She breathes again and it feels like she’s been reborn, crying and wailing fresh from the womb. She screams a second time, pulling in air and letting the sound echo like thunder in the enclosed space of wherever she is. There is a moment right after that second breath, where she realizes that she is a thing that is alive and aware, and just… feels. She experiences what has changed and is left silent by it. There, in that first, timeless moment, there is panic, and fear.

She is awake, and there is no pain.

Not as her heart beats. Not as her lungs draw breath. Not as her flesh shifts, not as her very mind tries to find it and, horrified, finds none.

The moment feels like shame. It feels like relief.

To be without pain, when one is so deserving of it, feels like the greatest sin she can imagine. And she is as guilty of this new sin as she is of all the others.

She hugs herself, and sobs, and swings her arms and kicks and writhes and rips the world around her apart.

And then there is someone there, and she is no longer alone or free of pain.

Something crashes down upon her, flooding her awareness with a sort of pressure like she hasn’t experienced before until she realizes that her skin feel impossibly sensitive. She hears the crackling of electricity and the faint scent of a formation, all dust and shaping and artificial form, and she flails against it, surprising herself as she grabs at it and tries to rip and tear and feels it strain even as it wraps around her like chains-

And then a hand, as big as her torso, settles against her shoulder. The weight of it alone pins her down, holds her against the ruins of whatever she was trapped inside, and she reaches and tries to grab it and-

And realizes that she has two hands.

It’s enough to shock her into realizing she hasn’t been breathing. She gasps in another lungful of air and feels something around her bend as she does, the taste of powder and runes making her cough in surprise. What is that, and why can she taste it?

“What-” she tries, coughing hard, “where am I? What’s- who-”

“It’s alright,” a familiar voice rumbles, like rock on stone. “Just breathe. Maen!”

A new scent arrives, battling with the scent of constructs and the musty, wild and dangerous smell Taurus always carries. She is hit by a wave of yuzu and hidden paths beneath clawprint and herbs growing on the vine and she gasps again, breathing even deeper. She hears a feminine voice gasp, sudden and quiet, and there’s the sound of someone stumbling even as she hears a heartbeat flutter and blood rush with anxiety.

And then, after another pause, she feels someone touch her on her other shoulder. Soft hands, some callouses but not enough to make the hand turn rough. She can feel a heartbeat through the touch, feel the flow of fluid and muscle and bone beneath skin, feel her breathing, feel that it’s- it’s Maen.

She focuses her eyes for the first time since she woke, turning them to look towards where the touch tells her that Maen is kneeling. She feels the pull and flush of her eyes, of her body, of her mind and self turning to face her, and catches sight, for the first time since the second longest week of her life, of the woman she dragged with her into the mess that she is.

“Hey,” Maen whispers. “It’s… hi, Raika. Are you…” Raika can feel her pulse in their touch, the nervousness and fear in it. “Are you… ok?”

Raika tries to breathe. Draws in just the barest hint of air.

“I’m-” she coughs again, almost choking. “Too much,” she whispers, her throat feeling hoarse and uncomfortable under the strain of trying to speak and breathe against resistance and cough all at once. “The- tastes bad. Can’t breathe.”

There’s commotion as she chokes again, as she squirms, trying as hard as she can to stay still, to keep from pulling on the feeling that is wrapped so tight around her, everywhere. She hears them talking, recognizes some of the voices and scents and sounds but without enough room to process as she struggles pull in air. It wasn’t this hard, was it? Her first breaths weren’t this difficult, surely, or she’d never have been able to scream as she had, to come into being as she had. Did something change? The air feels like chains, like gossamer strands wrapped so so tight around her, like a second cocoon, wrapped tight, and it takes so much effort not to tear at it.

“Raika, they- what’s wrong?!” Maen whispers, almost speaking, almost screaming, her heart screaming as Raika refuses to hold still, refuses to stop spasming and trying to breathe. Their eyes meet, and whatever Maen is seeing is enough to send her heartbeat skipping again.

The felinid woman looks ok. She’s not wounded. She’s not starved, and her terror is not the blind, blood-chilling panic she was in last time they saw each other. Raika can tell that she’s eaten lately by the smell of her, something tangy and full of rice and meat.

She’s spiraling. Thinking about it much too far, focusing on all the wrong things. Maen is ok. She stayed safe. The village is safe? It’s good if it wasn’t all selfish, good if she wasn’t just destroying herself and building something from the pieces that she might destroy again the moment after, it’s good cause she’s here now, and they’re alive, and she chose to protect Maen cause she brought her here and it’s her responsibility to keep her safe and-

FUCK, she can’t BREATHE

“We need her still,” she hears Yun-Ka yelling, voice breaking through the fugue, and Taurus rumbles something, a bit quieter, and Yun Ka screams something that sounds technical and like something is happening-

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Maen has started crying a bit, and Raika can’t breathe.

Enough. Fuck that. She just told the gods themselves to go fuck themselves for trying to kill her, she’s not just going to lay here and die on the floor.

Panic and pain and the need to survive all wrap together and she takes her hands, her hands, plural, and tears at the gossamer threads around her.

Something sparks, something warps, the smell of ozone and rotten herbs and the sound of the air itself screeching as she rips it all apart, wrapping it around her arms and in her hands which feel like they’re shifting and warping right alongside the air around her. She tears, and a wave of effects and chaos and mess and sound hits her, the sounds of panic and fear, and she tears, and the threads that don’t break and instead stretch the pulls to her mouth and bites.

Her jaw briefly feels so, so cold, her molars aching and feeling strange and sharp and inevitable, and finally she breaks through the cocoon and drags in air again.

