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Credits are in description. Continued from Part 1:
Compatability (Crossover Request Story) (Part 1)Credits are in description. Be sure to read the " Liquid Mercury " and " Liliraune " series before reading this! Compatability "Liquid Mercury" and "Liliraune" Crossover Part 1 [JINTAK CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS] [9:19 AM] [67 DAYS SINCE THE "“REFORMATION” ALLIANCE"] The advertisement is hidden beneath a long-winded opinion piece on the back page of the morning newspaper. The words “MISSING PERSONS” are the first thing that catches Sophie Belmont’s eyes when she sees it, a tantalizing sign that drew her focus there. The next thing she sees, the specific names of those missing people, keep her brain from migrating to another set of words a...

Compatability
"Liquid Mercury" and "Liliraune" Crossover

Part 2

[19 HOURS LATER]

A white cargo van may appear suspicious to many human observers, but the forest does not have many of those people around. This allows the vehicle to travel along the dirt path under the cover of night, away from watchful eyes and other commuters to slow it down. Sophie Belmont drives the van, knowing the route from her previous excursion to the greenhouse. Maria Shigama sits beside her in the cab, while Diane Mercury sits in the rear storage compartment with ten metal and wooden crates. Each crate has easy-to-open lids and padding on the inside to cushion objects placed within. All three women are silent as Sophie guides them to where she stopped before and shuts off the van’s engine.

Sophie and Maria visually scan their side of the van for any watchers as they step out. Diane opens a wooden crate she was sitting on and grabs a few cylindrical containers and plastic bags from inside it before she emerges from the back of the van. She quietly closes the large door before scanning the path the van came down. When she sees nothing has followed them except the wheel markings of their transportation, she walks around to the front and waits for Sophie and Maria to change into their proper forms. Sophie copies her previous method to hide the van’s key without assimilating it before she transforms.

Diane distributes her collected items equally among her sisters – one bag and one small container for everyone. “The van has left tracks,” she remarks as Mary and Selena take their share. “Shall we erase the marks?”

Mary shakes her head. “We’ll have to risk being spotted by inquisitive humans. This cannot afford to be left alone.”

Sophie nods. “Just to be safe,” she then suggests, “we should cease vocal communication from here on out.” All three women’s eyes flash once as they establish a telepathic link through the Network. Thus bonded, they advance on the greenhouse slightly apart from each other, Selena at the head. She guides them to the locked door and points out the missing window as well. They can all see a very faint reddish tint to the air that flows out from that hole.

Once the three women pass through the door, the garden’s humidity slams into their bodies. A sensation of amusement spreads through the Network from Mary as the trio all look at the verdant landscape, surrounded by glass and bathing in its own warmth. “Your statements are correct, Sister. We were not entirely convinced at first.”

Sophie only expresses confusion, but not towards Mary’s remark. “The air is thicker than before,” she reports. And the air does feel thick to them, laced with humidity and a spicy scent the Network classifies as pheromones. While this makes sense logically – so many flowers in one space wanting to pollinate would produce a high concentration of pheromones – the women aren’t comforted by it being here.

“Don’t tarry around,” Selena orders. “We should stay together and collect whatever samples we can; look for unknown types among the crowd.” With that order, Selena leads her sisters down the same narrow path she took before, the other two almost sticking to her back from how close they are to her. They look around at the plants without taking anything right away, the winking fireflies providing extra bursts of light for their use. Selena quickly motions to the stem of the flower she beheaded, the stem still missing its upper part. They then move on down the path, slowly cycling the garden’s air to copy human breathing.

Mary mentally tells the others to stop just before they cross a tiny wooden bridge that passes over a small river going through the greenhouse like a thread through a larger tapestry. She kneels down to get at face level with a sundew plant that has roots trailing down to the river. Diane and Selena move to either side of Mary, looking between their sister and their surroundings.

“There’s a spiral pattern on these tentacles,” Mary informs as she sees the finger-sized limbs shift around in their coiled position. “It’s made of the same red dust as I saw from the assimilated sample.”

