"Yes, yes," I said, "before you realized what?"
"That you are pregnant, of course!"
----
"Bwahahahaha!" Brainstorm guffawed, as he collapsed in an undignified heap on the floor. "You should have seen your face, Aneki!" he exclaimed, then continued laughing uncontrollably, his scruffy sapphire mane bouncing about.
"Huh?" said Cacha, somewhat puzzled by his change in behavior.
"You're joking, aren't you. You've just pranked me," I muttered. "Revenge for me telling you your feed pipe was crimped, no doubt."
"Sorry," Brainstorm managed between more bouts of laughter and gasps for air, "but the opportunity was just too good to pass up!"
"So, I'm not really pregnant, am I?" I asked, feeling somewhat relieved. The last thing I needed at the moment was a foal.
"Sorry, Aneki, but that part was true," Brainstorm chuckled as he climbed unsteadily back onto his hooves.
"You're still pranking me, aren't you?" I asked.
"No. You really are pregnant," the other Brainstorm insisted. That Brainstorm wasn't laughing.
"WHAT? How could this be possible? How? I've never taken a stallion... oh shit. The BASTARDS!" I yelled as realization struck.
"How long?" Cacha asked quietly.
"She's only around six to seven weeks, which was why it was so easy for us to miss it last time she was here," Brainstorm answered from the tank.
Cacha leaned over me, so close I could feel her breath "Aneki?" she prompted, her voice one of concern. "What happened back then?"
"I was unconscious, and strapped to a table in a laboratory, around that time," I muttered. "I was a captive of Central. I remember nothing from after you left me at the elevator, until I accidentally woke up in the lab of one of their deniable facilities weeks later. I was able to chat with one of the ponies for a short time, before they knocked me out again for the rest of my stay there. He was only willing to talk because he knew I was to be terminated. As such I was not a security risk."
"You poor thing! So, you are telling us they raped you while you were out cold?" Cacha asked, clearly shocked at her conclusion. Her forelegs wrapped around me and held me firmly, but not so tightly it caused discomfort.
"Hell, no. They were afraid to even touch me in case they were attacked by the modifiers themselves. They were performing all sorts of experiments on me at the time, including vivisection!" I spat, "so artificially inseminating me to see what would happen is the more likely scenario."
"Idiots," Cacha said, shaking her head. "It isn't as if you were contagious. Didn't these fools know anything about hellite modifiers?"
"They knew very little," I confirmed. "That was why they had me strapped down for over a month. They wanted to learn as much about the process as they could."
"I am sorry, Aneki. I am so sorry. If I had realized... I would have taken you with me instead," Cacha apologized, her voice wavering a little. I felt some gentle impacts on my skin. What? She was crying!
"So, you'll never know who the father is, then?" Brainstorm asked. "Maybe that is a good thing."
"Oh, I think I have a very good idea of who the sperm donor was," I said, seething.
"Who was he?" Cacha asked, then added lamely, "not that we will know him, or anything."
"I never saw him. I don't even know his name because they all used codes instead of names," I admitted, "but one pony went out of his way to help me escape. It was the same fellow I had talked to when I briefly woke. He told me some of what they had done to me, and he apologized to me in such a way that I was sure he was holding back on something... He was apologizing for something personal, not just their unforgivable treatment of me."
"4J2," Crimson said quietly from where he lay. I hadn't realized he was part of the conversation. He had been so quiet since his last comment, I thought he had drifted off to sleep.
"Pardon?" Brainstorm asked. "4J2?"
"Aneki gave me a code to listen for if Central turned nasty on me. 4J2. At the time she didn't clarify what that code meant, stating it must not be repeated to them, and that it would only help if I listened for it," Crimson said. "And just now, Aneki told us the ponies where she was held used codes instead of names, so I am taking a leap of faith, and guessing that the pony that donated the sperm was calling himself 4J2, and that he was the one that helped her, and his unborn child, to escape."
"Aneki?" Cacha prompted, after I didn't respond.
"What he said," I muttered.
Silence settled on the room for about a minute. Eventually it was me that broke it.
"Cacha, what will I give birth to?" I asked, my mind trying not to think of the possibilities of a modifier enhanced birth. My mare bits were still flesh and blood, although I didn't know if that was the case for all Hellites... or did I? When Cacha had flashed hers at me, they had looked just as natural as any ordinary pony's.
I felt the grip of her hug shift a little. "You want me to guess if it will be a filly, colt or something like me?" she asked, puzzled.
"No, I want to know if it will be a pony or a Hellite," I said.
