Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers! #05 (Patreon)

The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 2

The graveyard in Marikina– sorry, the 'Memorial Garden'– was, in fact, actually fairly private. While they had a gate, the guards didn't stop anyone or even asked them who they'd be visiting, and the three of them just walked in, each of them holding a bouquet of flowers that Tammy had grown from the backs of her arms and wrapped with what seemed like a very thin banana leaf. No one even looked at them.

"This feels vaguely sacrilegious," Sanny said, already feeling hot from the bright sunlight coming from above, holding the improvised bouquet over his head. Occasionally clouds would drift overhead, giving some respite, but most of the time, the sun ruled undisputed. Under his skin, he could feel his body altering, trying to find a more efficient cooling system to vent heat. He wished he'd drunk more water.

Once they got inside, Tammy pointed with her bouquet. "Over there," she pointed. She didn't seem to be sweating at all, though her hair was starting to turn mildly green. "You can't see it from here, but there's a church over there. Since it's the middle of the day, the only ones here are the groundskeepers, and they won't bother you if you look like you're praying. We can practice there."

"We're practicing in a church?" Sanny said.

"Near a church," Tammy corrected. "I think the church itself is usually closed, unless it's Sunday or All Saints' Day. There're trees there."

Sanny could feel some sort of carapace starting to grow on his head, probably as a heat-protection measure, and stopped it. The hurried walk there was torturously hot, and Sanny found his metabolism becoming ectothermic, using the heat instead of finding a way to vent it. He let it, since that was better than suffering, and he did find himself becoming more energetic, though he willed away the venom sacs that had formed in his throat. From the back of his head, he felt frustrated hunger. "How do you know about this place?" he asked.

She pointed. "Our grandparents are buried here," she said. "Somewhere over that way. Huh, Willy and I should stop by to say hi."

"I'm sorry," Sanny said.

Tammy waved it away. "Nah, it's fine, I was only a little kid when it happened. I sort of remember them, but it's been a while, you know? Huh, I should check out our albums, I don't even remember what lolo looked like anymore…" Her tone had a strange wistful nostalgia to it.

The area around the church had the promised trees and shade, and Sanny was able to switch back to a more endothermic metabolism as he leaned against a tree, pulling his hair back from his face. Long hair was so ticklish!

"So, what can you show us?" Tammy said eagerly, sitting down on the ground in the shade and leaning forward eagerly, legs folded under her. Willy glanced at her, then after a moment sat down in the exact same position. She stared at Sanny with a disquietingly intent urgency. The bouquets lay to one side, out of the way. "Is it cool?"

"Do people actually still say that?" Sanny said as he sat down, his hair just brushing the ground.

"If people have invented new slang to replace it, it obviously hasn't caught on," Tammy said. "Not here, at least. Come on, show me, show me!"

Put like that, it sounded vaguely dirty, but Sanny didn't say that. Instead, because of the mention of grandparents, he held up both hands. "Okay, I'm going to pull off my thumb," he said. He stuck out one thumb, grabbed it with his other hand and pulled.

"I can do that too," Tammy said, tucking her thumb into her fist and doing the simple magic trick known to all dads and uncles.

Sanny opened his hand to show a severed thumb, one end a vaguely ragged stump showing red flesh and white bone. Only a little blood dripped around the edges.

"That's disgusting!" Tammy said, a wide grin on her face. She looked at her thumb speculatively. "I'm pretty sure I can do that too…"

"What can you do?" Sanny said. "Something related to plants, right?"

"Something," Tammy said, smiling.

Sanny nodded. Fair enough. "Looked about right. If you're anything like, you should be able to do this." A new thumb was already growing on his hand. "Anyway, watch." He held up the thumb he'd pulled off.

It bent at the joint as Tammy leaned forward, fascinated. Then it started wiggling.