“Take it,” Diane advises. “Rip out a tentacle and store it.” Mary adjusts her items so they are all in one hand and opens the container before extending her index finger into a larger pointed blade of liquid metal. She takes a moment to position her container beneath the tentacle, and then slices through the limb with one good stroke. A sweet-smelling juice starts spilling out from the plant as the tentacle falls into Mary’s container and she closes it up.

“Watch out, Mary!” Selena mentally shouts, too late for her to notice a small flower lower down on the sundew blooming open and aiming right at her face. The flower spits out a dense cloud of pheromones that get into Mary’s nose and eyes: she automatically shuts them as her facial features start to melt and shift. The ground around the three women shakes as several thick vines burst out from the surrounding plants, each vine carrying a larger white-petaled flower that drips blood-red nectar. Selena’s hair-blades rise up and quickly slice through two of the vines before they get close: Diane turns her arms into blades and earns the same score.

More vines come at Mary, but she wisely crawls towards her sisters and hides her face with her hands. Diane and Selena shift around Mary’s position, each severing three more flowers from their host vines before the Network detects how high the pheromone levels in the area are getting. There is so much of the stuff now that it clogs some of the nanomachine’s processing power, slowing Diane and Selena down as they try to dodge more flowers and what they assume is pheromone-induced nectar they continuously drool onto the soil.

A series of loud snapping noises comes from the other side of the bridge; the vines and their flowers draw back, but the pheromone levels do not decrease. Diane and Selena feel the liquid pooling around their feet, transmitting lethargic sensations to their brains where they should be immune. They do not understand why they feel tired, but the mission has clearly gone beyond their immediate control. They bend down to scoop up the curled-up Mary and her container, only for their feet to slip as roots jut up from beneath the soil they stand on and make them both fall on their faces. The nectar gets into their eyes, noses and mouth now, temporarily stunning them.

In this moment of vulnerability, the snapping noises stop as two gargantuan flowers emerge from among the plants. One is a lily with white petals and a green stem, the other a rose with pink petals but arranged in the shape of a rose. Both are the size of small cars, crossing over the river using luscious and thick roots the size of tree trunks. Standing inside each flower are two women, unaffected by the flower’s motions as it brings them to within a few feet of the three robots. An intimidating female voice asks them, “Why are you harming our garden?” as four pairs of pinkish-red eyes glare at them like burning stars.

Diane, Selena and Mary each simultaneously realize they are not staring at humans, but human-plant hybrids sharing the qualities of beauty for both species. Each of these women have either a rose or lily attached to one side of their scalp like an ornament, a smaller flower acting as a choker around their neck inside a dark-green coating of leaves. That coating extends down their bodies and either covers their breasts or moves along the side of them to reach and cover their vaginal openings. Additional roses or lilies are on each of the women’s hands, and more of the matching flower’s petals overlap their upper legs. Their feet are inside a pool of the same nectar the smaller flowers were drooling out, both the rose and lily nearly filled to the brim with the stuff.

The greenhouse’s caretakers have been found, and they do not look happy.

Tension hangs in the garden’s humidity-laden air like a thick blanket, insulating and building up the potential for a dangerous outcome. Diane asks the plant-women, “You are the garden’s overseers?” as she and Selena help Mary stand up on her feet. The metallic “skin” around Mary’s face bubbles as she tries to scratch it with shaking hands. Diane and Selena keep her hands down by turning their own hands back into actual hands and holding Mary’s in tight grips.

The same woman that spoke before, one of the two inside the giant rose and sporting neck-length hair with pointed ears poking out from the sides of her head, answers for them all. “We take care of the garden, if that’s what you mean.” She raises a hand and places it on her breast while spreading her other arm wide to gesture the other three around her. “I am Sirova,” she tells Diane, “and these are my sisters.”

“You are Sirova Dalton, then?” Diane confirms. Sirova’s eyes widen at that name, the beauty in her face marred by several irritated wrinkles. A reluctant “Yes” comes out of her lips, as if her full name is something left unspoken.

“Then,” Mary continues as she looks to the woman beside Sirova with red hair that extends down to her waist, “you are Casey?” The woman’s red eyes widen before she gives a brief nod, not saying a word and appearing meeker than her fellow hybrid.

