New York Overture

Subject: Re: New York Overture Sun 24 Jan 2016 - 23:31

Leena's mass turned in its entirety to look at Jeanne, then staring at her for a full beat. She knew the kid was smart, but she hadn't expected her to put the situation together that quick.

Leena was also moved to silence out of confusion- over the past few years she had gotten pretty good at reading tone, inflection, facial expressions and body language, and Jeanne's body and voice were telling conflicting stories. Her face said 'sad, crushed, disillusioned' and her body, 'foreign emotion, does not compute, discomfort'. However, her voice showed revelation and understanding, if not necessarily commendation, and nothing in the way she spoke gave feelings of falseness or deception.
Overall, Leena wasn't quite sure whether to make heads or tails of the situation, or decide that the coin had simply landed on its side and stuck there.

She managed to get out, "Well, you missed some details, but that's the basics of it, yeah" before Jeanne got up. Here 'eyes' followed Jeanne curiously as she walked away. Waffles one minute, crepes the next, she thought to herself. A twinge of depression hit as she remembered her inability to taste, but she shook her 'head' to snap back to the here and now.

in the process of shaking her head back and forth, droplets of slime cascaded off the sides of her face, forming beaded strands that looked not unlike cornrows before the melted back in.
huh. i'll have to play with that later. Well, assuming...

Leena kept an ear(??) out for anyone coming this way and made her way over to the lockers on the side of the room, idly spinning the dial on her own lock
it occurred to her that she hadn't checked in on Emily yet, so she leaned over to see how the woman was doing...

Subject: Re: New York Overture Sun 24 Jan 2016 - 23:46

Jeanne looked around so as to find her way to the shower around the corner, as Leena had mentioned upon their arrival.

She began to undress once she was obscured, and stepped under the showerhead. Uncaring about the temperature, she cranked the water on with the gauge straight in the middle--and was greeted with a waterfall of freezing cold water.

Jeanne shivered involuntarily and actually recoiled from the stream. This caused small sparks of white light to dance along the walls of the washroom, disappearing once she realized that she was subjected to this fate directly as a result for her own actions.

"My god," she mumbled, the water getting to a more humanly acceptable temperature. She put her face in the stream and closed her eyes, finally getting to relax. It had been a while since she'd been able to be calm, for she'd been subsiding primarily on the cortisol flowing in her body since before she'd even deserted, and before she'd even joined. She'd been in a state of panic ever since she saw that assassination on national television, and her pure but unfortunate mind had been able to extrapolate what would happen before she realized it herself. She'd felt it in her visceral reaction, and her fear, and the way she dreamt of nuclear winter that night.

She sighed. This was her life now.

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 1:35

As Leena looked to see how Emily was doing she would come to the conclusion that... Emily was no longer there. While looking Leena could see no sign of anything having happened either. She was simply... Gone.

Once Jeanne was done with her shower and turned the faucet off she would see the curtain open. Standing there was a white male who stood what looked like 5'7" who wore what looked like a button of shirt and blue jeans if they'd never been washed. He wore no shoes, and wore a pair of clean black glasses that covered his dark green eyes. The man also had a mess of dark brown hair that clearly has no thoughtful style to it, and a goatee that's only partially shaved. You didn't hear him enter, had no idea who he was-

And he was holding a towel.

"Here you go."

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 2:07

Jeanne stared at the man wide-eyed, and her jaw slightly dropped as she took in his entire appearance. Her arms dropped to her sides. While Jeanne had never felt particularly self-conscious about her body, it had never occurred to her to think about the possible scenario in which she is prematurely exposed to a stranger in a strange and foreign place.

She didn't scream. Instead, she took the towel, and smiled weirdly. "Thanks."

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 2:10

"No problem." The looked her up and down for a moment before stating,"You look nothing like your profile. Didn't your mother ever tell you that those who lie go to Hell? Or something."

He shrugged before backing up enough to give her room to get out,"May want to get dried and dressed though, cause we gotta go."

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 2:13

Jeanne raised an eyebrow, finally snapping into cognizance.

"What?" She stepped out of the shower after the man, wiping down her thighs and her stomach. She eventually succeeded in tying the towel around her hair, still not intimidated by her own nudity.

