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I hate getting into this fucking thing. The tail sleeve is always so fussy and it’s hard to get it started. Could they really not put a zipper on this or something? It’s like when you’re trying to put on a light jacket or sweater and you just can’t seem to find the sleeve and it takes way too long. At least this thing isn’t just flat grey anymore. Fuckers, if I’m doin’ this thing I’m going to look fucking cute doing it. I wonder how hard it was to get all the sensors and stuff that shade of pink? I hope it was really hard. I hope they hated doing it. Being lubricated from the neck down isn’t helping me get a grip on this. The suit stretches like crazy, but it grabs at the skin, the lube helps with that. The gel is also supposed to help the micro sensors in this thing pick up the signals from the tiny little robots they’re supposed to be injecting me with or something. Electrult—Electo—fuck it conductive. The gel is conductive or something. A while back they used some nanos to permanently remove my body hair for the same reason, though, I’ll just pretend I hate that so I can complain. I can’t wait to go back to chatty, this better fucking work. These idiots need my memories anyway. Not sure how that’s gonna fucking work though, I can’t even remember when I stopped counting the years since the last demonite...well since then. Why is that still so hard to think about? I should be over this, pull it together Lucy you’ll be seeing them soon, they aren’t gone yet.

Oh there it goes, fucking finally, tail’s in. Now I just gotta squeeze into the rest of it. It always looks like the hole for the neck is going to tear when I stretch it open, but it never does. I scrunched the suit up to its shoulders, it seemed impossible to start putting this thing on otherwise. The last time I just tried to just put this on like a pair of pants I got all sorts of air bubbles and my tail got caught in the back and I had to take it all off again. My arms slide into their sleeves as I use them to lever the suit past my waist. The neon pink traces for the sensors follow along any part of me where a lot of blood goes, yeah, even there. You know the creepy pictures of the circulatory system in like high-school biology? Yeah it’s like that almost, just cleaner, more angular. The rest of it is white with a faint triangle pattern, something about how the sensors are put in. The ports on either side of the neck dig into my skin. They itch terribly and are meant to assist the needles. I’m glad they put me under for that. There are larger more mechanical ports that straddle my hips, my spine, lower thighs, calves, and chest. That’s where all the sensor feeds are read and where the vacuum hoses connect. There’s also a very small one in front because, well, this process makes you pee a lot. It looks so sus. Alright, time to see what this looks like in the mirror. My feet hit the cold tile floor and I’m instantly chilled. Also the gel’s fault. They couldn’t give me carpet, at least that’s what they told me; something about fibers getting into the suit. I flip the bright vanity lights on. Oh! The white parts are a little see-through aren’t they, shit! That is fucking sexo. Been a while since I rocked a girly look. Huh, they even put the womb tattoo on like I asked. Who the fuck is knocking!?

“Lucy, are you finished yet? We have a schedule to keep.”

“That’s fucking Ms. Pyre to you asshole! I’ll be out when I’m out!”

Dumbass I’m not your fucking friend. I outlived all of those I’m sick of it. Only Chatty gets to call me Lucy, just chatty. Stupid fucking rapture. I could just see them all in hell if it weren’t for that. That’s when I lost them all. Like, they would of all died of old age eventually anyway but I would have seen most of them in hell again after that. Would have been daijoubu. Things don’t work that way anymore. Well, I guess it kinda works out if this time machine thing actually goes right. Wonder what happens to me if it doesn’t? Whatever, if I can’t see chatty again anyway it doesn’t matter I guess. Besides, when I get to the past and tell that fucking bitch to lock every single demonite in her basement so she doesn’t fucking lose them in the rapture, me, this Lucy, I go away anyway. This is it for me either way. I click all the vacuum hoses in, and little red indicators on the ports turn green.

“Eeeep!”

The suit pulls even tighter against my skin. The gel finds every crevice and void it can as the last bit of air is pulled out, some even escapes the neck. Damnit, I’ll never get used that part. Oh shit! You can even see my skin tone through this suit now. Oh that, that leaves nothing to the imagination does it? Hopefully this is the last time. This outfit is a bit on the nose for our reunion isn’t it chatty? God I’m already thinking like they’re here. Let’s get up and get out of here. It was to the right wasn’t it? Damnit, I barely got a tour of this place, you’d think people who can build a fucking time machine could have hallways that make sense. I hear the pest that rudely banged on my door calling to me from behind. I guess it was to the left after all.