“That implies you two,” Selena continues for Diane while looking at the two women inside the massive lily, “are Tara Megami and Harry Itagara. Is this also correct?” The shorter-haired woman of those two, her hair more spiked and with a masculine shade to her facial structure, instinctively moves closer to her longer-haired sister, holding her shoulders firmly while they both look at Selena without speaking. Their silence reveals their answer to the machines.

Mary lets out a quiet chuckle as she gets enough strength to make eye contact with Sirova despite her face looking like it has a bad case of poison ivy itches. “This simplifies our initial problems,” she informs the flower-bound hybrids. “Your names have all been reported in local newspapers as missing and under investigation. We have come to the last known location stated in the report.”

“Investigate?” The woman named “Casey” breaks her silence at this, her voice sounding smoother than Sirova’s as she gets Mary’s attention. “People are still looking for us?”

“Affirmative,” Mary answers. “Do you not remember your families and friends outside this place?” All four plant-women look at each other, the question addressing each of them with equal impact. Sirova continues to show authority over the others when they all look to her for an answer.

“We remember our families,” she tells Mary. “And before you ask, we do not wish to return, or for them to find us here. We are happier here than with them. Anyone who has come here without our permission has been convinced to not return.” Sirova earns concurring nods from Casey, Harry and Tara at that, none of them verbally objecting or trying to change the statement.

Mary shares her growing unease with the hybrid’s mindset with her sisters by squeezing their hands in hers. She tries to maintain her former attitude towards these mutated humans as Sirova asks her, “I will assume our families created you, or contacted your creators to make you come here?”

“We chose to come here,” Mary replies. “We are capable of independent thought and action, as our creators intended us to be.” The two hybrids inside the lily gasp, the longer-haired “Tara” not noticing some of the flower’s red nectar slide down her chin as she stares open-mouthed at Mary like an awestruck child.

“You’re A.I?” the shorter-haired “Harry” asks in disbelief, her voice cracking slightly from shock. “That’s crazy!” Tara snaps back to her senses and shakes her head at her sister before Harry realizes what everyone else appears to be thinking. Namely, she does not seem any less crazy to these robotic women. Where artificial intelligence stems from science fiction, the four half-human, half-plant women connect to fantasy and mysticism. Harry figures this out before any of her sisters tell her otherwise, quieting up as a tiny purple blush spreads over her cheeks and refusing to look any of the three robots in their eyes.

Sirova smirks at Harry in a forgiving way before turning back to the fatigued robots. “Returning to the point,” she says as the roses on her hands puff out small clouds of pheromones that float towards the robots like an airborne virus, “why are you hurting our garden?”

“We did not intend to damage this place,” Mary answers with a choking voice as she tries, and fails, to keep from breathing in more pheromones. Every breath the robots take is laced with the stuff, and they can’t shut off their filtration systems for extended periods without the risk of permanent damage to those programs. “We only came to collect samples, to study how the plants here are different from any other on Earth.”

“You took what we made for ourselves?!” Harry shouts, sharply leaning forward to stare right into Mary’s optics. “You rat-faced thief!” A loud, wet slap follows this accusation, Harry’s hand digging into Mary’s face and ripping out a chunk of her malleable skin.

“Harry! That’s not what…” Tara stops talking when Harry suddenly clutches her hand at the wrist, the fingers starting to shake as Harry’s eyes bug out. “Harry? What’s going on?!”

“My hand! It’s burning up!” Harry’s hand begins to steam as if about to combust; instead, it starts to melt into gray goo that slowly starts to drip onto the ground. A quiet hissing signals the danger of this situation. Casey and Sirova exert telepathic command over the rose they stand in when they make it move towards the lily, but they never step outside its confines.

“Hang on,” Tara says as she moves over to Harry inside the lily, “I’ll help –”

“No! Stay back! I can’t…!” Harry moves as far away as possible from Tara, clutching his melting hand at the wrist. Her hand is now completely melted, and the arm is beginning to join its fate. She looks to Tara with a desperate expression, her lips peeled back and her eyes almost completely white. Her pain is so clearly defined that Tara’s face pales as well. Harry looks at her, or possibly through her at something only she can see and fills her with terror.

