A short fanfiction I wrote in response to an anon ask on someone else’s blog back in aother time and another life. I think it was @babyspacebatclone , but am not sure. I know that they wrote a little sequel back in the day and I wrote a sequel to that, but this first / original story was initially meant to be a stand-alone.
This is the one story I have the rights to. I do not have the rights to babybat’s part of it, nor the name they later gave the Vessel - which are separate properties. If curious, contact them about that. This was the first story that those stemmed from. I have no idea if babybat wants to continue anything further in collaboration, but I doubt it, since we are no longer in any kind of regular contact with each other and, for my part, I don’t want to do collaborative fanfics (in any fandom) anymore. This is to be taken as a stand-alone. I am posting it because I like it as its ow thing and because I am having thoughts of taking the basic idea (fronted by an anon) off in a different direction.
A anon asked on tumblr “What if Prime’s vessel survived Hordak dropping him off the ledge, sans Prime-inhabitation?”
I wrote a story about Hordak, Entrapta and Bow finding the near-dead altered clone.
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Vessel
*Ping! Ping! Ping!*
“The signal points to here! I can’t believe it, but data doesn’t lie!”
“What is it?”
“It’s a life-sign! Something… or someone… is still alive in here!”
“That is not possible. We were the last living beings in the throne-room before I was inhabited and we teleported down to the planet.”
Bow and Hordak followed Entrapta’s lead as she followed a signal on a data-pad, holding an antenna aloft in one tail of her hair.
“It’s coming from the ground floor, which means…”
Hordak suddenly stopped, his ears pinned back and his teeth clenched. “No further!” he ordered.
“Hordak?” Entrapta inquired.
“We go no further!”
“Could it be one of the attendant-clones?” Bow asked, “They’re trapped! We’ve evacuated everyone on the ship already, we have to help them, too!”
“It is not an attendant,” Hordak growled.
“Well, the signal isn’t moving, so they aren’t moving!” Entrapta said. “What an opportunity for study!”
“Wait, you fool!”
Hordak reached out for her, but she was already bounding into the ground-floor level of Horde Prime’s sanctum, ambulating on her hair.
“What’s the matter, Hordak? You look afraid,” Bow asked. “Did… Prime have some kind of guardian-beast we should be worried about?”
Hordak shook his head. “No. I suspect far worse lies within. Entrapta has much more curiosity than self-preservation. Ready your weapon.”
Hordak ran after Entrapta with Bow following on his heels, bringing out his bow and one of his more explosive arrows.
“Entrapta?”
“Entrapta?”
The two of them called into the darkness.
“Over here!” came her chipper voice. They saw a waving lock of hair in the dim light of the still-running ship-lights and the newly-born fireflies that danced in the air among the twisting roots and branches of the magically-induced vegetation that now coated the Velvet Glove inside and out.
Hordak snorted. Bow covered his mouth and gagged. There was a smell here - a strong reek, metallic, but not clean. It was a definitive biological odor. Entrapta was hunched over a humanoid figure on the floor, running a different program on her pad, scanning it over while exploring it with tendrils off her hair.
Bow shivered when he beheld the form. Hordak went white-eared (something that Bow had recently come to realize was a sign of fear in the “spacebats” from the company of Wrong Hordak.
The body that Entrapta had found was twisted, laying on its side, but with the torso twisted unnaturally away from the legs. The jaw hung open and the tongue lolled out. The side of the face visible to them was the side with only one eye, tightly closed. The cable-hair was spread out and there was thick, sticky blood - light green close into the body and darker green were dried and smeared underneath it.
Horde Prime - or at least, his last vessel.
By the blood-streaks on the metal floor, it looked like he’d crawled some space, however feebly.
Entrapta gently prodded the body and read scans. Bow jumped back as the middle of the figure rose and fell. Stray hairs of Entrapta’s that were studying the face moved as breath hit them.
“He’s still alive!” Bow squeaked.
“If you could say that,” Entrapta said. “I can’t get a read on how much brain damage he’s suffered from the fall yet. In any case, damage to the internal organs is massive. I think he’s only still barely functioning due to his internal cybernetics.”
Hordak’s ears relaxed somewhat, but remained dipped. He suddenly started looking around the room, rummaging for Bow didn’t know what.
“Hordak, what are you doing?” he asked.
“I regret that I did not think to equip my canon,” he muttered, “and I doubt that my stun-baton will be sufficient.”
“What?”
Hordak loomed over Bow. “I would ask you to arm your most deadly arrow, but I worry that it would not pierce his modified skin. I also doubt that you have have ever before preformed a mercy-kill.”
