Are You Even Human

"Friendlies!" Emily shouts from atop my back. "Friendlies, friendlies!"

I'm not sure if the soldiers hear her or not, but either way it doesn't stop them from blasting a hole through another one of my knees, causing me to start to topple. I'm completely out of reserve, so I can't heal… but maybe I can shift into something smaller?

I don't have much choice. Everyone on my back could get pretty seriously hurt if I fall. I try to shrink and pray it works, and sure enough it does. I start to feel my reserves of power refilling a little as they reclaim the mass from my enormous Behemoth body. But just a little. Not anywhere near as much as I'd like.

But that's okay. The important thing is that it lets me better control everyone's descent to the ground. My fall goes from a catastrophic topple to a controlled collapse, except the collapse is less like a building and more like a star. My mass consumes itself, rapidly condensing down and folding away and ultimately getting tucked safely somewhere outside the realm of everyday physics. Emily hops off of my back and hits the ground running, Anastasia in her arms, as Christine falls off of me in a heap the moment the tendrils holding her let go. I grab her by the wrist, yank her to her feet and start forcing her to sprint alongside me. I don't have the kind of energy needed to tirelessly carry her around anymore, not in human form. And I don't dare to use anything other than my human form.

"Friendlies, friendlies, friendlies, don't shoot us please!!!" Emily continues to shout as we rush directly towards the building those gunshots came from. Behind us, the Angel-clone tide rapidly gains on us, and I'm almost thankful for it because it means whoever's in charge of this ambush squad suddenly has way bigger things to worry about than us. Not that they sound worried.

"Weapons free! Cut those monsters down!"

A thunder of automatic weapon fire erupts towards us, and though I instinctively turn my body to shield Christine, the bullets somehow all whizz past us without making contact, splattering through the Angel clones behind us without mercy.

That new power, that feeling of unending legions, presses into me again. It's in the air all around us, a ward against the wrath of the Queen. Whenever an alien enters this bubble, it dies, torn apart by unnaturally accurate gunfire. But outside its aegis, there is no such protection. For the moment I'm turned around, I watch as a dozen Angel clones get chunked by a storm of bullets, but the moment a bullet exits the power's radius… it vanishes. It's gone, in a puff of what looks like smoke.

At first, I think it must be some aspect of the power surrounding me, something that makes and guides weapons that only exist within its limited range. But then I realize the little puffs aren't smoke but dust, the microscopic remains of the bullet rapidly decelerating and spreading out as the Queen slices them into nothing. Just like what would happen to any soldier who leaves the range of this power, too. Just like what happened to Andre, and the real Lia, and probably most of my foster family.

Oh right, I can feel fear now. That's what this is.

I start sprinting again, doing my best to remove myself from the line of fire since the soldiers seem to be courteously doing their best to not shoot me. A side door from the building slams open and a guy in full tactical gear runs out of it, beckoning us.

"Over here, over here!"

Don't gotta tell me twice, but I'm not gonna complain that you did. I book it his way… or at least I try to, when something suddenly wraps around my ankle and yanks. I faceplant right on top of Christine but I have the presence of mind to at least let go before I'm dragged backwards, bullets impacting the Angel clone behind me but not fast enough to prevent it from getting replaced by another one before I can untangle myself.

"Go!" I shout at Christine. "Go!"

She stares at me in shock as another Angel clone leaps over the one dragging me to grab her, but fuck that. I didn't haul her ass the entire fucking way here just to let her get taken away now. I can't shapeshift much right now, but I really only need one thing: something to eat with.

My body shifts into Raptor form and reverses orientation in one motion: my head turns into my tail, my legs turn into my forelimbs, and all at once I go from being on the ground and dragged away helpless to being on the attack. I grab the clone trying to vault over me and yank it into the ground with my tail-mouth, biting down and swallowing just enough flesh to keep me going as the Angel attacking me tries to wrench my forelimb off. That limb suddenly being mostly blade makes that difficult for it, but since its scales are made of the same crystal as my swords I can't do any real damage to its limbs without a lot more leverage and force. Y'know, like with a bite.

I take another. I'll need it. I'll need every last scrap of biomass I can steal, and wouldn't you know it, there are suddenly piles of it all over the damn place. I take a split-second to roar at Christine, finally startling her enough to get her on her feet and running away as I intercept the next clone leaping for her.

