14. Discontinuity of Consciousness Club (Patreon)

A/N: Hey everyone! I'm back. As I mentioned in the last Bioshifter chapter, I got hit by an entire bus of depression last week and couldn't even leave the house for a while because of it. You know how it goes. But I'm back now, and so are chapters. Apologies for the delay!

"It's totally up to you," I say, craning my neck up to look my conversation partner in the eyes. "I a hundred percent get it if you don't want me walking around with a template of your body in my head. But it could be helpful to me, so I figured I'd ask anyway."

It's been three days since I was first teleported to the zoo. After I regained my consciousness and my clothing, the soldiers escorted me back to the room I teleported into initially and contacted Cross Country to pick me back up again, which he did about half an hour later. For the next two days, I finished off nabbing templates on everything else in the zoo and aquarium, giving me a frankly overwhelming amount of biological information to try and sift through. I feel like I could spend my entire life trying to pick apart every potentially useful evolution in my collection and never scratch the surface of everything I'm capable of right now.

Yet here I am, hungry to get even more.

Now that I'm done with the zoo, I'm back to training my powers alongside nearly everyone else outside in the forest clearing. It's hard not to notice the seven-foot-tall guy in our group, but I've actually found the time to chat with him a little and he's pretty cool. His name is Cameron, his hobby is welding random bits of junk metal together to make abstract art, and his power is the ability to emerge from any point within his own shadow, causing his old body to disintegrate into dust and his new body to be about as tall as his shadow was long, but without the weirdly stretched proportions.

It's freaky as hell to look at, honestly. His shadow just suddenly has a depth to it like you're looking into a black hole, and then one of his hands pops out of it, grabs the ground, and hauls the rest of himself out while his old body just fades away in the wind. It even resizes his clothes and whatever else he's carrying, which seems to break conservation of matter pretty hard but I seem to do that too so who am I to judge?

"I don't think your power would work with mine," he says, scratching thoughtfully at the stubble on his chin. "Resized stuff I make returns to normal when it leaves the range of my domain."

Oh, interesting. I hadn't known that. That probably does mean I won't get any cool giant forms from him, but that's fine.

"Well, I guess the advantage of my power is that we can make sure," I tell him. "Just let me scan you before and after you translocate, and we can know pretty much exactly how it affects your biology."

He purses his lips, thinking about it.

"I'm also a perfectly accurate cancer screening," I tell him, shamelessly sweetening the pot.

"Alright, yeah that sells me," he sighs. "Just promise you aren't gonna turn into me in the shower or something."

I blink, taken aback by the implication. What does he think I'm going to do? I've never even… no. No, he doesn't know that about me, it's a reasonable concern, if an immensely gross one. I still snap back at him a little, since it would be expected for Lia to do so and also I want to.

"Making a lot of assumptions about how interested I am in seeing your dick, huh?" I scowl. "No man, I'm not gonna do that. Get over yourself."

"Just makin' sure," he sighs, spreading his domain out to weaken it enough for me to infiltrate. "Hit me with it."

"Yeah, yeah," I grumble, doing just that. His body is mildly interesting at best; best I can tell, he's naturally seven feet tall and feels like he's been suffering from some of the negative effects of that for most of his life. "...Were you this tall before your powers?"

"Yep," he confirms with a nod. "That's why I'm this height most of the time. I have to maintain my power to stay at any other size."

Ah yes, the way powers are supposed to work. Whatever.

"Well, do your weird teleport whenever," I say, glancing at his shadow. It's late in the afternoon, and we're outside at the tail-end of our power training class. The angle of the sun creates a pretty long shadow for Cameron, but there are so many trees around that most of it overlaps with other shadows into an incomprehensible mess of slightly-less-bright. I'm not really sure how that interacts with his power, but Cameron doesn't seem to have any trouble. The ground his shadow is cast on starts to suddenly look that much less real, and the moment I see a hand emerging from it, the sensation of Cameron's body I get from my power suddenly goes haywire for a split second before it stops.

The original body—and clothes, and everything else—still looks like Cameron, but my senses insist that they are dead, nothing but inert and useless matter as uninteresting as concrete. And yet the body remains standing, still supplying the shadow that Cameron now crawls out of, nearly twice the size he was before.

Even Cameron's own domain doesn't recognize the slowly fading mass of person-shaped dust to be him anymore; in an instant, it moved to center around his new position. The domain feels like a reflection in a dark room, an implication that something far more real exists, but isn't the thing I'm currently looking at. I quickly walk closer to Cameron's new position, covering him in my domain again and impossibly detecting that he is biologically identical to how he was before: the same height, strength, and everything else, despite the fact that he's clearly taller than a one-story house and likely capable of using a car as a shot put.