"Go where?"

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 2:19

"Not here that's for sure. Who knows how long it'll take the Honour Guard to track me down. I'm sure they're set to drop a tungsten rod or something silly like that on this building in no time. Then again you probably know all this huh?" Without skipping a beat the man continued,"I already saved the other chick with the broken ribs easily enough." The man replied before opening the door to leave. In doing so Leena would see the man walk out of the showers and give a half wave.

"Oh, forgot to tell you. Friend's fine, don't worry about it."

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 2:22

"I really don't." Jeanne's mouth would move without making sounds a few times before she finally managed a flustered, "Who are you?"

At this point, Leena would see Jeanne running after him through the door, her feet leaving marks on the floor's tiles.

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 2:27

Being able to see all directions as your 'peripheral' is more than a little disorienting, so when Leena saw movement in the direction of the shower, that didn't look like Jeanne, she was halfway certain she was seeing things. That said, she was on edge due to Emily's sudden disappearance, so her peripheral very quickly became the focus of her attention, and in it she found a strange man.

A lot of thoughts passed through her head, ranging from how'd he get in here? to did the Honor Guard find us already?, but the main subject of her concern was-

"Jeanne!"

Leena rapidly slid across the floor, much like she had back at the fitness center, but slowed slightly by the fact that this floor was carpet instead of concrete. Her only concern was getting between Jeanne and this strange man...
so it made sense that she pulled up short when Jeanne came around the corner, naked as the day she was born aside from the towel (where did that come from?) wrapped around her head.

Leena looked first at the man, then at Jeanne, then back and forth again before asking, "What's going on?"

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 2:42

"I don't know," Jeanne cried out, her panic now fully triggered by Leena's surge of action.

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 2:47

The man looked down and away from the women; his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. His shoulders sunk as, for a moment, the question of who he was tread deeply on him. During the brief pause it only became more and more clear just how misshapen and unclean this man was, and the thoughts of what he must have been through to look this bad was hard to keep out. With a roll of his shoulders he looked upward, still not daring to look at the women behind him. With a steady hand he gently pushed his glasses back into place with the gentlest tap of glass shaking in the frame. Even those needed fixing apparently...

"That... Is a very loaded question you know... One that not many people know the answer to, some seeking the answer to that very question for months or even years. Some believe 'you' are defined by a singular spark one must find, others still by what you do or own. Maybe we're all defined by simpler things, but no... Not even that fits. To me, who one is should be determined not by any of that, but by what they've experienced. What they've done in life. A life of... Being Free."

The man stood there solemnly for a solid 30 seconds before turning around, his stance loosening up entirely as it looked as if his attitude took a complete 180,"But to actually answer your question, Mike. I was sent here to save three Alphas."

Subject: Re: New York Overture Mon 25 Jan 2016 - 3:04

Leena reached out to comfort Jeanne, but stopped short, sighing in mounting frustration. Extending a tentacle, she reached out and found a towel (huh, Raoul never leaves these here; weird) and, as daintily as she could, wrapped it around Jeanne’s bare shoulders.

Then the man spoke, and of all the things that could have come out of his mouth, philosophy was certainly not what she expected.
“…that is not a bad perspective, because regardless of what we might have been to begin with, it is what we see, hear, and feel that makes us what we are here and now.”

…
“Leena.” She began to extend a tentacle, but thought better of it and held the boneless appendage up for the man to see. “I’d shake your hand, but I don’t think you’d want me to, and it’s not that I’m ungrateful, but how exactly do you plan to do that?”

Subject: Re: New York Overture Tue 26 Jan 2016 - 19:06

Jeanne's initially dazed, the panicked, and then intgrigued state of mind mellowed out considerably as she mimicked the man's general calmness. She'd always been sensitive to group hysteria; the butterfly effect of a small push towards panic had often resulted in a younger, pre-pubescent Jeanne in throwing crying fits over a teacher's insinuations that she'd done somrthing improperly. The very thought of disappointing somebody or not living up to her own standards had always filled her with discomfort. Jeanne's fickle emotional state had smoothed out in recent years, but her total and unabashed loss of emotional control--a heap of confusion--in the situation was a bitter reminder that she was still a slave to her emotional state.

