Fiber Optic Bundles Of Joy - A Crimbus Special (Patreon)

WOOF big sorry it's late! But here's a lil crimbly special with everyone's favourite AI-Pregnant mouse, Agatha!

Written by the amazing Rabidbadger!

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Agatha was wholly certain she was dreaming. That was the only explanation for why she was currently running down the side of a hill giggling through a strangely off landscape. It felt a bit strange, but that was the way of dreams. Vaguely pinkish snow crunched under booted feet with grass beneath, though nothing was exactly as cold as it should be. More of a pleasant coolness with none of the sharp undercurrents. The delicious rush of wind across her body without the sting of frigid nipples. 

Behind her, Agatha could see the trail through the snow she was making. Little blooms of everything turning a little bluish as the snow kicked into the air and hung there in stillness. Little maddening dances of light hitting spinning crystals. She just about tumbled over in the process of doing that, but found her body righting itself with a mix of instinct and intent. Once more her feet were digging trails through what felt like an endless slope, heading for something gleaming down below her.

It took a moment further in the descent for Agatha to start remembering things properly, to assign reason to some of the oddities prodding her mind. Like how it only belatedly occurred to her that it was strange that she was moving. Not just being moved by mechanical forces that were dubiously in her control; but moving her body. Because she wanted to. Her arms moved and swung, her legs pumped and she flew forward, her – no, wait. She wasn’t breathing. That was weird.

Agatha looked herself over at that, but it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. As she turned her head down, she saw the gray fur she expected, the little pink digits, but then she saw the ground coming up alarmingly quickly and the sky started to resemble a tumble dryer while she rolled and skidded. 

The lucky part was the overall lack of pain, though that just exacerbated the strange disconnect she felt about where she was right now. Agatha found herself wondering, if he had figured out this was a dream, could she seize control of it? Lucid dreaming was something she’d heard plenty about, but it hadn’t ever happened to her before. Presumably it would let her do anything she wanted, which was why she started trying to fly right then.

Either it failed to work, or she had flown right down the hill and accomplished nothing. The net result was that Agatha still tumbling until she felt the hill leveling out under her, though that didn’t lead to the slide stopping. Instead Agatha seemed to be careening down a mostly flat plane, probably ice under the snow, sprawled on her butt and watching a cloudy sky that was dancing with silent lightning twinkle above her. 

It didn’t take Agatha long to let herself giggle and give up on the flying to enjoy the slide. She did move a bit, swinging her hips and causing herself to spin slowly across her ride, marveling at just how far she was making it without losing speed. She did notice, sliding through her view every few seconds as she rotated on her butt, a glint of light in the distance, however. One growing steadily closer.

There was a gradual slowing to her slide, Agatha found. That made sense though, even in dreams – if she expected some degree of physics there’d be one. Even if she hadn’t quite gotten the flying to work. Maybe that was something one had to get the hang of. Instead she contented herself with watching the little shiny oval get closer, with features of it beginning to grow familiar in the process.

By the time Agatha was easing toward a gentle stop she had long recognized it as the ship she and her ‘offspring’ had absconded with when fleeing The Cloud. As the boarding and loading ramp lowered down gradually, she slid right into the edge of it, feeling soft flesh bounce off but just as much the bone and muscle beneath for once. After that began the near alien concept of rolling herself over and getting off the ground under her own power.

Agatha would’ve taken a breath if that hadn’t been discounted already, and she still tried despite that. She took it slowly walking up the ramp, little details creeping into her thoughts as she did. It was quiet, which was strange in itself. She’d gotten so used to having her body, twitching and gurgling heap that it was, constantly vibrating as her ‘son’ moved around through all that data storage – to say nothing of how talkative Red tended to get. 

Now her world was quiet, apart from the gentle creaking of the ship itself and the sound of the assistant droids hovering about. Agatha turned as she reached the peak of the ramp, to where she usually rested when they were in transit.

The mouse blinked slowly then – mostly because she was staring at herself. At the version of herself she had come to know, that is. The quivering mound of flesh and fur resting atop its thighs, belly, and ass all of which forced it into a sitting position where her feet never touched the floor. She was even looking back at herself, though Agatha saw a handful of metallic devices resting across her brow, and her eyes looked kind of vacant she thought. But her expression changed even as she felt it doing so where she stood now. 

Squinting in confusion, Agatha reached out and put a hand to her own belly – the one outside of herself – and felt it just as readily and clearly as she remembered she should. That same instant her vision blurred, then glitched as video artifacts began spreading across everything she saw. Agatha felt like she was falling backward, disconnected, empty, weightless – and then all at once that collapsed into the more familiar feeling of being the heaviest thing she’d ever experienced. 

Agatha quivered as she blinked her eyes clear, looking down to see a little metallic body in a vaguely mouse-like shape resting, motionless, with its hand pressed near her belly button. It didn’t have her fur, like she had remembered seeing, but she saw the pink snow caked onto it and sliding downward to the ship’s floor. 

Below her, Agatha saw a reddish glow from her belly along with movement in the light. She knew it was Red’s face moving across her fur but couldn’t make herself look away from the artificial mouse body.

“Still working out some of the kinks, but that was a great test for the balance handling. You know bipedal movement is super hard to emulate balance for? It’s like if you don’t grow inside a body meant for it it just doesn’t work. Too many instant reactions and calculations, even for me, but you handled it great. Anyway.”

Looking down properly, Agatha saw the image of her artificially cultivated child smiling back playfully and sporting a long red hat with a puff ball on the end of it.

“Merry Christmas mom.”