I found myself on a stage in a large, empty amphitheater when I realized I was in Orange’s simulation for me. She sat in the front row with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap.
Her foot bounced as she waited for me to walk to the front of the stage. “I’m sure you have a question about how I’m going to make you more comfortable using new arms…”
I shook my head. “Nope. At this point, I’ve learned to trust you wholeheartedly.”
A smile crept on her face. “That’s good. I understand such trust is earned and should be treated with the utmost respect. My promise to you is that I will never betray such trust. It has never been my intention to, but I understand that you may wish to hear those words.”
I sat down on the edge of the stage and let my stinger arms fall loosely behind me. “It helps. You’ve been taking this ‘developing a personality’ thing seriously.”
Orange waved her hand. “Why would I not? It has bolstered our cooperation exceptionally and made helping you much easier now that I can see your perspective more clearly.” She held up her hand. “As pleasant as this chat is, you came here for a reason, correct?”
I sighed and lifted my stinger arms. “Yeah. These things are still very alien to me. Yeah, I have complete control over them, but it requires conscious thought. Although the longer I have them, the more I seem to develop, like, nervous ticks with them. Why?”
My doppelganger instantly grew a pair of stinger arms of her own. “They’re seamlessly tied to your nervous system. Your augments are developed to feel as natural to your body as possible. Your ‘nervous ticks’ are a sign that your body isn’t rejecting them.”
Her stinger arms reabsorbed themselves into her body.
I held one in front of me and stared at the blade. “So subconsciously, anything I do to my body will eventually become second nature?”
She shook her head. “No. It will become a primary function, or a first nature, if you will. It will be as if you’ve always had them.”
My eyes went wide. “Oh, okay. I guess at this point, I should’ve expected that.”
So I don’t just have control over what my body looks like and what I’m made out of; I can change my very being. I guess that’s why my mirror self was so accepting of being a werewolf. It wasn’t just a part of her; it was who she was. Any augment I take can change who I am on such a fundamental level. It’s kind of terrifying.
A subtle exhilaration crept up on me as I considered it further. “I can be literally anything I want—anyone I want.”
Orange wagged her finger. “No, no. You only can and always will be Rina Lone. You just have complete control over who that is, like every other person in the multiverse. But for you, like Killa, can define your physical self too. Have you not wondered why, even though Killa can take any physical form, she keeps returning to the shape of a human woman?”
I opened my mouth only to close it. She’s right; I don’t know that answer.
Orange stood up and pushed down the skirt of her maid uniform. “It is only speculation, but we believe that is how she sees herself. True, she is more than willing to change in the moment to complete an objective. she constantly makes subtle, small, nearly imperceptible changes constantly, but she is fundamentally the same person. Her way of expressing that is to hold the same base form.”
She walked up and offered me a hand. “We bring this up to tell you that who you are and the decision you make are more important than how many arms or legs you have, whether your skin is made of flesh, metal, or diamonds, or if you can change any of that. Yes, you can decide if you want two heads or not, but only you can decide if that’s right for you.”
I took her hand, and she pulled me to my feet. “So, don’t go too crazy with the changes?”
Orange chuckled. “If you want to do something wild, do it. But know that while every action is permitted, not every action is beneficial. There are always consequences.”
I nodded. “Yeah, consequences.” I held out my stinger arm. “So how do you plan on getting me to get used to these?”
Orange grabbed my wrists gently and held them up to my chest. “By tying your hands—literally.”
I didn’t get a word out when a metal band appeared around my wrists.
“What?” I gasp.
The two bands pulled themselves together and pressed into my chest. I couldn’t pry them apart. The bands spread out and wrapped around my neck.
I squirmed in my restraints. “What did you just do?”
Orange tapped the restraints. “We’re forcing you to do everything with your stinger arms. You’ll figure it out. Since you’re doing this for a day and a half and your mind processes up to six times faster than standard time, we have effectively nine days.”
She waved her arms out, and everything shifted until I was in a small motel room. It was much like one I’d been fortunate to stay the night in while I was on Earth. A bed, a dresser, a mirror, a kitchenette, and a small bathroom.
“We’ll start with six days of this.” Orange slowly walked to the door, holding her arms out. “If you do well, we’ll release you.”
