Chapter Text
“This… is pretty humiliating…” Stay Gold sighed to herself quietly, doing her best to ignore the white haired elephant in the room, which was currently prowling around behind her as if it had no idea what legs were.
Which was to say, the thing that looked like an umamusume but was definitely not an umamusume was sort of just stumbling in a vague mimicry of humanoid locomotion- balance off and shaky, traveling mostly by some odd mix of instincts and rapidly learned motions, and occasionally falling onto the hardwood floor with an awkward thump. It’d be so much less awkward if she fell on the rug, but no. Straight onto the hardwood, each time with a sound that might have been human, if not for the fact that the voice creating it was trying to push an umamusume’s voice box to do things it categorically was not designed for.
The fact that she was alive currently was doing a lot to settle her nerves at the moment, but the earlier humiliation of being found by the security staff and Director Akikawa on the floor of the Ritto Dorm, screaming weakly while an alien creature disguised as an umamusume sucked on her face like she was trying to rip it off was… well.
It didn’t make this situation any better.
That the erstwhile not-quite umamusume proved to calm down a little after everyone stopped looking at it and trying to make eye contact was, if nothing else, part of the reason why Stay Gold was here in the Director’s office alongside said alien thing that was not, in fact, an umamusume. No matter how much it looked like one.
It was also still categorically naked, having resisted all attempts to put a blanket around its shoulders, but seemed at least aware enough of the concept of modesty that it held one hand in front of its pelvis while it tried to find a way to inhale Stay Gold alive and screaming. Despite having a mouth that was literally too small for that to work out.
And despite being several hundred times smaller than it should have been.
Was it a little dehumanizing to call the thing an it instead of a she? Probably. But until it showed signs of being a person rather than a particularly aggressive mimic- possibly with an unhinging jaw and the ability to scream really loud- she wasn’t about to hold her breath.
“UNDERSTANDING!” Director Akikawa shouted as she stood from behind her desk somewhat unnecessarily- her having walked in, sat down, and then stood up again- only to freeze when that same flash of motion and sound made the creature behind Stego growl.
TOCK. TOCK. TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK-
And then a low, slow bellow that would have sounded hilarious had a human voice tried to replicate it, but still came out bassy and echoing in a way that made Stay Gold distinctly aware that it wasn’t just making noise- it was, impossibly, projecting itself the same way she’d often felt on the track.
Did this fucking thing manage to mimic an umamusume so thoroughly it had access to a fucking Zone!?
“Hm.” Director Akikawa, uncharacteristically, sat her ass back down with a frown etched so deep it almost made her look the age she supposedly wrote on her papers. She looked… unsettled. Like a part of her animal hindbrain had just woken up in a way that most humans or umamusume never experienced and she did not like it. The cat sitting upon her head hissed, suddenly standing up on all fours and arching its back like it was trying to scare off a much bigger, much scarier predator, and Stay Gold didn’t even have to look to know that the thing behind her was putting on a threat display that made the hairs on the back of her neck raise.
The sound alone was enough. She didn’t need to imagine what horrors its face was probably doing right about now.
That flickering iris… the unnatural square shape of that iris… something about it just felt distinctly wrong. She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to someone unprepared for it, didn’t already have it pre-seared into her memory even across reincarnation.
That the Director didn’t immediately kick her own chair out of the window in fear, and managed to control herself enough to sit down and lower her gaze…
The force of will required raised Stay Gold’s estimation of the woman a little higher than it had already been.
“Ahem,” Director Akikawa stated at a much lower volume, unfolding her fan quietly and staring at Stay Gold in lieu of the creature behind her. “As I was saying. I understand that this is something of an embarrassment, Stay Gold-san, but thank you for… subduing this one before she could harm anyone else. I am sorry that the security staff were not able to locate her before she found you.”
