Ben and Amanda cosplay as their favorite superheroes for Halloween, and run into some old friends at a Halloween block party. But since the appearance of the Venn machines, Halloween cosplay has taken on a new dimension.

For those who are unfamiliar with Worm and its sequel Ward by Wildbow, start here.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Trust Machines universe by dkfenger, start here.

But hopefully you can enjoy this without having read either.

Warning: minor character canon-ship spoilers for Worm (nothing plot-crucial).

“So what do you want to do for Halloween?” I asked Amanda. I was washing the supper dishes and she was sitting at the kitchen table, reading on her laptop and keeping me company.

She looked up at me across her laptop screen. “I’ve just gotten to the part of Worm where Weld shows up again, and Sveta is with him, and I was thinking ‘What a cute couple’ —”

“Just you wait,” I said with a grin. I’d discovered Worm a few months earlier when a friend from work recommended it, and I’d told Amanda about it, but she hadn’t gotten around to starting it until a few days earlier. She reads a lot faster than me.

“So why don’t we go as them?”

“You have any strong preference whether you go as Weld or Sveta?”

“Sveta, if you don’t mind being an animate statue.”

“If you can get the Venn machine to work right.”

“Yeah, there’s no point if we can’t. We’d better have a backup plan. And you should let me practice on you a couple of times ahead of Halloween night.”

I’d been turned into inanimate objects for short periods a couple of times, and it was interesting in a way, but not the way I’d want to spend Halloween night. It was possible to turn someone into a living statue or doll, though, and I’d heard of people who did it, though it was supposedly kind of tricky. The one time Amanda and I had tried before, Amanda had turned into a regular immobile statue — blind, deaf, and too heavy for me to haul out of the booth of the Venn machine. So I just closed the door on her and let it turn her back to normal, and we tried again a couple of times each, with no success. But since then Amanda had run across a tutorial on YouTube about how to turn someone into a living doll, and she’d been wanting to try it.

“All right,” I said. “You study that tutorial a couple more times, and we’ll go to the park Friday evening.”

I understand that in a lot of places, the Venn machines will tend to pop up in indoor malls, but our little town doesn’t have one. We have two Venn machines now, though for years there was only one; the one closest to our apartment is in Baird park — a little one-acre tract with playground equipment, grills and picnic tables, some grass, a few trees, and a basketball court. And, for over a year now, a Venn machine at the corner of the parking lot.

We drove over there as soon as we both got home from work Friday, put a dollar in the slot, and pressed the day icon once, then stepped into the booths. “You want me to practice designing your Sveta form too?” I asked, looking at the screen showing Amanda over in her booth.

“You can, but don’t press the button until I’ve changed you,” she said. “I don’t want to have to get used to controlling all those tendrils while I’m partway through designing your Weld body. It would be a distraction.”

“Sure,” I said, and turned to consider the images the machine was offering me. It defaulted to an array of minor variations on Amanda’s natural body and the outfit she was wearing — reddish-brown hair, smaller boobs, taller, lighter skin, lower hemline — with smaller images of more significant variations out on the fringes of the cluster. I said, “A woman’s disembodied head, with compact vital organs in a sac and long, narrow, prehensile tendrils in place of hair.” As usual, for some silly reason, I enunciated more clearly than normal even though I knew the Venn machine could interpret a mumble or subvocalization just as well (or just as badly).

The minor variations on Amanda vanished and were replaced by variations on what I’d asked for. None were very close to my mental image of Sveta, and most of them didn’t look much like Amanda in the face. And I’d forgotten to mention the tattoo Sveta was supposed to have on her cheek. I decided we could add that with makeup or face paint on Halloween night; the Venn machine was notoriously bad at giving people specific tattoos, especially if they were supposed to be words or symbols rather than pictures. I heard Amanda mumbling under her breath from the other booth, and tried to tune it out. “— no, no, the clothes are supposed to be separate, not part of the sculpture —”

I ruled out the image-bubbles that had a torso or limbs, however atrophied, and focused on the ones that were just a head — this one had thick, suckered tentacles like an octopus; that one just seemed to have super-long hair; this one had approximately the right sort of tendrils, though she was darker skinned than Amanda, not pale white like Sveta. I touched that image and further variations on her popped up, replacing the ones I’d dismissed. Some had lighter skin and some had thinner tendrils, but none had both, so I picked one of the ones with thinner tendrils and then another with reasonably thin tendrils (though they were too short) and lighter skin, then one with longer, darker tendrils and lighter skin, and then —

“Got it,” Amanda said a little louder, and a moment later I was blind and deaf. I existed. I was calm. Patient. Nothing mattered but looking good and being seen. Was anyone looking at me? Amanda, for instance? Maybe she would set me up in the living room and invite her friends over to look at me. Or better, here in the park, public art for all the kids and their moms and the basketball players to look at...