Orange went over my daily itinerary. I was going to have to learn how to do everything—and I do mean everything—without my hands. After my morning routine, I was supposed to spend half of the day at a butchery, cutting up chickens, cows, pigs, and fish. Other than that, I was free to do whatever I wanted, which I spent mostly trying out different modifications. The only rule was that I had to return to normal before doing anything else.
The first two days were horrible. I learned really quickly, that showers were off the table, and getting dressed was infinitely more difficult. Butchery was the easy part.
Orange had some mercy on me. Every door had a lever handle. If there was even one knob handle, I would’ve lost my mind trying to grip it. Washing my stinger blades was maddening enough.
The third and fourth days, I finally figured out how to get through the day without screaming in frustration. The fifth and sixth days went more smoothly.
I finally understood why Orange did what she did. If I had access to my hands, I would’ve kept giving up. They say necessity is the mother of invention. It only makes sense that forcing me to adapt to not having hands would be the most effective method.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t made enough progress, in Orange’s opinion. She made me spend two more days with my hands tied to my neck. When she released my hands for the last day, I almost forgot I had hands again.
Waking up the next day was a real shock. While I felt like I had lived nine days, only one and a half passed in reality.
I grabbed my head as I sat up. “This is a really good way to mess with my already fragile sense of time.”
I got up and stripped out of my shirt and jacket. As I looked at myself in the mirror, I remembered all the different augments I tested during my time in the simulation, but I found myself not really seeing myself with many of them. I developed a list of augments that I found that I liked, but knew I couldn’t afford right now. But there was one I could and needed to do now.
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Seeing my skin shift into the metal of my regular arms and stinger arms just didn’t look right anymore. “I’m not human, so I might as well get rid of everything that makes me look human.”
Orange, please replace my sub-dermal plating level two with epidermal plating level two.
Replacing sub-dermal plating (torso) level 2 with epidermal plating (torso) level 2.
Cost: 30,000 shards.
Commence?
Yes.
The skin on my chest slowly transformed into a pallid white complexion. Gradually, a multitude of crimson lines emerged beneath the dying skin. Suddenly, with a wet plop, the skin from my torso detached itself and onto the wooden floor of the cabin I slept in. The red-hot, overlapping metal plates cooled, emitting a faint sizzling sound as they melded together, seamlessly transforming into the same obsidian black metal that encased my legs and both sets of arms.
That leaves only my nervous system, neck and head left to change. But for now, something a little more practical. Orange, the next augment we agreed on please.
Mana-weave Hair level 1 augment available.
Cost 62,000 shards.
Purchase?
Yes.
As a sudden sensation of heat and cold washed over me, my scalp prickled with discomfort. I seized my braided hair and ripped it away. The abrupt exposure of my bare scalp felt peculiar, accompanied by an intense itchiness as new strands of hair grew. I patiently allowed it to grow, reaching the length of my shoulder blades, before deftly weaving it into another braid. I fastened the fire-resistance clip that Chad had given me.
It was the same color, but now my hair seemed to shimmer and flow almost like a shadow. Appropriate given my mana can only ever be shadow magic now.
After the augments finished, I checked my augments and status.
Name: Rina Lone Augments: Level: 42 Cellular Reconstruction Agility: 409 Synthetic eyes: lvl. 2 Arcane: 325 HUD Power: 160 Mana battery (shadow) integration Quickness: 600 Additional Stinger Arm X2 Resilience: 305 Arm blade (right), Retractable Toughness: 315 Synthetic tendons (legs) lvl. 2 Unassigned Points: 0 Synthetic muscle (legs) lvl. 2 Shards: 2,600 Synthetic bones (legs) lvl. 1 Synthetic bones (arms) lvl. 1 Shadow Powers: Synthetic tendons (arms) lvl. 2 Manifestation lvl. 7 Synthetic muscle (arms) lvl. 2 Shaping lvl. 6 Epidermal plating (arms) lvl. 2 Distance lvl. 1 Epidermal plating (legs) lvl. 2 Anchoring lvl. 1 Epidermal plating (torso) lvl. 2 Synthetic muscle (torso) lvl. 1 Nanobot Blood Replacement Nanoweave Hair lvl. 1
Epidermal plating (torso) level 2:
An inner layer of organic metal lines the host’s torso. This metal is flexible, nonmagnetic, conductive, and immune to oxidation. Defense and resistance in the augmented areas are doubled.