"Well?" he asks, his voice the exact same pitch despite the completely different acoustics of his throat. The only difference is volume. "Do I have cancer?"

"Uh… nope," I assure him with a frown. "You don't. And your power definitely isn't biological."

"Yeah, thought not," he says, and I feel him turn his power off. I blink, and he's back to his usual height when my eyes open. "Everything feels… god, I don't know how to put it. Too normal? Like, when something's really big, it should have a tougher time moving, right? Because of all the extra weight. But I feel exactly the same as I always do. From my perspective, it just looks like everything else gets smaller and lighter, and I'm operating on the same scale as before."

Huh. So then how… is it some kind of spatial warping? No, wait, if it was literally just a change in perspective he wouldn't actually be any stronger, would he? He'd pick up what appears to be a tiny car but still be affected by the car's usual weight. So then how the hell does it work?

"...Superpowers are fucking crazy," I conclude, because how else do you respond to something like that?

"Lia, your hair's an octopus," he answers. "You don't get to say that about my powers."

I wiggle my tentacles in surprise. Dang it, I'm still doing this, apparently.

"Whoops," I say, unforming them and putting Lia's hair back into place. "Sorry."

"I wasn't complaining. You do you," he shrugs. "Any non-cancer health alerts you wanna share with me, while we're at it?"

Hmm? Oh. Let's see…

"...Well, your spine's a little fucked up," I tell him.

He snorts.

"I could have told you that."

Fair enough, I guess. I shrug and he walks off. The experiment wasn't that helpful, but it was certainly informative. Powers all seem to have weirdly unique ways of interacting with the world; I guess it's no wonder that we haven't figured out how they work yet. It's such an interesting problem, though.

I look down at my own hands, watching the barely noticeable shifts in the shape and thickness of my fingers as I tweak the muscle distribution. I've been getting better at maintaining my Lia form now, though I'm obviously far from perfect. The trick is to always give the part of my brain managing my power something to focus on: a task that's genuinely useful enough to be worthwhile, complex enough to hold my attention until I think of a new task, and subtle enough that it doesn't influence the outside of my body much.

…But we're in our power training class right now, so it's not a bad time to get weird. I remember back when I was just a mass of tentacles in a tank that I was sort of tree-like in how my tentacles would branch off of other tentacles. For tentacles specifically, that's not very difficult to do, since they have no bones. It's certainly not trivial to create a structure to anchor a tentacle more or less arbitrarily on my body, but it's relatively easy. Other limbs, though? Hoo boy, that's a difficult problem. If I want another arm, I can't just pop it out of the side of my torso, I need to completely redesign the skeletal and muscular structure of my torso. And I don't know how to do that.

There are no vertebrates with more than four paired limbs. Period. Even the occasional fish that looks like it has more than four fins is stuck with the same basic skeletal structure everything with a spine evolved from a gajillion years ago, which is actually really interesting in a vacuum. At the most basic, technically-incorrect-but-correct-enough level, every skeleton ever is just a stretched, squashed, or otherwise-slightly-modified version of some other skeleton, a single template used to create everything from birds to whales to people to axolotls. And while that's really interesting, it's also extremely limiting from the perspective of my power.

I have no usable frame of reference for growing myself more bony limbs. I might be able to make myself a centaur or something by just stapling the upper part of a human spine to the lower part of a horse spine, but any nonstandard change with actual elegance is beyond me. And I don't like that.

I should be better than that. I should be more. So I'm having to quickly try to figure out why and how my biology works through trial and error, shaping new ideas into being and then unshaping them before they somehow fuck up my anatomy in unspeakable ways. Externally, I imagine I look like some sort of movie zombie twitching in the throes of madness as the inside of my body randomly bulges up in weird ways, but whatever. I've long since burned away any desire I might have had to be considered pretty.

"Uh, hey Lia!" someone says. "Are you busy right now?"

I glance over to the voice and my heart automatically flutters, an irritating excess of surprise and self-consciousness flooding me unnecessarily. It's Maria, in all her tall, freckled glory, and just the sight of her makes me return Lia's body to normal out of embarrassment. God, why are her freckles so cute!? I didn't give a shit about freckles a month ago. This is such bullshit.

"Just practicing power stuff," I tell her casually, repeatedly shapeshifting my cheek capillaries back down to normal sizes whenever they try to make my face red. Which counts. "What do you need?"

