Full-Armor Alexa and more fiction excerpts!

More Alexa concept art, this time regarding the heavier armor that she brings along when she knows she will need it.

At first, I was really in love with the bottom row, the heavier stuff. But now that I have sometime to think about it, I really like the upper row too. I, frankly, love how "ugly" it is. I mean, this isn't supposed to be a pretty thing, really, and it seems like its more, I don't know, buggy? Like it would be easier to hide, or at least detach. 

Please my fans, let me know what you think about these concepts.

In return, I am offering you not just one, but TWO excepts of stories I'm working on. 

One is from a sci-fi romance, the other is from a weird fiction short story I'm editing one more time. 

Xen and Vengance- a Sci-Fi Romance

He growled low in his throat

Vengeance laid on her side in their marriage bed, the sweeps of her bronze hips shining in the dull red light of the room. The last Synod of the Dire Word declared something or other about red making women more fertile and the act more pleasurable.

Foehammer was laying beside her, holding her left hip in his dusky, large hand. She faced him not, kissed him with no passion, and reciprocated none of his most earnest endearments. The real thing, apparently, was a very dull affair compared to the SinSims that he has so often used on leave.

Vengeance was almost ashamed, but far more than that she was indignant. She knew, knew positively that laying with your husband was not a boring thing. Her Sister-in-God told her: by the Lord she SHOWED her how exhilarating, how truly lovely it could be.

It was sinful, perhaps even blashpemetic, but she had recorded one of her nights with her beloved for a SinSim company to render. It was elegant, at least at first. Much lace, much sweet scents, the usual cliches.

But when the act truly began in earnest, even stereotypical black teddy's could do nothing to cool the lust. The things they did were indescribable: not because they were impossible or unusual, but because words cannot replicate the feelings they created in each other. The warmth. The silkiness, and firmness. The breathing. The vulnerability, and yet dominance that Retribution had with her husband, the great Deacon Warborn.

But her wedding night? The night she was to be educated in these mysteries? The night the doors to a new perception were to be opened? Little more than some uncomfortable grunting and confused fumbling.

She never even became... what did she call it? Full? Fevered? Her womb did not resist his masculinity, but it by no means invited it.

"Why?" he demanded.

"Why what?" she pretended not to know.

"Why did you not enjoy it?"

She glared at him: surely it was his fault. "I don't know? Maybe women don't enjoy being pointlessly...."

"I followed the manual to the letter!" he suddenly stormed. "You should have!"

"Women are not machines to be programmed, Foehammer!" she stormed right back. Foehammer flinched, and rightly so. He may have been an esteemed Paladin, with the confirmed deaths of dozens of Demons in his long record of battle. He may have even brought a Babu down to the ground in a bare handed fight, only his cybernetic enhancements saving him.

But Vengeance had killed far more. The Battle of Io, the surprise attack that the Triad of Alaso designed to be their Austerlitz in their conquest of the Lord's Solar System, was given to her by divine hands. Though it was General Foreboding and her masterful maneuvering of her Navy that drove the Triad back to Pluto, Vengance's contribution, unfairly in her mind, was the one remembered by most of the gentle sheep. It was surely providence that, while fighting among a squad of Paladin in the brutal ground skirmish, that she should carve a bloody road straight to Beelzebub, a general of that diverse and disgusting alliance of hellspawn itself. She laid it low in single combat, and it whimpered away in its damnable language to lick the stumps that once held two of its 1000 psi pincer arms.

Vengeance, the hero. Vengeance, the Blade. Vengeance, who should be Bishop, or maybe Cardinal, say the sheep and their shepherds. But the Army of the Lord knows better. Her place is in battle, perhaps as a Sharlamane, a leader of paladins, but none the less soaked in Demon blood.

If they had seen her performance tonight though, the nominations would probably be taken back.

"I sleep." she said with cold finality, and the Paladin dare not defy her. But he could not sleep, while he was so unsatisfied.

So, as his wife slept, Foehammer crept away, to the Prisons where Demons awaited formal trial and execution, to do as he had always done when the SinSims grew tiresome. He went to buy a whore...

***

Xen was lead into the room.

