The change was instantaneous, but I could feel every moment, every piece and parcel of it. Every fibre of my being hummed all at once, the uniform hum of it making my body feel like a tuning fork. There was a build-up of heat from the tone that permeated my body that brought it to a warm, but not uncomfortably hot, temperature. The heat rapidly brought with it the feeling of a building pressure, an indigestion not of the gut but of all of my body, an internal swell of every cell, from my skin to bone to brain.
I could feel my body shifting as the heat rapidly built and began to be expelled in a soothing stream of familiar, ethereal light. It shone through my skin, building and building in intensity as the heat in me grew higher and higher until I could feel sweat forming on my brow until the pressure of my body built to a sensation between the pleasant pain of a stretch and the jittering rush of release from pleasure. It built to a breaking point, a sudden crest to a wave of heat, and the heat snapped out of me as a brilliant flash of light that rivalled the birth of a star.
All the while, beneath the light and pressure and heat, my body changed. I grew a numbed sense in my body and barely felt the bone growing suddenly, the shift of it up from my collarbone, forming my familiar subdermal neck guard. My skin smoothed and soft and grew to its dryer, rougher texture, a feeling of greater solidity that permeated down into my muscles as they lost their extra flexibility. I felt the fat melt away, my legs thinning, my chest lightening, though where it melted into, I had no idea.
My hair suddenly tingled and tangled into my familiar mess of hair, and the feeling ran down into my scalp, and down into my head and spine and into my eyes.
And from skull and spine it vibrated into my head and around one of two spots that did not vibrate. A small, pea-sized shape within the inner meat of my lower brain and a paper-thin shadow between my gut and groin where the race of energy had originated.
And as it crested and echoed within my brain in a tingle, I could feel it change.
And just as soon as it came, it was gone, and my brain and body were returned to my pre-green goo form. It was objectively less than a second before the flash rushed out soundlessly, and I was suddenly met with a horrifying conclusion.
I had just escaped a living nightmare, escaped a planet that scared me more than the idea of getting a hole through my head with an Artifact that spoke to me in my head. I had been stabbed in the back, stolen from and left to die, and somehow, I had been more focused on politeness, on convincing Lilly, in the same way, I would approach an attempt to change my situation by going into a fight.
I had become… Placative. Soft.
I had temporarily buried my roiling anger, reaching for conversation instead of the firey loci of my unbelievable fury and the theft and betrayal I had faced from the Collector.
My mind… no, my brain, had been different. The feeling of reading into the conversation and the ability to let myself drone on intentionally without thought was distanced, not gone, so much as behind a pane of tinted mental glass. I felt like I could feel the disconnect, but it was more… discordant and fuzzy.
It had been me, it was just a facet where I embarrassed communication and wanted to hold hands and sing kumbaya like a soft little shit, confused the moment I had no move immediately given to me.
And that scared the shit out of me.
“FFuck! What the fuck was that? Lilly, what the fuck was with me?”
“You were your persona, your polite social mask, that’s why I recommended you transform back before you begin making long-term decisions, it's about how to portray yourself and interact with others, but it isn’t your self, you are now your self,” she said with what I thought was intentional calm but was no longer quite sure of.
“What the hell does that even mean!” I shouted, not caring that I sounded petulant, not caring that I sounded like a winey asshole as I did it.
“God, you are sometimes very hard to work with. Your brain was changed, tuned to be more aware of your social acumen and the way you would come off. You have now changed back to yourself, both your normal brain chemistry and using your inactive self-shard. Your transformations change your body, which changes your brain, your back to your normal abrasive self, instead of thinking before you speak, now breath.”
I took it in and barely used a fucking iota of my head space that was overflowing with the urge to track down, throttle and skin the collector before turning him into a living warning on why you don’t fuck with a mercenary, and you abso-fucking-lutely didn’t fuck around and leave loose ends, because I was a fucking loose end, and I was going to fucking end every living thing between him and me if I had to make the system burn for it.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me? Why is that even a thing? What the fuck is the point of that? Why did you hide that?”
“I didn’t tell you because you would have just accepted it while keeping it inside like a fucking time bomb, it’s a thing to help you manipulate others when violence would cause issues, and I didn’t! I’m copying you! I’m doing it right now, I was doing it before, and I will continue doing it in every situation you find yourself in because III’m a fucking copy of your ego with your female traits knocked up a notch. So don’t go bitching at me when your angry at another thing way more than you are at me because I know you're fucking furious at the fucking Collector and his tripe, supervillain bul- bullshit.”
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I opened my mouth and began to spit out a retort that was so instinctive it had to be automatic when Lilly continued, “Don’t even start; I already know what you're going to say. I am, in a way, a copy of a part of your subconscious mind, with extra knowledge incorporated into it. The other parts include one corresponding to each of your forms and my opposite, all of which is still you. You have a lot of moving parts because you need a lot of tools to work on your own and keep your incredibly complex mind stable. So, for the love of everything, that’s good! CALM THE FUCK DOWN! FOR TWO FUCKING SECONDS! AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD BREATH!”