Sanny could feel the changes happening under the skin. It had begun as it had appeared, a severed thumb, if one severed a bit too cleanly. Blood vessels had been pinched close before removal, nerves had been deactivated; the skin, bone, ligaments, muscles and tendons rigged to fall off like a lizard's tail. The cells were still alive, and would actually last for some time at the cellular level even detached from his body. Any body part would under normal circumstances.

His body parts though… well.

He could still feel through his thumb. He'd gotten used to the situation, but it was still weird. He could feel thought his severed thumb, feel the warmth of his head, feel the nail still growing bit by bit. Wind blew and he felt it passing over the skin. And he could feel it changing inside, as easily as he felt any of the changes that happened in his own body, a level of hyperawareness that had once felt like too much information. He could feel the muscles and bone in the thumb changing, rearranging, the solid bones forming a skull, tiny vertebrae, ribs. The muscles squirmed under the skin, becoming more evenly distributed, supporting a different kind of movement. The mass of the bone reduced, seeming to just disappear, and new muscle seemed to come out of nowhere to replace it. The muscles became specialized, forming lungs for metabolizing, a basic digestive system…

Small needle teeth suddenly sprouted from around the raw edges of the stump at the base of the thumb, that entire end becoming a mouth. Between one moment and the next, what had been a stump of muscle and bone became a gaping– for its size– maw, and the thumb was no longer a thumb, but a bizarre, flesh-colored worm with a firm underside and soft back, what had once been a nail becoming a sort of decorative plate. It wiggled a bit stiffly, but its movements became more refined as its musculature and skeleton kept changing, becoming suited to its size, optimized to be a living creature.

Sanny had no idea how it happened, only that it did. Oh, he could direct small, individual changes, like the head being at the stump end, could feel each change and know what was happening, get some vague sense of how each organ contributed to the whole creature, and set general parameters, like it having no sexual or reproductive organs. He could control the finished creature as if he'd been born to the body, knew how to get to it move and do what he wanted. But how and why each part changed to become as it was? All the literally microscopic changes to the cells that made them stop being thumb muscles and become something else? He had no idea about those, and he'd felt them happen. It had all been according to the hand of someone else. Somethingelse.

"Wow… that thing is gross," Tammy said succinctly, a wide, amazed smile on her face. She reached forward tentatively. "Can I–?"

Sanny felt the urge, opportunistic, hungry, selfish, felt the muscles bunch up just that little bit too much. His hands snapped forward to pluck the little form out of the air as it lunged at Tammy's fingers, its mouth opened wide, teeth growing absurdly in a split second. Tammy froze in place, eyes wide in surprise, but Sanny's hand had already wrapped around the little worm, willing it not to move, to be part of him, and it subsided, suddenly docile.

He could also feel it. Blind, deaf, with only a vague sense of balance and a general direction of where down was because of gravity. It had targeted Tammy by… by the input from his own eyes.

"Sorry," he said, keeping the worm back, using his other thumb to keep the mouth closed in case… yep, venom sacks. He willed them to uselessness and he didn't even know how he did that, it just happened! "Urges. You okay?"

Tammy stayed till for a little bit too long, then she shuddered and put down her hand which, Sanny realized, had become thorny again. "Y-yeah, I'm good. Wow, that happened fast."

"Sorry. I didn't have full control of it at the time. It shouldn't happen again… soon, anyway," he added conscientiously.

Tammy gave him a vinegary smile. "Yeah, I get it." She looked down at her feet, and Sanny realized roots had gone into the ground from her ankle. "You might want to find a different place to sit, there's a bamboo shot under your ass that's ready to go through you."

"I saw that show where they tested that, doesn't it take at least a few hours?" Sanny said, even as they carefully stood and moved a little to the side.

"I'm a growing girl and I grow fast," Tammy said as she wrenched up her leg, and frowned as she found the root was being reallyclingy. She grabbed the root, braced herself and ripped it off with a wince.

"Are you hurt?" Sanny asked, concerned.

