(Fate: Grand Order TF, Fs to Monkeys)

In retrospect, the fact that it was a trap should have been fairly obvious. But Martha was a saint for a reason, and said reason did not include her mastery of deduction. Unfortunately, it did include a calling to help others, which is precisely what had led to her being ambushed and brought to a deviant’s laboratory.

Said deviant was currently skipping around the room, occasionally pausing to check on the two clear tubes that contained her victims. As ever, a mad gleam lingered in the rogue AI BB’s eyes, and it only grew when she looked at the captive Frenchwomen.

Martha sneered. “You do realize that using Marie as bait was-”

“Brilliant?” BB replied with a smile. She laughed, tousling out her hair. “Only joking. I know you were going to say something like ‘monstrous’ or ‘evil beyond all compare’ or… Well, something banal, I’m sure.”

“Cowardly, actually.”

“Hm. Here I thought you were more of a lover, not a warrior. No matter, that’s not a part of today’s experiment.” BB whirled towards the tube containing Marie Antoinette, a former queen and current lab rat.

“And what is?” Marie asked, a serene smile on her face. As ever, she was the very model of etiquette.

“Well, first, I’m going to see if an educated woman could possibly be affected by a little creation of mine. And then, we’re going to see if that creation works on a saint.”

“Oh, so the fact that we are both French has nothing to do with it? A bit of a disappointment,” Marie tutted.

“Consider that a bonus. Now, I’ve kept you both waiting long enough… What say we let the show begin?”

That was all the warning BB gave the two before a purplish smoke entered Marie’s tube. For the first time since she’d been captured, Marie began to show a little unease—especially when she looked down to her arms.

It wasn’t much to see, just a slight bit more hair on her body and a little more muscle across her form. But it was a lot to feel, given how her eyelids fluttered. She pressed a hand to her head uneasily, curling her toes.

“H-hold on… Whuzzat? Uh… What you doing?” Marie slurred a little, as though drunk.

“My lady?” Martha blinked. She pressed against the glass of her confines, as though that would help her better see what was happening.

“La…dee? Me?” Marie pointed at her own chest, blinking slowly. “Wuh… How come me sound all dumb?”

BB’s reply was to punch her fist in the air triumphantly. “First stage, success! Oh, but that’s a bit of a shame. Marie would have been the only one to appreciate what ‘de-evolution’ entails.”

Martha blinked. “Evolution? Like the heresy?”

“Like the fact!” BB clapped her hands together. “You see, I’ve just regressed our dear lady back a few hundred years or so. Well, maybe a bit more. The point is, I’ve found a way to play with all of your little Spirit Origins.”

Martha felt a chill down her spine. A Servant’s Spirit Origin was what tied them to reality, and allowed them to manifest as themselves. Tampering with one was akin to completely rewriting the person they had been and replacing it with another.

Marie, on the other hand, struggled to keep up with the conversation. Despite the fact that she still looked much like the Queen of France-albeit one who’d never learned of hygiene-she acted like an utter oaf. Idly she scratched at her backside, then sniffed at her nails curiously.

“But that’s not all I can do. Let’s jump back a little further. Or… Maybe a lot further.”

“Huh?” Marie looked around as her chamber started to fill with smoke once more. She took a surprised breath, then coughed.

“Marie! You can’t breathe more! That gas is going to make you dumber!” Martha did all she could to warn her fellow Frenchwoman.

“Huh? Whuh? Buh Marie nuh wannuh be dum-dum!” Marie gasped, sucking in another lungful of the smoke. “Mnnuh, muh head feel funny! Marf-Marf, help! Marie nuh wannuh be dumm, Marie… Uh… Marr… Marruh…”

As she babbled, she took on a distinctly simian slouch. Her arms grew more toned, and her breasts and hips swelled as well. After all, a cavewoman needed to be able to nurse the litter of children she’d birthed.

Martha stared in undisguised horror as the woman’s brow jutted outward, and her hair grew messy. She tore at her clothes, stripping most from her body and leaving only rags behind. Her slender hands and feet had gotten so big and oafish, unfit for anything save the most primitive tools.

“Marruh… Huhuh…” The cavewoman stupidly giggled to herself. She fell flat on her ass, drooling like a moron and playing with her newly swollen breasts.

“Shameless!” Martha gasped. “She acts like an animal!”

“Awful funny you should mention that,” BB snickered. “Because we’ve got one more stop on our little journey. Who wants to see her make a monkey out of herself?”

“No! You can’t! I won’t allow this!” Martha began to hammer her fists against the tube that encased her, causing a brief flicker of concern to pass across BB’s face. But its walls held, and her cocksure grin returned.