And then, I'm so deep into the fray that I couldn't run away if I wanted to. I don't want to, though. With the soldiers handling the protection portion of my Task, the most important factor in ensuring my success is stopping this Angel. And for a few moments, I start to make headway at that; they're all so obsessed with grabbing Christine that I manage to start eating more than I have to heal, slowly making progress towards surviving in a situation where surviving, frankly, doesn't seem possible. But it doesn't need to be, as long as I do enough to complete my Task.

But of course, whatever machine guns they have set up in there are express-built for mowing down unarmored targets, and while the Angel clones are technically armored, the bullets are thick. For every round I see deflected off the scales, three successfully penetrate, though that could be due to the unnatural accuracy the weapons seem to have as much as the stopping power of the weapons themselves.

So the first thing I do when I have enough biomass is grow another tail. Angel clones die in droves around me, swarming furiously, silently screaming their accusations of theft and blasphemy into my mind. The air is thick with anger, loss, and death; single seconds and single bullets are the only things keeping me between life and death. But that's fine. Hate me all you like; I don't care. I can't care, because nothing matters except for stopping you.

I devour Angel flesh by the mouthful, tearing and biting and being ripped apart and growing back ever the more ravenous. My legs are crushed in the grip of a Tendril, pulped into blood and powder so I shift again, taking the Angel's own form, replacing its tendrils with ravenous tails so I can eat and eat and eat and eat and stay alive just one second longer.

A Raptor's brain doesn't know how to handle an Angel's form. But of course, I don't have the time or ability to be afraid. I make the change, and the screaming demand for my death quiets into something even more impotent.

After all, I don't have to take orders from a peer.

I am a thief, a raider, an insane, mad beast that must be put down… according to all of them. As a Raptor, it felt as though the very air carried those things as truths, as immutable facts of the world as clear as the ground under my feet. And still, the air is heavy with these ideas. I feel the rage and the hate and the insistence that I am wrong, horrid, evil, and deserving of death. But I deny this consensus; I reject it. My answer is no.

And the feel of the air shifts around me in response.

Negation is unclear, and unaccepted.

They aren't words. They aren't feelings. They just… are. I know that these concepts are being conveyed to me in the same way that I know what I'm looking at or listening to. The conversation is a qualia.

Did the air change because I spoke? Was my own truth felt, pressed into the air the way I feel all these petty opinions about me? I bite and tear and swallow everything I can get my teeth around, and again I say 'no.'

Negation is unclear, and unaccepted.

No, damn it! Fuck you! Can you monsters even understand me?

Emphasis: negation is unclear, which cannot be accepted.

Okay, well, how's this for clarity: leave. Leave! Leave us all the fuck alone, or I will eat you one by one until every last one of you is dead!

Negation reciprocated. Displeasure reciprocated. Intent of war reciprocated. Discussion concluded.

And somehow, in whatever way I've felt any of the rest of this, there is a subtle note of a much more complicated intent. A malicious, vindictive, personal message broadcast just to me. It feels like someone smiling at a funeral, it feels like an ant pleased by the pain it inflicts on a person, it feels like looking forward to a warm shower after a long day of hard work.

The Angel tells me: may your god weep upon your corpse.

How evocative. I hope you can understand my rejoinder: may your body taste as sweet as all the others.

The Angels converge to tear me apart, and I tear them apart in turn. Time becomes impossible to judge, my thoughts empty but for the next movement in this whirlwind of violence, the delicate dance between pain and food and healing and pain again. Bullets start to strike me, occasionally at first but more regularly as the chaos moves on. It doesn't matter. The only part of a wound that matters is how big it is, how much mass I need to waste to fix it before it bleeds even more. The bullets tend to go clean through me, leaving relatively small holes compared to the wide-scale damage being crushed by tendrils tends to inflict.

Sometimes, the bullets end up lodged inside of me… and then vanish like the food in my gut, removed from my flesh for the crime of not being part of the form I have chosen, the sovereign right I hold over every last cell of my body. The bullets don't help me replenish my biomass at all, but it's still interesting that I can eat them.