I find myself in the clean room with the pod that will contain my body for the trip. It smells like a hospital in here. The humans here actually fucking dedicated to their work don’t even notice I’ve arrived. The other degenerates are taking their fill of the view. The capsule opens from a hatch on the top and I shimmy into it. It’s already half full of some fluid that only vaguely resembles water. I put on the respirator. They’re about to fill this the rest of the way. I lay down and try to relax, the hatch shuts, and the lights go out. The capsule begins to fill and in a few seconds I hear a voice emanating from its walls telling me my pulse is too high and to calm down. After a few moments I guess my heart rate fell to something they thought was acceptable, or they just said fuck it, because the lights were cut off and the capsule started actively eliminating all noise from inside and outside. I couldn’t even hear my own heartbeat, though I could feel that I should. I float weightless in the tube. Connectors attach to my plug suit, the needles should be next.

I remember when they offered this guinea pig experience to me. They explained that current computer tech wasn’t good enough to account for all the variables of time travel, but they worked out that if the computers could get a memory assist they should be able to. Unfortunately, no humans existed that could remember far back enough to really be useful, especially for preventing the rapture, their ultimate goal. The work around came from the rapture itself. Demons freely walk the earth now, and since we’re immortal we have the capability to travel a useful amount into the past. The next hurdle they said, was reading memories at all. Bone and signal loss made this impossible from any sorta headband or something. But the humans have gotten good enough at nano tech that they think they’ve got a work around. They’re about to inject me with billions of little tiny robots, and they’re going to build a bridge straight from my brain to my smallest nerves. This is what the suit is going to read. They’re building the headband inside. Apparently this didn’t go so well the first few times they tried it. Now the nanos have little thingies on them so oxygen can still be passed to my cells. That’s how clogged it’s going to be in there. They have to introduce them slowly of the course of several hours, diluted in saline. That’s why I need the piss port. The needles are large and quite painful, so they sedate me for most of it.

When they sent the surveys out for this project, of course I was excited. I almost lied on the part of the form that asked what I would want to do most in the past, I’m glad I didn’t. I’m sure other demons put some sort of ambitious world altering goals on there, but I just put that I wanted to see chatty again. Those were the kind of answers they were looking for. The first experiments for this were supposed to be trivial, so they’d alter the timeline as little as possible. That way when it came time to change the big stuff they’d have this worked out enough to send humans instead, having harvested enough coordinates from demons. Not only does our immortality give us the memories they need, but also lets us confirm the process works. This is a two-way trip, but coming back takes the long way. From their perspective, if this works, I’ll pop out of existence with the capsule, and they’ll suddenly get a text from me that I’ve been back. They said it was important to wait until exactly this date and time to send that message, and that the number for it wouldn’t be active until just afterwards anyway. Something about not effecting the development of the process. I feel the sting of the needles go in, and my mouth immediately tastes like metal. Guess I’m about too…

I thrash a bit as I come to. In this sensory deprivation chamber it feels like falling out of the bed forever when you wake up. I threw up the first few times and they had to rescue me from the capsule since my respirator clogged. This is the part where I think about y’all, and that little room I had in the fifth circle. I’ve forgotten a lot. I stopped counting the years after a few hundred. I still remember that room though, not like it was yesterday, but like it was today. I’m coming chatty. I’m coming.

Lucy cracked her knuckles and picked up her phone. Four hours. It had taken four hours just to write that much. What was the point of being a typing speed queen if it took that long to write a short story, she thought. She looked over at her cold half-eaten bowl of packaged ramen and the e-mail from her mom saying her new outfit was just about ready. She’d waited until the last second to write the lore for it, but that was done now. All that was left was to do some test runs, get adjustments requested, pester Cillia for last second add-ons, and set the debut date. But before that, it was time to watch the third episode of Kuroinu again.