Amaranthine- Horny Heroes

CHAPTER 7

Nick couldn't really define his style of movement, but he could execute it just fine. It felt as though his body was rolling, but his mouth, and the area he'd come to think of as his face, stayed in the same place unless he wanted to move it. His myriad of new appendages also seemed to automatically grasp handholds or push off the ground, although he could purposefully direct them as needed. The mental transition between directing 4 limbs and 13 should have been impossible, but apparently whatever passed for a brain in his new body was just wired for it. He didn't have to understand it, just like how he'd never had to understand how he had moved his arms. 

The same went for his "sight" for lack of a better word. His sense of smell had increased exponentially, but now seemed to be attached to his sense of taste as it all ran through the gaping maw that took up so much of his central mass. He could pick up scents that were completely new to him, and glean much much more information from them. He was certain he could pick Cait, Pete and Director Swan, maybe even the EMTs, up just by their scent from a pretty good distance away. He could even use that to get a pretty close position on them. More than that, their scents now laid their emotions bare to him, pheromonal communication that humans had lost an evolutionary reason to consciously control. 

That was what had led him to stick so close to Cait. Every other one of the, admittedly few, people he had met so far since his transformation, even Director Swan, let out an initial stench of fear when they saw him, and that stench followed all of them to varying degrees. All except Cait. She'd had the initial burst, but it had faded quickly, and had been replaced with one his human mind likened to a candle he'd smelled named 'Warm Winter's Hearth' or something dumb like that. That candle had smelled nice though, and the part of his mind born of his new body identified the scent as one of something akin to companionship. He appreciated that more than he was able to currently express, and he had decided he would be paying that comfort back. 

Just a step or two ahead of him, the scent of Director Swan wafted back to him. Of all people, besides Cait, she had the least stink of fear in his presence, but it was there, subtle, like the smallest undernote in a complex wine. Otherwise, her scent was sharp, and strong, bringing confidence and competence to mind. His other senses came into play as well, the most prominent being a vibration sense that seemed to utilize the skin all over his body, and worked both to allow him to hear as well as form a surprisingly crisp sonar image of his surroundings. 

He noticed that, from his low position, he could 'see' right up Director Swan's skirt, but that didn't draw his attention like it once would have. While he was still able to appreciate the woman as aesthetically beautiful, like a masterwork statue, the part of him that was sexually aroused by the sight of human women seemed to have left alongside his penis. He thought he'd have missed that more. 

The Director in particular lit up his senses in more than just scent and the psuedo-sound/vison he possessed. A sense he had no human analogue for made her position light up in his mind, a sort of glowing warmth indicating exactly where she was and even the position of her limbs. He'd noticed it a few times since the change, and the pattern hadn't been hard to figure out. Pete, Dustdevil, many of the people in the Pantheon AEGIS building, Director Swan, and especially Cait, who glowed like the sun. He was sensing gatherings of whatever power comprised the Waves. It was different in every person, his mind perceiving it as different temperatures, colors, pulses, rhythms or intensity. He found that if he focused and opened that sense to its fullest, the world was bathed in that energy, coloring and saturating the radar image his vibration sense conjured. It was a passing rendition of the Lisa Frank binders the little girls in his school had growing up. A storm of colors, none of which matched the ones he knew things to be back as a human. The director in particular slowly pulsed a subdued violet, calming but having an physical weight to it. 

As such, despite the loss of traditional sight, Nick found himself to be more plugged into the world as a whole than ever before. For the exception that proved the rule, with all the extra stimulation he realized he'd completely lost track of what Director Swan was saying as she led him away from the Coliseum. 

"-gets carried away." Director Swan said, her scent carrying a whiff of mirth to him. "I imagine testing Miss Smith will take her a number of hours, at least. As it is already late, I understand if you would like to undergo testing in the morning. You would be able to utilize AEGIS lodgings, free of charge, until then of course." 

Nick tried to answer in the affirmative, but got the same gurgling hiss as always. He was getting better at changing the tone of those to impart some kind of meaning, but doubted he'd ever manage to get his gaping maw to produce words. Instead, he twisted a tentacle into a thumbs up, and Director Swan smiled in response. People liked it when he did that. 