And I can hardly blame the humans for shooting me. I've copied the Angel's form inside a tide of Angels; how are they supposed to know? But I don't really have a choice. With the Angel's form as a baseline, replacing the tendrils with tail-mouths lets me barely, barely coordinate myself enough to eat just a little more than I lose. And as the fight goes on, I learn to make that margin of damage to intake wider, bit by precious bit.

The most dangerous thing the Angel can do to me is grab: lock me down, crush my body, prevent me from moving and fighting at anywhere near my full capacity while its fellows swarm me. Its tendrils are designed for that and they're better at it than my tails, which can only keep me healthy if they manage to bite off a chunk of flesh and swallow it without being damaged too much in the process. Nothing loses me as much biomass as getting grabbed and having a limb torn off of me, so that's what I focus on, that's what my mind obsesses over making happen as little as possible. It's a nearly impossible task in the midst of a writhing pit of arms, but every successful dodge helps.

But of course, I feel a tug. Something hooks around my limb, tries to squeeze, to hold tight, to keep me down! I do everything I can to yank the limb away, trying to slip out of its grasp in a panic, and every time I get a little better at it, my tails seeming a little harder to actually catch. I focus on it, I master it, because I have to or else I'll die. Over and over, I think I'm dead but I somehow slip away, and with every failed attempt to kill the air weighs angrier and angrier around me.

It's only a matter of time before I feel that horrible obsession with separation press in, too, fighting and pushing against the power of the humans protecting my Task (and shooting me a lot, but that's less important). The Angel's real body is here, supporting its clones with a contesting power aura expanding not only its own domain of influence but its Queen's. The Queen's power obliterates any ammunition that so much as kisses the steadily shrinking edge of whatever superhero's power is supporting the squad behind me, and suddenly the innumerable tide of Angel clones I felt like I was fighting off myself become much more focused and numerous without automatic weapon fire constantly chewing through their ranks.

There's a whole lot of battle going on around me that I didn't have the luxury of noticing much, as it turns out. Angel clones as well as Raptors, Behemoths, and Wasps are attempting to flank the soldiers in force, though it doesn't look like the building they're holed up in has been breached yet. The sensible thing to do would probably be to retreat. To return to the area controlled by the human super and see if they'll stop shooting me long enough to let me help them defend.

But somehow, I know that the Angel would prefer me to do that. It wants a drawn-out, defensive battle where it can keep supplying near-limitless reinforcements directly on site while we slowly exhaust our bodies and our ammunition supply. It's pissed at me for being stubborn enough to survive this long, sure, and it's extra pissed at me for stealing Christine from it (no, wait. Rescuing. Not stealing.) but ultimately, no matter how much I feel like I'm slowly making ground, the current situation favors the Angel. I might be slowly regaining biomass reserve, but I don't even know if the Angel needs a reserve, and if it does, well… it's presumably had a lot longer to prepare for this invasion than I have.

Yes, this is logical. This is optimal. My Angel brain doesn't have quite the same lack of self-preservation instinct as my Raptor brain, but I've never had all that much self-preservation instinct to begin with and at the end of the day the only thing that matters is the result. Gambling is a fool's game, but if I'm forced to play it I'm going for whatever has the best odds.

My gut says that's to attack.

I use up nearly all my accrued biomass at once, raising my size and weight as much as I can to get the reach and momentum to crawl over this horde of monsters as quickly as possible. I shift most of my tail-mouths back into tentacles; the Angel is already optimized for high speed over arbitrarily rough terrain, so no need to try fixing what isn't broken. The feeling of Division came from the west, and just very slightly north. If I kill whichever body actually has the power, the aliens lose their free reinforcements and their ability to push back against the powers of human supers.

But the Angel knows that, of course, which is why it's going to be surrounded by countless clones. Fine by me. Now that I'm in the rhythm, I'm starting to think this is kind of a bad matchup for you, Angel. You make more, and more, and more, and I just burn it all as fuel for the fire. I roar a challenge, and though the alien hordes remain eerily silent I must have sent my intent to the Angel one way or another because I feel it accept.

The clones swarm over me, climbing onto my limbs as I try to climb overtop of them. Their crystalline scales catch on my own, peeling them off of me, making me vulnerable, making me bleed. I devour chunks from as many as I can, but in the Angel's zone of influence the wounds I inflict on my foes do not stick and I am subjected to a fraction of the frustration I know it feels fighting me. But I don't need the wounds to stick, do I? As long as I can move forward, and I can eat just a little more than they can damage me, I can make progress.

