Looking into mirrors has always messed with your head, but this is nothing like a mirror image. It’s like looking at yourself distorted even further, sharper, the bare bones and skin shaped into something more solid, but still thin and tense and narrow.

"I ain't opposed to getting my wetware wet," she says. You think you could almost make out the words just from the movements of her lips against your ear, and that gets all down your spine even as part of you writhes in annoyance at a seadweller without any modifications beyond the cosmetic using the word wetware. Fuck it, it's still hot.

Why the Beforan equivalent of yourself didn't appear here, you're not sure, though you suspect it has something to do with direct and indirect transference and the extent to which each of you had contact with game code prior to this remix of the universe; the Ancestors from Alternia had vague memories of being their Beforan selves, so both versions re-instanced, but as far as you know you're the only version of Sollux Captor the game was aware of. Poor Sollux, you jeer internally, all alone in the world. If you were to quadrant yourself, you're not sure whether self-hate or self-pity would be the dominant emotion, but either way, you're getting off on it. God, you make yourself sick. You hold your bulge like you're trying to restrain it, but who the fuck are you kidding. It wraps around your fingers, both tendrils snaking and coiling harder the more you try to will them to stop, like don't-think-of-a-trunkbeast, and you rub at them distractedly because you can't stand not to. Sollux Captor, system architect of the new universe, reduced to thinking with his bulge by two copies of his ancestor being obnoxious at each other. Fuck your hot life.