Stat bonus: +25 toughness, +25 resilience.
Mana-weave Hair level 1:
The host’s hair has been replaced by mana infused filaments. They are able to change their length at will for a small energy cost. The mana filaments attract ambient mana more effectively. Energy recovery is increased proportionally with the length and volume of the hair.
Stat bonus: +20 arcane.
Oh, look, another level. I looked at my energy level. It was down to five hundred percent.
I put my clothes back on. “It’s so nice having hands again,” I whisper to myself. People take having them for granted. “Let’s go see if Killa and Shadara are ready for another island after some food. That simulation really used up a lot more energy than normal.”
Also, your daily energy consumption has increased.
Good to know. More food, yay. I rolled my eyes as I pulled the door open with a stinger arm. Shadara was standing in the doorway, her hand raised as if she were about to knock on it.
She jumped. “Oh, uh, good to see you’re ready. I heard you moving in there, but I wanted to give you a minute to change or whatever.” Her eyes narrowed on me. “Did you do something with your hair?”
I chuckled. “You noticed?” I ran my fingers through it as I pushed my mana into my battery so that it was up to over three hundred percent. “I replaced it. Now it improves my mana regeneration. Does it look good?”
Shadara flattened her ears as she rotated her head slightly. “It’s pretty good. Your hair looks more, I don’t know, lively? It looks like it has almost a pulse to it while still being even darker than before. But it still looks really good on you. It makes your eyes just pop all the more.”
I smirked. “How about some food? Did you already eat? What time of day is it?”
“She hasn’t eaten,” Killa called out from the room behind her. She walked out with a smile on her face. “We wanted to wait for you. Two days without food must really drain your reserves. And I figured, since I caught a whole bunch of fish yesterday, you’d want to try some.”
I dropped my smile. “Please tell me they’re cooked. I’ve seen enough of raw fish lately.”
Shadara scratched the back of her head. “Well, they’re not cooked yet. But we can cook them after we cut them up. Unless you want to eat the bones, that is.”
I waved a stinger blade. “Nah, Killa can have them.”
“Aw, thank you,” Killa cooed.
We went into the galley that Killa and Shadra had been using to cook while I was sleeping away the days. I showed off my new skill at deboning a fish with my stinger blades and even helped Shadara cook them.
My sworn sisters stared at me as I never used my hands and only my stinger arms when I flipped them and handed Killa the remnants of the carcass. Their jaws dropped as I even ate a dozen fish without using my hands, filling my energy reserves to six hundred percent.
I’m going to need so much food from now on.
Shadara held up her hands. “Okay, I need to stop you right now. Who are you, and what did you do with Rina?”
I tilted my head. “What?”
Killa propped her head up with one hand. “I think she’s a little taken aback by how much you’re using your new arms. Before, they seemed to be something you avoided using. Now? It’s like you want to use them more than your hands.”
I nodded. “Ah, yeah. I’m still trying to balance that back out.” I waved a hand. “My quickness is six hundred. Because of that, every second is like six to me. And since a day and a half is like nine days to me, I’ve had lots, lots of time to practice using them for everything. Fighting with them may take another day or two to get good, but at least now I can move them without thinking too hard about it.”
“I knew you’d do it.” Killa gave me a wink. “I’m sure you’d be interested in knowing that our esteemed captain is already taking us to another island if he hasn’t already arrived at one.”
I rotated all four of my arms in sequence. “Good. I need the shards. I’ve got a bunch of upgrades planned out.”
We headed up to the deck to see a volcanic island off to the side of the ship.
Webster let out a wet chuckle. “Did ye lasses get yer beauty sleep? As ye requested, an island waitin’ for ye to be explorin’. This time, don’t be pokin’ monsters ye ain’t ready to be pokin’.” He nodded to the small row boat. “As usual, this be as far as I can take ye.”
Wordlessly, we hopped in the boat and dropped down to the water, and Shadara rowed us towards the shore. It was easier to balance myself with my new arms, and I knew my balance was even better now that I could distribute more weight in more directions. The water didn’t seem so scary anymore.
Although that probably had more to do with, during the simulation, Orange and I figured out a way so that I could breathe underwater. When we’re done with this island, I should have enough shards to pull it off.