…But progress towards what? I do actually have to kill at least one of these, ideally after figuring out which one that even is. My constellation-like network of eyes flick around independently from each other, trying to determine if any of the bodies are acting differently from each other, trying to keep their distance from me, doing anything that's a little weirder than its fellows, but I don't exactly know what counts as weird for a swarm of Angels in the first place. How can I tell which one of these fuckers is actually the real one!?

Negative response, the air presses around me, except for one little spot nearby that insists otherwise.

Affirmative response.

What. Seriously? Just like that? I mean, it's obviously gotta be a trap, right?

Assertion is unclear.

Y'know what? Fuck it. I have to start somewhere anyway. I rush for the Angel that felt affirmative and it rapidly retreats, clearly expecting me to do exactly that. I keep my eyes on a swivel, on constant lookout for whatever's going to jump out and fuck me over while I take bites out of the aliens swarming me and toss them away. But I don't see a trap. I just see that, behind me, the bullets shot by the humans make it a little further out for every step that the Angel retreats. Which means it's the real one, right? It's definitely the real one? Why would it tell me!?

Query is unclear.

Oh, shut the fuck up.

Request is unclear.

I am going to fucking eat you.

Acknowledged; aggression reciprocated.

Oh, you understand that one, huh? Well, be mad all you like. But can you back it up?

…Answer is unclear.

Ha. Let's find out. I thrust myself towards what I know is the true body, somehow or another, and the tide of Angels intercepts me harder than ever before. I can see now that the body truly is designed for movement across any surface—even copies of itself. They coordinate and interlock and form a living web of writhing flesh, crawling up me and wrapping around me and holding me down from every direction at once. I roar again, trying to break free as parts of me are carefully torn, ripped, and broken, the monsters carefully dealing enough damage to force me to heal without compromising their grip for even a moment.

But that's all I would need. Just a moment. Just a fucking moment, because my target is right there. Right on the outside of my cage. I refuse to fail this close to my goal! I'm not some impotent waste of space that can't even take care of herself! It's my job to take care of everyone else, and no disability, no apocalypse, and no goddamn Angel is going to stop me from doing that.

I pump up the pressure in my hydraulic muscles, peeling open a hole, trying to push through, but this net can patch itself. Angels rush to fill any gaps the second they're made, but I don't have to get desperate. There's only a little bit to push through. There's urgency, but there's no panic. Not in this mind. I just have to work, and wait, and—now.

The moment I free the tip of a tendril I let my whole body shift, pressing as hard as I can into the ground, pulling as hard as I can on my opening, and shrinking all the way down to Anastasia's size as I launch myself out of the gap. The Angel net collapses behind me as I grow again in midair, Wasp wings on my back directing my fall as a Behemoth blade and hydraulic heart bulge out from my chest. My wings snap together behind me and I drop like a cannonball, blade piercing through my target's core and splitting open its brain. Off-center or not, I know exactly where it is.

There's a twitch, a tiny spasm as the monster breathes its last gasps. Elbow-deep into its guts, I twist my arm and the feeling of the Angel's power vanishes from the world around me. The clones do not. They rage and wail and hate and despair, but the hard part is done. No more healing. No more reinforcements. Only food.

They come at me and I fight my way through them, returning to a thrashing ball of tail-maws and hunger. Without the Angel's power to back them up, they don't have the durability to deal enough damage to me before I bite them somewhere fatal and swallow away the pain. And since every clone dead is a safer world for my Task, I continue to eat, moving back towards the humans as I do. Once I make it back into the range of the human super, the aliens don't stand a chance, not the least of which is because the Army's reinforcements seem to have arrived.

Which is good. Great, even. But it doesn't concern me. I've been hungry for far too long, and now the entire battlefield is filled with meat. Countless corpses of Angels and other aliens layer the ground around me, and in the absence of immediate threats it is essential that I eat. I nearly failed my Task because of an insufficient reserve of biomass, and that is not in any way acceptable. So I engorge myself, killing every alien that approaches while ignoring the stream of aliens that retreat and the increasingly loud sounds of human weapons because there's more than enough of a feast here already. I'm already soaked with blood and gore from end to end, and my tail-maws don't exactly lend themselves well to table etiquette as they devour chunks of corpses bite by bone-splintering bite.