Then I was myself again, and Amanda was looking at me from just outside the open door of the booth. “Sorry,” she said with a little pout. “I thought I had it. But you know, a picture of a living statue doesn’t look any different from a picture of an inanimate statue...”

“I know,” I said. “Here, give me a kiss and let’s try again.”

I tried again to get a good Sveta body for Amanda, and after about ten iterations I was pretty close to my mental image of her, though still without the tattoo. Amanda still wasn’t finished, though, so I waited until she said: “There, let’s try this one,” and pressed her green button.

This time I didn’t go blind or deaf. I felt really solid, and my slight hunger had vanished. I looked at my arm and saw it was a dull metallic color; I brought my hands together and heard a clank rather than a clap. I looked further down and saw I was naked. “Great work, sweetie,” I said. “I can’t get from here to the car or from the car to the apartment without violating the local decency laws, though.”

“You’re fine art,” she rejoined. “That means it’s fine for you to be naked in public. Have you got a body for me ready?”

“Yeah, you want to try it?”

“Hit me.”

I pressed my green button with half a minute to spare, and the door opened. I stayed in my booth to spare the sensibilities of the mom and kids we’d seen on the playground when we arrived, and waited for Amanda.

It was over a minute before she slithered into view outside my door and then into the both with me. Her tendrils didn’t move the way Sveta’s did in the book, snapping out like a whip to latch onto something and then pulling her toward it, and then lashing out again to grab another handhold; they lay on the ground and wiggled like a couple hundred snakes, moving the head they supported with them.

I knelt down to be close to eye level with her.

“I should have thought about that,” I said. “Told it how the tendrils were supposed to move.”

“It’s okay,” she said, “if we can’t get anything better. Let me try something before we change back.” She concentrated and some of her tendrils started to lift up off the ground, reaching for me, winding around my legs and waist, and gradually she pulled herself up. Once she seemed to have a good grip, I stood up, and she continued to climb me until she was resting on my shoulder with her tendrils draped around me, winding around my neck and my upper arms, like Sveta with Weld in the books.

“That was way harder than it should have been,” she said. “Let’s definitely keep working on tendril functionality.”

“Right now?”

“Sure, one more time and then we’ll go home for supper.”

But another couple was waiting to use the machine by then, so we waited till they were done and re-entered the machine. The second try wasn’t any better. I wound up with metallic shorts covering my privates, if I even had distinct privates under those shorts, which I doubted. Amanda wound up with tendrils that moved like Sveta’s, but they were too weak to lift her; she could only drag herself along the ground, which was painful. We changed back, went home and ate supper, and tried again on Saturday.

By Halloween, we were pretty well ready. Amanda could turn me into a living statue that looked about the right age to be Weld, though she never managed to give me separate fabric clothes over a naked metal body. I could give her tendrils that were strong enough for her to move around easily and climb on me, though sometimes at the cost of other aspects of Sveta’s appearance — skin color, color of the tendrils, or something. We figured the park would be jammed on Halloween with people venning for the night, so we decided to go over there on the thirtieth and change when it would be less crowded. Even the day before Halloween, there was a wait — a dozen other people had had the same idea we did, apparently. We spent a pleasant half hour chatting with the people in line and people who had just gotten venned. Once it was our turn, we set the timer for three days and entered, leaving a duffel bag with our wallets and keys and a change of clothes for me outside; one of the guys in line behind us promised to watch it for us. We’d run into him and his boyfriend at the park before, and kind of knew them. (The local venners had tried to get the city to put in a bank of lockers near the Venn machine, but the city council didn’t like the thing, and would have gotten rid of it if they could. A laundromat near the park had put in some lockers to serve us, but we often didn’t bother using them, if someone was around we thought we could trust to hold onto our stuff.)

A couple of minutes later, the door opened, and I kept my back to the door. “Hey, Rick, could you toss our duffel bag in here?” I called out, and a moment later, the bag landed by my feet. I bent down and pulled out a pair of underwear, shorts and a T-shirt and put them on. By the time I finished getting dressed, Amanda had emerged from her booth and come into mine.

“You look scrumptious,” she said. She was lighter skinned than her normal body, although not as pale as Sveta should really be, but her tendrils were black and about the right length, and they moved the right way, more or less. She reached out with a couple and wrapped them around my arm.

“Let’s get out and let Rick and Aaron have their turn,” I said, starting to stoop to pick up the duffel bag.

