A spiral of energy spontaneously appears in the middle of the lab in an open space, resembling pixelated black smoke.
        It coalesces into Sakura; when her form is complete, she starts to move, as if being taken out of suspended animation. She stumbles forward a step, and places a hand to her head, rubbing her temple.
        "... Man, that's gonna take some getting used to," she murmurs to herself. Standing upright, she looks around the laboratory. "Heeeeeey Arashi! You in?" she calls out.

Alarms blare, flashing lights alternate red and blue. Turrets pop from the ceiling and walls and floors... and then a switch clicks off. A scrap of paper drops from the ceiling.
Two blossoms drift by.
Razor wind watched the first fall,
And kept the promise.
Sakura drops from the ceiling, eyeing Sakura suspiciously.

        Sakura #1 startles back. "WHOA WHAT THE -HELL-!?" she exclaims, drawing her arms up defensively. It's not every day you find yourself staring at yourself.

Sakura #2 seems satisfied, and hands over another scrap of paper.
        Living sister
        and risen daughter of the dark
        serve the wind as one.

        "Guess he couldn't wait, huh." Sakura frowns, placing her hands on her hips. She looks aside, eyes shut tight, biting her bottom lip.
        With an irritable, disappointed sigh, Sakura #1 reaches up to her bangs, ruffling fingers through smooth white hair and flicks them to the side, looking back and up at Sakura #2, shifting her weight to her right leg. "Well, I suppose this is for the best. You're probably still ridiculously, blindly in love with him, too, aren't you?" She places her hands on her hips. "Well, he gets his pet back and you get to go back to being content in your misery."

Sakura #2 hugs herself a bit and shakes her head, then closes her eyes in response to a radio message.
        To show his power
        carefully reproduces
        that which was taken.
        A pleasure to serve
        even if my time was brief,
        I have no regrets.
She leans forwards and kisses Sakura #1's cheek.
DEW DEW DEW DEW
The lab defenses slide away again, turrets retreating into the walls again.

"So, you're still alive. Welcome back."

        Sakura... doesn't know how to take this. When her alternate self steps forward and actually kisses her, then... explodes....
        She still doesn't look very happy, even when she hears Arashi's voice. She points at the remains of the other robot. "What the hell was that all about?!" she demands.

Arashi Kazefuki scowls, "Don't take that tone of voice with me." And then the scowl vanishes, "It looked like you'd been telefragged. I figured you were dead, so I started over. It's good to have you back."

        That does bring a little bit of smile to Sakura's face. "Well, that's because I -was-," she explains. She straightens herself back up, right hand on her hip. "And I'll take any tone of voice with you I feel like." She winks, grinning.

Arashi Kazefuki laces his fingers together, "No. I'm not raising my tone of voice to you, and I expect the same back. You can manage that. So, what happened? Where have you been?"

        Sakura nods. "Okay, okay, I'll give you that," she acquiesces. She walks over to a diagnostics table and hops up on the edge, sitting; she places her hands on the edges of the table and swings her legs back and forth just a little. "The Undernet," Sakura explains.

Arashi Kazefuki quirks a brow. "You were in the teleport buffer the whole time?" He sets the diagnostic sensors to work again, and the tickling lights come back.

        "Not exactly," Sakura explains. "It's... Well, it's like there's a whole other layer of reality you can only access through the teleporter." She beams.
        "That's what Darkloids are, Arashi. We're sentient, self-willed beings that natively exist as energy and information. We use the teleporter to materialize in your physical existence."
        The diagnostic scanners show Sakura as being just as she was before she left, with no apparent alterations or damage.

Arashi Kazefuki's face brightens with delight, "That's amazing! Can you retrieve items lost in transit, or... how does it work? I'm not even showing anything different. What else did you learn?"

        "I'm afraid I don't have enough technical expertise to explain it, but it was something I had to be shown how to do. It's like learning to swim; you have to figure out how to do it right. If you don't, you drown and die," Sakura explains.
        "Oh, and you're going to love this...."
        Sakura hops down of the table. She activates her teleporter -- and she vanishes in a snap of light.

        One of the monitors near Arashi turns on of its own accord, and a message appears in text:

        Hi Arashi. You'll never guess where I am.

Arashi Kazefuki blinks a bit, looking up at the monitor. "I assume you're in the Cerberus array?" He sits back down at his terminal and starts scanning the code. "Let's see what you look like in this form."