"We are heading towards the lab installation," She gestured towards what looked like nothing so much as an old, WWII concrete bunker. "Many of our Meta-brains have tendencies which lean towards the destructive, even when working on projects where destruction seems only a remote possibility. As such, we had The Hobbyist place this bunker here and it houses all of our scientific experimentation areas, including the Accessibility Bay, which is our destination." 

Nick squirmed along beside her as she went over some of the various things she knew to be going on in the labs, although by her own admission, the Altered Meta-brains on staff were extremely prone to going off on scientific tangents only barely related to their proposed experiments. All manner of scientific inquiry was represented, from work on how Altered plants could be exploited to feed a population suffering from the difficulty farming unshielded farmland, to a nanoscientist that had built a molecule thin exo-suit that imparted conditional super strength at the cost of shattering the bones of whoever used it. When she announced that same scientist was who they were going to be meeting in the Accessibility Bay, Nick learned he could still sweat in his new body. 

Director Swan led him through the heavy metal bunker door, into the expected decor shift. This again, looked somewhat similar to an office building, with glass walled offices in a row down the center, hallways on either side. Nick's vibration sense could tell that the walls on the hallways opposite the offices were thick concrete, very thick, and some odd resonance he was unfamiliar with in them that spoke to some heavy reinforcement. Led down the right hallway, Nick followed only to bump into the director's leg as she unexpectedly stopped at the first door. 

She smirked, "It'd be rather rude to put the Accessibility bay deep in the bowels of the building wouldn't it?" 

Her voice felt good as its vibrations washed over Nick's skin. An odd thing to get used to, but so far, not unpleasant. She rapped twice, hard, on the door. "Always best to knock when working with Meta-brains, you just never know!" 

The door swung open, and a young woman called out 'Come in!' from somewhere deeper in the room. The Director entered, and Nick followed, braced for the inevitable burst of fear stench that was getting all too familiar. 

"Gwyn, this is-" 

"Wow!" Exclaimed a young woman with a quickly pulsing green glow emanating from her head in his senses, seated behind a desk littered with tech parts. "Look at you!" 

She jumped up from her stool and all but ran around the desk towards Nick. She was pleasantly plump, especially her chest, in a way Nick was certain he would have loved less than 2 hours ago. The hat wasn't just a joke after all, when his guildmates had sent it, it wasn't unwarranted. She was wearing a hoodie and leggings under a lab coat, obscuring but not totally hiding a body that would fit neatly in the dictionary next to the word thick. Glasses ornamented a cute face, with light hazel eyes that shone with curiosity and a smile that seemed genuinely warm. 

That was all Nick got from her, actually. Even Cait had the initial burst of fear but from this girl, Gwyn, he got an overwhelming wave of a clear, bright scent his mind assigned to curiosity. Refreshing as that was, it also struck him as very odd behavior. His new senses didn't allow him to use mirrors, but this brain had come with enhanced proprioception, and his vibration sense allowed him to put together a vague image of himself. He knew that any horror movie director would kill a family member if it meant their art department came up with something that looked like him. The fact that people got scared when they first saw him hurt a little, but he knew that if he had seen himself like this when he was a human, fear wouldn't have been the only stink coming from him. 

This girl, however, approached. She oooo'd and ahhh'd at his tentacles, hat, and crouching to, apparently, try and get a better look inside his mouth. 

"Heh. BREAST MAN." She said in a low macho voice, managing to annunciate the capital letters, just like Cait had. She chuckled to herself. "That's pretty good." 

So this is what happened to the Dodos, huh? Nick thought. Director Swan took a handful of Gwyn's lab coat and pulled her to standing. 

"As I was saying, Miss Stine," the director said, the touch of her voice not as pleasant with the edge of irritation it now held. "Mr. Breastman here-" 

"Wait, that's actually his name?" Gwyn cut off the director, already rummaging around the tech spread across the bench. 

"Chosen, for now," Director Swan said with a sigh. "Please, allow me to finish. Mr. Breastman here shows all signs of sentience and understanding of his situation, but unfortunately has lost his means of verbal communication. I'd like for you to do what you can so he can make himself understood without having to resort to a mime act." 

"Way ahead of you," Gwyn responded, now attaching things to a canister full of a shiny grey goo. "He has such an interesting physiology, but one look at that maw of his, I knew he wasn't going to be capable of speech."

She paused for a second, tapping her chin.

"Although, I guess Bubb-Bill the bubbleman can talk, so I don't know why I'm making assumptions." She turned her attention back to the device she was assembling. 

