... A familiar, wolfish heat crept back into his stacked set of two right eyes as they narrowed, focusing in on her. All red and knife-like. It made Charlie clench her back teeth together and lean away as much as she safely dared. Pale hands gripped at the rubbery, braided wires that made up her improvised swing. The sheer difference in scale between his oblate, mutated head and her lithe form were all the more apparent now that she’d been brought closer.
Charlie was suddenly keenly aware that, intentionally or not, Vox had taken away her ability to easily leave the room via the seemingly magnanimous gesture of whisking her up from the hazards of the floor and suspending her on high.
Clocking her discomfort, Vox pulled himself back a pace and huffed a short, synthetically casual laugh from his toothy, cavernous mouth.
“This is- This is cute,” he swept a claw in a lazy arc, “You’re like a songbird on a perch.”
Just as quickly, his expression twisted and soured with a flash of realization. His elongated antenna shot upwards like lightning bolts.
“Shiiiit!” Vox dragged the one word out to the length of a full, bitter sentence, “I’m wasting such a golden opportunity.”
He strained once again against his own cables and the sockets keeping him tethered. The jacks groaned and squealed violently as they bore and held against Vox’s considerable weight. Charlie full-body winced from the sound. Despite his efforts, the virus demon remained bound.
“I could be rampaging around downtown with you all tied up in wires!” Vox wailed, beating his front insectoid legs against the ground like a tantruming toddler. “But I’m stuck in this goddamn bell jar of a building.”
The remaining monitors on the wall shuddered in time with his blows and clouds of drywall and other particulates dusted into Charlie’s hair as she clung to her quaking cords for dear life.
“Imagine what that would’ve done for my reputation! Big monster and the princess- I could be giving the public a real King Kong moment!”
“W-well, I haven’t seen that one,” Charlie poorly suppressed a yelp as she attempted to re-balance herself and nearly slipped clean from her roost, “But is that really something to emulate?”
Vox halted mid-bellow, legs frozen, and gave her an incredulous look. The effect was highly comical given his monstrous facial features.
“You seriously haven’t seen King Kong?”
“I heard it was sad.” Charlie replied frankly.
“What are you talking about? The big, dumb monkey just dies at the end.”
“Yea, like I said. Sad.” the princess exhaled, beyond grateful for the reprieve from his thrashing, “I don’t like sad movies.”
“What kind of movies do you like?” Vox asked, so quickly and without any tone that it felt accidental.