She spoke with so much force in my head that my brain short-circuited for a moment, and she paired it with a tiny shock from my core that sprinted through my body and loosened my muscles a little. Both paired together turned me off and on again like a light switch. And, of course, the first thing I did while my mind booted up was breathe, and good god, did it help my screaming, angry lungs from the feeling of implosion they were undergoing.
My mind whirled, and I scrambled down, got into my coat pockets, got a cigarette out, placed it in my mouth, and lit it. I breathed in as I turned off my lighter and quickly got over to the vent to let the smoke find its way out. I closed my eyes and listened to the crackle as the flame ate down the tip, and I sucked down stimulant and exhaled anxiety.
I had never heard her swear like that. It was a wall of cussing that was so against the internal image I had of her that I was stunned into twenty seconds of silence while I sucked in the smoke, pulling it deep into my lungs steadily before exhaling an expanding plume of grey.
Each inhale and exhale gave me time to turn back on and time to breathe. My heart, a rapidly pounding drumbeat of blood, slowed in my veins, the heat of it suddenly turning cold as it faded. I could feel my arm twitch, and I finished it and put it out, rubbing the butt out on the counter before tossing it with the other butts, a little bit of burnt-down paper ends I had fashioned from an anti-fire bin for oil rags.
“Are you back from your almost panic attack? Because I can try to use that charge I used to try and relax you further. While I am sorry for not explicitly telling you about your brain chemistry being affected. But I want you to know, I didn’t do it; it's just part of being a legionnaire.”
I let her words settle in, and I had to admit, it took what little pep I had out of my stance.
“I don’t even remember the joining bit,” I told her, letting my mind ramble around its dark corners.
“You accepted my aid in gaining revenge against the man that almost killed and your life for five years of service and the duty to uphold the law. Considering there's likely no one around who can order you unless you stumble into situations blindly, you should be ok.”
Ohh boy. That was the exact kind of thing that got me into a mess.
“That was absolutely an omen of what was to come; with my luck, I am now going to bounce around for the next five years getting caught up in a whole load of trouble,” I mused, “And I’m not going to be able to get out of it. Am I?”
“No,” she said, “I am obliged to keep you on track and upholding your duties if they’re required, which would basically amount to me nagging you, but I can honestly tell you that it will give you more points, and they can be used for more than just unlocking your shards so its worth it to just go along with it.”
“I’ll let that salve my fears of getting stuck every six feet because I’m cursed to have an interesting life.”
We had a pause come between us then that slowly grew longer and longer as we both thought that through, but I broke the silence first.
I sighed, “Where are we going? I think the thrust is borked, I need to get to dry dock it for a fuck load of repairs, then we need to hunt down the fucker, and kill him, and he could be gone at this point. I have no clue where he is… And I need to make sure my fucking money is secure because I don’t trust him to have not fucked me over,” I told her.
“Luna,” she said immediately, “This thing is a deathtrap, and if you want to move between planets without turning into space debris, you need a proper ship, and to get some more tech, and the closest place that had a Legion shipyard is Luna. Luna herself runs it, so we should be able to access a proper ship to go between planets, and you can ask her to check where he went. And before you ask about it, I’m sure we can get one that can hold this mobile primitivistic suicide box you call a ‘boat.’”
“It stresses you out, doesn’t it?”
“YES! Yes, it does. I get it, I think. You like broken stuff for some god-awful reason, but I will mother you until you at least get it fixed by a professional or get a proper vessel that’s unlikely to fucking end our collective existence.”
“I can understand that,” I told her, “And while I respect your opinion, it's my goblin cave, not a man cave, and my rules are law.”
“As the goblin in this relationship, I will push you into making good decisions by pressuring you and getting inside your head if I need to.”
“You know what? I don’t know how to feel about you anymore, Lilly. On one hand, you were adorable, and now you are kind of weirdly my type, and that makes me uncomfortable.”
“We both know your friends with benefits with your hands; you have already been with yourself, and I’m just more of that.”
“That,” I told her, “Is not helping; now I’m going to go set our course and then pretend like you're not in my head for a few hours and take a cold shower.”
“Sure, sure. Now get out from underfoot; I’m working, you weirdo… You're distracting me from my anger.”
I got my ass back up to the cockpit and set our course, and then, despite what I said, I sat there and zoned out.
My mind had changed, my brain had changed, but my body was the worst part, worse than the chemicals in my brain or having a tiny chunk of whatever a soul gem was. The worst part was the lack of reason for my dislike of my body.
And why didn’t my real body feel… better? It wasn’t distasteful or revolting, but my current form felt… disconnected. And I didn’t know how to feel about that. One part of me wanted to ask her more, learn more about this possibly horrifying situation, but I wouldn’t go digging through it, I didn't feel like I had the energy to after the fear, anger and panic. Lilly had saved my life, it wasn’t her fault that I agreed to a deal that caused it, and now had an issue with something that had been made far before her creation… Birth? Conception? Fabrication? Whichever the word for it was.
I didn’t think she was being malicious, but she had a side that was far beyond a golem that made it feel hard to trust, the part of her that had come out down on the ground. It had been so cool and distant that her claim of not being a person made a horrible fragment of sense. She was still a person, but that part of her unnerved me.
How much of my freedom had I traded away… And how long would I need to go before I felt whole? Where would this nightmare of my identity end, or would whatever changes have overcome me never abate.