Her throat was dry, her chest cold in the air conditioned air. The business end of the Altar Boys blaster was uncomfortably close to her arching back. Her tail, tipped with a slender poisoned spine, was tied tightly around her waist. Her poison tipped claws were corked with bulky plastic caps. A muzzle was fitted over her perfect darker blue lips, and a leather hood held down her frills and poison coated hair.

Everything else was bare. She was being ogled at by yet another brainless Altar boy, laying back on the bed with his maleness sticking up in the air. She had seen bigger. She had seen less ugly, less mashed in the face.

And she had been secured alot better than this, and still killed her man.

She did the shashshaying thing that monkey-people seemed to like. His organ responded with a disgusting twitch, and his face was twisted from its respectable grimness into a sort of childish "dem titties" look. Her chest was massive, her hips heavy and proud, and her buttocks were the envy of the other hominid-compatible females and males. Then again, Oo'til'larg, the Feenobian, an independent from the imperialistic Triad like herself, seemed to admire her shape, even though it had a very curious, non-bilateral frame.

She did not intended to stay long with him. He had that smell that said he took the antidote to her natural poisons already, and she expected that. But she hadn't expected the prison guards to be so lazy in searching her person. They thought her gold tattooing, in its beautiful shaping around her wide, Rubenesque body was only accent.

She straddled him, not getting near his man-parts, and draped her self before him. He closed his eyes and took her in his mouth and moved to suck, while Xen pretend to stroke her own side in animal-heat like indulgence.

In truth, she pulled the razor wire garrote, secured by a simple glue, off her person. She grasped the thick filament handles, and let the mono-molecular filament drape behind his head.

Then, after she begged the Lord for forgiveness for this murder, she flicked the garrote.

He simply stopped. He did not bleed much, the line slicing him so finely. But the garrote had completely decapitated him, and the connection between spine and mushy grey matter was simply broken.

She worked her caps off, and the hood and all the other little devices, including the suppository that was supposed to ensure the altar boys control. She knew she would not get very far after this: couldn't be that lucky.

She knocked for a guard, ready to send her hard elbow into his throat and drop him flat. After that, who knows.

The door opened, and Xen's elbow flew. But it struck the hard neck of a monkey-female, not a male! The guard stumbled, but Xen worked quickly to gas her out: if the guard died, then Flatline alarms would go off. At least that is what Gin told her.

The guard was disrobed, chained to the bed next to the dead body with the BDSM equipment that altar boy intended to use on her, and gagged and muzzled. Xen donned the guards clothes: a little tight, but not too much. She wasn't a small woman, in any respect.

She shook as she prepare to leave the room. Into the prison: identification points, genetic scanners, and most of all, people familiar with this guard and her mannerisms. There was no sneaking out. She would simply die.

She prayed the Lord's Prayer, and begged that the Lord would give her rest, and figure her not just for the death's she caused, but for failing to reach the Orthodox Terran Catholics with the truth they had been denied for some many millennia.

With one last steeling breath she burst from the room and ran with all speed to her death.

****

Vengeance stood over the body of her husband.

She had been married for 5 hours, 1 one which spent at the wedding, another in the bed, and the other 3 in sleep.

She positively identified him, and the yellow sheet came over him. A priest came to say the last rites, modified for his status as a Paladin. She would have to preform the Deathwatch, unless she was called to battle.

"Vengeance." a deep baritone boomed behind her.

She turned. Her eyes were moist, her lips quivering, but only slightly. This made Bishop Reaver suspicious, but only until he remembered the scandalous truth.

"My condolences are with you, Paladin. But I may have something better to offer than that."

Vengeance merely glared, waiting to hear what this fool would make her do in her mourning. Yet, was she really mourning?

"You husband was destroyed by a Demon, a female from St. Dante's. I will be frank, since I know you would prefer that to..."

"He was fucking a harlot." she said, surprised at her own brusqueness in front of the Bishop.

The Bishop was forgiving, for he feared Vengeance as much as her late husband did. "Yes... in the prison. They ran a brothel mere yards from one of our most historic missions on Mars and a children's catechism school!" His fist clenched hard on his leather and his face flared Passion Bulb red. Inwardly, Vengeance laughed at the comical sight of the doughy man scrunched into an indignant scowl.