        Sakura's code is, once more, a mass of unreadable mess. It's like line noise, and it's constantly shifting, as if it's always rewriting itself on the fly. It's a program running in the background, almost completely unnoticeable unless you are actually looking for it. And it's able to manipulate the rest of the code around it on a whim, as if it were always root. She's like a computer virus or a massively complex robot core... but more. So much more. The code itself gives the impression that it is moving, breathing... /living/.

        It's decently roomy in here. Kinda bland though. I can see all the others... it's like looking at someone's guts and brains from the inside. They're just balls of data.
        I want you to think about something, Arashi. Every Darkloid can do this. We can get inside of any computerized system, -anywhere-. We can take control of banking data. Security systems. Transportation systems. We can disrupt teleporters. We can overwrite drones. And the whole time, it's like we're never -there-. We can't be physically fought like this. We can't be physically killed.

Arashi Kazefuki grunts. "Alarming. So how do we resist it? I can't have Shade Man and the others poking around in here."

        I'm your first, last and only line of defense.

Arashi Kazefuki says "Well then. Come back out and I'll load you for bear. I'm sure Paradigm will be willing to present a hefty budget for the upgrade of the only thing that can defend their servers..." He grins, "This is going to be one hell of a report."

        The monitor goes blank, and a red beam of light streams from a wireless sensor near Arashi's computer; it breaks up into a cloud of polygonal matter that fits itself together into Sakura, the process taking under a second.
        She walks over and places a hand on his shoulder, leaning against him lightly.
        "Kinda nice having your own pet demon, isn't it?"

Arashi Kazefuki nods, "It's..." after a brief pause he decides to use the work that balked him. "...perfect." He seems to pay no attention to the touch or the leaning. "On the other hand, I can put you to great use myself instead of just leaving you here on guard duty." He rubs his chin a bit. "So, let's get you some extra processing power, and see how well that translates to strength in the Undernet."

        "I just hope they don't notice that I'm getting non-Darkloid upgrades," Sakura says. "They apparently have a laboratory in their home, the Tower. They've done some upgrades on that other Darkloid, Arcadia."
        Sakura grins. "Oh she hates me. She /hates/ me."

Arashi Kazefuki says "If I'm going to use you to defend the lab, then we have to assume they'll figure out you're working for me... Perhaps you should convince them that I'm the one being decieved into upgrading you." He takes a chip from the reciever dish, which has a little pink blossom stamped on top. "This one should be compatible at least."

        "Sounds like a plan," Sakura agrees. "After all, they think that..." She chuckles softly. "They think that you're /my/ pet."

Arashi Kazefuki nods, "You'll get along with your sister, once that energy leaks into her core. You are of the same mind anyways, there shouldn't be any difference. And if that works, I can make more." He opens the access hatch on Sakura's head. "If you change your internal schematic to accept it, the chips should merge next time you ring out and I'll get the single stronger chip back."

        Sakura looks up, watching.
        "You have no idea how incredibly disturbing this is, do you."

Arashi Kazefuki smiles, "None at all. Don't worry, it's not a sister so to speak. The language just doesn't have the right words to describe it. She IS you again, down to the last whatever the hell made you fall in love with me. It'll be a perfect overlay once it settles. I'm not going to make the Search Man error."

        "From what I understand, that error was fixed," Sakura says, now with Classic Sakura Inside (tm). "Cossack did good work."
        She grins impishly. "... /very/ good work. He's got an ass that won't quit."

Arashi Kazefuki snorts and then clears his throat. "Moving /on/..." There's a click, and for a moment the sensation of being beside oneself... and then of being so much more aware.

        Sakura blinks a few times, trying to clear the sensations in her head. "... Oh that was just -trippy-. Ugh." She rubs her forehead.

Arashi Kazefuki moves a hand to block the rubbing. "Wait, I haven't closed the hatch yet. You'd break off some
capacitor matricies." A few moments later the access is closed and locked again, and Arashi takes a step back. "So, how do you feel?"

        "It's full of staaaars," Sakura whispers, dreamily, gazing off into the distance.
        She snaps her vision back to Arashi's and chuckles. "Just kiddin' ya there. I'm not exactly sure how to explain how 'being smarter' feels. You'll have to use your imagination."

Arashi Kazefuki chuckles. "Excellent. Back into the monitor now, I want to see how that change maps to a new pattern." He stretches a little. "Even if I can't read your data now, making known changes from a known state to an observed pattern will eventually clue me in."

        "Back into the computer, Sakura. Come out of the computer Sakura. Get back in, Sakura. Man, things I do for you," Sakura mock-grumbles, the tone of her voice indicating the teasing nature of her comments. She blinks out in a flash of light, and within fractions of a second, she's in the computer again.

