Commission: Clara the Shapeshifter, Puts the Squeeze On
Added 2021-08-22 01:07:58 +0000 UTCSummary: Clara, a shapeshifting assassin with a body like clay, pursues the legendary contract killer, Dean Constantine. But she may be in for more than she bargained for. Commissioned by Moneris.
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Clara's second encounter with Dean Constantine had resulted in another demoralizing outcome. Clara was in no mood to deliver another round of bad news to her superiors.
She brooded to herself in her hotel room, locked away in the luxury bathroom; she liquified herself in the stately bathtub, her biomass filling up to the lip, stirring in elegant, tan swirls.
Her head bobbled along the surface, eyes narrowed and agitated; her hair fanned out across the surface of her melted body in wild lines. A tendril coiled around a bottle of bubbling champagne; she had taken to drinking straight from the bottle.
Her phone rang from beside her bed, just the next room over. She grimaced, wondering if room service was finally getting back to her. From the ooze, her fingers rose, along with her head; travelling along a rapidly elongating neck, the twin appendages curled out the door, down the small hall, and out into the room.
She grasped the receiver. "Make it quick." She droned on, eyes half open.
"Clara, what on earth are you getting up to now?"
She grimaced. It was Dr. Krauss, over an encrypted signal.
"I'm raiding the mini-fridge." She rolled her eyes. "Have to put those investor dollars somewhere, right?"
"Do as you will, just please tell me you dealt with the mark." Dr. Krauss urged, more insistently.
"The big one got away," Clara grimaced. "I tried to double-team him, but he juked me. I was actually in the middle of typing up the report-"
"Ohhhh no, this won't do." Krauss fussed. "How could this happen? You're an apex killer..."
"Man fights like a cornered wolf." Clara pouted. "At least I ruined his crummy little date."
"Clara, do you understand the situation you're in? You can't be so flippant!" Krauss hissed; his raspy voice rattled harshly from the earpiece.
"What's got your knickers up in a bunch, doc?" Clara rolled her eyes. "If I keep going after him, he's bound to die from old age at some point before I-"
"There's a shakeup at the labs. Dr. Weathers has been insistent on a new experiment, she's calling it an 'updated model of infiltrator'. She wants to liquidate our existing assets to take research in a new direction..." Krauss explained in a tizzy.
"'Liquidate assets'!? I'M your damn assets!" Clara sputtered.
"Precisely. The board has taken a keen interest in her ideas... and paid close attention to your attempts on Dean Constantine. They aren't happy. There are sentiments of going 'back to formula'."
"...' Back to formula'??"
Clara's eyes widened, repeating those words with a dreadful utterance. Her finger curled anxiously around the phone's cord, lengthening and following the coils.
"We need a win, Clara. Enough to put these talks to rest. You've got two strikes against you already..."
Dr. Krauss' voice was quiet, hushed.
"You know what you have to do."
Kaclick. Beep. Beep...
Clara listened silently to the dial tone for several agonizing moments. If she still had a heart, it would've skipped a beat. She gingerly lowered the headpiece, before her head flopping to the floor, neck draped over her bed before shuffling off too.
She understood the threat all too well. If she failed one more time, she'd get sent back to the lab. And odds were good that she'd never come out again...
Her cheek rubbed against the carpet as her limbs retracted towards the bathroom, sliding up the side of the tub, and dipping back in. She stared at the white ceiling.
She had gotten so used to feeling invincible. How did it get to this point? She could feel the executioner's axe hovering over her neck...
...No. It wouldn't end like this. It couldn't. Her eyebrows furrowed.
"No more games." She uttered to herself.
Pop! She raised the bathtub plug, dangling it above the surface between her perky toes. A sickening sucking down followed, as if a terribly thick smoothie was being forced through a too narrow straw.
Clara gave herself to the sensation of her body being pulled downward through the drain, her body pressing and narrowing, her slurry of features compressed on eye sides; bubbles of air burbled through her skin, breaching the surface. She bowed her head, melting into ooze as she trickled down the drain, lurching through the piping below.
Tonight was the night Dean Constantine would perish by her own hand.
---
Clara had committed his files to memory; he had picked out a nondescript house nestled on the periphery of the suburbs. Perhaps he wished to avoid detection, or to draw out targets to dispose of them in the woods in the back.
What he didn't count on was the commonality of the city's water infrastructure—something Clara often used to her advantage.
Schlick... schlick...
She forced her narrow body through pipe after pipe, her body pressed into a tube and scooching along. Her body shuddered against the cool metal.
The metal curved downwards, and Clara knew she was reaching the end of her journey.
Shlorp... at the end of the pipe, she forced her way through a showerhead, ebony black ooze dribbling from the tip through a litany of holes. The pitch-black ooze blended in with the surrounding darkness; the lights were off, draping the bathroom in shadows.
As a tendril emerged from the showerhead, it rippled, thickening into a leg, and silently touched down within the porcelain tub. A twin tendril touched down next to it; the showerhead gurgled and struggled as her hips and thighs pressed through, her legs tensing to silently lower herself.
Her upper body wrested its way through the showerhead, her arms bonelessly stretching above her head as she squatted down. Her entire body had the blemishless, shiny gleam of a latex body suit that hugged her own body... only it was her body, her skin.
Her face shimmered as she reared her head. Her eyes had a particular glow to them—modified to see through darkness. She crept to the floor, her body overflowing the curve of the tub, her elongated body slithering along the ground.
