Another week passed. We ran into a handful of small Kaijus. Well, small compared to us. This got our souls up to 9,001.

  The more fascinating development was the modernization of the village. Through our soul links with many of the villagers, we watched Lateo transform. Gas and oil lamps were replaced with humming electric lights. All connected by wires stripped from Mech Sparkles and the ores. Small posts guided the wires from house to house, looking like the strings from spider webs if they were black.

  The power source of the village were several solar panels on the mountains and water mills near the river.

  It was strange to see LED strips glowing inside the rough-hewn stone and wooden houses. It was a clash of aesthetics: primitive architecture meets modern technology. The villagers seemed to love it, though.

  Through the eyes of Lucia and the chimera girl, I saw the source of all this innovation. They were inside an entirely new house, built deeper into the valley. Tables were piled high with scavenged circuits, stripped wires, and equipment from underneath the village.

  Lucia, the peacock monster girl, was pacing back and forth. Her iridescent tail feathers twitched nervously with every step.

  “I still don’t get it,” Lucia said, looking at the three-headed chimera. “Nilo, Atgo, and Kanes. Those aren’t girl names.”

  Nilo, the lion head, looked up from a soldering iron she was holding with a paw. “No. We never changed our names.”

  “Oh,” Lucia muttered to herself. She balled her hands into fists. I internally smirked. Not like she could do anything against me. “Lucia’s not my original name.”

  “You were a boy before becoming a monster girl?” Kanes asked.

  “Yeah,” she simply said, leaving out the part that she only became a monster girl a little over a week ago. “Sometimes, I’m not too sure about this girl thing. Why do all men have to become girls because of the Rift?”

  “I dunno,” Atgo shrugged, causing Nilo’s head to bounce a bit. “Not that we mind.”

  “Doesn’t it feel wrong to you?” Lucia asked. “That the Rifts forcibly turned us into girls? That’s not even considering the monster part, which is also pretty messed up in my view.”

  “Not really,” Atgo shook her head, with Nilo and Kanes following suit. “We don’t plan on returning to our past lives. Not after the Monster Purifiers hunted us down like animals. Besides, being a monster girl isn’t so bad.”

  Lucia stopped pacing. She looked down at her feathered hands, clenching and unclenching them. “Not so bad? Abandoning our past lives isn’t so bad?”

  “Like Atgo said, we’d be hunted down if we tried,” Nilo scoffed. “You know how the Monster Purifiers are. We can’t just exactly go back to society and ask, “Hey, please turn us back into humans!” They would just shoot us in the head if we’re lucky. If we’re unlucky, they’ll drag us back to another lab.

  “Also, what life would we go back to? I imagine all of our past friends and families would hate us for being transformed into monster girls, even though it wasn’t our fault. They would think we were just tricking them to eat them later.”

  Lucia didn’t respond for a few seconds.

  “Sometimes, I miss my past life,” she finally said, looking down at the floor.

  The chimera girl walked up to her and put a paw on her shoulder. “Hey, look on the bright side, you have a superhuman body now, and you have a cool name. I bet it’s way better than when you were a boy.”

  “I have… a cool name?” Lucia stuttered, looking up at her.

  “Don’t forget the superhuman body too.”

  “Yeah, that…” Lucia looked down at her feathered hands.

  “We might end up changing our names thanks to you,” Kanes smiled. “You brought up a good point. None of our names sound like girl names.”

  The scientists continued their work, on opposite sides of the room.

  “I... I can't go back either,” Lucia whispered to herself. “I've been hiding in here for days. If I went to the Monster Purifiers, if I asked for help... they'd see a monster. They'd kill me. They wouldn't care that I'm Dr. Lucius of Medius. They'd just see a target.

  “But I don't know what to do. My specialty is neuroscience! Brain mapping! Synaptic rewriting! I don’t know the first thing about magical biology. The only thing in common with humans and monster girls is the brain.”

  Tears fell from her eyes. “I guess the only thing I can do is rewrite those monster girls.”

  “At least she’s not trying to escape,” Samsara commented in my mind.

  “She’s terrified,” I noted. “She realizes she’s stuck here forever.”

  Hours later, the sun had dipped below the canyon walls. Nilo and the others had left to get food, leaving Lucia alone in the lab. She chose to skip lunch.

  She was hunched over a workbench, her feathers ruffled.

  "The only thing I can do is the brain," she mumbled to herself, tweaking a small microchip with a pair of tweezers. "Neural pathways. Memory centers. Identity cohesion."

  She let out a dry, bitter laugh. "It's funny, isn't it? I spent years developing the tech to wipe memories and suppress independence. I created the obedience algorithm. I made the mind-compliance protocols."

  She laughed again, louder this time. It sounded manic, edging on hysteria.

  "And now! Now, I'm the only one who can reverse it! If the Purifiers ever catch me and wipe my mind... well, at least I'll have the cure for it right here! I created a problem that literally only affects me now! Hahaha!"