Arashi Kazefuki chuckles. "You need the practice anyways. If this is one of the defining characteristics of your new archetype, you don't have a whole lot of time to get better at it than Shade Man is. Good work turning their speech back on them earlier. That was delicious to watch." And now let's go scan the new pattern and see what "a binary processor" looks like in Darkloidspace.

        Heh. It's what I was actually thinking-- You would not believe how easy it was to ea^h^h, er, merge that chip. I... I wonder if that's normal...

        Sakura's pattern is altering itself with greater efficiency. Code responds more quickly to it. The processor itself seems to have been seamlessly infused into Sakura's core, and the result, simply, is greater /power/.

        You want a visual?

Arashi Kazefuki nods, "Sure, show me what you're seeing. And also... you're in charge of data security now. Eat Cerberus."

        A holographic viewpanel is projected out of the wireless sensor for Arashi to see. It's like watching a semi-translucent flatscreen tv, about the size of a computer monitor.

        The landscape is unique; the sky, while appearing to go on forever, also looks like a ceiling. It's flat. Everything feels contained, yet expansive.

        The ground is made of overlapping,irregularly placed layers of black, flat square tiles. The skyceiling and horizonwalls are a gradient of burnt orange to marigold, becoming darker the further up one goes. The ground and sky are interlaced with what looks like lines of circuitry that are imbedded within, digital veins under transparent skin. Radiant pulses of light move through them like waves crashing on the shore.

         Sakura is standing in front of Arashi's view; she looks almost identical to how she appeared in material space. There are a few differences, however; she looks as if she's wearing black, heavily armored gloves, and her eyes are full over red.

         "Welcome to cyberspace," she says, her voice coming through speakers somewhere in the lab.

Limiter Cerberus waits in a contained area of the terminal, snaking back to... somewhere. The signal disappears into a mess of tangled circuit lines that flow and shift. It doesn't know what's coming. Neither do its kicking screaming parts.

        "Now, you'll be able to see what's going on visually... like I do. What I'm doing is piping the translation my sensory hub applies to network data straight to your monitor. Seeing everything okay, Arashi?" Sakura asks. She begins to set out across the rather bleak landscape to hunt for Limiter Cerberus.

Arashi Kazefuki keys up a few extra displays, "Hold on a moment." A second monitor opens, and a third. Together they project a hologram into the middle of the room. "There we go. That's better."

The area around Limiter Cerberus is metal, ice, and magnet panels, all nice and ordered so as to draw those who approach in, the same way an antlion does.

        Sakura approaches with caution.

        She locates the disgusting tower of screaming, half-melted corpses and its lashing tentacles. She stops short of the dangerous panels, hands on her hips, and shakes her head.

        "You made it a tentacle monster on purpose, didn't you?" she asks, grinning to herself.

Arashi Kazefuki chuckles a little, "I didn't /make/ it /any/ shape. Form follows function. That's the only reason it looks like chains or tentacles."

Poison and Lava panels await any who tread closer to it, and an increasingly steeper and steeper descent.

        Sakura decides there's only one way to go when it comes to the beast.
        Head on.
        Sakura's hands begin glowing in the palms, circuitry forming in them like bright, vaguely purple lights.
        She crouches.
        A look of ure, feral -joy- spreads across her face.
        She leaps.
        Sakura launches like she's lighter than a feather, shot from the barel of a gun; she sails over the tiles.
        She begins to fall.
        Screaming in delight, she's targeted herself to fall right into the middle of Limiter Cerberus itself, her hands outstretches to grab anything they can get hold of. There is a warping effect around her palms, pulling things into them.

The panels overhead crack as Sakura drops down, leaving only an unsupporting void below. The Lava panel walls that used to be floor ease in tighter and tighter as she falls. The cracked panels above break and ChainLines come out from them, racing down towards Sakura.

        The chains wrap around Sakura's arms, jerking her out of her fall; she grunts in response, looking quickly upwards, then downwards.
        The palms of her hands glow a little more, and she twirls her arms to wrap the chains around them, grasping hold with those palms of hers.
        She jerks, hard, with her right arm. It's like Stone Man trying to wrench a chain away from a concrete block to which its attached, and at the same time, her palms are trying to suck in the chains le two tiny black holes.
The chains break rather than be absorbed, and the ones around her arms knots and spread across her body, attempting to burrow through skin. It's not easy, apparently. It can't lock onto the code cleanly or phase through like it did to Forte. The chains lash upwards from Sakura's back to reconnect with the severed strands above, wrapping her wrists to force her arms apart.