"But what I'm offering you is a chance to create your own justice, restore the honor to your late husband's family, and enjoy the particular rush that your namesake gives. The Lord has blessed us such that the fool had not disabled the tracking device in her vessel..."

"The succubus escaped?" Vengeance demanded, incredulous.

"Uh... err, yes. Some how, the Demoness disabled a female guard that was playing look out, and shot her way to a prisoner transport. Our men followed her to Phobos, but she landed and abandoned the ship before they could shoot her out of the sky. They chased her into a cave, and then I got the idea to let you have the honors of destroying her."

Vengeance was dumbfounded. Why would this Bishop be so foolish? Why didn't he just have the creature killed and be done with it?

"Do you accept?"

Vengeance sighed. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to mourn... maybe. It must be the shock. She may have not known even the name of her husband until the day of her wedding, she may have had the poorest love in perhaps the entire Galactic Congregation for her wedding night, but surely there must still be feelings that the Lord would give her, to make her love him as He made Foehammer love her.

Love her so much that he would sneak off to lay with Evil itself?

"Of course, your eminence." she said, far more halfheartedly than the Bishop expected.

He touched her arm, and began to say "If you need anything, you can always ask me." But she snatched it away and fully scowled at him, with a angry, questioning look.

"Very well Paladin, you're dismissed. You ship has the briefing. Happy hunting" he said, hurt and sheepish.

Vengeance stalked off, her mind racing with frustration, confusing, and a growing despair...

***

Why didn't they fire?

Two starfighters hovered before the cave mouth. They had a clear shot, but did not fire. One shot would fill the cave with a deadly heat that even Xen's spacesuit could not resist.

Maybe they wanted to starve her? No, they were waiting for something. Waiting for a transport to take her back? Why bother? They were justified to kill her on sight at this point. This was...

A another light moved among the sea of stars, and grew brighter. Soon another fighter came into view, one of those fancy ones that Orthos gave their best "Demon" hunters. Best hunters of anything besides humans, more like it...

The ship continued to come close, until, to Xen's fear, it decided to land right before the cave. Lights filled the cave with a soft glow, instead of a harsh one which they could do. The front bay ramp opened, and a Altar Boy stepped out.

She had only seen a Terran female once before, and she had been throated by her flying elbow. Now, she had seen another one.

And she was deadly, and beautiful.

***

"By order of the Holy Church of the Lord of Hosts, a declare you anathema, to be put to death, by honorable single combat or your cowardice."

The Demon did not respond. Some demons were not educated in Terran, and that did not matter. There was no honor in them, only in the chosen Creation of God, only in the creatures he made in the Garden, that populated the Lands of Cannaan, and with His might conquered a world.

But Vengeance did not immediately fly to the battle and dispatch this creature. She was new: a different sort of Demon from the ones in the Bestiary Demonical. Discovering new creatures was not unheard of, but it was rare, and this one fascinated her to hesitation.

Why? Many reasons. There was her shape: very humanoid. Very humanoid female. If she were a human female, she would be one of the most desirable, of the body type that was often called "fat" by other women jealous of its fullness. Desirable: was Vengeance desirable? Did she lack what made this eerie, Demonic beauty so intoxicating?

But then, unexpectedly but undeniably, the Paladin felt something. Vengeance felt her cheeks warm, and the catalysts deep within her producing reactions that were warm, deep and yet somehow unholy. She was shocked, unnerved by what she realized was blossoming in her.

Lust. Lust for a Demon female.

****

Axel - a tale of little men and strangers

Some grandma out in Texas was getting ripped off, not too long ago.

She gave her desktop to a young man in a little computer store that otherwise had a good reputation. Couldn’t get into it anymore, she said.

Probably had some viruses on it, she said. That’s what the tech that claimed he was from Microsoft told her when he called her out of the blue to help her with a problem she didn't know she had, she said.

She gave it to him yesterday, late in the afternoon. His cold fingers hadn’t moved its dust by late the next morning.

Axel loved to work hard, but hesitated at all the starts. Mortals had stingy gods or ungenerous laws of science that only gave them pocketfuls of seconds to kill their “Did I do enough today” anxieties. Axel had not yet learned how to use his effectively. He was a procrastinator, perhaps even a victim of ADD, but could not afford to find out if he had such a disease. All he had was talent with things that beeped loudly when they were very sick, and time to burn, and a bucket of guilt.