"Nah, but it always feels like it should, you know?" Tammy said. "Like when you pull at a hangnail and a lot comes off with it and gets bloody and them mildly infected and painful and purple… "

"I… don't think I'm susceptible to that anymore," Sanny said, looking at his thin, feminine hands. "My nails obey me or die."

"Good for you," Tammy said, smirking. "Put those uppity nails in their place. Seriously though, I've already seen that trick. It was more awesome when you used your whole forearm and made a huge killer tail-stabby thing."

"I suppose," Sanny admitted, remembered he had done that. "Well then, for my next trick…"

He held up the now-docile worm in his hand. "This is currently a very rudimentary vertebrate. It would actually be more efficient if this were a true invertebrate, like a slug or a leech. It's also the size of my thumb."

"Because it used to be your thumb," Tammy said.

Sanny nodded. "Have you ever seen one of those videos where they show how an egg cell becomes a fetus?"

He didn't wait for a reply, instead– after glaring at the pace in the back of his head and getting sullenness and frustrated hunger– directing his will at the thumb-worm. It twitched, shuddered…

They both watched as two stubby little legs grew just behind its head and the place where the thumb joint had used to be and still had a pattern of lines on the skin. Another shudder, and the head began to distend, lengthening as a skull grew within, as a neck was delineated from head and torso, as more bones grew to give its body definition and the basic body plan of an animal of phylum chordata…

"It's growing," Tammy noted as what had once been a thumb-worm began to writhe, muscle groups becoming more complex…

"Yeah," Sanny said as the now fist-sized creature kept writhing, bones becoming thicker and longer, muscles splitting and lengthening… "But where is it all coming from? It's not eating anything, not drinking anything. It should have only the mass and elements of a thumb to work with."

"The air?" Tammy suggested.

"If you put it underwater, it'll still keep growing," Sanny said.

Tammy seemed to consider that. Then she turned to look at her cousin and pointed. The taller girl had been so silent Sanny had almost forgotten about her… if he hadn't been every bit as intently as he'd been watching Tammy. "Willy, can you put this in a ball of water and keep it out of the air."

Willy nodded, raising a hand. Sanny tensed, the muscles in his legs becoming fast-twitch and coiling in readiness to dodge, images of industrial water cutters in his mind's eye, but water only flowed smoothly out of Willy's hand like a cartoonish case of nervous sweating. The water fell to the ground, and against expectation didn't since into the dirt, but gathered as a basketball-sized droplet. It rolled– flowed?– along the ground towards the twitching creature, whose limbs were elongating. Sanny felt the water cover it, felt miniscule lungs start to burn from lack of air.

"Can you aerate the water?" he asked. "I think it's drowning."

Tammy blinked. "It's drowning?" she exclaimed, staring at the creature, which was now trying to use its limbs to try to swim out of the water. It remained in place however, stuck in the center of the large orb of water no matter how hard it tried to move. "Willy, let it go!"

That did it, and whatever force had been keeping not only released it, but also spat it out of the orb. Sanny was surprised– but not surprised…– to see the creature was completely dry as it took small, gasping breaths. In the few moments it had been drowning, it had progressed to a clearly bilaterally symmetrical, bipedal humanoid shape, a little doll-sized homunuculus with, Sanny was amused to note since he hadn't thought of it or intended it, the little thumbnail resting on the juncture between its legs like some sort of strange censor bar, despite the fact it was completely biologically sexless.

It wasn't a miniature human though, any more than most dolls were an anatomically correct depiction of human body proportions. It had elongated limbs vaguely reminiscent of his combat form, thin androgynous proportions, and a face that was completely dominated by a circular, lamprey-like maw. Its little skull had a single huge– for the skull– hole in the front to accomplish this, in spite of it being mounted on a vertebrae stalk like a human head. It still had no eyes, and instead of tiny ears it had organs Sanny recognized from insects to get its balance.