"Oh, a pony. We always have ordinary pony foals. We have built environmentally controlled living quarters down in Hell. Mostly, we built it for the young as they can't survive the temperature variations of the rest of Hell. They don't get converted to Hellites until later, at the same time we give them the modifiers for growing their fingers," she said. "Hellite conversion is a per-pony event. Once the modifiers attach to a particular pony, they register their DNA, and become harmless to all others, except perhaps an identical twin, and when's the last time you heard of one of those?"
"DNA registration? That was good design," Brainstorm said, "and was something we hadn't considered."
"No doubt the dangers themselves were something you did consider, though," I said.
"Yes, yes. That's why we didn't try to make our own version of them," Brainstorm agreed. "There is enough grief in this place without another uncontrollable plague of modifiers being released."
"Mostly the Hellite modifiers are harmless, too. The standard variant is, anyway, which is what we usually use. It has to be injected to be effective, much like the finger modifiers," Cacha said.
"Cacha..." Brainstorm's disembodied voice prompted. "You said something like you. What are you, if you are not male or female?"
"Oh, you caught that, did you?" she asked shyly. "I'm a victim of a modifier plague, as you put it. Down below, due to genetic sabotage, males are never born. We are either female, or something in-between like me. I am genetically male but with external female sexual organs. I can't have foals because I don't have ovaries or a uterus, and I can't get females pregnant because I don't have a... dick."
"Would you like one?" Brainstorm asked, as if giving Cacha one would be the easiest thing in the world to do.
"Of course I'd fucking like one," Cacha growled, "or if that wasn't possible, a uterus and ovaries. Either would be better than being a sexless thing."
"Then we may be able to help," Brainstorm said from within the tank, and this time we heard him, with our ears.
Thumps and sloshing sounds alerted us to movement within the life support tank, so we all glanced over that way. Fortunately I could see it without having to move. A head appeared through the opening at the top, a wet jade green mane slicked across a startlingly feminine face of sapphire blue. Next were a pair of hooves and long, slender legs, again lacking any muscle tone or meat. That was one sexy looking... what?
"You... you're a mare?" I gasped. And I'd promised Cacha two stallions. Oh, I guessed I was still delivering two, if you counted Crimson.
"I am a mare now," the female Brainstorm said. "That's why I am still in the tank. We restored Brainstorm first, so he could get out of here before we added concoction sixty three. That altered my DNA for the rebuild."
"While we were in the tank, it didn't matter what gender we were," Brainstorm, the ambulant, said, "but now that we are out, we thought we might try having a family together, and we couldn't do that if we were both male."
"These... these guys could save the Hellites!" Cacha gasped. I felt her grip around me tighten in enthusiasm. I wondered if she realized she was still hugging me. I didn't mind.
"I told you they were good. And it is their brains that are important, not their balls," I said with a chuckle. Life was going to get very interesting from here on in. It was becoming very... fluid. Very little seemed set in stone anymore.
"This could be so... wow!" Cacha squeed, giving me another squeeze. She had to know she was doing that.
"And Brainstorms, a suggestion, if I may," I said, "Pick yourself some new names. We can't keep calling you both Brainstorm. It's damn confusing!"
"You can call me Stormie," the new mare suggested, smiling.
That would work.
"And you can call me Storm," Brainstorm the male said with a grin.
"NO!!" we chorused.
A good night's sleep had done me wonders. For starters, I could stand again. Crimson was also on his feet again, doing surprisingly well for a normal pony that had a bullet removed from his guts only hours before. Brainstorm and Stormie were lounging about. Like foals, they needed a lot of rest. At the moment we were gathered around Cacha while she taught us about hellite modifiers. Perhaps gathered around wasn't quite the right description. Cacha was standing so close by my side we were touching.
She went on to explain that there were two types of hellite modifier, the original injectable version, and air-born variant that was only developed so the Hellites could catch males. It was ironic that if the Hellites hadn't been modifier-bombed by the surface ponies in the first place, this nasty class five, hellite modifier would never have been developed. Further explanation on Cacha's part revealed that the class five version was in fact made of two types of tiny machine, the true hellite modifier, the same type that was injected, and a second machine, called a carrier. Upon activation, each carrier loaded itself with a modifier, then went hunting for materials the modifier required, while waiting for a victim to wander by. Once the combination was absorbed by the victim, the carrier deactivated and was treated as building materials by the hellite modifier.