"Uh, well… I was wondering if you had any advice," she admits. "Your power kinda… messes with your head a little, right?"

"What, do I have tentacles again?" I ask, pawing at my scalp. Nope, definitely still hair.

"...No, I mean like mentally," she giggles. "Anastasia said you were talking at lunch the other day about how shapeshifting makes you like or dislike certain foods."

"Oh, that," I frown. I don't really like talking about what my powers do to my brain, but I kept unconsciously shifting my body in response to whatever food I was eating so it just kind of came up. "What about it?"

When I heard Maria's power described as 'creating fairies' by Anastasia, I just kind of assumed that was her childish interpretation of what was going on. I was entirely incorrect in that assumption: there simply is no better way to describe her power than 'it creates fairies.' I've only watched her use it a couple times, but that's just straight up exactly what it does. If the fairies are affecting her mind somehow, that's kind of concerning.

"Well, do you ever have anything more than that?" Maria asks. "I just… I feel like the only one whose power makes me question if I'm even still me."

I open my mouth, and then I close it. She's… having the same problem I am?

This a trap, right?

I let one little thing slip to my therapist and suddenly I ever-so-conveniently have an attractive girl trying to empathize with me about it? Ridiculous. The Army could have planted her here to… no. No, calm down, Julietta. That's stupid, right? Like yeah, it's not impossible, but what's more likely: the army instilled a fake trainee long before they ever knew who I was or if I'd even try to talk to her to manipulate people into having conversations about their feelings in case they didn't open up to a therapist, or that there's just somebody in the same situation as me that happens to have a similar issue because of that.

Besides, it's not like I have to open up about my problems all that much to help her out. So there's no reason not to do that. And hanging out with her more will help me determine how legitimate she is anyway! It's a win-win.

"...It's way more than that, yeah," I confirm with a nod.

"Does it like… change your personality and stuff?" she asks, a little too specifically.

"Uh… well, that's the thing, I guess," I hedge. "How can you know? I have to assume I'm still me, at least mostly, but it's hard to self-assess if anything is different unless I suddenly stumble across something that freaks me out."

Such as, for example, the fact that I am attracted to you. …But of course, I don't say that.

"Yes!" Maria agrees. "Yes, exactly. It feels like it's fucking with me, but not in the moment, so like… god, my power freaks me the fuck out, Lia."

Hmm. She's scared of her own power? I mean, that tracks. The only times I've seen her use it are when she was required to in our power training course. She's obviously been avoiding experimenting with it since long before the therapist managed to crack some information out of me, so that's some decent evidence that she isn't a plant—why set up a fake trainee to pretend to hate her power before ever knowing if there would be a real trainee who could empathize with that in the first place? It's a bit far-fetched.

…Maybe I should be a little less paranoid about the therapist guy in general, actually. But… meh. I can think about that later.

"Well, I don't know if I can help, exactly, but at minimum I can certainly commiserate," I say, giving her a friendly smile. …Wait, is my face suddenly in the attractiveness-optimized layout I made while staring in the mirror the other day? Gosh dangit, of course it is. Ugh, it doesn't even feel notable when my flesh starts rearranging itself anymore.

I don't even care if she thinks I'm attractive. I don't.

"Y'know what, I'll take it," Maria sighs miserably. "Commander has been sending me pointed looks and passive-aggressive remarks about how I have to use my power to train it for days now."

"Well yeah," I shrug. "The Army doesn't care if we lose who we are as long as they gain a soldier out of it. They're gonna switch to not-so-passive-aggressive if you don't fall in line."

"I know, I know," she grumbles. "But I just… look, can you help me out? It'd make me feel a lot better if someone I know was watching me while I do this."

I nod.

"That, I can definitely do. If you want to pr—"

I cut myself off, my brain suddenly sending a bunch of screaming warning notices as I try to invite my crush (ugh) to do an activity with me.

"...practice with me, I'd be happy to keep an eye on you," I finish anyway, because I'm not a fucking coward. Stupid brain, just shut up and say what I tell you to say! No part of your pointless little attraction matters. At minimum, I have to pretend to date Emily until her birthday, and by then Maria and I will likely be on completely different assignments.

And even if my ridiculous circumstances of incest-based financial fraud and being drafted to fight aliens didn't make romance a terrible idea in context, I don't know if I'd ever want to date anybody outside that context either. Like, even if we ignore how much I hate feeling controlled by this stupid, hormonal attraction, I'm not sure I'd be interested in having a relationship like that with somebody. I know aromanticism is a thing, so maybe I'm that… but also maybe not. I've just never really bothered to think about it before, since I've lived my life as a hideous female eunuch up until this point. Unfortunately, I've got like fifty Big Thinks lined up and not a lot of time to process any of them, so that particular self-revelation is just going to have to shut the fuck up and wait in line.