"Whoa," Tammy said, staring. "That thing grew up fast."

"While it was drowning too," Sanny said, perplexed. "So… they don’t need food to grow, bulk up or have energy… but apparently they need to breathe? That makes no sense!"

"First time in the water?" Tammy asked, reaching out to poke the little homunculus, pausing, then grabbing one of the flower stalks from the fake bouquet and using that instead.

Sanny absently made it step aside. "First time in water that didn't have any dissolved oxygen," he said. "We gave it gills, but there was nothing to breathe, which is weird."

"Says the virgin single mother," Tammy said, still trying to poke it with the flower stalk. Sanny made the homunculus run to the other side of the water droplet, which was just politely sitting there, not dissolving into water and getting the ground and all of them wet. "Congratulations, it's a… fairy? Does it eat teeth? Pretty sure I saw something like it in a movie that ate teeth."

"Doesn't need to eat, remember?" Sanny said. "Just breathe, apparently… weird."

"I'll admit, that was a bit cooler than the arm thing," Tammy said. "But is that all?"

"What, you don't think being in two places at once is useful?" Sanny said. Technically it was three, but the him that was in the office was bored silly and on the verge of falling asleep…

Tammy blinked, then stared at the homunculus, which took on a random pose. Then it twirled, and crab-like, inter-locking, overlapping shells of bright yellow with subtle touches of white appeared to grow over the homunculus' body, and the entire thing actually became an invertebrate instead of having an internal-external skeletal system, the skull getting pushed outside of the skin, the teeth interlocking and fusing solid to complete the skull as black compound eyes appeared, letting Sanny finally see from its point of view. It wavered slightly as Sanny had to adjust to the boot-like feet, and he had to cheat a little by flattening the entire foot pad that made contact with the ground to make the whole thing stable.

"I'm not limited to this size," Sanny said as the little homunculus proudly put its hands on its hips and slowly began to grow, becoming taller, thicker, longer. "It can be full-sized and I can still operate it from a distance."

"Full-sized?" Tammy breathed, eyes wide. "Wait, does this mean I can just make a clone and have it go to school for me?"

"It… might depend," Sanny said.

"On what?" Tammy asked eagerly.

"On how humanlike you can make your duplicates," Sanny said. "I mean, I can make my duplicates very human-like. no one would even be able to tell the difference. But… well, your power is plants, right? If you're power is anything like mine, you'll probably be able to control some kind of human-shaped plant, and I don't know how human-like you can make that plant. My power basically lets me turn into any animal, or parts of animals, or vaguely animal-y, and humans are just another animal." Was that too close to admitting this was a fake face?

Tammy stared at him. Then she pulled out her paper cup with its cute little seedling-stalks-and-roots figurine. She gave it a very intent stare. "You," she proclaimed, "are going to school as me on Monday. Let's make this happen!"

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"It didn't happen," Tammy sighed in disappointment, now cupless and with a little plant person sitting dejectedly on her shoulder. It was the rich green of new growth– that is, it looked like celery– with clean limbs that probably looked a lot smoother than they actually were and probably had all sorts of hidden sharp edge on super-narrow, nearly invisible sharp spines in addition to the decorative but very sharp thorns jutting parallel to its forearms and over its elbow, and the smaller thorns on its fingers. If he had to guess, Sanny would have said there was probably other strategic thorns that was letting the little plant person get traction on Tammy's shirt. "I still have to go to school!"

"At least you can go to school and be out in plant form at the same time?" Sanny suggested.

"But I wanted it to be the other way around!" Tammy cried. Her cousin awkwardly patted her on the shoulder. Willy had been able to make a duplicate out of water too, but it had been… well, definitely not human. For one thing, it had more in common with a simple stick figure, without any proper human proportions at all but the vague shape. For another, it had been completely transparent. Sanny wondered if that had merely been compliant apathy on Willy's part, doing the bare minimum.

