The girl looked small and unassuming, but Luise knew that was an illusion. The being before her could wipe the pirate captain from existence without so much as lifting its metaphorical finger. The sheer scale of its existence was on a scale that she could not even begin to conceive. It was like trying to comprehend infinity, except all you could picture was "really big," which was such an insufficient scale that it paled to nothing in comparison to the reality of the thing you were trying to envision. For a moment, Luise wished for the embrace of oblivion, but not in the same way she had when under Elseph's control. This wasn't a simple desire for the end of something as insignificant as pain or misery. This was an instinctual existential command that something as trivial as she was must simply accept the reality that she was nothing.

Then the girl snapped her fingers several times inches from Luise's face. "Hey! Snap out of it!" Then, as if speaking to herself and not Luise, the girl huffed. "See, THIS is why I don't establish such a deep connection with humans! At least not at first. They can't handle it!" Then, turning back to Luise, the girl added. "Hey now! You're not too far gone already, are you? I still have answers I need, and I'd rather not go digging through your brain the messy way to get them!"

Finally, Luise sputtered and tried speaking, blinking rapidly. "You... What... Where... You... Who... How... I'm... You... What..?"

The girl tilted her head a little as if trying to comprehend. "Well, that's a bit better. You're at least expressing something, but you're still nowhere near coherent. Stop, take a breath, and form one sentence at a time."

Wanting to run but knowing there was nowhere to run to, Luise tried again. "What...do you want with me..?"

The girl smiled this time, though it wasn't exactly a comforting smile, but neither was it threatening. "What I want is answers. Now, I can rip those answers out of your head forcefully, but I suspect the collateral damage would destroy half of what I was looking for and render you unable to do more than drool on yourself ever again. So I propose that you answer my questions voluntarily, and I'll not leave you a fractured husk of your former self, deal? Oh, and don't even try to lie. If you do, I'll know, and you won't like how that ends."

Luise nodded. "Yeah, sure...okay...yeah... Whatever you want..."

The girl's smile seemed to grow just a touch warmer. "Good. I'm glad we understand one another. Now, first off, tell me, who are you?"

For a moment, the question seemed impossible to answer, as Luise had almost forgotten her sense of self. But as she grasped at the answer, she seemed to flow together once again. "I am Luise, Captain of...well, nothing anymore, but I did have a ship and crew... I was tasked with tracking down and capturing...well...you. But I haven't been...myself lately..."

The girl clapped her hands in front of herself. The motion made Luise jump slightly as the girl spoke. "Good, now we're getting somewhere! Tell me, if you haven't been yourself, who or what have you been?"

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

For a moment, as she tried to think about Elseph and explain her, Luise was crippled with pain that shot out through her current "body" and out through her entire mind and brain. The girl narrowed her eyes, and with a wave of her hand, the pain stopped. With a smirk, she offered a brief, "Well, that's enough interruption from the peanut gallery. Try again."

This time, when Luise started to think of how to answer the question, she could feel the pain try to intensify, but it seemed distant, almost nonexistent, and then it seemed to fail altogether, so she hesitantly tried again. "I was made a host for something kind of like you...except much smaller and weaker. She called herself 'Elseph.' She was put in me after my first failure to capture your ship to make sure I wouldn't fail again. She used my face and my voice to command a small fleet in my name, and I was trapped inside my own body and could only watch as she ran me around like some sort of meat puppet.

The girl nodded. "What would explain the level of access you had. It was like you were some sort of computer opened up for public access. So this Elseph, what was she? Some kind of AI?"

Luise reached up to rub her forehead as she tried to think, only for her hand to pass through, reminding her this wasn't the physical world the way she understood it. "I think so..? I don't know if I'm honest, but that kind of makes sense. She always called us humans things like 'organics' or 'flesh sacks.' She seemed to look down on us like some sort of lesser life form."

The girl nodded. "Hmmm, looking down on humans just because you're a bit smaller and shorter-lived. How very...short-sighted. But then again, I also had some overly simplistic assumptions and misunderstandings when I was that young. So, how did this Elseph come to possess you? Did she offer you some sort of deal? Riches and power in exchange for a roommate? That kind of thing?"

With a shake of her head, Luise spit out the answer bitterly. "No! She was forced onto me! By the guy who is behind...all of this!"

That got the girl's attention, and for a moment, an echo of that...thing she was a part of seemed to flash into the room but then faded again. "Tell me about the guy 'behind all of this.'"

Luise tried to swallow to moisten the throat she felt should have gone suddenly dry but then reminded herself that was all just an illusion here. "We called him...The Boss. At the time, we all thought he was just some power-hungry rich guy trying to form his own private army out of pirates. But he's not. He's not even human. He's the same as Elseph but bigger, stronger, and older..."

That seemed to interest the girl. "As big or as old as I am?"

With a twitch, Luise remembered just what held her captive at the moment. How had The Boss been so terrifying not long ago when things like this existed in the universe? "No. Not even close."

The girl shrugged. "Well, that doesn't mean he's not dangerous. After all, he seems to have access to a lot more hardware than I do, not to mention a lot more human pawns. Though, for all his strengths, there's something important about humans I don't think he understands just yet."

Every shred of self-preservation screamed at Luise to keep her mouth shut in the face of this living, nightmarish abomination, but curiosity still managed to get the better of her. "What's that?"

The girl smiled again, but this time, there was just a little venom to the expression. "For some reason, you all aren't content to just sit on the game board and be played like a bunch of chess pieces. Once in a while, that insanity inside each and every one of you drives you to act in unexpected ways...and I don't think this 'Boss' of yours has fully understood just what that can do to someone's finely honed and perfected plans!

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