And though he had wasted plenty of hours already, a giant urge, one that Axel loved to indulge, called for a little bit more fun. More mayhem to his tightening schedule.

He explained the plan to himself, in a harsh, angry whisper. “You know what, I’m gonna fucking do it. I am going to get a big, sexy, fucking danish, put that shit in my mouth, and eat it. Not like she’s the fuck around to stop me anymore...”

His urges, himself, had the rationale for this violation of a decent working ethic. A danish that would add another drop to his overflowing cup of adipocytes had to be tasted first, before the old lady that just wanted to get her granbabies pictures back could see her fixed income turn into a fixed computer. He didn’t say “I’ll get a motherfucking danish after I finish my work.”

Tea knew all about Axel’s lust. That’s why there was only one pillow on the bed now. That’s why there are no more Lovecraft books or wire sculptures or pads or makeup or bras or anything that was for her and her alone in his house anymore. That why her chastisements, her threats, her wisdom did not scent the air with dread and hurt and hope for a better tomorrow. Not anymore. She could stop him from hurting himself, stop him on a dime, when he loved her.

Number 2 also knew just what Axel was incapable of, and that is precisely why it was there in the computer shop, leaning against the counter in tight jeans and a fine maroon button up, shining necklace hanging from a 30 year old’s woman’s swan white neck under blue, dove-soft, eyes. Number 2 was here to see what Axel WOULD do, when squeezed very hard...

Invisible to Axel’s watery mortal eyes, 2 listened with a manager’s care. Axel monologued with his audience of tiny screwdrivers over the pros and cons of convenience store pastries, especially in the contexts of body pride (Its wrong to bully people based on their weight), personal health (self-inflicted obesity = suicide the danishes have a delicious variety of toxic food additives), Tea’s thoughts on the matter (”I want you to live a long time with me.” “I don’t want a fat husband”), and how tired he was of listening to good advice.

Some foreign, internal urge told Number 2 to wave its gentle hand and fan Axel’s cowardice dry: his soliloquies were uninspired, delusional and deformed. He was out of shape for the kind of work that was coming. Really, if you put Axel on paper his desire to do right would be quite high, but everything else it seemed was triple digits under the x-axis. He was not ready for real life, much less the quasi-reality, the mutant truth that was stepping in.

But Axel’s re-calibration wasn’t in the plan. They needed him to stay a break-fix. They would not let him run smoothly. Why, 2 wondered, chewing an end of hair that was no more real than what she looked like now.

A twinge pinched 2’s left temple. Gooseflesh rose on its skin.

The creature was here. The beast Number 2 had been waiting for had finally arrived.

A cloud of light solidified into the form of a giant next to the oblivious Axel. A forgotten instinct tensed the muscles of 2, the godlike: fear, an old friend 2 had not seen in years, stroked its spine.

Axel pushed against gravity, which pulled him more everyday, and began to turn his chair towards the door that we lead him out of the computer shop and into the convenience store a couple shops down in the strip, like aiming a gun at his ambitions of being slim again, like when he would run a quarter mile everyday, before seeing Tea, then his girlfriend. Tea, his life reflected, toggled, and warmed, he sometimes thought of her.

And in that 270 degree arc, Axel saw the beast’s back.

It could only be described with the strongest similes: arms like old trees, legs like courthouse pillars, chest like a prison wall, and a head bald as a new door knob. It was masculine-shaped, hyper-masculine in fact: the impossible kind of body that boys are taught to aspire to by evil TV and old-minded fathers. The body that boys like Axel wisely disbelieve as fantasy, until they watch their friends turn into specimens of that impossibility, or at least something closer to the ideal than they ever could be. A mysandrinstic body.

A polished, brand-new sword longer than Axel was tall hung in a leather frog at its left hip, leaning against a dark leather kilt that smelled tanned today. Minutiae of impractical armor sprinkled its chest, protecting the vitals from little, but explaining slowly and clearly that this monster knew how to kill very well, but was very inept at being hit back.

And as for the skin: the beast was covered in tiny scales colored an eye-straining royal purple.