        Sakura... seems to be enjoying the struggle. She laughs.
        "This is fun!" she exclaims, as the chains thrust her arms apart. The glow at her hands is flickering, shifting through colors.
        Little flecks of the chain she has contact with are beginning to peel off, sucked into her hands. Little fragments of data, pieces of code, bits and bytes, are being absorbed into Sakura, broken down, examined, devoured.

Limiter Cerberus knows no defense. It only attacks. The chains being absorbed glow molten white-hot, coating her hands. The binds on her wrists draw them behind her back and lash them together, more chain spooling out of the empty sky above. It swings her violently, thrashing and grinding her against the poison and lava panels that speed by one after the other during the descent. Wrists bound, more chains grab at her elbows and begin prying them apart, threatening to rend joints from their sockets.

        Sakura unlocks the base code of the chains.
        Her palms settle into an orange color.
        A series of perfectly timed explosive forces ripple through the chains, turning them into the equivalent of detcord, unravelling it at its most base level. This is, unfortunately, happens at the same time Sakura is being drug across the magma and poison tiles.
        Sakura is burned and poisoned, and she roars again -- difficult to tell if its agony or ecstacy -- damage showing on her form as pixellated black steam, and fragmentation around her elbows and sides. She tumbles and rolls, landing squarely onto a poison tile.

The chains halt abruptly as the change sweeps through them. Being transformed into something else is novel, and most unpleasant to those processing it. Again, the only "defense" it knows is to hurl itself at Sakura increasingly fast, breaking each link as it becomes infected. The slope is nearly vertical now, offering little purchase aside from raw harmful pouring fluid. A single chain stabs up from the darkness to grab her legs and pull them out from under her.

        Sakura begins sucking the fragmented chains into herself. The damage done to her is reversed as she incorperates that particular method of assault into her being. Her leg is bound and she's pulled off her feet, being drug downward indeed...
        Sakura holds out her hands. The orange glowing circuitry of her palms now reverses its capture method; jet black links of chain erupt from her hands, lancing down towards Limiter Cerberus, turning its own attack back on it.

The chain makes contact. Limiter Cerberus did not perceive it a threat. At this point, the metaphor collapses.
The chains of course are not physical. They're a program representation of the links binding the minds trapped in Cerberus together against their will, and now that one end is coming from Sakura, it's gotten past the skin it couldn't burrow through. The cacophany of voices rush into her head, grabbing at fragments of personality and absorbed peices of itself.
        It /wants/ to lose. There is no peice of it not begging for death, save for one confused entry that simply doesn't understand what's happening and just wants to go home. The collective, however knows only an intruder must be destroyed... no... a pair of intruders.
The sky and ground flickers as Limiter Cerberus changes the panels. Once again, Sakura comes face to face with herself. This time both are, for the moment, strung up in chains like marrionettes. It tries to compel them to fight and weaken each other.

        Sakura's will fights back the intrusion. There is a roaring, wild, angry need to be utterly and completely free; never to be overtaken by any sort of exterior force or set of code again. It's violent. It's vicious. It's destructive. And it's dangerously, powerfully strong. The smell of a repressed freedom, crushed cherry blossoms, illuminates Sakura's mind like a painful incense, driving the wild newborn beast inside of her mad; never again. Never again the limiters.
        The darkloid factor corrupts the chains trying to dig into her; it eats away at them with an audible wet crackling pop, disassembling them and pulling them into herself. The screaming in her head is silenced by the roar of her own feral joy. The mutant capture drive inside of her is pulling the stolen fragments in like white blood cells engulfing bacterial flotsam.
        "... You're going to die. All of you. Surrender to me, and I'll make it all go away quick and easy," she purrs, speaking to both her doppleganger and the writhing mass itself.

The doppleganger makes the same speech, the same purr. And all but one surrender. The storm of aggression sucks up chains, gears, melted pools of iron, hundreds of heads and voices silenced.
Left behind is a flickering afterimage of a young female robot master, with only the crudest stylings of physical form. "I don't hear anybody anymore..." Her body is a solid white, hair, eyes, skin, and frame. The inside of her mouth when she speaks is white. Only a single scrap of chain remains around her forehead like a circlet. "Is anyone there? I think I'm lost."

        Sakura howls, siphoning in every last surrendering mind. Every core consciousness is fed into her, digested, incorperated, added to Sakura's strength. She pants softly for a moment, recalibrating herself. Her code is infinitely more complex and distinct now, and ten times more virulent.
        Her form alters visibly, little circuitlines forming up her arms and legs and cheeks. A black haze forms around her, transparent, but dancing like foxfire.
        Sakura regains her composure, standing up, and fixing her gaze on the stranger.
        "What's your name?" Sakura asks, a beacon of darkness in contrast to the light of the last being there.
"I... I don't know. I don't think I have one." She pulls the bit of chain off her head and looks at it. "Did you want this too?" She looks sad. Maybe she'll miss it?

