Anzhelika- 'Demilitarized' Secretary

It's another chill winter's day in the Drears. From your vantage point in your large office halfway up the tower, you can see the whole compact city laid out around you. There's a fog up today and it is no ordinary one, a massive drift of human fog having made its way slowly across the Atlantic ocean and now busying itself slowly drifting across the ruined continent of North America. Even here, on the far side of the world from the frontlines, nobody is entirely safe from the consequences of the Pleromatic War.

One of those consequences is on her way to you now.

The door to the office slowly creaks open. It's a nice office, surprisingly spacious, with a great view of the ugly city all around you. One wall is lined with books. Have you actually read them or is it just to look impressive? Regardless, this is the kind of office that selling out might give you. You're a corpo, a middle member of the executive branch of Freikugeln Contracts, a meatware cybernetics subsidary of Independent Argonautics Ltd. And considering that Independent Argonautics Ltd is now one of the most important corps in the world and all but owns this town...it's pretty important. Someone in this position is permitted certain...privileges.

Speaking of which, here she is now.

Your new prospect enters the room, smoothly ducking her head beneath the doorframe. She's an absolute beast of a woman, an alabaster statue come to life. A vision in monochrome. More to the point, she's an Argonaut, one of the boosted meat-jacked cyborg super-soldiers that give Independent Argonautics Ltd their name. Normally they'd all be occupied with fighting the Pleromatic War but this one...she's a special case. Decommissioned, demilitarized. And still almost eight feet tall.

"Anzhelika Independent Argonautics Ltd, reporting for duty." Her voice is surprisingly soft for her size, speaking entirely without shame as she lists herself off as fundamentally property, her surname replaced by corporate branding. Once upon a time this hadn't been the practice, Argonauts had been permitted to delude themselves into thinking that they were still free human citizens. But as the years have gone by and the control of IA Ltd has only gotten stronger and more overwhelming in the days of the Pleromatic War, those delusions were put to rest. Nobody is under any illusion about what an Argonaut is anymore.

The towering woman is dressed casually, in just a set of trousers, boots and a large coat. Perhaps the trousers are...remarkably tight. She crosses the distance between the door and your desk, her shadow falling across you.

"Let's get everything straight, boss," she says, her tone suddenly surprisingly casual. "Make sure we're all on the same page. You wanted a secretary/bodyguard and you specifically wanted an Argonaut. And I'm the only one of those currently on the market." What with the War and all. "You bought me, fair and square. So let me show you what you've paid for. Everything you paid for."

And without waiting for your consent or dissent, without permitting you to make any sort of remark at all, she starts tugging at her coat. No, at something beneath her coat. At...at her skin???

The coat that she'd been wearing as her top comes loose with a great ripping of fabric. And so does the smooth white porcelain skin underneath it, Anzhelika tearing the skin of her midsection loose in a great ragged sheet. Blood splats across the carpet and your desk, though not as much as it as you might expect. There is a wet flap of noise as she discards the sodden pile of albino skin to the side, revealing herself topless in more ways than one.

"A-ha. Don't worry, boss. This skin is all synthetic but it's so...soft, so weak. They took off all my proper armoured synthskin and replaced it with this tissue paper when they were demilitarizing me. Now take a look. Take a good look."

Her skinless torso was a mess of red and white, raw musculature exposed to the world. But it wasn't human musculature, not quite. And it was marbled with, ridged with, great white strips of knobbly fatty cartilage that moulded itself to her body. Her breasts were nothing but mouldings of this material, her somewhat pleasant shape revealed to be nothing more than an extrusion of this dense mat of myofibres beneath her skin. And below that, in her abdomen, was a jagged hole in that mess of artificial muscle and cartilege, as if she'd been impaled on something. And peeking through that hole was red, a deeper more gelatinous thing...

She didn't permit this to remain a mystery however. Reaching down with one hand, her hands still covered in porcelain skin even as everything from the wrist up had been flayed away, she reached into her belly wound and slowly tugged something free. Her hand came out gently cradling a gelatinous mass most closely resembling that of a stylized heart. Not one that beat but whose surface rippled and swam with faint suggestions of a branching nervous structure within surrounding a denser core. That, despite lacking eyes entirely, looked at you.

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"Like what you see, boss? You know what this is right?" She gazed down upon it with surprising tenderness. "Back when I first got modded, they were still calling this an 'Argonaut Core'. But everyone knows the deal these days."

They do. That thing, that blob, is what is called an Apostle. A dimunitive type of Pleromite, a native lifeform to the alternate dimension who even now was invading Earth. It was these types of beings that Argonauts were designed to fight. But they were also powered by them, each Argonaut containing a mutilated and lobotomized Apostle within the deepest reaches of their body. Only not so deep for Anzhelika it seems. They're...they're probably not supposed to detach like that. A thin red string ran back to wound in her belly, a glowing red deposit of slime still left inside.

"I'm going to be your secretary. And even guard your body. But, a-ha, I have a hobby that I expect you to let me indulge. Would you like to know more?"

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It turns out there are certain disadvantages to employing an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall secretary. Doors, for instance.

THUD.

Anzhelika Independent Argonautics Ltd has been working for you long enough now that she's learned to duck automatically. Not just the little tilt of the head she used when she first reported for duty, either. Eight feet was already pushing what most buildings in the Drears were designed to accommodate. Eight and a half means bending at the waist, turning those enormous shoulders sideways and carefully negotiating herself through every doorway she encounters. Despite her general hyper-competence at seemingly everything else, negotiating the exact size of her body in the world still seems to be something that gives her problems.

