OC Kiss Challenge 2026 | Day 1 - Impulse

I really like prompt challenges; I find I write more easily, without overthinking every little thing, and get motivated by the engagement that taking part in a writing challenge automatically grants me. So when the 2026 OC kiss challenge came across my Tumblr dashboard, I committed!

​Here is the first of seven excerpts!

this kiss comes from my wip Glitch which is not a wip i'm actively working on but nevertheless one i think about a lot!
​
length: 500 words

​ ↳ in which there is a cyborg named sacha, a shapeshifter named cipher, a missing heir to a global conglomerate, a virtual reality called FAE.REALM that just might be carnivorous, and a quest

​It was impulse that moved her. 

He just looked so pathetic, with his body and his form both wracked by shivers—his hair curling and then straightening, plastered against his face; one iris going purple and the other orange, pupils rounding and slitting with each staccato breath; nose broadening and then narrowing, the bridge sometimes high, sometimes low; and his cupid’s bow flexing as his lips changed shape. ​

Sacha stifled a snort. His lips looked like wriggling worms on his pale face. He would’ve been highly affronted by the comparison; whatever form he took, he preferred to be beautiful.

Sacha thought worms were better than beautiful: they were vital, they minded their own business, and they were industrious. And anyway, there was something not unlovely about the sleek pink forms, something so perfect in what they were. Function, design—it was its own beauty.

But she was getting distracted with nonsense poetical thoughts and this fire wasn’t going to light itself. Cipher, the miserable lump, could not help. He didn't have these sorts of skills or abilities. She might have been annoyed about it, but she was too tired and wet and cold. The flash flood had swept them along regardless of any stones or broken trees in the way, and she ached, no matter her skeletal reinforcements. 

At least it wasn’t raining.

“Cipher,” she called, buoyed by this thought and by a spark from the wood finally catching on her exposed circuitry.
He made a sound that could charitably be called inquisitive, and more accurately described as a wheezing whine, a sound like a balloon made when its lip was stretched and its air let out in a thin stream.

“Cipher,” she called again, tenderly feeding the tiny tongue of flame. And though there was no gentling her voice, modified by the implant as it was, she could dial the volume down so it almost sounded soft.

He finally looked up at her. “Warmth!” he breathed reverently, scuttling toward her and threatening to drip on her still small fire. “You’re a marvel, Sacha.”

It was the first time he’d used her name and not an offensive nickname, though she’d long since stopped being offended by them, and long since known that he didn’t mean them anymore. 
And so, on impulse, she gave him a kiss of a punch—a two knuckle tap to his cheek, with only 3.5% force applied so that really, it was more of a caress. 

His pupils went near-white in surprise, all his features momentarily flashing into amorphous colour in a vaguely humanoid shape that hurt her organic eye to look at and made her bionic one glitch in a smattering of pixels and fractures. And then, a moment later, she was looking at herself—how she might have looked without any enhancements: smaller and unscarred and altogether unrecognizable except through a sidelong glance.

“Was that…was that a gesture of affection?” Cipher demanded, voice high and strained in faux shock.

“Yes,” Sacha said, because the truth seemed to always rock him, and she enjoyed upending his expectations.

And in reward, he graced her with a blush that might even have been real.