She blushed, and wrapped the towel around her body, silently thanking Leena.

She also had to smile, because despite everything, Mike seemed like a kindred spirit. A rock, despite as disheveled and peculiar as he was. Somebody to act as a counterpart to her airy hurricanes of dogma. She blinked, and nodded thoughtfully to Mike's monologue.

"We are," she swallowed the lump that was building in her throat. This gave her voice its thinner quality it used to have. "Three alphas." Her speech broke as she tried catching her breath, unsure how to proceed. "But why?"

Subject: Re: New York Overture Tue 26 Jan 2016 - 20:00

Mike looked to Jeanne and rose a single eyebrow before stating in a matter of factual manner,"Because I was told to." After reaching into his pocket and extending a piece of paper to Jeanne he continued,"This is how I'll save you two. It's a flier for a Super Hero convention meet up where you'll hop a bus to the convention. I recommend you both be there. As for you Leena, I just put a suit in your locker lined with a resin polymer. If I'm right you shouldn't be able to melt that yet."

With a roll of his shoulders Mike looked at the pair and finished with,"I got about a minute, any questions?"

Subject: Re: New York Overture Fri 29 Jan 2016 - 12:14

Leena cocked her ‘head’ at Mike, silently wondering a number of things: how did he know which locker was hers? How did he get a suit made of a material that she wouldn’t dissolve, and how did he get it in the locker without her noticing? But, for the sake of her happiness at having something to wear that wouldn’t instantly melt, she put those questions aside and went back to her locker. She finished spinning the combination, but what she tried to open it, her tendril wasn’t strong enough to pull the lock and passed right through it. She stared at her tendril in annoyance for a moment, made it thicker, and tried again- this time the lock popped open.

“Hiding in plain sight? Clever, but how do we find you once we are at the convention? Assuming you are going to be there yourself, of course.”

Leena opened the locker to find a tall, heavy-looking costume where she would usually hang her coat. She pulled it down from the hook and looked it over; it certainly didn’t look like it could hold all of her mass, but it looked to be of good-quality material. She turned it over and realized that it was a suit you put on feet-first. She pulled open the neck and had a moment of trying to figure out how she would get a ‘leg’ in there when she didn’t really have a leg. Something clicked and she lowered her tendril down into the suit, further and further until she felt a bottom to it.
Then, she just kind of…followed it, letting her body pour in after itself. The legs filled up and started to stretch to accommodate the mass, but it wasn’t quite enough, and she started to fill the chest as well. She got halfway up the torso when she felt more space, more cavities she could fill in, so she did. She started to lose balance as the bulk of her body was actually in the suit, but she shifted her weight a bit and leaned back against the lockers for support. Finally, all the was left was her head and tentacle, but there was no room left except… oh wait… She grabbed the flap on the back of the neck and pulled it up as she flowed into it, reforming her head inside it and shifting her tentacle’s mass a little further down.

Now that she was all snug inside, she straightened up a little more, distributing the weight a little better, less in the legs, more in the arms, holding herself steady, etc. If they made it through this, this suit would be a great support for helping her practice her humanoid shape.

Okay, now to…whooaahh- she tried to take a stop and almost fell on her face. In a human body the skeleton supports muscles, which move the body but only allow it to move in certain ways and to certain degrees. If your body is made out of sentient slime with no internal levers, trying to walk on two ‘legs’ becomes a task in itself. Three stumbling steps forward and she caught herself on the edge of a make-up table and sighed. As she slowly straightened back up, she caught sight of what she looked like in the suit for the first time. If she had a jaw, it would have hit the floor.

The suit itself was primarily black, but overlaying most of it were scale-like sections of a dark silver, metallic-looking material that made it look like she was wearing armor. Strips of deep green and spots of blue broke the monotony, primarily on the limbs, but most of her front and back was armored. The ‘hood’ that she had put on came up over where her ears would have been and was quite snug, and she realized it felt a lot like neoprene, so it was a lot like a scuba suit.
And her figure- oh, god. Where once was a shapeless blob now stood a hulking, but very obviously feminine, human. At a guess she now stood 6 ½ feet tall, and the way the contours of the suit were designed it gave her the impression of being incredibly muscular- powerful legs, broad shoulders, thick arms, and down the line. And her bust was…sizeable to say the least. She’d had fair-sized breasts before, but this was just ridiculous.