The first thing I pay attention to is the echo of the Queen's lament, rippling through all of Illinois at the news of her Angel's death. Her power retreats along with her front lines, shrinking away and ending its oppressive weight on my shoulders for the first time since she arrived. I had gotten so used to that part of my mind whispering of how I must be cut to pieces that it's oddly uncomfortable to realize it's gone.

But still, I continue to eat. And eat. And eat and eat and eat and eat. Some humans start making noise nearby, but they stopped shooting me a while ago when I just ignored it so I suspect they'll leave me alone if I ignore this, too.

Something burns, and one of my limbs is vaporized in an instant. An attack! I immediately reorient myself towards its source, coiling my limbs and growing my scales into longer, sharper daggers. Above me is a glowing white figure, encased in radiant light. I know her face, I know her clothes. Agnus Dei, one of mankind's strongest superheroes and greatest force multipliers, floats above me. The main things I know about her are that she can fly at supersonic speeds and shoot lasers. Not a good matchup for me; I'm not reasonably able to hit her with any of my attacks and she could easily fly outside my range and attack me with impunity. Unfortunately, she impedes my Task and I cannot retreat, so… wait. Wait wait wait wait wait that's Agnus fucking Dei, Max had a poster of her on his wall, that is not an enemy and not an impediment of any sort! We're on the same side.

Except we aren't because she shot me.

Except we are, she just shot me because I'm acting fucking insane, holy shit wait wait wait we have to negotiate here. I am friendly, I am on your side! Wait, no, humans talk with sound or whatever. Oh! Human! Right! I should look human, how do I do that again? Holy fuck what is going on what happened to me.

I slowly, carefully lower my tentacles and start to shrink down, my mind slowly sputtering back into working order. Okay. Just went a little insane there for a bit. No big deal, nobody worry about that. Uhhh, fuck, I need a human body. I'm supposed to use Lia's, right? Ugh. I hate Lia's body. I hate it so much. Really any purely human form is painfully unoptimized, and—okay brain, nope, none of that. Human is fine. It's fine! I've been human for my entire life, for fuck's sake!

Also I'm negotiating with humans, and the human form is obviously optimized for that. Right? Right. That makes me feel better for some reason. Lia's body it is.

I let humanity take over my form, doing my best not to descend into a complete mindless panic as I shift my brain into something capable of experiencing that for some stupid-ass reason. My hands are raised in a surrendering pose as I carefully finish my shift into a full-blown, one-hundred percent human, with all its restrictions, limitations, and absolutely terrible cable management. Why is the circulatory system so jagged and tangled!? At least make it symmetrical or something.

Wait shit I think people are talking to me.

"U-um," I begin, and the superhero threatening me with a death beam tenses, ready and waiting to vaporize me into dust. I swallow, and keep talking. "Sorry about that. I'm good now."

The world's strongest superhero blinks placidly at me.

"You're… 'good now?'" she asks. It's kind of remarkable, looking at her this close up, to see how plain she is. Blonde hair, brown eyes, skin that's probably less pale than it looks thanks to all the light constantly radiating out from her… it's boring, in a way. She looks to be in her late thirties or early forties, and while her body is in the sort of top form you'd expect from a soldier there isn't really anything else exceptional about it. She just looks like she's somebody's mom. I guess she probably is.

"I mean I'm, uh, lucid?" I try to clarify. "I just, I nearly died, and I was a little, um. Out of it."

She twitches the arm she's aiming at me, and scales bloom over my body in a panic, power rushing into my muscles… and then I push it all away, flow back into human standard because no amount of shapeshifting would save me if this woman decides that I should die. I realize, suddenly, that I'm still covered head-to-toe in blood and gore. That's probably not a good look.

Agnus Dei says nothing. I guess she isn't done testing me. Okay.

"A-are my friends okay?" I ask her. "I came here with three other people. Um, Christine, she's really tall. Anastasia, she's just a kid, but she was in really bad shape. She has claws and super long hair? And uh, Emily, she's my—"

Don't say sister.

"—girlfriend."

Agnus Dei stares at me for a little while longer, while I try really hard not to grow any tentacles or eat any corpses.