It knew its job all along: the monster picked up the store owner’s old cathode ray 30” television from the cheap fiberboard shelf it sat on, and hurled it through the west wall. It blasted through with a loud crash-pop, rolled gaily for several yards on the plump, green lawn between the computer shop and Eagle Laundry, and smashed to a stop against the laundry’s cinderblock wall.

But the purple man was not finished with his construction project. The beast kicked more chunks out of this wall. The beast could do the same to Axel, and would only get a little wet for its trouble.

The Adonis stepped out into a glaring sun, and headed for the laundromat at a confident pace. An easy pace.

Axel stood gently: very, very gently, shaking with a heartbeat stronger than he felt in years.

He started to creep to the front door, to leave the beast to do whatever it was going to do, with that sword, to those people he didn’t know in the laundry. Whatever destruction and carnage Mr. Purple wrought, it wasn’t Axel’s problem, and wasn’t one he could solve anyway. He would just be in the way, he assured himself,

Axel was just about to take his third step when he heard a scream of metal. He turned.

Mr. Purple arms lifted the laundry’s condenser unit above its gleaming purple scalp. Metal and wire hung and swung freely, as the beast raised the iron chunk over its head.

Mr. Purple raised a foot off the ground, bent backwards like a palm in a Gulf of Mexico maelstrom, and snapped forward like the storm suddenly died. The condenser exploded, the cinderblocks disintegrated and the stand up dryers on the other side of the wall leaped forward. As the launders slipped on suds and stood agape, the dryers fell into their small, shielding arms.

And as the beast stepped into the building, Axel found he could no longer run away, or even move, save for blinking uselessly.

The building was now dead: its 240 volt A/C pulse flatlined by the damage. Darkness danced happily in the bass beat of the launders beating on the electric sliding doors that would not open. 

They cried out their last screams.

The monster was stepping inside. And his hand was reaching for his sword...

Axel’s skin wept with sweat. Helplessness, the only thing Axel owned that Tea would not take with her, welded his feet to the floor.

And then strangely, perhaps even magically, this helplessness, that he allowed to hinder him so long turned to a frustration, then an indignation, then a hot rage.

Number 2 watched Axel carefully, saved the look on Axel’s face in her mind. Soft, meaty fatty check twisted into a snarl. Anger, and determination, like heat waves.

Axel lurched forward, in an awkward bolt/dive for a small chunk of cinderblock in front of him. His hand clawed it. His left foot planted itself before him at a strong angle. His arm flapped in the hot July air as it swung back. Like a whip, he loosed his ammo.

Purple’s head was so hard that it gave an audible crack-thump sort of sound, when the bullet struck precisely where Axel aimed it.

Axel was elated, briefly.

But then screams in the laundromat continued, and Mr. Purple’s courthouse-pillar legs began to pivot, bringing his overlarge body to an about-face.

When the shadows peeled away from its face, Axel saw eyes of solid gold, and teeth of ivory as pointed as a wolf’s, behind a smile twisted with hunger, hate, and joy.

Axel's rage melted back to sanity and his accustomed weakness. He backed up one step at a time, to the beat of the stream of “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…” pouring from his mouth.

Then the monster’s smile began to fade into concentration. Mr. Purple stooped, and its giant hand pivoted slowly to a relatively whole cinder block. Axel stopped, stupidly, and watched the monster’s fingers envelop the whole thing like a softball. Projectile in hand, the monster slowly rose back to standing.

Axel gulped, and the beast frowned, as it aimed.

And Number 2? Only watched.

Two could play, the monster seemed to say. The monster hurled back its arm. Axel bent his knees.

The beast shot the brick with all the foot-pounds his muscles could give it, and he had plenty in store. The wind cried as grainy concrete pierced the air.

At the same time, Axel pushed against the ground with all that his every fiber of his flabby leg muscles.

And Axel leaped hard and fast... towards it.

The cinder block struck Axel full on in the face with a satisfying crunch, smashing his brains so hard that they leaked out of the ears a little bit. His corpse twirled neatly in the air, then thudded to the grass below. One more twitch, and it was done.

Number 2 closed its green eyes and shook its brown pageant curls. “Idiot”.