Vitality

"Could be the venom sacs are right inside the vine? Maybe it needs to get the sacs inside your body in order to secrete?"

"That makes sense. Note that."

"Acknowledged. Tala..."

"I know."

"There are several venoms that precede 322 secretion. These are probably your last moments of sanity."

"Yeah."

"So... is there anything you want me to record?"

The vines covering Tala's body twisted, and a million needle-like bristles unfurled. Far too thin for the naked eye to perceive, but Tala felt them pierce her epidermis. It was, nominally, painful; her conditioning had dulled her nerves, silenced her pain receptors, and taught her to dismiss any sensations that happened to permeate her physical resilience. As always, she made a note of the feeling, and focused without reaction or emotion.

"Just note down what happens."

"I meant... I meant your last words."

"Oh. Sure. Just... I'm glad I'm doing this."

"Acknowledged."

"And I'm glad you're here."

Lucie sighed wearily, and resigned herself to the events ahead. "So am I, I guess."

There was a minute of silence. Lucie stood patiently, staring at the intercom, waiting for what would come next.

Those millions of needles twitched in unison and each one injected a microscopic droplet of fluid underneath Tala's skin. Over the intercom, Lucie heard a long note of discomforted murmuring as Venom 318 instantly unblocked every pain receptor in Tala's body, reversing every bit of conditioning she'd ever undergone in a second. For the first time in over a decade, she felt pain. Amplified pain, a white-hot, enveloping agony that coated her like the suit she'd discarded. It was like the first pain she'd ever felt.

The impulse to scream was unbearable. Through the shock and the agony, she tried to steady her thoughts, and pull herself back to basics. Breathing techniques, mantras. But the pain built and built, overwhelming Tala's thoughts, her long-memorised techniques yielding no help. She attempted to break free, her strong arms and back straining against the vines, which in turn clamped tighter. Beneath the raging glove of pain covering her body, she felt her circulation compromised, pins and needles, a numbness spreading from her fingertips -- but not one that blocked this pain.

Tala had begun screaming before she'd realised it. Unable to move or still the pain, it was the last thing her body could do. Every breath was an elongated shriek of sincere torment. From moment to moment, her eyes were screwed shut, or wide open, swivelling in their sockets, looking for escape. The needles twitched and agitated her skin further, and the screaming went on.

"Lucie!" Her name slurred through the distorted shrieks saturating the intercom. Lucie stopped typing notes and turned back to the panel.

"Go ahead, Tala."

The screaming didn't stop. It was a continuous sound, broken only by sharp breaths and the words she managed to force out, each one barely intelligible.

"Kill... m... me..."

"I won't." An especially high pitched, grating howl came in response.

"P... lease..." came the low, guttural sob.

"My superior, when she was still sane, ordered me not to interfere. I will continue to follow that order."

Another long string of screams. The intercom speaker was a wall of tinny noise. Lucie stood silent and suppressed the impulse to act while her mentor and friend screamed like a newborn, helpless, a short distance away beneath the earth. They had withstood every form of sensory overload, often together. Despite her flatly suppressed reflexes, the fact that there was something that could undo that resilience instantaneously, that could reduce Tala to this, seeded real fear in Lucie's belly. She had never seriously imagined that the veteran would be brought to the point of begging for death, in spite of all probability.

In the freezing, humid cellar, Tala's limbs jerked hopelessly against the vines, every movement eliciting fresh pain from the needles. But by now, it was involuntary. The single vine that had penetrated her cunt, balling up inside her like tangled rope, was now becoming engorged, stretching her hole wide. That pain, too, was now impossible to stand; Tala had none of the mental or physical instruments of endurance at her disposal that she'd become accustomed to. All of this was like feeling for the first time, and she yearned, in futility, to pass out and be spared the agony for another moment.