"...Your friends are alright," Agnus Dei answers, lowering her laser-aiming hand. Thank fuck! On both counts! "The little one had some pretty serious injuries, but as far as I know she's expected to pull through."

I let out a deep breath, a weight on my shoulders lifting off and flying out to the stars. I think I speak for both myself and Raptor brain when I say this: Task. Fucking. Complete.

"Thank you," I tell her.

She nods, but she doesn't smile, descending slowly and watching me very, very carefully.

"You and your friends were out here a very long time," she comments. "Long enough for most to die ten times over, even with powers."

"I'll, uh, take your word for it," I say, not really knowing how to respond to that.

"Are you often… not lucid?" she asks. "Have you had this problem before?"

The radius of her power finally brushes against me as she gets close, feeling me out, pressing into me. It is contrarianism and sadism and rejection and taboo. My power flares up in defiance at the slightest touch of it, my hackles raising and strength pouring into me seemingly from nowhere.

"I… no ma'am," I manage to say while all of that is happening to me. "This is the first time, even after all the fighting we've had to do. I just, uh. I think I might have pushed myself too hard, I guess. I got the Angel, though."

Her power's touch recedes, and the odd bloom of might recedes with it. It didn't feel like I was physically stronger, it felt like my power just got stronger somehow. But… stronger at what? I guess it doesn't matter. It's gone now, and everything feels normal again.

"You killed an Angel?" Agnus Dei asks, raising an eyebrow. "That's very, very impressive, if you're telling the truth."

"Yeah, it was, uh. Well, it was these guys," I say, awkwardly gesturing at the corpse I was eating. "It had a cloning power. The clones didn't also have powers, though, and I got the body that did."

"Just now?" she asks.

"Uh. In the fight just a bit ago, yeah."

"...Which explains why the Queen condensed its power," she hums. "Well, well. If you're an Angel or a Devil, you're certainly a convincing one."

I blink. I get I'm the one being interrogated here, but I think it's worth giving a question a shot for a namedrop like that.

"What's a Devil, ma'am?"

"A fallen Angel, of course," she answers. "All violence. No cunning. Prone to friendly fire. It's what I was convinced you were until you started talking."

Huh. Okay. Well, I'm glad she doesn't think I'm one anymore?

"You could still be an Angel, of course," she muses. "I don't know of any Angels that can talk, but it's best not to assume with those things. You could be, say, an illusion that speaks whatever words you read from my mind that would be most convincing."

"Um," I say, trying to think of something really unconvincing to contradict that with. "I promise I'm not?"

She chuckles, her feet finally touching the ground in front of me.

"No, you're not," the superhero agrees. "You're a shapeshifter. Not exactly less dangerous, in the worst-case scenario. What's your name, kid?"

"Lia," I lie. "Lia Morgan."

I'm not sure if lying is exactly wise, but it's the name Emily would have given them and contradicting that would definitely be bad.

"Is that what you normally look like?"

I look down at myself, realizing rather suddenly that I am stark naked except for the gore. Because… well, duh, of course I am. No way my skirt survived any of that. I instinctively remove some of my more sensitive bits, then consider that might be a bad idea and put them back, and then I grow some scales to hide them, and then I think that might be bad too so I get rid of them again. I stop looking at myself and focus back on Agnus.

"...I guess?" I manage. "Sorry, it's a little hard to, um. I'm a bit stressed right now. I just hid from, ran from, and/or fought aliens for four days straight and then I ate… I don't even know how many monster corpses in a weird fugue and I'm naked and covered in alien guts and now I'm talking to Agnus Dei and I think it's all just a little bit much for me right now."

Please Ms. Superhero I am an innocent, overwhelmed child! I am not going to kill and/or eat anyone that I haven't already, pinky promise. Normally I'd be a little disgusted with myself for doing the meek and helpless routine, but god dammit this is a bit much for me right now. I killed a fucking Angel and ate it! Give me a break already!

I killed an Angel.

Oh, holy fuck I killed an Angel.

That's, uh. Good? Bad? It's certainly insane, and generally considered to be one of the most impressive achievements a person can have beyond being part of a push to kill a Queen, since the number of times that's happened can be counted on one hand. So like, y'know, objectively, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, definitely a good thing. From the perspective of my future? Possibly not so good.