It hits her system like a drug. Her heart and body roars back into her awareness as she drinks in enough air to do more than scream, to fuel an altered body that she can now feel. It barely feels like her anymore, but somehow instinct fills everything in, lets her keep shifting and churning without ripping herself apart. Her muscles coil now, each fiber pulled into patterns and weaves so complex that she feels like she can rearrange, replace, or compensate for anything, can move in any direction, each cluster of those weavings linked in a complex lattice or chain or web with tendons and ligaments and fibers. Her bones feel heavier, weightier, but she can feel that they should be much moreso, intricate architecture letting it resist the impossible strength and stress she’s already putting them under far better than a solid block of material could and keeping them light. There’s a new layer to her, between skin and muscles, interlaced with both and blocking neither but feeling like interlocking plates, light and reactive to twitches and nerve-reactions.

There’s more, so much more, differences in her weight and how she moves and she has an arm and her organs feel… off inside of her, strange, but she doesn’t know enough and-

She stops. Forces herself to take a second, slower breath, ignoring the sounds of commotion all around. She goes to slow her heartbeat, and finds she doesn’t need to, her blood shifting and flowing through her body at her will no matter how hard the organ might otherwise be pumping. She can already see some potential issues with that, but at least while she’s here, forcing herself to lie still on the ground, she has enough mental bandwidth to use both, letting her heartbeat modulate as she slows the circulation of the blood around her brain.

Which is when she realizes that that feels different somehow too. Which is another concerning thought that she can solve and think about later, when she’s calm, yes?

Yes, she replies, that sounds reasonable and helpful.

She lets out a breath, nice, long and slow. It feels like smoking a cigarette almost; as she exhales, the scent and taste of the formation leave her, flowing like a cloud of smoke and ash back out. She can tell that some of it remains, tickling the back of her throat, but she still marvels at the sensation. She hasn’t had a cigarette in… fuck, maybe two years.

She feels the ground tremble, ever so slightly, as Taurus walks back over to her. She could track him by the sound of his joints, never mind needing to look at him, but she opens her eyes again, lets them follow him.

“Feeling better?” he asks, quasi-bovine faced even more alien than normal with a very human expression of amusement on it. “All done making a mess?”

Her first instinct is to spit at him. To cast him aside like she did the judgment of an impossible thing mere moments ago. There’s even the slightest rumble of adrenaline deep inside, urging her to shift, to bare her teeth and go to bite, to let the heat overtake her flesh until she is molten and violent and perfect… before she tamps down on it. Makes it quiet. She does not know her capabilities, but one tribulation does not a Nascent Soul’s opponent make, never mind the soft power he holds over her… or his promise.

Perfect honesty.

She puts on her liar’s face, muscles shifting, skin and bone and fat all shifting with them now as she creates a parody of her feelings and puts it into a mask sincere enough to fool him. “Much better, thank you,” she whispers, listening to her voice. It hums now, slightly, and she’s not sure if it’s her enhanced hearing or something new that others can notice. It sounds like a musical note being played, or the undercurrent of a purr or growl under the words. “Sorry about any mess, Runemaster, but… it would seem that whatever formation this is did not feel good.”

“Oh!” She hears Yun Ka say, from where her heartbeat tells Raika is behind some kind of podium out of line of sight. “Apologies for that, honored Raika. Standard procedure with newfound biomodifications, especially ones with high Qi density, is to establish proper quarantine procedures and examination. When you emerged in that… state, I triggered one of the failsafes. I take full responsibility for my actions.”

She sees Taurus wave a hand, dismissing the apology before she gets a chance to. “We learned something new,” he says instead. “And you survived with your brain intact. Good job.”

She chuckles, the interior and exterior of it failing to match as she inwardly snarls at him for callousness and outwardly agrees. There’s a mix there; she acknowledges it was a smart call, that he likely did learn something useful, but she has the right to be pissed off at him denying her the explanation and the apology.

Yeah. She still doesn’t fucking like him. His mask might be better than hers, but it’s harder to tell if his is wearing him rather than the other way around. She feels it’s a good trade-off.

Slowly, she rolls to her side to get to her feet, noticing and dismissing the realization that she is buck naked and absolutely soaked with… something that doesn’t seem to be blood, actually, much darker in color and viscous, like a syrup. She tries to get to her feet, feels Maen come closer to help and marvels at how fast her left arm shoots out, palm out, the palm that was missing for so long…

She crawls over to the cocoon, body twitching with old and unresponsive commands against new and upgraded hardware, and grabs hold of it. It crumbles, partially, and for the first time she looks at it properly.

It is a horror.

It does not look like a clean, smooth shell. It looks like something froze a body mid-explosion. In the unbroken portions she can see what looks like calcified or burnt flesh in the shape of perfectly preserved muscle tissues, she sees eyes and half-formed mouths, she sees pieces of what look like bones, like an oversized spine, all wrapped around it to provide some kind of stability, and she knows, deep in her bones, that it was not always calcified. Was not always black and burnt and stiff, not at first, not till the end.

Yeah. She really can’t blame them for the “quarantine protocols”, whatever that means.

She goes to use it. To put her weight against it. The first time, her grip breaks it and it crumbles. The second time she lays her palm flat, using friction as a grip to slowly pull herself up. She makes it to a crouch, then slowly, ever so slowly, makes it to her feet.

She reaches into the horror of the flesh-cocoon she broke free from and picks up what she’s looking for.

A single, slim piece of steel, its color glinting strangely orange and blue when the light hits it, shaped like a perfectly made tuning fork.

She stands to her full height, somehow taller than before, the weight of what feels like almost her full body length of hair pulling slightly at her neck with its mass, and hits herself in the forehead with the tuning fork.

Dink, it greets her.

She laughs. Soft and low, and does not stop for a good few minutes.