Sanny had his little homunculus pat her on the knee, careful not to let any poisoned spurs grow. "There there, it's all right. We can still go after monsters like this. And even during office hours too. Or school hours in your case, I guess." At the third pat, he felt something pointy on the armored palm of his little body. He blinked.

"Sorry," Tammy said, sighing in self-disappointment. "Urges. It's just a thorn though, and I don't think it was any of the nasty stuff–"

"It's getting really itchy and starting to rash," Sanny said.

"Yeah, that's the urushiol oil," Tammy sighed. "Sorry."

"As long as you didn't mean it," Sanny said. "I think we might have to get used to this if we're going to hang out together."

Tammy brightened. "You still wanna hang out?"

"Sure," Sanny said, surprised she was surprised. "Um, don't you? I thought we were getting along okay…"

Tammy looked flustered. "No, no, I want to! It's just… I wasn't sure if we were really getting along or if you were just being nice… Argh, I shouldn't have said that, right? Sorry, sorry, I'm being awkward, I… I don't get a chance to talk to a lot of people older than me, you know? They're mostly teachers or relatives, so I don't know how to talk to… I mean, do I call you ate?"

"You've managed to not need to so far," Sanny said, bemused and amused.

"Oh shit, you're right!" Tammy said, looking aghast.

Sanny laughed. "Look, you don't have to worry about that, okay?" he tried to reassure her. "I think we're equally inexperienced at this, so it shouldn't matter that I'm older. Just call me Sanny, all right?"

"Okay a–, er, Sanny," Tammy said.

"There, see? I didn't start hating you for not calling me ate," Sanny said. "We'll be fine."

Tammy nodded. Then, diffidently, she said, "And Willy?"

Sany hadn't forgotten the other girl, but he felt like he should have. She was just… there. Quiet, intense, and only seemed to really pay attention to Tammy. "I'm sure we'll get along too…" he said, feeling a bit unsure about that.

Tammy glanced at her cousin, who seemed to come to attention when the shorter girl looked at her, like she was waiting to be told what to do. "Willy," Tammy said. "Sanny's our friend now, okay? You be nice and talk to her, and she'll talk to you." Tammy glanced deliberately at Sanny, and her next words sounded like they were for him as much as her cousin. "I'm sure she'll be patient and understanding with you," there was a note of awkward pleading underlying the encouragement in the words, "so you be patient too, okay? Remember to explain what you're doing or ask for an explanation if you don't understand. If we're in a fight and I'm not around or I'm busy, you can ask Sanny what to do, okay?"

"Like teacher?" Willy said.

"No, not like teacher, this is only if we're in a fight or heroing," Tammy said. She glanced at Sanny again, and seemed relieved when Sanny nodded. "And don't forget to help her too if she's in trouble, okay?"

"What kind of trouble?" Willy asked.

"Like if someone is eating her or beating her up," Tammy said.

Willy nodded gravely, and for the first time since their handshake, looked directly at Sanny. The predictable hunger rose from the back of his mind, blunted at the last moment like it had remembered an unpleasant dining experience, and he hand to wonder what Willy was feeling. "You want to drink me too?" Willy said.

"Not… particularly," Sanny said. He didn't glance at Tammy, and only because he had a second body to do it with, even if one hand was still itchy from… what had she called it? Urushiol oil? "I'm thirsty, but I can wait until I get to a vending machine."

Willy nodded. "A little drink is okay. But only a little."

"Okay…?" Sanny said. "I don't really understand."

"You can't drink me," Willy said. "But if you're thirsty, you can have a little bit. Like Tammy does."

Tammy looked away with a wince, her face ashamed.

Ah. Drinking. Of course. She had water powers, after all, and you didn't eat water unless you were a senator at an impeachment hearing. "Thank you for saying that Willy, but I don't want to drink you. If I am, stop me, all right?"