  Her laughter echoed in the empty room, bouncing off the stone walls.

  Her laughter echoed in the empty room, bouncing off the stone walls. It was the sound of someone realizing the cosmic joke played at their expense.

  Crunch. Crunch.

  Footsteps approached the door. Lucia snapped her mouth shut, stifling her laughter instantly. She smoothed down her appearance, trying to look composed.

  The door creaked open. Nilo, Atgo, and Kanes walked in.

  "What's so funny?" Nilo asked, eyeing the peacock girl. "We could hear you cackling from the stairs."

  "Nothing!" Lucia deflected fast, her voice squeaking. "Just... a breakthrough! Yes! I got the memory device to work!"

  She held up a clunky-looking object. It looked like a helmet made of scrap metal, wired together with a mishmash of circuits and screens.

  "It works?" Kanes asked, slithering forward to inspect it.

  "Ideally," Lucia said, regaining her composure. "It reverses the polarity of the mana blockers and re-stimulates the dormant neural pathways. I... I've also been working on a bigger version." She pointed to the corner of the room.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  There, resting on a reinforced table, was a massive structure. It looked like a satellite dish bent into the shape of a bowl, rigged with thick cables and power cells from the mech. I was reminded of the stealth field generators.

  "For Aisling," Lucia whispered.

  "Let's test the small one first," Nilo suggested.

  “Yeah, the bigger one isn’t ready yet,” Lucia agreed.

  They brought in one of the rescued monster girls—a rabbit girl who had been vacantly staring at a wall for two days. Lucia successfully placed the helmet on her head. The rabbit girl didn't resist.

  Lucia flipped a switch. The helmet hummed.

  The rabbit girl gasped. Her body seized for a second, and then she slumped. When she opened her eyes again, the dull, glassy look was gone. She blinked rapidly, looking around the room filled with wires, circuits, and scientist monster girls.

  "Where..." Her voice was raspy. “Where am I? What’s going on? I was… with my Mom? Is she here? Where is she?”

  Atgo and Kanes consoled her as she began to weep.

  I was glad I didn’t have to be the one doing the consoling. It was way better having other people do it. I found it to be quite tedious on anyone that wasn’t Samsara.

  “That’s because you only care about me,” she said. That’s true.

  A few days passed in a blur of restoration. The thirty girls we rescued were waking up, confusion turning to gratitude. But the real test was waiting outside.

  We sat in the valley floor, the ‘giant’ metal helmet contraption resting next to us. It looked ridiculously small next to our 200-meter tall form, but it was just the right size for Aisling’s head.

  Aisling sat cross-legged, still feral and restrained by my will. I kept her docile, staring blankly ahead.

  Nara stood by Aisling’s foot, wringing her hands together. “Is... is it going to hurt her?”

  “It shouldn't,” Lucia called out. She was standing on top of a makeshift platform on several metallic stilts to be heard. “It might be a shock, but no pain.”

  “I’m nervous,” Samsara admitted to me. I felt her anxiety in her chest as if it was my own. “What if it doesn’t work on a Kaiju? What if the scientists truly messed up her brain? What if her brain is too different now?”

  “Then we still have a strong Kaiju that worships us,” I said pragmatically. “But looking at Lucia... she seems confident. Desperate, but confident.”

  I maneuvered the giant helmet with my hair tentacles. Gently, I lowered it onto Aisling’s head. A small gap allowed the fleshy stalk of the lure to be free.

  “Okay!” I called out. “Turn it on.”

  Nilo threw a switch connected to the heavy cables running from the tech house.

  Aisling’s body spasmed. A second later she blinked. She was no longer fighting me. Aisling was no longer trying to eat the villagers below. I released her.

  “Huh?” Aisling asked. Her eyes squeezed shut. She grabbed her head with both hands. “What’s going on?”

  "Aisling!" Nara screamed.

  Slowly, her massive eyelids fluttered open. She looked down at her hands. She looked down at Nara. She looked at us.

  “Aisling!” Nara cried out, tears streaming down her face. She ran forward and slammed into Aisling’s shin, hugging the turquoise reptilian skin as tight as she could.

  Aisling froze. She looked down, her eyes crossing slightly to see the tiny lizard girl clinging to her leg.

  “Nara?” Aisling whispered. “Is that you?”

  “It's me!” Nara sobbed into her leg. “You're back! I'm so glad you're back!”

  Aisling looked up at us. "Ramona? Samsara? You guys aren’t as... huge. Wait. I'm huge."

  She lifted her hands, turning them over. Aisling looked down at the monster girls below her. “I'm... I'm a Kaiju. I can't believe I'm a Kaiju. Nara, you’re so small.”

  “You're just big!” Nara wiped tears from her face. “Ramona and Samsara saved you! They brought you back and got some people here to fix your brain!”