“Hang on a second,” she said, and yanked herself toward me, wrapping most of her tendrils around my torso and shoulders as her head slammed into me. I worried about her for a moment; she probably wasn’t as durable as the fictional Sveta.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, picking up the duffel bag with a few of her tendrils and carrying it. “Now let’s go.”

We walked out.

“Cool,” Rick said. “You said you’re characters from a superhero story?”

“Yeah.” We’d told him and his boyfriend Aaron, whom we didn’t know as well, what we planned while we were waiting. “It’s really good.”

“I just finished it a week ago,” Amanda said, “and started reading the sequel. It’s great stuff, pretty dark in spots, but not a downer overall.”

“I’ll check it out,” Aaron said. “Here, this shouldn’t take too long,” and he and Rick handed us their wallets and keys.

“Come on, let’s get venned,” Rick said, and he and Aaron went in the booths, the doors closing up after them.

A few minutes later, when the doors opened, we saw a baby in diapers lying prone on the floor of the booth where Rick had entered. He struggled a little and managed to prop himself up and crawl toward the door as Aaron, now a woman about mine and Amanda’s age wearing a princessy ball gown, emerged from the other booth, nodded to us, went in and picked Rick up. “Let’s get to the store,” she said to Rick, snuggling him. “I tried to design you with a pumpkin costume, but couldn’t get anything that looked right. It kept giving me babies with an actual pumpkin in place of the head or torso.”

Rick gurgled and shook his head.

We gave her back their wallets and keys, and then went home ourselves. Once I got in the car, Amanda crawled off me and up onto the headrest of the passenger seat, wrapping her tendrils around the seat in lieu of a seatbelt. The car sagged lower to the ground than usual when I got in, and I realized that a solid metal statue the size of a teenage boy might weigh half a ton to a couple of tons, depending on the particular metal or alloy I was made of. “We’ll see if this works,” I said. “If the undercarriage is scraping the speed bumps, we’ll park and walk home.”

“I think it’ll be okay,” Amanda said, and it was, though we had a nervous moment when we came up on the first speed bump a couple of minutes later.

When we got into our apartment, Amanda wanted me to undress, so I did, going into the bathroom and looking in the mirror as I did. Amanda, who’d climbed off me, hung by her tendrils from the shower curtain rod and watched. I had curly steel wool on my head, armpits, and pubes, but not much on my chest or belly or legs.

“You did a good job,” I said. “I hope I did okay with you?”

“Yes!” she said, and grabbed me with a couple of bundles of tendrils, pulling her head toward me. “Look back here,” she said, turning the nape of her neck toward me; “what do you see?”

“Um... it looks kind of like your vagina?” Though not exactly.

“I thought so. Did you plan on that?”

“No — none of the image-bubbles showed you from that angle.”

“Well, I’m glad it worked out.” Some of her tendrils reached for my crotch, and it was forty-five minutes before she got around to eating supper.

I still wasn’t hungry. In the books, Weld eats, but doesn’t need to eat much or often, and can’t taste normal food, only the spiciest of spices. But the living statues the Venn machines create don’t ever need to eat, and I found when I put a little chipotle pepper in my mouth that I couldn’t taste it. (Weld “eats” metal, too, absorbing it into his skin, but the Venn machines have never been able to replicate super-powers like that.) Amanda still felt hunger, but her stomach and digestive system were pretty tiny, so she filled up after a few bites and needed the bathroom less than a quarter of an hour later. When she emerged, she said, “That was weird.”

“What?”

“It felt like everything came out from the same place. It was kind of messy, and it’s not easy to handle toilet paper with these tendrils... I think it’s a cloaca rather than a vagina.”

“Interesting.”

Our bed’s springs creaked pretty ominously when I started to sit down on it later, but I wasn’t really sleepy. In the books, Weld doesn’t need much sleep, and venned living statues don’t sleep at all. I wound up sitting cross-legged on the floor all night, reading ebooks on my phone, while Amanda slept in the bed, some of her tendrils draped around my shoulders.

On Halloween, I went to work as usual, but dropped off Amanda at her job rather than letting her drive. She’d practiced typing on her laptop the night before, and was satisfied she could do her job, but we didn’t think she should try to drive in that form, at least until she got more time to get used to doing fine manipulation with her tendrils. I didn’t excite a lot of comment from people at the store; I’d come to work venned before, as had some of my co-workers, and today there were more of us than usual. My manager just told me not to climb any ladders today, as he wasn’t sure they’d bear my weight. When I picked up Amanda, she seemed pretty excited. We drove home, where I changed from my work uniform into Weld’s casual outfit, a sports jersey and shorts. I didn’t have any shoes that fit this body, but that didn’t matter much, as tough as my feet were. Meanwhile, Sveta was at her vanity, doing her makeup. I went over and looked over her “shoulder” at her in the mirror; she was finished with the foundation and blush and was doing the “tattoo” on her cheek with an eyeliner pencil.