Willy titled her hear, and looked at Tammy first, who nodded. "Okay," Willy said.

"And… do you want to… drink me, Willy?" Sanny ventured. Was that the right term? Ugh, it sounded dirty…

Willy shook her head, a single, sharp, abrupt movement. "No. You're too loud. It hurts. So it hides. It always hides."

Sanny felt his eyebrows rise. No wonder these two worked. The only one with… urges… like that was Tammy. Only one point of failure.

Or two, now… personally, he wasn't exactly sure how he'd even be a threat to Willy. She could just flow away. Actually, wasn't Willy pretty overpowered? She was water. No one beats water. Ask anyone making a 'mountains or the sea' comparative allegory.

Tammy, at least, sighed in relief, so at least he hadn't screwed up anything. "Well, we'd better go home," she said. "N-not that we don't like hanging out, but we live pretty far away, and we're going to get stuck in traffic as it is! My parents told us not to get home late."

"That doesn't mean we have to stop hanging out," Sanny said, pointing at the little plant person on Tammy's shoulder. "Can't I just bring that one with me when I go hunting tonight, and you can control it from your house?" He frowned as he thought of something. "Or do you need to be close to it or something to control it? I mean, I can control mine from a long way away, but that's me. You might be different…"

Tammy tilted her hear. "Actually, I don't know how far away I can control it from…" She looked at the little plant person. "Why don't we find out…"

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"Thanks for being so patient," Tammy said through her little… offshoot? Her little offshoot. Its chest was bulging and shrinking as she made it into some kind of air sac to force air through whatever ever little vocal chords the little thing had so it could talk audibly. "With Willy."

"No problem," Sanny said through his little drone, reconfigured to be a large bird, carrying the offshoot in its talon. A little on the legs– talons?– carrying the offshoot let him hear what Tammy was saying over the rushing wind as the drone flew to Makati, while the drone wearing the new shirt and jeans walked back home and the third watched the clock until it was time to leave the office. "Is there… anything I need to remember? About her? Anything I can do to make her more involved? I feel like it was just the two of us talking most of the time."

"That's because it was just the two of us talking," Tammy said. "Willy's… quiet around people who aren’t family. That's just how she is. You want to talk to her, you ask her a direct question and you make it clear you're directing it at her instead of someone else, or she'll think you're just talking. But don't worry, it's my job to get her to be more involved. Don't worry about it."

Sanny pondered that, watching the winds and updrafts as he headed for Makati. He could flap all the way there, but the turbulence made it a little hard to hear. "How do I become friends with her?"

There was silence.

"Sorry, accidentally reacted in my other body. This is really weird, but I think I'm getting used to it," the offshoot finally said. "Becoming friends with her… That's gonna be hard. A bunch of kids we… used to know… they said they wanted to be friends with Willy, but they… well, they were kids. Kids aren't patient."

"That… sounds about right," Sanny said, sighing in one of his other bodies.

"I'm friends with them now," Tammy said wistfully. "At least, we say hi and talk when we see each other on the street. But Willy never forgets, and… well."

"It sounds…" Sanny didn't say 'tough' or 'hard, "like a lot to remember."

"Still wanna try being friends?" Tammy said. "It's okay if you don't, as long as you're at least decent to her."

"Yeah," Sanny said. "If we're going to be hanging out, might as well be as friends, right? There's nothing to lose, and I might get a friend."

Silence.

"Sorry, forgot to talk through here again," Tammy said. "That's… really nice. Okay, we'll see about you being friends with Tammy. Can't promise anything, but… it'll be nice for her to have another friend."

There was a weird sound.

"Wow, throat clearing does NOT work in this thing," Tammy said, voice sounding a little ragged. "I think I tore something. So, where are we going?"

"Makati," Sanny said. "I've already checked out the spider, but I thought I'd give it a second look, and you can check it out and give me your opinion…"

One part of Sanny flew to Makati as two parts made their way home.