The now wrist-thick vine that was stretching her vagina unravelled, sliding back out of her hole caked in the wetness that she herself had forced her body to produce minutes earlier. Tala screamed through gritted teeth at the movement, which dragged at her opening so forcefully that it threatened prolapse. With roughly twelve inches' length withdrawn, it slid back inside, balling up within her again. The pain of reinsertion was so vivid, so visceral, that Tala's screams became a stultified whimper, and tears flooded down her cheeks. She continued to produce half-sobbed, barely pronounced wails as the mass pulled again, unravelling out of her once more, before snaking back inside her. Her fingers and toes trembled, jerking, making futile grasping motions. Her spine, although fixed in position by the vines, spasmed, attempting to arch and pull in different directions as her whole body searched for escape. The plant was slow-moving, lacking the physical capacity for the kind of harsh drilling motions she'd been subjected to in the Chamber, but with her body alight with pain, the slow, slithering copulation of this vine was far beyond endurable.

"Tala? Requesting update if you're able." Quiet, quivering sobs were barely audible through the tiny speaker.

Tala's body began to go limp from exhaustion, the condensation sheen on her tightly-bound, prostrate anatomy now saturated with sweat. Still in the same position she'd willingly adopted, she was now effectively suspended in place by the hardened tangle of vines. Her buttocks, inner thighs, and vulva were the only parts of her that were visibly moving, drawn back and forth by the methodical sliding of the massive tendril.

More, larger needles opened up on the moving limb, scraping in and out of her. The shock woke her up slightly, and her moaning leapt to a shriek for a few seconds, before dying down once more. The direction of these bristles corresponded to that of the insertion, and they pierced and scraped her labia and clitoris with every horribly long stroke.

"Lu... cie" she managed, again begging for her partner's assistance.

"I'm here, Tala. Do you have an update for me?"

"...hurts." She sounded timid, and barely conscious.

"What hurts?"

"Ev... every..."

The needles torturing her vagina became coated with an oily fluid, and every thrust injected Venom 319 into every part of her pudenda and internal flesh.

The pain inverted. Flipped, like a switch. It was still pain; acute, hot, unimaginable pain. The new venom travelled through her bloodstream and into her brain, rewriting her sensory perception. Her pain receptors still screaming, the signal was now transmuted into sheer pleasure.

Though extreme, it was a still, peaceful euphoria, yet quietly alive with the buzzing agony that fuelled it from beneath. It shrouded her. Her face muscles, still aching from what felt like an eternity of screaming and contortion, quivered into an immersed, introspective smile. From her stretched cunt and her tingling clit all the way to her lips, soothing waves of joyful sexual feeling tantalised her body.

She let out a few grateful moans, her voice still hoarse.

"Tala? You're still there?"

It was a pleasure she hadn't known in many years, or perhaps in her entire life. Sensual, loving, vital. It seemed to radiate beyond the confines of her body. Her skin felt energised. The slow furling and unfurling of the meaty vine in her pussy seemed to flood her body with glowing, golden rapture. She desperately wanted to writhe with the ecstasy of it, but the vines and their millions of needles kept her still. In this moment, though, as surging, pulsing sexuality filled her to the brim, she was happier than she could express to be trapped in the plant's embrace.

Lucie held her ear close to the speaker. Tala's purring moans were laden with long, adoring yesses; it was perhaps more disquieting than the torture from moments before.

"Tala."

"Oh... my god, yes..."

"Tala, are you lucid?"

"Lucie, I'm... I love it, it's..." more moans followed. Sweet, soft. Warm. Lucie had no concept of her sturdy, indomitable mentor melting into ecstasy like this. It sounded sexual. On Lucie's first night as an Inductee, her dorm had engaged in mass cunnilingus, naively thinking it would prepare them for the time ahead. It was the last time in her life she had heard such unwithheld and untainted pleasure, before a career of sexual torture had hardened her mind and libido beyond repair.

"I'm noting that you appear to be in a state of extreme pleasure. Is that accurate?"

Lucie couldn't see Tala's gurning jaw, or her fluttering eyelids. "Hnnnrrrg. Yynnss."

"Acknowledged."

Tala's vision blurred, and so did her thoughts. Holding on to a baseline seemed pointless; the golden, vibrational throb being injected under her skin and fucked into her cunt was a private universe in which she abided. Her fingers trembled. Her lips, too, still fixed in a warped grin, her teeth clenched tight. The more it hurt her, the more transcendentally good she felt.