I was already doomed to a life in the military from the moment I got powers. That much was a given. But now, I'm special. I'm impressive. I'm noteworthy. Christine and Anastasia are probably in a similar boat, but me? They're going to hold me tight and never, ever let go.

Fuck. You idiot, Julietta, you didn't have to do any of that! I mean, I guess it might have been the impetus for the aliens to start retreating, but Agnus fucking Dei is standing right there, the military was going to be fine. You could have just run away from all the grabby tentacle monsters, but no, you had to jump into a pit of them totally naked like some kind of fucked up fantasy porno. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

"Ms. Morgan?"

"Huh?" I blink, remembering that that's supposed to be my name.

"I asked you to follow me," Agnus Dei informs me in a tone that indicates she was not, in fact, actually asking.

"O-oh, sorry, it's just… all hitting me, I guess," I mumble, moving to fol—wait where's my cane. Uh. Oh. Right. I don't… that's not my body anymore. I take a step, and another, and it feels normal and natural and easy and nothing bad happens so I follow Agnus Dei, pretending I never had that thought at all. "I can't believe we actually lived. I just… what happens now?"

"I'm not the one who decides that," she answers, and I guess that's fair enough. She leads me towards the humans in silence. I mean the other humans. Oh boy that's a Freudian slip that could fucking kill me if the military happened to be, I dunno, afraid I was an infiltrating Angel or something. Better add that to my long list of things to never ever say out loud, right underneath 'I like to run my thoughts on alien brains as a coping mechanism' and 'I'm not actually Lia Morgan, but I promise I'm wearing her skin for really good reasons.'

Okay, refocusing! As I approach the humans I feel that familiar power from the battlefield, the one that… made people really accurate with guns or something, which seems like it's far too oddly specific to actually be how the power works. But as for which of the dozens of soldiers moving around, knocking down houses, supervising emplacement setups, and countless other tasks actually has that power, I can only guess.

"Get me Sainsbury in five," Agnus says into her headset. "New power pickup, specialty interview. Yes, again. And tell him to bring something for the girl to wear. What do you mean 'what do I mean,' she's naked. Yes, that one. No, it turns out she does talk, apparently she was just having a time of it after ripping her first wings. Yes, well, the angel is dead and I sure didn't kill it. Don't I know it; I'm sure Commander will just happen to find it best for the Army to snap her up. Four, now. Goodbye."

Hmm. Well, I think I got most of that. It notably didn't sound like formalized radio chatter; whoever Agnus was speaking to, it was probably someone she knew, on a private or mostly private line.

"So, uh, is a 'specialty interview' good or bad?" I ask her.

"That depends on you," she answers.

Hmm. I'm gonna go with 'bad' then. Probably bad. Agnus and I stand around for a few more minutes before a man walks over to us carrying a hospital gown. He's got a very different set of gear than every other soldier around, with an odd mix of light armor and professional dress that's unlike any military uniform I've seen before. With the tactical vest and helmet, it feels like he should have the entire ensemble on, but his pants are more like slacks, his shoes definitely aren't combat boots, and he's not wearing any gloves at all.

"Hmm," he says, holding out the hospital gown towards me at full arm’s-length in a manner that implies he would really, really prefer not to make contact with me during the exchange. "You should have told me to bring a towel."

"Spoken like someone who can't scour himself clean with a thought!" the superheroine grins at him.

"Yes."

His words are clipped and almost emotionlessly professional. If he was a cartoon character I'd expect him to end every sentence by adjusting his glasses… but since this is real life, he is unfortunately not wearing any. Still, I have to immediately give him a full perfect score on his first impression because the man's eyes did not so much as stray below my chin even once for the entire interaction. He doesn't even seem fazed. The man saw a teenage girl dressed in nothing but blood and immediately decided that he just stone-cold did not give a fuck.

I shrug the medical smock on, and as soon as I'm done the man offers me a handkerchief from his pocket.

"Do wipe your hands, at least," he instructs me, so I do, trying (and failing) to get all the alien blood off with a dry cloth. "I am Master Specialist Jeremiah Sainsbury, also known as Cross Country. I specialize in small-scale, long-range personnel transit operations. When you are ready, please take my hand and try to avoid using your power. It is possible that you will feel some discomfort; this is normal, do your best to ignore it."