At the same moment, Diane and Selena feel a crushing pressure on their minds. Warnings and alarms flash and blare behind their eyes as they feel Mary’s hands grip them with crushing force. The mercury and iron-skinned women turn to face their sister and see her face lose its human appearance. The Network starts screaming as a reddish liquid begins to froth and dribble out of Mary’s mouth and down her chest. Selena scoops up Mary’s container and bag in one of her long strands of hair, curling the end inward like a tentacle.

“Harry, don’t!” Tara screams as Harry tilts dangerously far out of the lily. “Don’t – EEEYAGH!”

Tara’s words change to a howling cry of pain and anguish as Harry tumbles outside of the flower. Several long vines connecting Harry’s elongated legs and toeless feet snap off as if cut open by an ax, flailing in the air before falling back into the lily’s nectar. Harry’s arm is almost completely melted away by this point, the odor of burning wood competing with the pheromones for dominance. At the same moment, Mary leaps towards Harry with surprising speed, breaking free of Diane and Selena’s grip. She ends up sliding into the roots of the severed sundew plant and coating some of those limbs with her melting face.

Before anyone else can move or react, all seven of the minds in the greenhouse are grabbed in the same crushing mental grip. Their bodies lose all sense of coherence, flopping to the ground or slumping into their respective flowers. The unseen hand tears their thoughts out of the physical shells that hold them, drawing them out before smashing them together like a child playing with clay. They become twisting shapes, plant and robot momentarily combining only to rip apart again without knowing what they are experiencing.

Seven mouths taste the same blend of intoxicating ambrosia and nerve-shattering fluids; fourteen ears hear voices of people they never knew in their ears, all of them screaming in anger and suffering. Flesh and metal both melt away when touched. The toying limbs that hold them tight then pull inward, Harry and Mary most of all, towards the dark mass of an abominable something plant and machine both cower before; what all seven minds see as certain death.

They are drawn into unity, becoming one single being none of them understand or relate to. The something appears anathema to both flesh and metal. They are all afraid of it.

A single voice then speaks into the noise, its words echoing like thunder: “Assimilation incompatible. System at risk. Activating terminal preservation protocol.”

The seven minds lurch with pain as their connection is cut by the individual strand. Their thoughts float in isolation and then slam back into their own bodies all out of place, their senses thoroughly rattled. For desperate seconds they adjust, their skin and organs unfamiliar to them. Their senses magnify to microscopic levels at random, and then fall back to their normal levels with no warning. They smell the rotting flesh of a skeleton buried far beneath the garden’s soil, the vile mixture of wilting flowers and old wood, and the stench of molten metal fresh from the kiln.

When the not-so-affected robots and humans regain enough of themselves to look around, they turn to their respective sisters. Harry and Mary lie near each other on the ground, away from the river. Harry is curled into a tight ball, lying on her side so that the lily on her head can be seen. Mary kneels in the soil, away from the roots, with her head drooped down to her chest and a blank layer of hardened “skin” for a face. Harry’s body quivers on the soil as the blue lines on Mary’s chest dim to the point of vanishing completely. Both their eyes are shut tight, barely a breath coming from their mouths as their bodies change colors to similar shades of muddy-brown. It is a darker, faded shade, different from the garden’s fresh soil, provoking anxiety in all five remaining humanoids as they look at their appropriate sisters.

“Harry! Harry!” Tara stretches her hands towards Harry’s body, unable to reach her sister and still stay in her lily. Sirova and Casey look on with terrified awe, immobilized as they try to comprehend the separation they are experiencing. Tara feels and looks the worst of all, tears of liquid nectar streaming down her cheeks and her feet pressing against the sides of what is now her flower.

Diane and Selena do not have any better luck. Diane’s quiet, “Wake up, Clay,” produces no response. “Wake up, Clay,” she says again, louder and more insistently. Still no answer. She turns to a frowning Selena, her face and voice appearing calm, but her words laced with concern. “Her system is compromised,” she tells Selena without any proof, leaping to the most logical conclusion. “She needs to recover.”