She giggled, titillated by the tip of another, more slender vine sliding inside her anus. It felt cold, perhaps more skin-like than the others, with the absence of piercing needles. Smoothness. Her abdomen tightened as it penetrated deeper and deeper, progressively widening further down the limb, her hole another source of acute pain that her altered brain greedily rewrote and clamoured for more of. Its tip came to rest somewhere behind her navel. Unlike the branch churning inside her pussy, it stopped moving and didn't start again. It seemed to harden in place, trembling slightly under its own tension.

Deep in Tala's body, a sphincter at the tip of that vine began to gush a smooth amber-coloured liquid. The supply was ample, and constant. It flooded her intestines and washed through, permeating her bowel membranes and forcing her body to absorb an unobstructed surge of Venom 320.

Lucie jumped a little at the sound of a fresh, howling scream, with several more following after. The venomous fluid washing through Tala's intestines all the way down to her anus, plugged watertight by the vine, burned and corroded; the pain set her senses alight tenfold. While the original agony had enveloped her skin and danced like an oil fire, this was a volcanic eruption that roared through her pelvis. The effect of 319 was now even more pronounced: this nuclear pain, that felt like her organs were being scalded and ripped from her body, was instantaneously remade in a chorus of heavenly violence that sang with exalted bliss from her quivering anus to every nerve ending in her body.

Tala couldn't help but resume screaming. Orgasm suppression was, of course, core to her training, and the sensation was all but unknown to her. The first she'd felt in years was compounded by cascades more, mere seconds later. Every muscle in her body tightened into a cramped, solid knot, her pelvic floor the origin point of numerous, unending shockwaves of disabling tension. Capillaries burst throughout, lending her skin, already reddened by heightened blood pressure, a crimson marble texture. Finally, involuntarily, she thrashed violently enough to move the interlocking vines just a little; the tiniest crack, as her body seized with orgasmic frenzy. At the pinnacle of each one, her mind vacated itself of thought, her hearing and vision giving way to ringing tinnitus and white light. Her nostrils flared. Her mouth gaped open in a series of discordant screams that emptied her lungs with each breath. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, bloodshot.

"The compromised Retriever has returned to what seems like a state of extraordinary pain," Lucie recorded, gritting her teeth a little. "Since the Retriever removed her suit before engaging the plant, there is no biofeedback data whatsoever. Uncertain which venom has produced which response, or whether the screams are due to external stimuli or the effects of chemicals." She paused, listening intently to the abrasive screaming that pierced out of the speaker. "It is my opinion that this encounter was conducted without adequate forethought or preparation."

At the briefest lull between climactic spikes, Tala found the wherewithal to shriek Lucie's name.

"You have an update?"

"Lucie, you-" another thirty seconds of screaming "-you have... to... feel this." Lucie let the following series of shrieks expire before answering.

"No thank you, Tala."

"Pleaaaassss-uh." It was a scream all of its own. "Please. Please. I want you with me. Please."

"I'm not coming down there. Look at yourself. I don't want to end up like that."

"Yessss you do." Low, guttural. "You do. You do. You do. Please. Please. You want this. You wuuugghh-"

"Compromised Retriever now ranting and demanding that remaining crew agree to be trapped by same specimen. It is my view that she is not lucid and is unaware of her own behaviour."

Another orgasm drew out a long shriek into a breathless wheeze. "It's so good it's so good it's so good..."

"Can you please be specific?"

"Can't stop cummmmming" Tala growled, barely able to form the words. "It'sss making me... I'm... hap... py..." her next orgasm coincided with an urgent engorgement of the branch that was fucking her, causing her pussy to stretch wider by roughly another third. Her scream was completely silent. She couldn't draw breath until the rippling, cascading muscle contractions relaxed their grip. Her next words were a whimpered squeal.

"Lucie, please."

"No." Lucie shut off the intercom before another one of Tala's screams could distort the signal again. She mused over the past several minutes, and resumed her note taking.

"Thus far, progression of assimilation into the plant body is fairly typical, in line with what few other cases have been documented." She stared out of the window for a few seconds at the crumbled stonework. "The only aberration appears to be the refusal on the part of the specimen to engage with a working, standard-issue Dummy. Retriever Tala's hypothesis that the advanced age of the specimen may contribute to reduced aggression or lack of venom potency has apparently proven false. Retriever Tala should, regrettably, be considered Retired."