        Sakura is wary. The wildness in her lusts for this creature, to reach out and consume it as well. But it seems strange... foreign. Sometimes, it's best not to put strange things into your mouth. Just ask anyone who accidentally ate a death's cup mushroom, mistaking it for something safe.
        "What do you want, girl?" Sakura asks gently. Soothingly.

This gives the girl pause. "I don't know. What is there?"

        Sakura frowns, a little confused. "... What do you remember? Anything?" she asks, trying to puzzle this out.
"There were a whole lot of people forever... and I couldn't see them. Sometimes new people would come. They sounded upset. And now they're gone. Sometimes there were puzzles. There was a black squiggly puzzle. I couldn't figure it out. Did everyone go away because I didn't figure it out?"

        Sakura... can't believe it. This is a child consciousness. She isn't sure where it came from, either.
        "No, it wasn't your fault." She smiles a little. "You wanna get out of here, kid? I think I have an arrangement I can make that'll work out well for you."
Her eyes never close, never blink. Always bolted wide open and vacant. "Out? Yes, some of them said they wanted out, or to go out, or to get out, or..." She looks up, "What is out? Is it a place? Did they go there?"

        "They were hurting quite a bit. So much so that they wanted to go away. I helped them go away," Sakura explains. "They're happy now." Well, actually they weren't anything anymore. But it was what they wanted, right?
        "I have an idea. You don't seem to have much of a concept of anything other than being stuck in this place. Why don't you come with me? I can make some room inside me, and keep you safe and protected. You can share what I see, what I feel and what I hear, until you decide that you want to be outside for yourself. That sound all right?"

"I didn't want them to hurt." She takes a step closer and the whiteness increases, a soft aura reaching out and pushing back the dark flames around Sakura like a breeze tilts a candle. "I don't think I've ever been out before. Is it okay to leave?"

        "I think so," Sakura says.
        She is mildly disturbed by the fact that this creature is affecting her Dark Aura. That shouldn't be happening.

"Okay." She looks around a bit, "How do we go out? Is it... a way we can move?" She squats down and puts her finger on the invisible black floor near her foot. It ripples like water.

        "Like I said. There's a lot you have to learn; I can show you and let you adjust, if you come inside me," Sakura says. She closes her eyes, and a crack forms in her torso, neck to crotch, like a window to another world. It's surprisingly white, warm and inviting; there's a faint image of a Japanese spring, cherry trees in bloom, and a solemn but beautiful tea house on the other side.
        It would seem that for all the darkness, Sakura still has a corner of peace inside her.
The scene is alluring, even if she doesn't understand. She approaches slowly, inquisitive, and takes off the chain from her head again. "Okay. I think you better hold this then." She hands it over, and then flickers into less defined whiteness as she goes inside.

Does this make you my mommy?

Sakura seals the crack closed, leaving a warm and comfortable little room inside her for this strange and unique creature.
        She feels oddly at peace.
        ... I guess it kind of does, doesn't it?

She knows no anger. She knows no fear. She knows no sorrow. These things cannot touch her. She curls up inside that little area with the slightest of smiles, eyes still opened wide and vacant. She tries the tea, and decides she likes it.

        A beam of red light shines from the wireless port, and the hologram ends, as Sakura materializes.
Arashi Kazefuki types in a few commands on his terminal, and gets only an error prompt back. "That was... very interesting."

        Sakura rubs her belly a moment.
        "Yeah. Figures you'd get me knocked up on the first date."

Arashi Kazefuki blinks a few times. It takes him about fifteen seconds to speak again. "What? Pregnant?"

        Sakura grins. "Yeah. That was a netborn AI. Came out of nowhere, on accident, out of that mass of delicious crazy you made. It happens, you know. That's why there's Darkloids."
        "Anyways, I made a little containment for her inside me, and she's connected to me. I'm feeding her and sending her sensory data to help stimulate her AI with information until it hits full self-awareness."

Arashi Kazefuki scratches his head and turns back to the logs. "So how far does the rabbit hole go, Alice?" he muses to nobody out loud. "You're free to do as you want for a bit. I have to think up my next move, and process a lot of data."

        "Sure thing, 'dear'," Sakura teases. "I'd better go stock up on pickles and ice cream."

Arashi Kazefuki's report now fills several spiral notebooks. He sighs. There's no end in sight to this insanity.