Which makes sense since she wasn't eight and a half feet tall when you hired her. She had been just a few inches shy of eight feet back then, during that portentous 'job interview' where she....where she...disrobed. To put it one way. She's been growing. Which means she's been feeding. Best not to dwell on that.

Another disadvantage is that when your secretary's contract specifies that she's also your bodyguard, "working hours" become a rather flexible concept. Which is to say, she follows you home from work every night. That's why she's in your corporate apartment right now.

Anzelhika had followed you home from the office as she usually does, still dressed for work in her tight white blouse, little black leather skirt, sheer rights and heels. The outfit, which Anzelhika had provided herself out of her apparent interests, was almost stereotypical and despite being printed to fit her specifically, looked almost absurd on a woman of her stature. Her legs in particular looked like they could go on forever.

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Are the heels really necessary when you're already enormous?

And there was the smell. That fucking smell.

She's gotten better at covering it, mostly due to the application of a pungent incense-y perfume that hangs around so thickly that it feels like it should be an almost-visible cloud. Your whole office and apartment smells like it these days. Underneath it however is a more unpleasant scent. Sour. Rot. You know what causes that too. Anzelhika showed you on your first meeting. The smell of synthetic muscle and an almost-sterile wound, covered up by her propensity for long-sleeved high-collared blouses. All that missing skin...it's still missing.

At present, she is sorting out your schedule as a secretary should. Red holographic screens dance across the cybernetic screens that pretend to be her eyes.

"Nine thirty, you have a meeting with Jocklertech procurement. Eleven, the quarterly meatware compliance review. Twelve thirty, you have lunch. A-ha, let me just cancel that lunch for you. You want to be productive, don't you? At one you have an executive budget meeting and you'll want to be there at least fifteen minutes early to avoid a repeat of last week's incident. I'll just pencil in lunch at two instead. Then at three thirty you're expecting a call from IA central. Wow, the big bosses, huh?"

Despite having no experience at it whatsoever, Anzelhika is remarkably gung-ho about embracing her secretarial position in all aspects. Maybe alarmingly so, if you consider the fact that she's likely doing it so that she can keep up her horrible little feeding habit in secret. And she has been. That she's been slowly but steadily growing is proof of that. That thing inside her, that 'Apostle', that captive & lobotomized Pleromite that powers all Argonauts...it has a catastrophic effect on humans, on true humans, not on whatever she is. The ruins of Europe and the perpetually migrating fog bank that had once been over a billion people is proof of that. But it hasn-

"Boss? Are you paying attention?" She is suddenly very, very close, sitting down beside you so that she can bring her large face up close to yours. That's another thing she lacks: personal space. This close, you can see the faint stains beginning to form along the edge of her blouse. Her skinless torso doesn't bleed very much but what little it does leak it leaks incessantly. She must print a new top every day. She favours you with her usual expression, which is a sort of resting death glare. And then a faint smile. "A-ha. Do you ever regret hiring me?"

Once upon a time, you used to have a large office. It had been roomy, spacious even. Your desk had been isolated and alone, standing with the window to the foggy city behind it and the shelves of books on either wall.

That was still your office, to be clear. It was, physically, still the exact same size as it had always been. Nowadays there was just more in it.

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At twelve feet tall, Anzhelika Independent Argonautics Ltd doesn't really sit in your office anymore. That term's too casual. It might be more fitting to say that your office is occupied by her, in the sense that a defeated nation would be occupied by a conquering army. She sprawls herself out before you, one large foot tapping against your desk with a casual bored rhythm. The sofa that is leaning an arm against creaks dangerously. At this angle you can look right up her skirt but she doesn't seem to mind.

She's been a very gluttonous girl lately.

Everyone else at the office knows, of course. It's impossible to hide. But they don't suspect the truth. As far as you can tell, everyone just thinks that you've been feeding your pet Argonaut a boatload of steady pills to deliberately induce growth and indulge what everyone now believes to be your obvious fetish. And what can one really say to that? 'No, I've actually been letting her EAT PEOPLE'?

Actually, what's the difference? Everyone knows the steady pills that keep Argonauts normal are made from human remains anyway. Does it really matter that your Argonaut is free-range and organic, so to speak? Employing Anzhelika...letting her slake her horrible hunger...in a very real sense it is no different and certainly not any morally worse than everything you had already been indirectly and directly assisting by working for a company that works for Independent Argonautics Ltd. People are going into the meat grinder no matter what. People are turning into fog no matter what. Pleromites are detonating in crowded marketplaces and turning 149 people into a sort of living paint no matter what. The end of the world, the slow and utter obliteration of humanity that the Pleromatic War threatens to bring about...your company was doing it already anyway.

So really who gives a fuck if some rando exec at a subsidiary has a secretary who eats people.

With this kind of logic to help justify everything, to help people look the other way, a very large Anzhelika has been produced. She is larger than any other Argonaut currently in the world, living or dead, active or demilitarized. And she doesn't seem to be getting full.

"Hey boss," Anzhelika says, tapping her giant heel lightly against the side of your desk. She pauses for a moment, clicking her tongue. The room is full of her scent. "I think I'm, a-ha, ready. Ready to tell you something special. Would you like to know more?"