In the cellar, the main stem stirred, floral appendages flexing in the haunting ambient light. Tala, crouched on the cracked, wet stone tiles, screamed unabated as successive overloads of full-body pain continued to be transmuted into a procession of rapturous orgasms, her anus and cunt stretched wide by thick, pulsing vines; the latter still writhing and churning in and out of her, the former cheerfully pumping acidic poison into her guts.

Another of the thicker vines had lifted off the floor, and was tracing a path along her belly, over the network of tendrils that was increasingly becoming embedded, integrated into her skin. It made a slow beeline for her chin, its length sticking to her torso and applying forceful pressure wherever it touched. Between her breasts, up along the central line of her trachea. It slithered up to her bottom lip.

Tala had not had a coherent thought in some time, now. Were the onslaught to relent, she might have regained some of herself. She no longer wanted to. She was a throbbing mass of impulses, reverberating pleasure rooted in endless, overwhelming suffering. She had given herself to the deluge of brutal erogeny supplied by the vines digging into her skin and the chemicals flooding her system.

She barely registered the vine entering her mouth, but reflexively, through the existential hammering of, by now, hundreds of psychotropic orgasms, she closed her lips around it in a moist and grateful kiss, willingly sucking it into her throat in spite of the inevitability of its violation.

It lodged somewhere around her collarbone, and like the others, it too became engorged, thickening rapidly with the buildup of fluid. Behind her uvula, a clump of needling fibres unfolded and tended upwards, burrowing through the soft flesh of her throat, slinking into the Medulla oblongata, and parting ways as they travelled further up, nestling their tips in every region of her brain. The vine that had now lodged her jaw wide and obstructed her throat completely flexed, tensed horribly hard, and relaxed again, releasing its dose of Venom 321 throughout Tala's cerebrum.

Tala's screams, now muffled by the vine in her mouth, went silent. Her brain gushed serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin; her perception of time collapsed. The orgasms that had previously roared through her body every few seconds, and the storm of horrendous ecstasy that birthed them, were driven to an extremity and frequency so acute that they made up the singular rhythm of her being, a white-hot pulse that throbbed at a hundred beats per second.

Her conscious mind was gone. There were no thoughts left, and no Tala to think them. Her still-living body jerked and twitched on the wet stone, a vessel encasing the surging, all-consuming pleasure that was all that remained of her.

The first vine to have violated her body shrank to roughly half its size as it gushed its payload of Venom 322 into the distended hollow of her pussy.

--

In the cockpit, Lucie activated the distress signal. She knew she would regret the breach. Either there was something of value to retrieve from studying Tala's body, or somehow -- she had not a clue how -- she might yet bring her friend home.

Snug in her flexsuit, she departed the craft, and traced Tala's steps into the barely-preserved rooms beneath the soil.

"You're right, Tala. It stinks in here." She stepped back out of the door for a moment to slide a respirator over her face. It seemed highly probable that Tala's judgement had been softened by something in the air.

She could see the glow radiating into the stairwell, through the doorway Tala had destroyed earlier. There were no sounds from the cellar ahead. Only the dripping of moisture falling from the ceiling, and the wet thud of her feet hitting each step.

She paused at the last corner; she had never seen Lethal Plant 18. Even dead specimens were considered too dangerous for dissection. Retrieval was the only opportunity to see one, and there were procedures to stop... this from happening. Supposedly.

Tala's theory echoed in Lucie's thoughts, again. The theory that had preceded this mess: that they were being purposely thrown at this organism in order to identify any form of resilience, immunity to it, should such a thing exist.

She ducked under the hanging moss, and her suit shimmered, mirroring the trembling glow of the enormous plant that had consumed so much of the room, it for all intents and purposes was the walls themselves.

But the grim reward of finally seeing the organism up close was stultified by the sad sight just a few feet in front of her. Lucie registered no outward feeling; she regarded her friend objectively, as an academic curiosity. But inside, she hurt. Tala was still alive. By the moist white light, she could see her friend's soaking wet skin, intertwining vines pulled tight around every inch of her, every joint. Her skin was inflamed red with thousands of broken blood vessels, but, as Lucie had feared, much of it was turning greenish-brown, with small shoots breaking through all over her back, her hips. The large vines at her rear had stopped moving. By now, the venom they'd come for would have been secreted, sealed inside her as the enormous plant incorporated her body into its own.