"Anyway! Of course, we can get him hooked up with a basic text or image to speech device, and we will, we will, but that hat of his gave me an idea." She turned around, the canister of grey goo now attached to a spray gun at one end and a tablet at the other. Crouching down to his level, she pointed at the gun in her hand. "Breastman, are you familiar with nano tech?" 

Nick raised a tentacle, giving it a wavy back and forth motion he hoped got across the idea 'kind of'. Gwyn smiled again. 

"Yeah, most people have heard of it and get the basics, but unless you work with it, nobody really understands it. Except me, sometimes a Bullshit Wave hits you and you have an in-depth knowledge of nanotechnological design and application!" She flicked the gun for emphasis. "I'm new around here, but I've gotten pret-ty good with this stuff. I'm gonna go by Nanosmith, if they ever let me take my toys into the field." 

Her face had turned wistful, but she pulled herself back. 

"Sorry! Back to you. Can you…. Feel the hat?" She asked, reaching out towards him, and touching after he showed a thumbs up. "Oh, that's adorable, love that." 

He found that as she touched his hat he could feel her fingers on it, not just the pressure of someone touching something you were wearing, but as though it was his own skin. He raised a forest of tentacles in excited thumbs up. 

"That's great!" Gwyn was beaming. "Do you have any control over it?" 

Nick focused hard, his mouth thinning to a toothy line of concentration as he tried to wiggle the bill. 

"Oh my god! The bill wiggled!" Gwyn squealed. "Good work Breastman!" 

Nick was ecstatic with a new way to express himself. He'd seen enough cartoons to know that something like a moving hat would be enough to convey emotions if he got used to it. He wiggled it back and forth excitedly, his tentacles going wild. 

"Okay, so, you can feel it, and have some control over it. That means you have efferent and afferent innervation in the tissue of the hat, and I can work with that." She showed him the canister of grey goo. "This is a neuro-responsive nano mix I developed. If I program it right, you should be able to use it to control what your hat says!" 

That was it? Sure, technically it was amazing technology, but it seemed like a long walk for what amounted to a shifting novelty hat. It would allow him to communicate a little better, but he felt a little underwhelmed. 

"Very impressive Gwyn," Director Swan said, surprising Nick. "With a form like our friend's here, branding is almost literally everything. Between the admittedly charming tentacle gestures and such an endearing method of communication, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing 

BREAST MAN plushies popping up before too long." 

Gwyn glowed with the praise, and Nick had to admit he was turning a corner on the idea as well. Hadn't he just been bemoaning being greeted by the stink of fear on each encounter with someone new? Anything he could do to soften his grotesque image was almost certainly a positive. It'd be hard to save anyone if they ran screaming from you, after all. He thought back to the I-Cub teddy bear he had as a kid, then compared it to the fierce countenance of the man-bear depicted in statuary outside. If he had a fun hat that was apparently part of him now, why not use it. He reached out and patted the gun with a tentacle and gave his best thumbs up. 

"Thanks Director! But let's make 100% sure this works before we get too excited." She flashed the screen towards Nick, but he couldn't make anything out on it with his new senses. "So, I've already got a base program loaded into the batch in this canister. It's keyed into my tablet, so even after I spray it on, I'll be able to tweak it. The nanobots are going to use the current text as a default and template, so they should be able to help you as you try to form words." 

She winced a bit. "I gotta warn you, this is probably gonna burn. The bots are going to have to dig in and mess with some stuff, are you ready?" 

If he had one, Nick would have steeled his jaw. Instead he just gave a thumbs up. Gwyn aimed the gun, and sprayed the contents over Nick from about a foot away. At first it just felt like a weird metallic mist, and smelled like spray paint mixed with blood. Then, as it settled, he felt the burn. It wasn't a bunch of tiny pinpricks like he'd expected, the bots were too small and evenly spread. Instead, it felt like the upper part of his center mass had been pressed to a stovetop burner set on high. He let out a long, moaning hiss and tried to keep his tentacles from flailing too close to anyone as the pain grew, intensified, and finally subsided. In the aftermath, Nick realized he had a much better awareness of the tissue that comprised his hat. He gave an experimental wiggle of the bill, imitating a skeptical eyebrow raise. 

"Hey!" Gwyn exclaimed. "That's new. You alright?" 