Selena looks towards the Liliraune and continues frowning. “The overseers have suffered worse than us,” she says, and Diane turns to view the scene for herself. Pity and Loss spring up in her subroutines, emotions that should not logically be there. Tara shows both feelings as she mourns her sister’s fate – and then she notices who’s watching her.

“What did you do to Harry?!” Tara screams as she spins to face Diane and Selena. Her sadness is now a berserker’s fury, love for Harry another emotion the two robots feel in their minds as strongly as Tara does. It takes a mental effort to get the words they want formed and spoken.

“Your sister did this to herself by physically assaulting Mary,” Diane tries to explain as logically as possible. “By striking her and getting some of Mary’s body on her hand, she triggered the assimilation protocol of the Network.”

“And then she turned to stone. Something you let happen!” Tara’s anger only rises, her fists clenching as her face shifts between rage and childish pouting. “Bring my sister back, now!”

“We cannot bring her back,” Selena replies. “The Network acts on its own programming, an independent code bound only by its own limitations. One of its programmed actions is to assimilate new material it contacts.”

Tara gives a wordless wail, pounding the lily’s nectar with her fists as a swimmer would the sea. The red liquid flies in all directions, some getting on Casey and Sirova’s bodies as they move their rose around the lily to get closer to Harry.

“Harry!” Casey calls out when she the rose gets within reach of the frozen sister. “Please, listen to me! Can you hear me in there?!” She reaches out a green hand to touch her, the eagerness to get a reaction from Harry bleeding into the robot’s minds as much as her sister’s.

Sirova grabs Casey’s hand and forcibly pulls her away. “Don’t touch her,” she orders. “That metal goo will spread onto you as well!”

“Harry…” Casey’s eyes tear up as she leans back into Sirova’s hold, her sister embracing her from behind and whispering in her ears. Sirova’s words do not calm Casey down, only keep her from trying to touch Harry again. Tara’s agony-induced tantrum cools to a simmering anguish, still not accepting what has just happened.

Sirova looks at Tara with sympathy and sorrow for her loss, and then at Diane and Selena with anger ready to unleash itself at a moment’s notice. “If you are lying to us…” she warns, not needing to finish the sentence to get her point across.

“Falsehoods are not going to improve our situation,” Diane admits. “Our sister has also entered a preservation state from the same effects.” Everyone not frozen, save Tara, looks at Mary’s faceless position as she kneels in silence. “This assimilation was a failure, the first ever observed since the Network was created.”

Casey’s breath hitches, a green hand moving over her heart. “Then… that’s what happened to those humans?” she asks for her sisters. “The voices I saw, the faces – some of them used to be people? And the machines, this “Network”, took them into itself?”

“The Network assimilated them, yes,” Selena says without looking Casey in the eye. “Body and mind were taken into its collective intelligence and integrated where best necessary.” She presents one of her hands to Casey’s inspection. “Those humans were changed to fit the Network’s goal; this included taking a human-like appearance for easier interactions.”

Casey leans back from the hand, the hand on her chest squeezing her left breast as her pupils shrink inside the irises. “Then,” she determines, “you did kill them, and then you took their forms to copy them.”

“That is one purpose our Creator programmed into the Network,” Selena elaborates, not confirming or denying Tara’s reasoning. “It must adapt and evolve. We must adapt and evolve.”

“You… must?” Sirova expresses intense confusion about this specific requirement. “You don’t care that you are killing people, plants, or animals?”

Selena glares at Sirova with her ears flat against her face. “The hosts we assimilated are not dead,” she growls out, trying to keep questions the Network considers useless from being conceived. “The Network took them into itself and uses them for its purpose. Is your connection to this garden not the same way?”

“Absolutely not!” Now it is Sirova’s turn to growl out a response and give an enraged glare. “Our garden doesn’t force people to join it or die. We offer happiness to those who want it. Those who don’t want to know about us can leave us alone.”

“That will not always work,” Diane cautions. Casey’s hand squeezes her breast again in response. “There are police cordons outside the garden,” Diane continues. “There have been reports that you have disappeared in newspapers.”