"Alright," Maria says. "Um, thanks. This might get a little weird, so sorry in advance. Just… you can tell me to stop whenever, okay? And I promise to listen to you."

Uh. Why'd you say it like that, Maria? Unfortunately, I don't have time to ask before her domain starts twisting oddly, catching my attention on something that feels more important than a concerning bit of implication. Maria's domain normally feels like carbonated water, an uncountable number of frothing bubbles popping aggressively against my senses. Yet now a part of the water feels like it's flowing down a drain, making a beautiful whirlpool funnel that bends further and further and further until it collapses entirely in on itself, twisting inside-out and forming a sphere.

The sphere is a small, but entirely separate domain from Maria's. It feels the same, though, like a mini-version of her power budded off via mitosis. And within the tiny new cell of eldritch might, there is a fairy.

She's about the size of my hand from wrist to fingertip, and she has the form of a woman, with diamond-shaped dragonfly wings keeping her aloft in the air. Her face is… similar to Maria's, but sharper, thinner, and more angular. Long, pointed ears extend from either side of her head. So yeah, like I said: a fairy. She's about as generic a tinkerbell as you can get. She even glows a pale blue color, enough to light up a dark room. If I were to pick a particularly unique feature that catches my attention about her form, however, it would definitely be the fact that she is stark fucking naked.

"Hey!" the fairy snaps, covering her chest with her arms. "Eyes on my face, bitch!"

Uh. Hmm. I guess she talks. I can see how Maria would be freaking out over that. Still, I need to defend my honor here.

"You are literally so small that I can't actually focus on one part of your body over another," I point out.

"Then just stop staring at me!" she insists.

Oh. Uh. I guess that's a reasonable request, actually. I look away.

"...If it makes you feel any better, I already know what almost everyone in the building looks like naked," I mumble.

"It does not!" the fairy shrieks.

"W-wait, you know what I look like naked?" Maria stammers.

Ugh, no! That's not what I… gah. That one is my own fault.

"I do not know what you look like naked. You haven't thinned your domain enough for me to pick you up by accident," I answer. The fairy's domain is weak enough for me to passively scan through, but she doesn't seem to count as biological as far as my power is concerned. …I guess the fairy might be accurately scaled down from what Maria looks like naked, in which case I would know what she looks like naked now, but I'm just gonna not think about that so that my brain doesn't explode. "So, uh, who is this?"

"I'm Maria!" the fairy insists. "Who else would I be?"

"In that case, who's in your body?"

"Fuck if I know! That's what freaks me out!"

"Um, no," Maria's body frowns. "I'm Maria. The power makes a scary, imperfect copy of me."

Ah. I see what the problem is now.

"I'm not a 'copy,'" the fairy insists, making air quotes as it buzzes up to big-Maria's face… whose eyes are now glowing slightly. Interesting. "Our memories recombine when the power ends, and I can remember being you. You're way too different. You're not Maria. I am."

"...I literally just created you from nothing," human-Maria points out. "And you know full well that when you don't exist, I don't act anything like you."

"Okay, alright, let's… not argue about this," I say, awkwardly leaning in to try and interpose myself between them. "First rule of discontinuity of consciousness club: don't freak out over being in discontinuity of consciousness club."

"I'm not freaking out," fairy-Maria scowls.

"Why wouldn't we be freaking out?" human-Maria freaks out.

"I'm not saying it's unjustified," I tell her, in as calm a voice I can manage, "but it's definitely unproductive. We don't get to stop having powers, you know? This is our life now. We have to come to terms with that."

'Coming to terms with things,' after all, is a damn important skill. Life is shit and it never stops throwing curveballs at you. Sometimes, progress is just about letting them hit you in the face enough that you can walk to base.

"I'm supposed to 'come to terms' with creepy copies that think they're actually me?" fairy-Maria snaps, buzzing furiously around my head.

"Yeah, maybe," I shrug. "We don't know for sure if that's what your power is doing, but it's probably safe to assume it's something fucked up."

"Why is that 'safe to assume!?'" human-Maria panics.

"Because if we assume the worst we end up either having our expectations met or being pleasantly surprised," I shrug. "It's a win-win."

"No, that's just pessimism," the fairy scowls.