Bow looked back and forth between Hordak and the unconsciously-gasping form of the late Horde Prime. The archer watched, dumbfounded, as Hordak knelt before the broken vessel of his progenitor and was disbelieving when the once scourge-of-Etheria bowed his head and tenderly stroked the one visible cheek on the dying clone.
“My apologies for being inefficient,” he said simply.
“Oh!” Entrapta brightened, holding up her scan-pad, “I think we can save him!”
Hordak rose. “He is beyond saving,” he said. “Prime’s vessels give everything they have to him. All that he leaves behind is mere memory-storage. This one is nothing but a data-disk.”
“But that’s WHY we should try to save him! Think of all of the data he has! And Hordak, the last vessel that Prime possessed was you!”
“But he was only within me for a short time. I still… saw everything. Enough of me was left to fight from within until She-Ra drove him out.” He gestured a hand to his chest for emphasis. “I felt myself fading, Entrapta, and that was with a tenuous hold. He did not enjoy my body - my defects and pain weakened him, but if he held me for more than a day, I would have been gone.”
He regarded his broken brother on the floor. “To think that I once considered it the highest honor to be his vessel, as did we all.”
“We can’t leave him like this, can we?” Bow asked, sweating with stress.
“Oh, I can harvest data from him as long as we keep him going,” Entrapta said.
“Entrapta! That’s sick!” Bow exclaimed. “Look at him! I can’t even imagine the pain he must be in!”
“I can,” Hordak said with a frown. “So you agree with me in the matter of a mercy-kill, then?”
“Hold on! Hold on!” Entrapta said. “I’m not asking that we let him suffer! He’s unconscious - maybe even vegetative - I haven’t determined his exact state yet, but I don’t think he feels anything right now! I think that if I can sync up his cabling with my computer, I can download some information from him - the ship’s workings, clone biology, stuff on tech, that kind of thing.”
“Entrapta, I really would rather have done with it,” Hordak intoned.
Before more could be said, the vessel screamed.
Everyone jumped as the body of Horde Prime stirred. The head slowly turned, all four green eyes opening. He gasped and yelped, whatever of him was left making his agony obvious. Hordak tried to charge an arm-cannon that was not there. One of the vessel’s clawed hands moved weakly.
“L-Lord Prime?” the clone asked, “I cannot feel my legs anymore and everything else is… am I achieving purity?”
“By the Void…” Hordak cursed.
The vessel choked, gasped and clenched his teeth. All four of his pain-teared eyes widened. “I… I am alone. Have I been unfaithful? Is that why everything hurts? Lord Prime, do not abandon me!”
Entrapta knelt again beside him and put a hair-tail on his shoulder. “Alright…um… big guy… it looks like you’re awake. And… not Prime. Definitely not Prime anymore. She looked helplessly at his ravaged body and probed the ports in his cybernetics, looking for a way to dull sensations in the nervous system. She’d never found a way to completely eliminate Hordak’s pain, then again, he needed to be able to move while this clone did not. She used her finer hairs to manipulate one of his back-ports. He visibly relaxed and blinked.
“Alright,” Entrapta sighed. “I’m afraid that you’re going to be a quadriplegic until we figure out how to stabilize and fix you, but do you feel better now?
Bow and Hordak stood so close to each other that their shoulders touched. They backed away from one another as soon as they realized this.
“Prime!” the vessel cried. “Prime, where are you?!”
“Prime is gone,” Hordak said, standing above him.
“That cannot be!” The clone said in confusion. “Prime is eternal!”
“You were his last intended vessel,” Hordak explained. “You were…wounded. Would you like me to end you?”
“Hordak!” Bow yelped.
“Defect!” the broken clone snapped. He glared at Hordak. “I know you! I remember you! You were defective!”
“Yes,” Hordak answered him, “But now I am free. I will ask you again out of courtesy; you are a Vessel of Prime that has been mortally wounded. Would you like me to finish it?”
“A vessel of Horde Prime shall not die by the hands of a defect!”
“So be it.”
“So, we can try to save him?!” Entrapta squealed.
“If you must,” Hordak answered. “I shall respect his wishes, as misguided as they are.”
Bow busied himself with a communicator. “Adora, you have to meet up with us. We need your help. You won’t believe what we found. We’re going to need some She-Ra healing, and… maybe some form of restraint? Yeah, yeah, bring Netossa.”
“I don’t know how to explain things to you,” Entrapta said, “But we want to help you.”
“Chatty rebel,” the clone said. “Loud purple-haired princess.”
“Yep! And we’re gonna help each other a lot!”