“I told you!” Tara bursts out, thrusting her way back into the conversation while glaring daggers at Casey and Sirova. “I told you all those people outside the garden last week were bad news! But you didn’t listen. You said we must never go outside the garden. But if we did, we could have done something to stop this!”

Sirova moves to calm her sister down with forced calmness. “Tara, how could we have known this would happen? I didn’t know robots like these,” she adds with gestures towards Diane and Selena, “existed until tonight.”

“Don’t argue with me, cousin!” The word “cousin” takes a visible effort on Tara’s part to speak where “sisters” had fit in so easily before. “My b-b-b… brother,” she finally sputters out, “is dead because of you!” The word “brother” appears painful for Tara to say, harder so than “cousin”, for reasons Diane and Selena can easily figure out.

“She’s not dead,” Casey emphatically pleads while moving in front of Sirova as best she can before the revealed cousin gifts the sister with a response. “We would know for sure if she was. She cut the connection to save the rest of us from her pain.”

Tara lets out a throat-choked laugh. “Save us!” she repeats. “Save us! How are we any better now? We still have them to deal with!” She turns to stare daggers at Diane and Selena, and then grins maliciously as a sudden idea springs into her head.

“Tara, stop!” Casey yells as Tara raises her hands towards the robots. “Don’t touch them. You’ll just become like Harry is.”

“What else can I do?!” Red tears flow down Tara’s cheeks as her pupils dilate to large orbs of burning fury. “These robots will become mulch for us, that’s what they deserve. And I’ll start with her!”

Tara whirls on the petrified Maria and curls her fingers like claws. With gritted teeth, she strains to bring her hand up high as the garden violently quakes. Then, with a last jerk of Tara’s hand, a colossal black-petaled flower burrows up from the soil. The petals swiftly bloom to reveal the mouth of a Venus Flytrap inside them, large enough to swallow a human whole.

Diane watches the plant while Selena looks at Casey and Sirova for aid. Their grim-faced expressions they give tell Selena, and Diane through the Network’s shared connection, a simple sentence: “I won’t stop this.”

Tara twists her hand around so her palm faces the ground, and the giant flytrap leans over Mary with gaping maw. Diane and Selena abandon all measures of personal safety, charging towards the plant together and making edged weapons out of their hands and hair. They strike together at the creature’s mouth, slashing and cutting with more strength than precision. Tara screeches along with the plant from the blows, the creature rearing back as red nectar flows from the wounds.

The two robots crouch down, returning their hands to normal, and grab Mary’s frozen form between them. It takes all four of their hands to lift her from the soil and carry her as fast as they can safely run. Selena drops the containers and bags she holds behind; Dane copies this action a few moments later as they leave the bridge behind.

“You won’t escape!” Tara bellows, and the garden shudders with her anger. The leaves snap, the branches crack, and the path becomes narrower and more constricting around the escaping robots. The flora moves to contain them in a choking embrace; the air becomes so filled with pheromones that they stick to the robot’s skin like glue. Still they press on, heedless that every step they take is against a quickly growing barrier that will almost certainly catch them. Then, miraculously, the path widens to its normal size again as if suddenly regaining its composure.

“Leave this place!” Sirova shouts from a faraway distance. “Find a cure, and do not return until then!”

Diane and Selena do not risk a final glance back into the garden to see what Sirova is doing, or has done, to open the path forward again. When they come to the greenhouse doors, they realize the window is too high and too small to toss Mary’s preserved form through. As they pause and debate about their next-best solution the garden shudders again. A loud thoom, thoom, thoom comes from down the center pathway, forcing them to make a choice even faster.

The choice the robots make shatters the greenhouse doors apart. Diane and Selena ram the locked object with their shoulders at high speed, with Mary nestled between them like a baby. They leave Tara howling for revenge as the garden’s pheromones fly out into the outside sky, a red cloud that climbs above the treetops and stains the forest crimson. Birds in those trees fly cawing and warbling into the sky as Diane and Selena carry Mary back towards their van, and escape from this ruined paradise.

To Be Continued?