Marie, or what had once been Marie, looked down as her chamber started to fill again. She didn’t know what the purple stuff was, but it looked tasty so she tried to take a mouthful. To her surprise, it didn’t really taste like anything—but she wasn’t exactly capable of learning, so she continued to use her large hands to spoon more and more of the gas past her thicker lips.

Already, coarse hairs began to sprout over her body. A shudder passed through her and she started to hoot her name softly. “Mahroo… Mahoo… Hoo-ooo-oo!”

Instead of any panic or even surprise, she took these changes in stride. Was she too dumb to tell how much she was losing, or did she simply no longer care? Marie couldn’t tell which possibility chilled her more.

“Aw, looks like she’s well on her way to being an idiot monkey. I wonder if she’ll end up with…” BB circled around the tube. “Aha! A tail! Marvelous!”

Marie seemed surprised by this too, as she reached her hands back behind herself, rolling onto her back as she yanked her tail up between her legs. Something about that clearly felt good, because she clamped her thighs around it, bucking her hips against the air like a nitwit.

It gave Martha a perfect view of the woman’s toes stretching further, spreading apart until they looked much like another set of hands. These changed feet slapped against the container again and again, echoing her idiot hoots of pleasure.

“There’s some saying about what separates man from ape… But damned if I can’t think of it right now,” said BB with a hum. She turned to Martha, and her grin widened at the outraged look on the saint’s face. “Don’t be like that. You’ll be giving her company soon enough.”

A hissing sound was all the warning Martha had. She didn’t bother to look down or react, instead clasping her hands together and praying.

“Perfect! This is exactly what I needed. Keep doing that, you holy types have the worst kinds of immunity.” BB stepped closer. A flourish of her arm summoned a tablet into her hands, and she eyed it closely, marking an occasional note every few moments.

Martha did her best to ignore her, quietly humming a hymn that was as rote to her as her own name. The notes filled her chamber with a holy power, each flowing into another perfectly. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know what was happening: the mist around her was glowing with a golden, purifying hue.

“Very clever, using something from your faith’s oral history. But… What happens when I increase the dosage to predate speech?”

Martha fumbled a single note. Her brow furrowed. She tried to repeat herself, but stumbled again. It was like she was trying to sing in a foreign language, the word didn’t quite fit no matter how hard she tried.

BB cackled, watching the slender woman’s furrowed brow thicken. “Oh, is that all it takes? It makes sense—oral traditions used to spread your religion around. So if you’re made to devolve before those traditions were conceived, your protection crumbles like your mind.”

BB wasn’t making a lot of sense to Martha, mostly because her words were completely alien sounds. Still, the saint stubbornly struggled to try to at least keep to the tune of the song she’d been singing. Music was something even animals could comprehend, so no matter how far back she was sent, if she could retain some part of herself…

She didn’t really have much a plan beyond that. Her perfect posture started to slouch instinctively, and the delicate motions of her lips grew more and more exaggerated as her jawline stretched. Then a single hoot entered her song, soon followed by another and another.

The saint hunched over, her knuckles grazing against the cool floor of the tube. She could feel her skull squeezing her brain smoother, dropping her IQ like a stone. Itchy hair burst from her pores, trying to distract her. But she knew she had to focus on… Something.

Her purpose was a guttering flame, and BB was all too keen to snuff it out. She rapped her knuckles on the glass to the tune of her BB Channel’s theme, and with that, Martha lost the beat she’d been so desperately holding onto.

“Aah-AAH!” The increasingly simian woman hooted. She’d given up everything to try to hold onto that one hope, and even that was gone. She couldn’t even remember name anymore, and any attempt to say it left her mindlessly babbling.

“So much for that.” BB smirked smugly.

The monkey didn’t like her tone for some reason, but it wasn’t like there was much she could do about it. Her toes curled as they stretched, and her ears tugged rounder at the sides of her fuzzy head. She scratched at the ribbons that were holding her hair into some semblance of order, undoing them with the thicker fingers of her new body.

The fluttering cloths reminded her of the rest of the strange fabric that still stubbornly clung to her body. She tugged at these with another hoot, tearing them from herself, exposing her furry chest and a new thrashing tail.

Had that been what upset her? She didn’t know. But it seemed right, so once she was out of her clothes, she started to calm down, falling onto her ass and sucking at her toes like an idiot animal.

“Barely seventy seconds for seven million years, give or take. Not that you can count that high,” BB gloated, admiring the two monkeys that were softly hooting mindlessly. “Which means that my next step…”

She began to plot infecting more and more Servants, words that were beyond the oblivious animals. Only time would tell how successful she would be, the only certainty was that Martha and Marie wouldn’t be alone for long…