“I wish we could give you the tattoo, too, but we’d need a metal-working shop,” she said. “I tried several times to get the machine to do it, but it never worked out.”

“Yeah. What are the odds we run into somebody who would notice? We’re going to have to explain who we are to almost everybody.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” She dropped the eyeliner and turned around, throwing tendrils over my shoulders and pulling herself up onto me. “Let’s go.”

We drove about half an hour to a larger town that has a big street party downtown every Halloween, with a couple of blocks cordoned off from traffic and various food carts and entertainments set up. We parked a few blocks away and walked; at first, Amanda just rode my shoulders, but when we got close to a street light, she shot out a bundle of tendrils, grabbed the pole, and pulled herself to it, then reached out again to grab the sign over a barber shop. “Come on, slowpoke,” she called out, and I hurried to catch up, my feet pounding the pavement and, I’m afraid, leaving small cracks in the concrete. Oops. I slowed down and called out “I’ll catch up later.” She stopped and waited for me, grabbing me with her tendrils when I was in reach and pulling herself back onto my shoulders.

When we got there, there were lots of kids in costume running around, and a lot of adults, some in costume and some obviously venned — who knows how many were less obviously so. I recognized a lot of famous superheroes and villains and movie monsters, including the ubiquitous xenomorphs — why people enjoy getting venned into those things I’ll never understand. There were also plenty from obscure media I didn’t recognize, and I doubted very many people would recognize me or Amanda.

We mingled, chatting and getting to know people, and sometimes running into people we already knew from the local venning community. Nobody recognized our costumes until one guy cosplaying as Nightcrawler (in his costume from the eighties) came up to us and said, “I love your Weld and — uh, give me a minute — Garotte?”

“I prefer ‘Sveta’,” Amanda said in-character. “The PRT picked that codename for me; I don’t like it.”

“Yeah, good point.”

“And then — oh, but have you read Ward? I don’t want to spoil it.”

“What?” It turned out he’d read Worm years ago, and didn’t know there was a sequel.

We chatted about Worm, the X-Men, and our costumes for a bit. His feet and facial features didn’t quite match the classic drawings of Nightcrawler by Dave Cockrum or John Byrne, and of course he couldn’t teleport and didn’t have Nightcrawler’s super-agility — but his overall build, blue fur and pointy tail were all spot on, better than most people could get when trying to venn their friend into a specific trademarked character. Weld and Sveta were easier, since we were trying to match written descriptions rather than pictures.

“Thanks,” he said. “My husband designed my body — he’s over there, the girl in the mid-eighties Storm costume. Our costumes are a couple of friends who are into being worn.”

Just then, his husband came over and joined us; when he was about to introduce us to her, we realized we’d never exchanged names. Nightcrawler introduced himself as Mia, and Storm as Devin; then Devin introduced us to their costumes as well, who it turned out were a couple of mutual friends, Emma and Jacob. “Oh, hi, Emma and Jacob, long time no see,” Amanda squeed, though they probably couldn’t hear us in those forms.

“A couple of Halloweens ago we went out trick-or-treating in kid form,” I told Mia and Devin, “and Emma and Jacob were our candy buckets. We tried to venn them into a jack o’lantern and a skull, but the Venn machine kept coming up with weird shit and we decided some of it was a lot creepier than the usual Halloween iconography, so we went with Emma as a six-eyed insectoid head and Jacob as just a shapeless blob with dark swirling colors that were somehow really disturbing to look at...”

“And they asked us to make it so they’d get a jolt of pleasure whenever someone dropped a piece of candy in them,” Amanda added. “And Emma’s eyes would blink and Jacob’s colors would go crazy when that happened.”

“Did you get some other friends to be your costumes?” Mia asked.

“No, we just got regular kid-size witch and vampire costumes from Target,” Amanda said. “I don’t like wearing or being worn by anybody but Ben.” She stroked my arm possessively as she said that.

We ended up hanging out with Mia and Devin for the next couple of hours, and they invited us to come hang out with them the following weekend. Emma and Jacob were there, too, and we had fun reconnecting with them and hearing about all the things they’d been in the last year or more since we’d talked with them.

Of course, when venners get together socially, you know where it’s going. At one in the morning, we all six ended up at the Venn machine out in front of the Wal-Mart near Mia and Devin’s house. I just hoped that none of us were so drunk the Venn machine wouldn’t let us change.

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