Nick went to make a thumbs up, then stopped. Might as well try this out. He focused as hard as he could on the word 'YES' trying to make it a physical construct of big block letters in his mind, then pushing it towards his hat-organ. 

"Oh my god! Wow!" Gwyn jumped up, bouncing around and clapping excitedly. "It worked! It worked! Nanomachines, son!" 

She said that last bit in a weird gravelly voice, but her excitement would've been infectious even if Nick wasn't already feeling it, so he responded in kind. 

NANOMACHINES, SON! was now proudly displayed on his hat and Gwyn nearly had a conniption from her joy. Even Director Swan had a broad smile on her face, though clearly she, like Nick, didn't get the joke. Gwyn wiped her eyes, which had teared up from laughter, and picked her tablet back up from the lab bench. 

"Whew! You're alright Breastman, I haven't laughed like that since I got here. Let's make sure it's working as intended though. Stop focusing on those words for me? Good, went back to default. Now try something simple like….." 

Gwyn ran Nick through a few more diagnostic tests, and tweaked a few things to make the words appear and disappear more smoothly, but otherwise was satisfied with the bots function. "Great! Now, I've also got this wrist mounted Text-to-speech device. I realize you don't exactly have wrists, but it should fit on a tentacle maybe?" 

Nick picked up the device in two tentacles, but realized quickly he couldn't read the digital screen. He drooped the bill of his hat sadly, and shook his body in the negative. 

CAN'T READ SCREENS, he displayed. 

"Shit! Didn't realize that…" Gwyn responded, frowning and tapping a thumbnail against her teeth. "Hmm… can you not perceive light?" 

Nick raised a tentacle, making a seesawing motion. 

LIGHT/DARK 

He could tell that light was present, but not differentiate beyond whether it was in the visible spectrum or not. Whatever he was now, it was clearly adapted to total darkness. 

"Hmm…." Gwyn said, deep in thought. "That is much harder then. I'm glad the hat worked out, because I'm going to have to think on it. Can you make do with communication for now?" 

Concentrating hard, Nick sent an image of a winking smiley face giving finger guns to his hat. Surprisingly, while Gwyn looked proud, Director Swan let out a barking laugh and immediately looked embarrassed. 

"You're a funny guy, Breastman," Gwyn said, before turning and gesturing around her. "With communication taken care of for now, do you need any mobility assistance?" 

While Nick hadn't been focused on them, there were various mobility devices scattered around the room. All the basics were represented, powered and non powered wheelchairs, leg rest scooters, walkers, and crutches. More interesting were the non basics. There was what had to be a hoverchair, a little ufo, skeletal man-sized mech suits, and more miscellany spread around the shop. 

 It was tempting, and Nick thought about it, but decided to try something he'd been wanting to do since he got in the SUV earlier that night. Lashing out tentacles, he wrapped one around a ceiling beam and pulled himself into the air. Once airborne, he used a combination of swinging from the ceiling and pulling on whatever looked sturdy to zip around the room. It was not graceful, and his experiment ended when he used the skelemech as an anchor point. It held till he reached it, but then he had to scurry out of the way as it tipped over and nearly crushed him. Throughout all of this, Gwyn followed his movement clapping delightedly. 

"Nice! Niiiice!" She praised as he slunk back over. "Guess that answers the mobility question! Lira's going to have a field day setting up a training routine for that kind of traversal." 

"Speaking of Lira," Director Swan interjected. She'd watched Nick's antics with quiet interest rather than open glee, but a gleam in her eyes betrayed no small excitement. "Gwyn, if that's all you have for our friend here, we left another new Altered with her for testing. Given Lira's proclivities, I'm of a mind to return and make sure Cait survived. It's almost certain Lira took her extraordinary durability as a challenge, and if she stayed within regulation testing I would be shocked." 

Gwyn laughed that off, but Nick found himself a little worried for his new friend. He was pretty certain AEGIS had a lot worse they could hit Cait with than a truck. As they left, Gwyn walked them out, securing a promise from Director Swan to ask Cait if her durability results could be forwarded to her. Clearly, Nanosmith had some ideas that required a subject that was more crash-test dummy than human.

When they exited the bunker and turned back towards the Coliseum, Director Swan leaned over towards Nick, a sly smile evident in her voice.

"You know, provided Cait did survive, I've got another concern given her file. We should probably make sure Lira isn't already pregnant."