The door to the bathroom was closed; she pressed her body low to the ground, spreading it across the tiles; the coolness of the floor crept through her body as she went flat as a sheet, her lower half bending and pushing herself forward like an inchworm.
Her eyes narrowed as her head emerged into the hallway. She inhaled, forcing air back into her body as her proportions returned to her, her form inflating; moving like a shadow, she pressed her body against the wall, her skin shimmering and camouflaging with the simple patterned wallpaper.
The unpleasant stench of alcohol pervaded the home. Clara stifled a groan, focusing squarely on the mission at hand as she shifted down the hallway. Her body picked up on the slightest vibrations—sound, coming from down the hall, past a doorway, into a living room. Staticky voices, laugh tracks... a television show.
She followed the sounds as she crept along. She took careful notes of the interior for traps. She knew how paranoid Dean Constantine was, the lengths he would go to safeguard his home. So she crept along the walls, her body shifting, flat like a second layer of wallpaper.
"...?"
She paused. She did find all manner of traps, but things were off. She spotted an array of bear traps disengaged, the diodes of an array of motion detecting laser deactivated, a crossbow installed in the wall without a bolt. And to the side, the various locks to the front door were all undone.
I could've just walked into the front door!? She thought bitterly to herself. Her attention turned to the dull flashing of a television box, erratically illuminating a dimly lit room. Voices droned from the speakers with a tinny din.
Clara narrowed her eyes towards the person slumped in the recliner faced towards the screen, scanning for any further threats. No concealed weapons, no conspicuous bulges... She noted the bottle in his hand as a possible improvised weapon, but it wasn't like a shattered bottle would cut into her very well.
It was Dean. Completely vulnerable from behind. She wouldn't have a better opportunity than this.
She rapidly unfurled from the wall, her body elongating and slithering across the ground, knocking aside emptied cans and bottles in her wake. Her torso rose up like a python, her hair billowing behind her as she zipped around the recliner over and over, her body expanding a foot a second as her legs twisted together behind her.
In her serpentine form, she wrapped taut around Dean Constantine, her coils tightening with agonizing pressure around his form; her body creaked against itself as her latex skin rubbed together. Her head loomed over him with a look of menace in her eyes; she flexed her hands, her fingers merging together as they fused, narrowed into points, and ran a deadly edge along her knife-like arms.
She had him exactly where she wanted him... and she was going to enjoy this. After the embarrassment he had put her through, she wouldn't be gentle. She thought about squeezing him until his dying breath escaped his lips, so she could watch the look of despair in his eyes as she finally...
She paused, her eyes focusing on his blank, tired expression. His eyes were still affixed to the television.
"You're going to kill me, right?" Dean muttered, "Then hurry up and do it."
"...what?" Clara blinked. This was a surprise... and the pathetic look in his eyes seemed to be arousing some misplaced sense of pity within her.
She grit her teeth, her coils tensing indignantly. "H-hey, don't you get off on telling me what to do! I'm the one in control here!"
"Sorry." Dean replied, rather mutedly this time. "I know your agency put you up to this. It's how it always goes. I'm just tired..."
"Tch. I'll put you out of your misery soon enough." Clara sneered. "I just want to enjoy every last drop..."
"That's nice. At least one of us will have fun..." His voice croaked a bit as Clara squeezed him in rhythmic pulses. "No one will miss me. Felicia left me."
"...Felicia?" Clara paused, her coils relaxing. "Who's Felicia?"
"Tch. You already know. She's my girlfriend... ex-girlfriend." Dean sighed. "She got tired of our dates getting interrupted by work."
Clara stared, the events of earlier that evening replaying in her head. Dean had gone to a cafe, there was a woman... she had stormed off. Clara didn't think much of it at the time. She thought superagents drifted from one busty sidepiece to another, never stopping to get too attached.
It appears she was mistaken; he was rather attached to that woman at the cafe. It just didn't sound like it, between his deadpan delivery. But Dean wasn't his usual self. He looked deflated. Hollow. Empty.
Clara looked around the disheveled look of the department. He had taken to the bottle quite severely.
"Just put me out of my misery..." Dean closed his eyes. "I'm tired. The world won't miss a killer..."
This was it. He was asking for death. Clara recalled her position at the agency; she needed to wrap up this job, or otherwise suffer the consequences. It would be so simple to slice right through him, puncture the aorta, crush his trachea.
...But she hesitated.
"...no. Not like this. Not yet."
Clara shook her head, her coils loosening slightly. Dean cocked his head up, his eyebrow perking up.
"But... It's your job." Dean cocked his head to the side. "You're here to kill me."
"Oh, don't worry your pretty little head. No one will lay a finger on you but me."
Clara smiled devilishly, confidence swelling within her. She purred as she slithered around his captured form.
"You're my prey, Dean. And I'll kill you on no one's terms but my own. Not your's, not the agency." Clara swivelled around him, her voice hanging in his ear.
"We've had such fun together, haven't we? It would be a shame to end it all with all the pomp and circumstance of a back-alley shanking..." She scratched her cheek with a red fingernail. "I need you in peak form. I need to make a statement..."
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, her chest pressing against his. She purred as she rocked her absurdly-lengthened body.
"I'll give you one more night of all the worldly pleasures. I'll take you to Heaven... before I send you to Hell."
"..."
Dean didn't stir in her grip; she looked at her dead-on, trying to read between the lines of what she was saying; in their limited interactions, he concluded that she was something of a dramatist, but he hadn't quite predicted this turn.
He smirked slightly.
"I'm in your hands, Clara."