Why wouldn't I be a pessimist? The world is ending and we're the sacrifices everyone else uses to keep it alive a little longer. But okay, I guess I can see how that might not be a helpful line of thinking for everyone. I'll change tactics.

"Why don't the two of you… do whatever it is you promised me you would do if I asked you to?" I try.

They glance at each other.

"...I don't want to," the fairy says.

"Well, I promised," the body says, glancing away.

"I promised!" the fairy insists. "And I'll do it. But I don't want to, Lia. Being a fairy is weird but turning back… it always freaks me out."

"Okay," I say neutrally. "Would you say that asking you to do this is unreasonable?"

"...No," the fairy grumbles. "Fine. Fine! Absorb me or whatever, freaky fake-Maria."

She flies over and sits down on human-Maria's hand, and I feel her miniature domain start to dissolve back into human-Maria's larger one, the fairy body disintegrating as well. Human-Maria freezes, the glow in her eyes dimming slowly into nothing while she stands stock-still, gaping vacantly at whatever's happening inside the confines of her mind before she blinks, half-focusing on me half-focusing on… something else.

"Hey," I nod at her. "You with me, Maria?"

"I… yeah," she shudders. "Yep, I'm here. Sorry about that."

"You have nothing to apologize for," I assure her. "But it might help if you explain to me a bit of what just happened. Which one of those was you?"

"I don't know," she answers.

Yeah, I was afraid of that.

"Why don't you know?" I ask.

"When I… split like that, I still feel like I'm me," she says. "I feel a little different. My fairy self is more… I don't know. Angry? Assertive? And my human body becomes less so. And each one has their own thoughts, their own feelings, and their own opinions, but they have all the same memories I do from before the split. And then when they merge back together, I end up with both sets of their memories. And they both think they're me."

"And you're worried that neither of them are you," I say. It's not a question.

"Yeah," she confirms. "And… I mean, they are too, you know? But I can't just say that in the moment. I can't bring myself to go 'yeah, I might be fake. I might not be real. I might stop existing the moment this ends.' That's… can you even imagine?"

"Yes," I answer simply.

She blinks.

"...Really?"

"Maria, I've completely remade my entire brain on multiple occasions," I say. "At first it was an accident, but now it's just… it keeps happening. It's… really disturbing. But right now, I'm still me. And right now, you're still you. Those things are true no matter what, okay? Even if we don't exist for a little while, we come back."

Julietta will come back.

"That… that doesn't make me feel better at all, Lia," Maria says miserably. "Doesn't that mean I die every time I use my power?"

"Hey. First rule of discontinuity of consciousness club," I remind her.

"Okay, but I really want to freak out," she insists.

"Well don't."

"How!?"

"Just don't."

She groans.

"That isn't helpful at all, Lia!"

"Well yeah, and if you were actually having a full-on freakout right now I'd want to smack anybody who tries to say that to you," I smirk. "But you aren't, and I offered commiseration, so here it is: there is no magical secret to coming to terms with something horrible. It just happens, over time, as the reality that it's your new normal slowly sets in. As long as you let it, as long as you focus on pushing forward with what you can do rather than lamenting what you can't change, you will be okay."

"That sounds miserable," Maria complains.

"It is," I agree. "But you will be okay. Trust me."

I try to make my expression as reassuring and confident as possible, but she just glances away, refusing to meet my eyes.

"How can you really say you're you if everything that makes you you didn't exist for a while?" she asks. "Does it not bother you that the real Lia and Maria might be dead, and we're just copies that think we're the original?"

Well. Ignoring the fact that Lia is dead…

"What makes any given Lia or Maria 'real?'" I ask. "You could argue it's an unbroken line of consciousness leading all the way back to our birth, but that's not the argument you have to make. It's just the explanation that feels easy and natural, not a rule of reality. Because reality doesn't define who you are. You do. And I choose to say that someone with all of my memories, goals, and experiences who believes themselves to be me is me. I claim that the Marias that exist when you use your power are both real, and so is the current you. You can fork and merge without ceasing to be Maria in any way that matters. Accept yourself, cooperate with yourself, and learn to excel as any particular quantity of yourself that happens to exist."

Because, after all, you have no choice. I glance over at Commander, and see that she's watching the two of us very carefully. I give her a barely perceptible nod, and she returns a barely perceptible smile. What a creepy bitch, but hey! She's the creepy bitch that decides my fate, so what's a girl to do?

I don't like her, but I don't like a lot of people. That doesn't stop me from working with them, or trying to make sure they like working with me. If it did, I'm not sure how I would have survived my foster homes. And regardless of whether or not it furthers the Army's objectives for me to convince Maria to be more comfortable with her power, I think her quality of life will improve if she's not freaking out about it all the time. It's a good thing to do for her no matter what.