  Lucia’s hands balled into fists. But she didn’t say anything. Good. I didn’t mind taking credit for saving Aisling.

  Aisling looked at us. “They did? I remember... fighting. Pain. The cold. And then... hunger. Just so much hunger.” She shuddered, her shell rattling. “I wanted to eat everything.”

  “But you didn't,” I pointed out. “We made sure of that.”

  “Can I…” Nara reached up, her hands hovering uselessly against the air. “I want to hug you. But…”

  Aisling looked back down at Nara, a look of heartbreak crossing her face. “Nara... I can't... I can't pick you up. I can't hug you. I'm too big. I'll crush you.”

  “Use your clone!” Samsara called out, pointing to the imitation lure. “You have a new mutation!”

  Aisling blinked. She focused. The fleshy stalk on her forehead twitched. The small, human-sized clone of Aisling animated. It looked down at Nara.

  “It feels... weird,” Aisling rumbled. “It's like having a third arm coming out of my brain. But... it's me. It looks like me.”

  “It's too far up in the air,” Aisling said, looking at the distance between her head and the ground. “But... I can bring you up to me. Or I can lie down.”

  “Lift me!” Nara shouted, looking up at the dangling clone. “I want to be lifted!”

  Aisling smiled. Nara stepped back as Aisling bent downwards and lowered her palm to the ground. She opened it flat, right in front of Nara. Nara stepped onto it.

  Through the soul link, I felt it. The sensation of Nara’s small boots pressing against the skin. It was tactile and precise, transmitted back to me because I was sharing Aisling’s senses due to the soul link.

  Aisling brought her up to the lure, slowly. Once they were level face-to-face, Nara threw her arms around the clone’s neck. The clone hugged her back, burying its face in Nara’s shoulder.

  “I missed you,” Nara wept.

  “I missed you too,” the Aisling clone whispered.

  We watched them for a moment. Tears fell from Samsara’s eyes. Yet, I didn’t feel anything at all. It was strange, since clearly Samsara’s eyes were making joyful tears.

  While I was glad that I didn’t have to constantly micromanage Aisling now, I couldn’t connect at all with her reunion with Nara. I just didn’t care about it that much. It reminded me of when I had my phone and I saw news of some famous celebrity passing away. The words just rolled over my mind.

  Actually, maybe I could get Lucia and the chimera girl to make me a Kaiju-sized phone. That would be cool.

  After a long hug, Aisling lowered Nara to the ground. Nara turned to us, wiping her eyes.

  "Thank you," Nara said, her voice fierce. "Thank you so much."

  “You’re welcome!” Samsara cheered.

  Nara dropped to her knees. "I worship Ramona and Samsara."

  Aisling, towering above us all, lowered her massive head. "I owe you everything. You saved me from that... imprisonment. I worship Ramona and Samsara."

  The power hit us like a physical wave. Two very happy, very devoted worshipers. The mana surge was intoxicating.

  "You're welcome," Samsara said, smiling.

  Night fell over Lateo. The village was quiet, the new electric lights turning off. Aisling settled down near the river, her massive shell looking like a new hill in the landscape.

  Because she wasn't feral anymore, we didn't need to restrain her. We didn't need to take shifts.

  Nara climbed up the side of Aisling’s leg. She settled down right in the crook between Aisling’s neck and her shell.

  “Are you warm enough?” Aisling asked, her voice a low vibration.

  “Yeah,” Nara murmured, snuggling in. “You're like a giant radiator.”

  “Internal warm-blooded mutation,” Aisling noted. “Pretty handy.”

  “Goodnight, Aisling.”

  “Goodnight, Nara.”

  We watched them for a moment before settling down ourselves near the river.

  “That went well,” I thought to Samsara.

  “It went perfectly,” she agreed. “I’m so happy she’s back.”

  “I’m so happy we can sleep together now,” I said. “No more shift-taking.”

  I grabbed the Kaiju cat fur blanket. It was pitifully short now that we were 200 meters tall. I laid down and pulled it over us. It barely covered our shoulders if we pulled it up, leaving my feet exposed.

  I scooted closer to Samsara. I wrapped my arms around her from behind, pulling her back against my chest.

  We fell asleep to the sound of the river and the quiet hum of the village we now ruled.

  The sun hit my eyes way too early. I groaned, tightening my grip on Samsara.

  “Good morning,” she thought in my mind.

  “Good morning.”

  We sat up, the fur blanket sliding off. Aisling was already awake, stretching her Kaiju-sized limbs. Nara was sitting on her shoulder, swinging her legs.

  "Good morning!" Nara chirped from her high perch.

  "Good morning," Aisling said.

  Samsara stretched, her back cracking. "Morning, girls."

  Nara tilted her head, looking at us. She looked at how close we were sitting, at the single fur blanket we had shared, and the way I was still kind of holding onto Samsara’s waist.

  "So," Nara asked, completely casually. "Are you two lovers, too?"