✴

Resisting her control over your senses is impossible with your tenuous grasp of CommTech, you realize. You decide to face her through the one channel she’s left open to your mind--the tactile. You grasp back at her hand, moving her own fingers into the kana signs of the word you want to sign: “No.”

You feel the rubber grip of cables tighten around your limbs. You’ll have to make do without moving too. You tighten your grip on her hand. Her avatar feels impossibly soft, like an unreachable ideal of estrogenized skin. Yours must feel soft and pleasant to touch too, since it should take every property of your idealized feminine self. You feel this back through your empathic connection. She likes it as much as you do. But your avatar is yours to control, it could feel any way you want.

The texture you’ll send back to her touch won’t be soft. You grasp in mind the concept of your form. You can reshape any part of it. The properties of your skin are like a multi-dimensional graph in your mind. You become the opposite of soft--like rough cut Lunar rock, with sharp jagged edges, uneven, and freezing cold.

Like a reverberation back through the empathic link you feel her response--the shock of an unexpected texture. But her surprise subsides and you feel only strong curiosity as she slides her fingertips over your hand.

????-??-?? ??:??:?? 明子 > stimmy!

You recognize the feeling in her feedback--the joy of exploring all the little details of a complex pattern. Maybe it’s too interesting. You reshape your surface again to be smooth, polished glass, featureless. She wraps her hands around your arm.

????-??-?? ??:??:?? 明子 > you’re like a sculpture

You’re clearly still too interestingly shaped. You need a texture too difficult to trace the shape of, without forming any recognizable patterns. Your skin becomes like loose, powdery regolith--microscopic grains abrasive to the touch, tearing the tiniest cuts in its victim’s skin.

????-??-?? ??:??:?? 明子 > always wanted to ‘touch regolith’ as you Lunatics say

What doesn’t she like? Surely every Autistic has at least one texture they can’t stand, you just have to find it. You reconstitute again. Your flesh melts into a wet, viscous gel. She squishes your malleable fingers in her hands and lets them bounce back.

????-??-?? ??:??:?? 明子 > slime girl!

With a slight adjustment, your liquid surface shifts from smooth and slippery to the most oily, sticky substance you can imagine. Suddenly her hands release you. You feel the feedback for the smallest moment: revulsion.

Even without direct contact, you know space is an illusion in the æther. You keep your sense of touch on the surface of her avatar at a distance, and flood the empathic channel with your current tactile output. You surround her, cover her every surface, engulf her in sensory hell.

But the feedback hits you hard. Every discomfort rippling across her now shocks your own nervous system. You try to stop your attack. It’s too late. You and her are locked in a sensory feedback loop, and the sensory hell only grows stronger with every cycle between you.