…And I kind of like Maria, at least a little. Beyond the whole hormones thing, I mean. I'm still mad at her for leaving Anastasia alone back when we first formally met, but I can see how, in a crisis situation she has no experience with, Anastasia yelling at her to go fetch me would take priority in her mind. It's disappointing that she didn't have the presence of mind to take charge of the situation, but she wasn't the cause of any of the problems and she was part of the solution to them, so I can't hold a grudge over it.

Frankly, Anastasia having the maturity to be the one taking charge at all is the concerning part. I glance over to where she's practicing her power, blood flowing out of wounds on her arms and shaping themselves into elaborate, puppet-show-like works of art before suddenly twisting into a dozen curved blades and stabbing themselves into the earth. It's actually quite a versatile and dangerous power, with a relatively modest Optimal Degree of Penetration that makes it well-suited for anti-power work. All of which means a comfortable defensive position likely isn't in her future.

I should take another day to play with her. God knows she deserves as much levity as I can physically give her.

…No, she deserves more than that. But at this rate, there's a solid chance she'll be fighting Angels or villains. She's been improving by leaps and bounds with her power, to a frankly concerning degree. She hasn't talked with me about it, but I think she might want to kill Angels, and that's a request I think the Army will be happy to say yes to. They're uncommon, but she'd hardly be the only child superhero.

I feel like my power doesn't really lend itself to heroism well. Infiltration, sure, but there isn't a huge amount of need for something like that. Most supervillains work alone, and all supervillains have domains more or less by definition, so they'd be able to detect mine and blow my cover. And infiltrating the aliens is… no. Even if it's possible, it would be stupid. So in a wartime setting, the main things I bring to the table are being hard to kill and being able to supply a domain, making me a mostly defensive asset unlikely to see much action on the front lines. Which is great! I'm not interested in fighting that at all. I don't want to be on the front lines.

…But Anastasia's going to be there. Her main ability is creating dangerous weapons anywhere in her domain that can attack from any angle and are technically made of mundane matter, so the domain of her target doesn't prevent her from stabbing them unless it's large enough and dense enough to overwhelm hers completely. And of course, Anastasia's Range/Density score is improving by leaps and bounds as well, so that's unlikely to be an issue. I mean, they don't exactly share our scores with each other, but I can't passively read her biology anymore, so I know it's getting a lot stronger. With a high RD, a low ODoP, and a dangerous offensive ability that gets stronger the more she gets injured, all she needs is mobility to be a potential wing ripper. And I think she'll figure that out.

But the thing is… I have a high RD, a low ODoP, and mundane-matter-based offensive abilities. I don't have anywhere close to the speed, precision, and omnidirectionality of Anastasia's blood, but I'm not really trying to improve my offensive potential because I don't want to be a superhero in the first place, let alone fight Angels.

But that's… not the right thing to do, is it? How can I let myself live a relatively quiet life on the backlines while a nine-year-old with no family gets herself killed fighting Angels? Shouldn't I get my head out of my ass and keep working to help her as much as I can, even after boot camp?

"Lia?" Maria asks, pulling my attention back to her. "You with me?"

"Oh, sorry," I say, flashing an apologetic smile. "I got caught up in my own head there a little."

"What about?"

"Oh, I just… I'm worried I'm not doing enough, I guess," I admit. "Like, I talk a big game about hard work and critical thinking, but at the end of the day I'm kind of a lazy idiot, huh?"

"What?" Maria asks, giving me an odd look. "Don't think like that, Lia. You're pretty cool, you know? There's a reason so many people go to you for help."

I shrug noncommittally.

"You wanna try out your power again?" I ask. "I should practice my own more too, but if you want me around to tell you to recombine if I think you're going too far, I'll be here."

"...I mean, no, but I should," Maria sighs. "So alright. Thanks, Lia. Here goes nothing."

She summons her naked fairy self again, who quickly starts swearing at her human body about something or another. I guess it's fortunate that the more forceful and assertive side of her is the one getting thrust into sudden nudism, or else I imagine she'd be even more miserable than she already is. My power is irritatingly limited by clothing as well, but I can at least remove all the parts of my body I'd be embarrassed about showing people. I'm also working on making better and more realistic clothes out of my skin so that I can be 'in uniform' but not need to rip up my shirt in order to turn into a giant monster when necessary.