“It… could be worse,” Stay Gold mentioned lightly, rubbing at her cheek and wincing a little at the nearly circular bruise there- it wasn’t like an impact bruise, the kind of thing she’d have gotten from a baseball or a fist… honestly it was more like a really weird hickey, considering that the thing that had made it had done so by sucking on her face. “I’m just… confused, ma’am. Why haven’t we… restrained that thing yet? Or better yet, made sure that it doesn’t hurt anyone anymore at all? Why is it…”
“All but roaming free? Because it- she…” Director Akikawa sighed, pursing her lips and staring directly down at her desk, as if the thing still making those awful clicking noises from behind Stay Gold wasn’t even there. Or like she was trying to pretend it wasn’t. “... I will admit. I am terrified of her very presence. I do not know if she is like us, or if she is like one of the doppelgangers that Manhattan Cafe-san occasionally comes across. Certainly, she is something that is not normal, something unnatural… and yet… she is an umamusume all the same-”
“Are you sure?” Stay Gold asked, almost jerking out of her chair and hissing under her breath- only stopping because it made her thoroughly aware of those white strands drifting through the air around her, what used to be a bob of white hair billowing out unnaturally into something almost long enough to reach the floor in ephemeral waves. She froze a little, hearing that same tock. tock. tock. start up again behind her.
Was it an intimidation tactic? Was she trying to kill them? She didn’t know. She never did figure out what that thing was back in her first life, only that there’d been a few other beings on that same farm that had vanished into the wind one day and it was responsible.
So she sat back down.
She trembled softly.
She took a deep breath, then balled up her fists against her thighs and tried to communicate silently with the director using jerky, halting JSL because she couldn’t possibly be sure if the thing behind her was about to strike-
Tock. Tock. Tock.
All attempts at communication stopped in quiet anticipation. Would it attack?
And then- the silent thumping of something tripping over its own two feet and a quiet grumble of something that, for once, sounded like a human voice.
Barely. Rough, harsh and disused, like the thing speaking didn’t really understand how to speak, but undeniably humanoid. A girl. An uma.
“Oww…”
It wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t even in Japanese. The way it sounded to Stay Gold’s ears, the way she could hear the subtle intonation in the accent…
Of all the things this creature could imitate… did it somehow decide to mimic an American?
The non sequitur of that thought almost made Stay Gold laugh, almost made her think that the situation was almost darkly hilarious, if not for the fact that the thing on the floor was almost certainly a hostile predator that ate people and was now either mimicking an umamusume, or was turned into one.
She didn’t know which was worse, honestly.
Neither of them did.
“She’s umamusume enough that I feel responsible for helping her,” Director Akikawa continued after a moment, slowly sliding her gaze past Stay Gold and onto the crumpled heap of a naked creature behind said uma. “She has the tail, the ears, and clearly the leg structure if she was able to keep up with you… somehow.”
She raised her eyebrow, and Stay Gold just shrugged.
“I’m not sure how it happened either. One second I was poking around the woods looking for anything I could report, next I was just sprinting for my life,” Stay Gold answered, idly thumbing the strap of her chest bag and frowning a little. “... tsk. Did any of the security crew find my flashlight, by the way? It was kinda expensive…”
“I’ll send them to look for it after this,” Director Akikawa answered, folding her hands together in uncharacteristic seriousness. She couldn’t afford to raise her voice for her usual antics right now, not when the creature behind them set off their instincts so badly it was hard to find any amount of humor in her presence, not when loud noises and the snap of her fan might set off the wild creature worse.
Their only solace was that she didn’t seem to know how a body worked yet, and seemingly had no idea that striking or clawing or biting were options on the table- as evidenced by the fact that she’d only used her entire body to pin Stay Gold to the ground and start ineffectually gumming at her face kind of like she was- well. Trying to give her a hickey.
But it wasn’t the effect of the action that made Stay Gold shudder.
It was the memory of that wind… that terrible, awful wind…
Tsk.