In short, she looked like a cross between an Amazon and…well, a superhero.

“Oh my god, oh my god!” Leena couldn’t help but chortle at her appearance. “I have worn some outrageous costumes before, but this one has got to take the cake. Where did you even find this?!”

Leena did notice a problem though: though her ‘head’ was covered, her ‘face’ was still exposed, and even if she could apply make-up and not disintegrate it, it wouldn’t change the fact that she had no facial features at all.

“Um, Mike, the suit works great,” (which it was; the suit had absolutely no reaction to her acidic touch), “but how am I supposed to hide… this.” She gestured to her face, but it was pretty obvious what she meant.

Subject: Re: New York Overture Fri 29 Jan 2016 - 15:31

Jeanne winced and giggled at Leena's stumbling, and pronounced a soft ooooh as her now more humanoid-looking shape towered over her. Jeanne was tall for a girl, especially a skinny unruly teenager like herself, and so having a female form that she could see at above eye-level was exciting in a strange way.

"Are there any clothes for me?" Jeanne asked, the dulcet tones of her voice taking better shape as her body and mind relaxed. She was not shrill and confused as when Leena and her had first met, and she was not surly and stressed like when she'd been under the pressure of the Honor Guard at her and her companion's tail.

She was happy to finally have a concrete direction, and it gave her strength. This also brought back her sass. "Oh, don't worry, Leena, nobody's going to be looking at your face."

Her gaze dropped just a few degrees.

Subject: Re: New York Overture Fri 29 Jan 2016 - 19:22

Looking over the Leena Mike looks to the lockers and, seemingly from nowhere one of the other lockers opens as a mask is seen inside,"There ya go. Wrong locker. And yeah I'll be there." He seemed a bit rushed, as if mentally focusing on something else while helping.

As for Jeanne Mike looked a bit... Confused at first before looking Jeanne up and down, seemingly sizing her up. After a moment Mike replied in an unsure manner,"Yyyeah, I got something."

With a tap of his foot Mike would look over to the lockers once again and say,"Okay, yours are in the fourth from the right. Don't worry about the lock, I broke it."

Subject: Re: New York Overture Fri 29 Jan 2016 - 20:29

Leena laughed alongside Jeanne's obvious smarm, and lightly cupped her 'hands' beneath her breasts, bouncing them lightly

"You may be right- still, can't be too careful now, can we?"

Leena turned at the sound of the locker opening, and took very slow precise steps towards it, taking her time to make sure she was moving right. It would still take a lot of practice before it stopped looking wooden. In the locker, she found a silver, metallic mask. She tried picking it up, and almost dropped it because her fingers wouldn't respond. She caught it on her arms, and looked down at her gloved hands. she tried moving each finger as an individual tentacle, and found that it felt incredibly complicated. she tried instead to use the end threads as parts of a single larger tentacle and pulled- all fingers curled into a claw. it took a few seconds to position her fingers, but once she had them where she wanted she was just fine. Slowly, she turned the mask over in her hands

The mask was solid, and shaped like a snake's head, fully embossed and hammered into shape. The mask's maw was wide open, with a large pair of fangs bared at her. Very coolBefore she put it on, Leena noticed something else inside the locker, some mass of black. Focusing on curling a single finger, she hooked it and pulled it into the light- it was a wig, made with long, voluminous black hair. Oh good, I was wondering how I was going to explain that. One item in each hand, she walked back over to the make-up table. Setting down the mask, she hooked her 'index fingers' and gently pulled the wig over the hood of the suit. the hood covered her neck to forehead, so there was no risk of catching the wig (which was likely vulnerable) on her body. She arranged the hair carefully about her shoulders, and then picked up the mask.