…Honestly, I should just rip the band-aid off. Getting practice in larger, more dangerous bodies is going to be important if I'm going to help Anastasia. I motion the Marias to follow me and head towards Commander, stopping in front of her and giving her a respectful nod.

"Lieutenant Locke, ma'am," I greet her. It feels like I should be saluting her since all the soldiers do, but I guess we're not expected to do that until boot camp? I dunno how it works; the Army is basically a cult.

"How can I help you, trainee?" she asks.

"I'd like to request permission to violate uniform protocol for training purposes," I say.

"Oh? What aspects of protocol?"

"Um… all of them? I suppose?" I answer. "I'd like to practice shapeshifting into forms that cannot reasonably wear the uniform at all."

"Hmm. Granted," Commander says imperiously, though the small smile on her lips indicates there are more than a few thoughts hidden behind it. She motions to a few of the powered soldiers keeping an eye on me, though I mostly ignore them. I have official permission to strip, and the important thing now is having the courage to use it.

…Obviously, though, I start by flattening my chest, smoothing out the area between my legs like a doll, shaping my body to be as generally androgynous and uninteresting as possible, and then growing a layer of fur over all of it, just for good measure. I'm not here to give a strip tease; I just need to turn into a giant scary monster without breaking my stuff.

"Would it be hypocritical of me to say that this is weird?" fairy-Maria asks as I pull my bra off over my head. Both she and the human Maria are averting their eyes from me and blushing, which… is a bit uncomfortable for me, but an entirely understandable reaction to somebody taking their clothes off.

"Only a little," I shrug. "You didn't ask for your powers to turn you into an exhibition show, but I didn't either. Though really, you can look. I made sure there was nothing to see."

"...I don't know if that's how that works," human-Maria squeaks.

"There's an inherent eroticism to removing your clothes regardless of what's underneath," fairy-Maria agrees hastily.

Ugh, okay, fucking… fine, then. I roll my eyes and turn into a baby tiger, letting my clothes just remove themselves on their own. A wave of disorientation hits me as I drop to a fraction of my former height in moments, even lower to the ground than I ever was in Anastasia's body. I awkwardly kick my legs until my pants fall all the way off, then scowl up at the Marias.

"Howth thith then?" I demand, my words high-pitched, lispy, and weirdly articulated. I guess it takes a lot more than a human voicebox to get sounds to work right. Maybe I should just swap to a parrot-like syrinx full-time?

"Oh holy shit you are adorable," fairy-Maria squeaks back at me. "Yes, this is way better! Why didn't you do this first?"

"Becauthe now my clotheth are in a heap on the ground inthtead of a nithely folded pile," I grumble. "And altho everyone ith going to want to pet me."

"I mean, can I—"

"No," I snap. "Now thtand back, I'm gonna get big."

I expand my body into a full-sized tiger as Maria quickly steps away, hopping around a little to get a feel for it. It's an incredible body, though likely not all that useful for fighting aliens in. I get more space and try to turn into an elephant next, but I get halfway through before feeling a sudden emptiness, a gnawing hunger in the back of my head that insists I can't go further. I abandon the shift, dropping to the ground as some thick-skinned tiger with a trunk, startled and more than a little afraid of whatever that sensation just was. It felt kind of like the moment before I passed out after killing that Wasp in the incursion zone.

Huh. Was that too big? Is that a hard limit, or… no. Wait. After I passed out, Emily said I needed to eat more. Do my shapeshifts use the matter I've previously eaten to work? Am I not violating conservation of energy? …No, I still am, right? I don't weigh as much as a tiger unless I am a tiger, so the mass has to come from somewhere and return to that place when I become something else. Or… does it return?

I quickly shift between a full-size tiger and a baby tiger a few times, adding in random improvements each time just because it's hard not to. At no point do I feel like I've started to 'starve' for mass, even after performing the shift enough times to equate to the weight of an elephant if you add up the difference in mass for each shift. So I'm definitely recycling my mass when I make myself smaller or remove features, and then using that mass when I make myself bigger or create features.

…Which means the upper limit of what I can shapeshift into is directly related to the amount of food I've eaten.

"I have to binge eat to train my power," I realize. I'm going to have to fill out all those damn ration requests again!

Even more notable is the fact that when I passed out after fighting the Wasp, I hadn't been trying to shapeshift into anything bigger than my current form. In fact, I'd just recently shapeshifted into something smaller than the Behemoth form I'd taken earlier that day. So why did I pass out? It would have had to be the acid, right? Healing off the damage I was taking from the Wasp acid was burning my reserves. So my regeneration actually has a very hard limit, and when that limit is hit it'll stop entirely, and I'll fall unconscious.