The first batch of modifiers I had encountered had not been long released, so when they attacked me, the carriers were not loaded up with extra resources, so the hellite modifiers had to make do with using the carrier for source material, as well as anything they could scavenge from my regular meals. As such, my conversion was proceeding at a leisurely pace until I walked into the second batch of them, which were all loaded up with significant resources. That was enough to push my conversion too far to be reversible. Cacha hadn't seen any evidence of the conversion when she left me, so it must have become visible after that. Exactly what happened between my collapse outside the Elevator Fifteen doors, and waking three weeks later, I would never really know. When I woke then, my conversion had been limited to my limbs, the skeletal parts of my torso and my cardiovascular system. Apparently, just one week later my full conversion had been completed. The scientists had probably been feeding some of the required minerals into my bloodstream. I was then studied for a further three weeks before being slated for termination. All up, my conversion had taken about five weeks from initial exposure.
According to Cacha, in optimal conditions, two to three weeks was sufficient for a complete conversion, although in emergencies, that could be reduced to just one week. The down-side of that was the extreme pain. My aches had been bad enough, so I didn't like the sound of the express conversion at all!
"The time the conversion takes isn't a problem. We aren't going anywhere, anyway," Stormie said from where she lay. She was spread out on the bench on which I had been recovering a day earlier. She was taller than the average mare, and rather sleek, not unlike some of the media's superstars. I wondered if her colors, which were the reverse of Brainstorm's, were natural, or a part of her rebuild. What exactly that rebuild entailed, I had not asked. Perhaps they really had been nothing more than neural matrices floating in pony soup!
"Neither I or Stormie would make it down two ladders before we were totally exhausted. If it wasn't for the Hellite option, we'd have to spend weeks exercising and eating to get to the point fleeing would be practical," Brainstorm said.
"You'll need to exercise anyway," Cacha said. "It will help a lot. Increased blood flow, muscle growth and so on all help."
"Aneki spent her conversion lying in a lab," Brainstorm pointed out. Hmm, Brainstorm didn't like exercise!
"Are you kidding me?" Cacha spluttered. "First, I expect that slowed her conversion down somewhat, and second, Miss super-mare here would have had twice the muscle mass of any regular pony when she went down. Even now her hellite form emphasizes that."
"Yours isn't any different," Brainstorm said.
"Because I spend all my time running about. My name is Catwalk Runner for a reason. Even so, my definition is nothing compared to hers."
I chuckled. "So the two most defined ponies in H'ven are sharing a room with the two weakest."
"Take your medicine, like a good boy," Stormie stirred. Brainstorm spluttered.
"It sounds like I need to do more exercise, too," Crimson interjected, eyeing our well formed bio-robotic bodies.
"Wait until you have healed," Cacha suggested. "Give it a week before you start."
"Will do. So how are we going to do this? Do you have enough modifiers for all of us? Will you just inject us with them, or what?"
"Conversion will be quicker if the modifiers have the chance to gather materials first," Cacha said. "We need somewhere safe we can set off the bomb. A contained area would be best. Any scrap we have access to should be tossed in there as well. If it's going to take a while, we could inject some into each of you now too, to start the process while we prepare the area. I have more than enough modifiers to do both."
"The shooting range would be a great place to use," Stormie suggested. "There is a protective spell in there designed to protect the walls."
"Once we fix the hole in the far end," Brainstorm said, with a smirk.
"Don't fix it too well," I said. "That hole is our best way out of here. Even if we go looking for an elevator, it would be best to do it several floors below here."
"What about materials?" Cacha asked. "We could toss in the armor the death squad was wearing, assuming we don't want to keep it for ourselves."
"And their weapons," Brainstorm added.
"Won't we want those?" Crimson asked. "They could prove valuable."
Brainstorm, Stormie and myself all laughed.
"What's the joke?" Crimson puzzled.
"Watch," I instructed as I mentally pictured one of the larger weapons from the showroom, an area to which Crimson had not been given access so far. His eyes widened in disbelief as I stretched out my hoof, my leg seeming to liquify as it formed the weapon I was imagining. "Welcome to Advanced Weapons Development Laboratories. Brainstorm and Stormie are expert weapon designers. Their designs are undoubtedly superior to anything Central has."
"So cool, so cool," Brainstorm said. "Thank you for that demonstration, Aneki."
"We can't offer you that model, as it requires the user to be a unicorn, but we can offer one that looks like it, as well as many other advanced designs."
"So I wasn't dreaming when I saw Aneki form a splint," Crimson said, rubbing his chin with his fingers. "Anyway, what's with the sales pitch?"