The mask fit over her face, but she found there was no way to secure it; there was apparently supposed to be a strap, but it wasn't here. But the holes were... maybe.
Leena looped small tendrils of slime through the eyelets of the mask, one at a time, and then had them rejoin back with her face. This pulled the mask tight to her face, and the mask didn't fall. As she suspected, given the aftermath of the Honor Guard's kick earlier, that her slime was drawn to itself.

Mask secure, she looked back in the mirror. While she felt a little bit silly, Leena had to admit she looked pretty fierce. She teased the strands of the wig bit by bit to get it until she was satisfied with how it looked. She mentally calculated the position of each strand, each contour, just as it was, so that she could fix or replicate it later, and turned around to see how Jeanne was doing.

Subject: Re: New York Overture Fri 29 Jan 2016 - 20:56

It was a nice thing to finally depart from gym clothes and firmly-pressed Honor Guard gabardine. Jeanne felt a slight pang of guilt on how exactly the clothes were acquired, and she hoped for her own emotional sanity that they were taken from a store and not from a person.

She nodded absentmindedly at Mike and went towards her designated locker, hand wrapped tightly around the towel on her body. She tut-tutted lightly at the broken lock, but upon opening it she found the plainest possible clothes she could wear, and it made her happy, because it was essentially the type of clothes she wore anyway.

She stopped for a moment as she was retrieving the black v-neck sweater with one hand, and decided that since her glorious naked body had been spotted anyway, she, once again, did not feel any reservations when it came to hiding herself dressing. She let go of the towel she had been handed by Leena and unearthed a pair of nicely-folded, unwrinkled underwear from the pile of dubiously acquired clothing.

"That's convenient," she said, and slipped the knickers on. Bold white font spelled out "CELEBRATE" on her ass. Next came the black jeans, which she also slipped on, and finally the sweater, which she careful put around her naked, soft torso, and then tucked so that it looked disheveled. Fashion.

The next towel to go was the one she'd wrapped around her head, which dropped unceremoniously in the same pile as the other one. She ran her fingers through her hair, a wet, glistening black, tousling it, and then flipped it back with a brisk motion.

"I'm ready," she said.

Subject: Re: New York Overture Fri 29 Jan 2016 - 22:10

Leena couldn't help but chuckle a little as Jeanne meticulously mussed her outfit- she'd always considered crispness and neatness to be the hallmarks of fashion, but then again, it was Jeanne's style.
She nodded, but also looked back at her reflection in the mirror.

"I'll need to find something to cover up with," she said. "We may be going to a convention, but this will still attract a lot of attention until we actually get there." She paused and thought about it for a moment. "Actually, we might be okay for now; this is New York, after all, but sooner would still be better than later.
Looking around, she didn't see the brochure for the convention. She also found that she had gotten at least somewhat used to having 360-degree vision, so suddenly having it reduced to the eyes ad eyelets of the mask made her feel partially blindfolded. She'd get used to it, but it was kind of jolting, going from one problem to another.

"Jeanne, where did the flyer say we needed to go?"

Subject: Re: New York Overture Fri 29 Jan 2016 - 23:36

Jeanne pulled at her jeans' back belt loop as she shuffled around to open the flyer that had been placed in her hand and subsequently on a surface as she'd been dressing up. The jeans didn't quite stay up on their own without a belt, but they would certainly do for now.

She read the location for the bus pickup, and then motioned it towards Leena, her arm extended and the paper dangling straight from her curled fingers. She waited a moment for Leena to finish reading, and then took a determined breath.

"Time to go," she said to her gelatinous friend.

Subject: Re: New York Overture Fri 29 Jan 2016 - 23:56

"Just one minute."

Leena knew they didn't have much time, but she had a compulsive need to tidy everything up. She swept up the towels, dropping them into a hamper in the corner, and closed the lockers one by one, making sure nothing was missing.

She stopped for a minute to grab a couple of things out of her own locker, lingered a moment, realizing that she was not likely to come back for quite some time, if ever. But Jeanne had a point- the time to go was now.

She took one look around the dressing room as she dropped her items in the gym bag and zipped it shut. Out they went, shutting off the lights and closing the doors behind them with a certain finality.
Squaring their shoulders, Leena and Jeanne began to walk towards what they could only hope was salvation as the sun broke the horizon, illuminating the New York City skyline before them.

End