That's… not great, but it's good to know. So the question becomes: what's the upper end of that limit? How much of a reserve can I hold at any one time? Because that pretty directly ties to how difficult I am to kill, right?

Also, how did I become a Behemoth in the first place? The Behemoth template I have isn't as heavy as an elephant, but it's still really heavy, and I turned into one before ever eating anything post-power acquisition. Does alien matter have a separate pool of material I use for shapeshifting or something? Did I just get some 'for free' when I first manifested my power? Does that make any sense?

I slowly start turning myself into a Behemoth to check if I hit the same weight limit as before. Is it possible that alien matter is fundamentally different in some way? My power lets me understand the structures that the matter makes to some extent, but the underlying chemicals and substances are a complete mystery to me. And the aliens are from another dimension, so I guess it's possible they use a completely different kind of matter, but what the fuck would that even mean? We'd more or less have to invent a completely new branch of science to understand it, and that just… that would be absurd, right? How could a 'different kind of matter' even exist in the universe? …Other than dark matter, I guess. But even though I don't really know what that is, I doubt it's extradimensional alien butts.

I let the crystalline blades of my legs extend me to my full height as I try thinking about this, my hydraulic muscles pumping with satisfaction. Oh, that's right! Hydraulics! If the aliens come from somewhere with a completely different kind of matter and physics, what are the odds that something as weird as hydraulics would still work?

A scream erupts next to me, breaking me out of my thoughts just in time to feel a smashing force and a sharp lance of pain in my side. I stumble, nearly falling over as I desperately try to interpret what just happened with my confusing alien sensorium. Am I being attacked? Who would—

"Die, die, die, die, die!" Anastasia screams, enormous blades of blood cutting off two of my legs and sending me collapsing to the ground where a mad-eyed nine-year-old is waiting to slaughter me.

Oh, no. I am such an idiot. I start shapeshifting back into a human as fast as I can, but it doesn't stop her from stabbing me in a dozen different places, tearing my body open before I can even get a word out. Soldiers converge on us on all sides, auras pressing furiously against us and trying to crush the range Anastasia can control her blood into nothing. Somehow, she fights them off, and this seems to be the wrong move because they start running in to knock her out instead.

"Wait!" I shout. "Ana, wait, it's me! You're safe, there are no aliens!"

"Liar!" she screams, stabbing me again even though I'm fully humanoid. "Liar, liar!"

I stagger to my feet as best I can and rush towards her, trying to reach her before the soldiers intervene further and get hurt, putting her in even more trouble. This is my fault, my mistake. She can hurt me as much as she wants for it.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have made myself look like one."

Tears are streaming down Anastasia's eyes, and that hurts far more than the blade of blood she stabs through my gut or the one she uses to chop off my arm. My body is nothing. I can grow it back. Out of the corner of my eye I see one of the soldiers yelling at Commander for support, but the woman already has an intense look of mental strain and worry on her face. She's trying to stop Anastasia and simply failing.

The soldiers seem to realize that they don't have a way to safely disable Anastasia without killing her, and they don't have authorization to kill her, ending up in an awkward half-circle around the two of us as I finally reach Anastasia and wrap her up in a hug with my newly-regrown arms. She sobs and flails and stabs me, but I hold her firm, my own eyes as wet with tears as they are with blood.

"You're okay. You're safe. It's me. It's Lia. I've got you."

"Liar!" she sobs. "Liar, liar!"

The attacks slow down nonetheless, though. I keep healing through the assault and whispering sweet nothings, brushing my fingers through her hair in the way she likes. Eventually, her wailings quiet down just a little, and the attacks stop. I've managed to exhaust her. Soldiers, officers, and my fellow trainees held at a distance by Lieutenant Locke's order. I'm thankful for that, in a way. Since this is entirely my fault, it should be entirely my responsibility to deal with.

"You're okay," I whisper. "I'm okay. Everything's fine. It's just me. It's just Lia. I've got you."

"Liar," Anastasia sobs quietly. "You hate it when people call you that."

I freeze for a second. I can't help it. I resume brushing her hair like nothing happened, but it's too late. She felt it.

"...Yeah, you're right," I admit, whispering it into her ear as quietly as I can manage. I don't have a choice. Any other answer would destroy the trust between us forever. "But I'm still here for you, okay? No matter what I look like and no matter what my name is. I'm still me."

She starts crying harder again, but she hugs me back, burying her face into my shoulder. And that, I think, is about the only win that I deserve.

I talk a big game, but I really am such an idiot.