I laughed. "Humor them," I suggested. "They had been locked in here for twelve hundred years without a single customer, before I showed up. This is their dream."
"Oh, okay. You may continue," Crimson acquiesced.
"Later, perhaps, when we show them to you. There are more important things to initiate at the moment," Stormie said.
"Yes, yes. Resources for the modifiers. There is material around the lab we could sacrifice," Brainstorm picked up the thread of the earlier discussion."
"We could gut the celestial body simulator next door, assuming Cacha doesn't object," I offered.
"That could be dangerous," Crimson said. "Central will be back, and sniffing around all too soon, and they will know where we are, or at the very least, have a pretty good idea."
"Assuming those thugs get far with broken legs," Cacha said darkly. "I expect their journey will be slow."
Broken legs? Wow. Cacha had meant business!
"They only need to get to the nearest Central controlled elevator shaft," I said, "and from there they will be able to call for assistance."
"Support may already be on the way," Crimson interjected. "No pony has reported to Central since yesterday." He pointed at the small pile of mappers on one of the workbenches. They had all been opened, and had their comms systems disabled, something Brainstorm had attended to after the medical emergencies had been dealt with.
"As you know, I've disabled the door between the service area and the public areas," Cacha reminded us, "although it is not as secure as the door to this lab."
"Not to mention possible access via the staircase, which is how I came down here," I said, "It can't be locked at this level because there isn't a door, although I guess I could blow away a few more stairs."
"Securing an outer perimeter would be good, with us effectively being trapped here for the duration," Stormie agreed. "Come here, Aneki. Touch your horn to mine."
I separated myself from Cacha, who seemed to have become a permanent accessory, and took the few steps to Stormie. A glow had been building on the tip of her horn, and as soon as we touched, knowledge flooded into my mind: more code snippets, more spells. More magic. Oh, awesome! I could now directly use my horn to fuse materials. I could weld! I could have been an even better structural engineer if I had these skills back when I still had a job.
"Fantastic!" I exclaimed. "I can weld up and reinforce the access points to this level. If I climb up a couple of floors, I can strip out the remaining floor plates and stairs. That will make it harder to climb down. I can then use those materials to fashion a false floor one level up. That will block off that access route. After that, I will repair and strengthen your outer door too."
Cacha laughed. "It sounds like we have a happy structural engineer on our hooves!"
She walked over to where I was standing, sidling up beside me again. Okay, this was getting pretty damn obvious.
"Are all you Hellites this clingy?" I asked.
"Ah, no. Sorry, I thought you didn't mind," she said shyly. I imagined she would be blushing under her black head armor.
"I don't mind," I admitted. "I just wanted to know if it was personal or not."
"Ah, it is. I kind of feel responsible for getting you into this mess, and I want to support you as much as I possibly can," Cacha said quietly. "Besides, I like you."
I could feel every pony's eyes on us, and started to turn red myself.
"Aneki's got herself a girlfriend," Stormie said with a smirk. "Look, she's blushing!"
"I'm a boy," Cacha declared, stamping her hoof to emphasize it. "Even if I do have mare bits. Even if you call me she."
Cacha's stance on the subject of her gender seemed to have moved from last time we discussed it, but back then, she didn't have any hope of becoming sexually functional either way. Brainstorm had broken into guffaws at Cacha's antics, though he managing to do so without being cruel. I could see this was going to be an amusing family, if I could use that term to describe the ponies gathered here with me. I had to admit, at that moment, I wasn't too annoyed about the changes that my life had taken. Banishment, separation from my family and friends, conversion into a bio-robot, getting pregnant, whatever; it was more interesting, more satisfying to my soul than my old life had ever been. I was already forming stronger bonds with these ponies than I had with any of my friends up on the surface.
"Hey, Cacha, I bet you are blushing too, even if we can't see it," Crimson prompted.
She let out a funny little sound in response. Yup, she was blushing all right.
"Cacha, show us your face, please," Stormie crooned, "You can do that, can't you?"
"Oh, okay," Cacha agreed shyly, "Please don't laugh."
Like my head armor had, hers folded back like the petals of a flower. What was this beauty that had blossomed? Cacha's coat was a gorgeous pale pink, offset by her cherry-red eyes, all topped off with her buoyant blonde mane. Absolutely stunning, beautiful, delicate... and about as far away from boy as you could get.
There was a collective gasp, but no laughter.
"Are you sure you don't want to get turned into a fully functional female?" Stormie asked. "You are so feminine it hurts!"