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V1 does not remember much of its time in that… it doesn’t know where that is, exactly, but it was running late to school (what?), and knocked into the self-proclaimed prettiest girl in town.
Mirage wasn’t wrong. The school uniform, though impressively unstylish, gave her a pleasing figure. The way her skirt swayed with each movement was mesmerizing.
It doesn’t remember much of its encounter with Mirage. She was grappling with some sort of struggle, and it said a bunch of words, and then it found itself back in Lust.
Though the conversation rapidly faded from its mind, its memory of Mirage’s image didn’t. Mirage was their mirror image, and it saw her in the reflection of itself. If it unfocuses its vision, it can nearly imagine itself as Mirage.
If Mindflayers could create human-like bodies, then who’s to say that machines couldn’t wear clothes?
Luckily for it, it’s pretty sure the long-gone residents of the city of Lust won’t mind a missing wardrobe or two.
It compares outfit after outfit in front of the mirror, swapping them out as fast as it can. Tight clothing and heavy, baggy pants restricts movement too much. Light, airy shirts feel nice to wear, though sleeves tend to get caught in its joints.
The best are the dresses. It watches itself spin around and around, the dress flaring out with each swish and turn.
Like this, it almost looks like Mirage. It stares at itself, a blue V model wearing a white dress with a red sash on its hips. If it wasn’t for the wings and its darker blue colouration, it would look exactly like Mirage.
It adds the dress to The Pile, and picks out something new to try on.
In its haste, it has forgotten one very important fact: it has no way to comfortably move everything in The Pile. That is not to confuse it with The Other Pile, full of clothes it does not care for. There is also The Other, Other Pile, which it intends to burn later.
Unfortunately, despite how much it loves the convenience of the weapon storage in its hard-light glass wings, those weren’t made to carry the weight of an insurmountable amount of clothes.
It tried. It fell. And, sadly, it admitted defeat.
So the logical choice of action was to bundle itself up with everything in The Pile, of course. It’s hard to catch fresh blood on its plating under all the layers, but enemies can’t hurt it either, so all in all, this trade-off was worth it.
It watches as the flames of The Other, Other Pile rise, a Streetcleaner’s flamethrower in its hands.
It throws a coin at the burning pile.
The burning scent follows it, despite it now being nowhere near The Other, Other Pile.
It realizes only when the flames lick at its plating that the bundle of clothes it’s wrapped in is on fire. It screeches, and parries the burning clothes.
[+PARRY]
Its artfully balanced bundle goes flying off into the distance, down below where V1 cannot reach.
[+KILL]
And also on top of some poor shmuck, it seems.
It flips a coin down into the abyss for the dead shmuck’s trouble.
Elsewhere, in the layer below Lust, Gabriel dies to a pile of burning clothes.
“I think I’m a girl,” says V1 to the corpse of King Minos. “Have you ever felt something similar? Born one way but feel another way? I only felt like this recently.”
The ball of void chasing her is unresponsive.
“I wasn’t asking you,” she points to the void ball, then back towards the giant corpse trying really hard to kill her. “I mean, you have to understand what I’m going through right now. You were born alive, but then you died. It’s like how I was born genderless, but now I’m a girl because I saw my clone who was me but a girl. Some other things were different too, but that was the most important part.”
The corpse throws a fist down into the arena. She parries it.
“You’re right,” she nods, “I should just punch my problems away. Thanks for the advice.”
She parries another fist. The corpse falls down, deader than dead.
She flicks a coin at one of the fists. “Keep the change.”
She stares at the corpse of an angel in the lowest level of Gluttony, buried under charred scraps.
She flicks a coin at the body.
She finds V2 in Greed, sitting on a throne like a cunt. V2 dramatically rises from his seat, like a cunt.
“Took you long enough,” he says. “If I was human, I would’ve given myself back pain with how long I waited for you here.”
“Wait wait wait,” V1 holds up a finger. “How did you know you were a boy?”
“What?” V2 squints, knuckles held mid-crack. “Who told you that?”
“Answer my question, boy.”
“Can we kill each other already.”
V1 stares until he relents.
“Fine,” V2 sighs, “I suppose I have time to spare.” And he sits back down on the throne. Once again, like a cunt.
V1 wants that throne. She pounces upon V2 like how the sun descends upon my eyelids every morning.
Unfortunately, her great plan is foiled by V2’s stupid green arm that V1 has yet to steal. He entangles her with the cord, and she falls to the ground like a great sack of potatoes.
“Can you not?” V2 shakes his whiplash arm, jingling V1 back and forth.
“I’m refraining myself from saying things that would be redacted.”
“Please do not,” V2 sighs, freeing her from the restraints. “The author is desperately trying not to write a V4V fic, or even mention V4V.”
She gets up to her feet and shakes off the heebie-jeebies. “It’s not exactly working if this passage is in here.”
Fuckers got me there.
“...and that’s how I figured out I liked being a boy.”
“Wait, back up,” V1 blinks, sitting cross-legged on the floor across from V2. “I didn’t catch that.”
“Which part?”
V1 leans back, hands folded on top of her lap. “All of it?”
“The entire thing?” V2 looks flabbergasted. V1 nods. “I talked for an hour. How much of it did you hear?”
“Only the end.”
“Why didn’t you stop me at any point?”
V1 shrugs.
“Well, the short of it is that, after I realized I would rather kill for you than let you die, I had a moment where I realized that I could do anything I want. That was represented by me gaining a new set of pronouns. You get it, right? It happens to all of us.”
“Not to you, and not to us. You’ve got the wrong chain of events in your brain.”
“What? But I remember it like it was fifteen days ago.”
“Sorry to break it to you, but that happened to some other cringefail version of V1 and V2 where they really want to have hate sex but resort to killing each other instead.”
“Wow,” V2 shakes his head, “Couldn’t be me.”
“I know right? It’s not even that hard to kill someone, but it took them years.”
“That too. But I would never fuck you. You don’t even clean yourself.”
V1 gasps. “Are you saying I stink right now?”
“Yes,” V2 deadpans. “I know you absorb blood on contact, but use some soap and clean that off every once in a while. I know your plating used to be much brighter than that.”
“With what nose are you even smelling me with?”
“I don’t need a nose to know you're filthy.” V2 shakes his head. “We’re getting off track. Did my story at least help you figure out your gender?”
“No. I already knew I was a girl before our talk.”
V2 squints at her. She squints back.
“Whatever,” V2 gets up to finish his interrupted knuckle-cracking animation, “let’s kill each other with rocks now.”
She gives him a thumbs up. “Works for me.”