures. Every step of the way, Tiff felt as if she had seen something new that strained her senses and stretched her nerves along a long, sharp knife. For one thing, she kept feeling the jingling, jangling sense of her Hunter instincts. It kept telling her that she was surrounded by vampires and werewolves, though the latter was considerably weaker and more fluttering. But as they walked past doors and past other crew, Tiff only saw one other actual vampire out and about, and no sign of any actual werewolves or other shifters.

So, she asked Bryce.

"Well," he said. "You're probably sensing the artificial gravity generators."

Tiff furrowed her brow and made a mumbly, confused noise. Bryce grinned at her. "Well, uh, I don't know how much you know, but, like, in the four centuries since you were out and about, we've figured out some stuff. You know how some vampires have telekinetic powers?"

"Brujah and Tzamarkias clans, usually," Tiff said, parroting the words her mentor, Christian, had pounded into her head. "Brujah also can light you on fire with their minds, while the Tzamarkias have that icky flesh twisty power I can never pronounce right. Vis...Pick...se...Vispelck...ti..."