I nod, and take his hand after a couple more futile attempts at cleaning my palms. It's only once I touch him that I finally feel his power; I guess his, like mine, works based on contact. He feels like an impossibility, an assault by a puzzle unsolvable, telling me, insisting to me, that one equals two. It scratches at my mind with its furious proclamation, and every instinct I have screams that it is wrong.

His power tries to soak its way into me, and at first I instinctively push it out, the pressure of it far too much like the Queen and her Angels. I flinch, and scales grow up my arm, my right eye separating out into a miniature constellation of three alien orbs. But just as the changes flow up my arm, before I can start growing any tentacles or tail-maws or what have you, I force it all back to normal.

"S-sorry," I stammer. "Sorry."

The pair of superheroes frown at me, but they don't say anything. Cross-Country simply tries to use his power on me again, so I hold my instincts back and let him. Suddenly, my vision doubles. I am, for an instant, standing in an impromptu military encampment in the middle of a suburb southeast of Chicago, but I am also in a concrete-walled box halfway between a waiting room and a jail cell. I feel my surprise twice over, doubled yet subtly different, before the me in the suburb ceases to be, the impossibility collapsed into a singular truth.

"Wh-what?" I blink.

"Some discomfort is normal," Cross-Country repeats. "You will wait in this room and you will not leave until you are given permission."

I glance up at the corner of the room, where a security camera emphasizes the point quite clearly.

"Understood," I nod. He nods back, and then vanishes, leaving me with the handkerchief.

Well. Uh. There's a table and a couple chairs. I guess I'll sit down and wait. I plop my butt down, expecting to feel some relief from getting to sit after such a long day, but I'm glutted with biomass so my body isn't the slightest bit sore or tired. I'm mentally exhausted, of course, but that's been the case since this all started and I'm certainly not going to get any rest here, of all places.

So I wait. It's… surprisingly difficult to just wait, actually. It feels wrong. I should be doing something. Eating something. Talking to someone. Braiding Anastasia's hair. Practicing my shapeshifting. Anything. But I'm just supposed to wait, and the last thing I want to do is grow alien bits in the middle of what is probably a top-secret military compound of some sort. I want to, though. The walls between me and what I thought were safe and sane uses of my power have thoroughly broken down after… well, everything that just happened. It's taking all the self-control I have left to not swap my brain over to a Raptor's for a bit just to be extra sure there aren't any aliens gearing up to attack us.

Although I guess… why shouldn't I? It's not like shapeshifting my brain is a particularly visible transformation. And it would make everything so much easier to just shut off the anxiety and stress, declare a Task, and just…

Wait. My Task is to wait until someone arrives or gives me permission to leave.

So I wait.

And I wait.

And the next thing I know, someone has arrived. Two someones, even. Task complete.

The pair of humans that walk in through the room's only door are not dressed for war, although both of them are armed with a handgun. The smaller one walks in first, holding a clipboard with what I suspect are notes about me. The larger one holds nothing, but when it enters the room I feel a pressure that immediately reminds me of Cross-Country's; it, too, is puzzle and impossibility and contradiction, but rather than insisting on that contradiction it searches for it, knowing it intimately and lovingly like a mother knows her child.

The power doesn't seem particularly strong or aggressive, settling comfortably on my shoulders like a blanket. It makes no attempt to penetrate my defenses, but I get the distinct impression it does not actually need to.

Ah, right. Emily warned me of this. She thought it was important that I could say she never used powers without lying. That's what this power is, isn't it? A living lie detector. But how does it detect lies, exactly? How does it determine truth?

"Well, let's get the easy ones out of the way first, huh?" the human with the clipboard says, sitting down across from me as the lie detector takes a standing position behind it. "Are you Lia Morgan?"

Well, fuck! The easy ones, it says! The easy ones! Jesus Christmas Christ, okay. Fuck!

…But I don't let any of those internal thoughts show on my face. I calmly revert to Lia's full, standard body, smile hesitantly at the woman interviewing me (or at least she looks like a woman. Why didn't I notice that until now?) and in my best hesitant, fearful voice I answer her question.

"Oh, geez. Uh, I'd like to confidently say yes, but honestly? After everything that happened I kind of don't know anymore."

All technically true, and the lie detector doesn't react to any of it. Which might mean nothing, but it might mean everything.

"Could you explain that a bit more?" the interrogator asks, and the game begins.