“I still think this is an awful idea, for the record,” Stay Gold sighed, biting her lip and resisting the urge to turn around. She almost yawned at that moment, the stress of the last little while catching up to her in a blur- it was past midnight, and hell, she’d been out training all day before all this anyway. All she wanted to do was sleep… it just didn’t make any sense that she was the one sitting here as if the thing behind her had imprinted on her somehow. It likely hadn’t, all things considered. She really didn’t enjoy being in the same room as something that probably only considered her to be prey. “I mean, what if we can’t rehabilitate it- her? What if she’s… well. What if she’s every inch the… thing… monster… whatever she is… that she feels like to our instincts? We don’t have any guarantee that she’s even intelligent enough to speak, let alone acclimate to… well… this. Tracen Academy. Shouldn’t we… I don’t know…?”
“And who else would be equipped enough to either help or contain her?” Director Akikawa asked, her voice in an almost dreamlike sotto voce, as if she herself was only barely keeping her cool at the moment. She chanced a look down again, watching the creature that appeared to be just another umamusume start staring at her own reflection in the glass of one of the cabinets along the sides of the office. There was an audible snap snap snap of unfurling fabric, that sharp sound of something almost leaflike in material whipping out- the same sound that matched the flickering of those unnaturally square eyes. Stay Gold shuddered a little, peeking over her shoulder at the billowing mass of hair that seemingly hadn’t existed until then- with the benefit of a slightly calmer environment, she actually got a look at the unnatural umamusume for just about the first time since the beam of her flashlight first passed over her.
She was… almost strangely normal looking, despite being, what, almost two meters tall at least? Pale like a canvas sail and skinny as a rail, the kind of build that human sprinters and runners often fell under. Leggy as hell, almost emaciated- as if she hadn’t been eating properly for at least a few weeks, and hadn’t been very substantial beforehand either. A crust of dried blood around her mouth and nose, dripping down to her chest. One eye uncovered, the other only barely visible through a matted tangle of pure white hair. The lone visible eye was green- leafy green, rippling and square in a way that no normal eye was- almost like the eye of some kind of marine creature just from its oddity.
And her hair… It had formed into some kind of round-ish bob cut almost like a mushroom cap earlier when she was… not quite at rest, but not making a threat display. Now, though, that bob had unfurled into long strands of billowing locks, each one almost the entire length of her body- where the hell had that all come from, anyway? Did her hair just… curl like that?
Once again, a wild, almost hilarious thought, trying to comprehend the hair structure of something that wanted to eat her.
Stay Gold sighed.
She looked back and forth.
She tried not to stare too hard at the alien creature in uma form pressing a hand to the glass and looking for the first time like she had a concept of what a reflection was.
She turned back to Director Akikawa and pinched her brow. “... Director, I-”
A pause, because she genuinely didn’t know what to do. It had been several minutes of them just sitting there with an uma shaped elephant in the room, barely a minute of dialogue between them. “... It’s late. I don’t think this is a good idea for the record but… I’m just a student and a wanderer. I can’t exactly tell the director how to run her own campus, now can I?”
“No… no I suppose not,” Director Akikawa shook her head, tapping her fan against her chin lightly, mulling it over anyway. “... Still. If she can learn to be a person rather than a wild animal shaped like an umamusume… we owe it to her to at least keep her safe until we get a confirmation either way. And should she prove hostile… Secretary Hayakawa has proven remarkably adept at handling her, has she not?”
“... Yeah, but… she can’t be everywhere,” Stay Gold bit her lip again, worrying it so hard she thought she might bleed. “... If we had any confirmation that she was a person, though… what if she’s just wearing someone else’s face? What if she’s hurt people?”
“Then we’ll have to deal with it as it comes. And we’ll make sure she doesn’t hurt anyone else, however it has to happen,” Director Akikawa nodded resolutely. She chanced a look back at the creature again, and-
“Jeeeeaaannn… jac-ket!”
It spoke. Slowly, with a cadence that wasn’t quite right still, and with pronunciation that was still off, but…
It spoke.
Its ears perked, its hair snapped and folded back into a bob, and it- she flicked her tail while her face made some kind of expression like she was trying to express some kind of joy but didn’t know how.
“JeEAn… JAckeeetttt!”
“Jeeeean Jaaaaaaaacket!”
“JEANnnnnnn jacccccckkkkket!”
Oh goddesses, it actually could speak.
And it was American.
Fuck.