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“Are you sure about this then, mate?” Meredith Chen could’ve been married for thirty years to the truest and most sincere love of her life, and be still calling them ‘mate’ or ‘bruv.’ As it was, she was with me instead. “I know the island doesn’t set much of a standard, but that thing was not normal.”
I turned the tape I’d just recorded over in my fingers, still rewinding the Ripterra tape I’d used to fight that thing. We’d wrapped up a fight against a bizarre, apparently unstable rogue fusion, and found half of it was a monster nobody had seen before; one that looked stitched together out of other monsters, and covered in hazard paint. “That’s part of it, right? Nobody knows what this bopto’s schema is. Maybe becoming one will give us some insight.”
“Are ‘bopto’ and ‘schema’ slang from your timeline?” She asked in her half-bored, on-to-you tone, while tucking her Cat-5 tape back into her deck.
“I’m firin’ it up.” Ignoring her question felt like the most efficient punchline. I plopped the new tape into my own deck and hit Play. In a blink, static consumed my human body, and it began stretching outward. I couldn’t see, but I could feel. The hiss of static and the twisting of my body disguised the scream that took over my thoughts.
My arms contorted, flesh and bone expanding outward to become both wider and much longer. The five fingers on my left hand hardened and fused into just three bony claws. A long tail extended from my lower back, already rattling as it shook; my whole body was writhing in the process of trying on a new form for the first time. My right arm was largely missing, until raw flesh whipped out of it as tendrils and formed itself into a new forearm. I could feel bone condensing in the middle of it.
The static shattered, and my new body was complete. Burly, strong. Needing. I was taking in ragged breaths, gasping for air, feeling unsatisfied. Something felt wrong with my jaw. Like it was too loose, like it could fly all the way off. I opened my eyes, and the world was upside-down. I tilted down, and the sky became grass. “Whole...whole…” I could barely think. Words cut themselves short by a single, overwhelming demand to be finished. To be complete, and whole.
I craned my vision to Meredith, staring at my partner with bright yellow eyes that lacked any lively detail. Words hissed across exposed fangs, “Fuse...fusion...one...whole…”
“I’m not going anywhere near that, you’re mental!” She didn’t hesitate to pick up a block of wood meant for our campfire and throw it directly at my head. It bounced off, more or less harmlessly, but enough to rattle my brains. In a moment of clarity, I was able to hit the Stop button on my deck – none of us actually knew how we did that, but thinking very hard about doing it seemed to work.
My body was static again, and shrank back to being human. Falling onto my butt in the grass, palms gripping it tight to make sure I didn’t float away from the world flipping up and down so many times in a row. I was still panting, but it was steady and gentle now, while I stared lasers into empty air.
Back in my own body, there were new emotions. There are a lot of things you can only experience by experiencing their opposite. You don’t really know cold without hot. You can’t understand being toothless without teeth. Back as myself, I was finished again. Complete and alive. Even my natural, normal, medical-grade depression was a trifle in the face of whatever that beast had hard-coded into its DNA.
“That’s...I apologize for that. I’m going to get better at that.”
“You absolutely do not have to, mate. That thing’s a nightmare if I ever saw one.”
“Kingrave and Capricorpse were less dead. But I didn’t learn anything. And that body is strong, I can tell. I’m going to practice it. You don’t have to come, if it’s stressful.”
“Well I’m not some daisy. And I told you I was in it with you. But don’t think I won’t fight you, if I need to!”
With flinching fingers, I let go of the grass. I didn’t fly away, which was comforting. Taking a deeper breath, I gave her a smile. Warm and sincere. “That’s the world, you know. Thank you. I’m just – if we do fuse with this thing, I can only try to help you be ready for it. Let’s head back to the cafe and get a plate of fries or something, we’ll talk over that.”
“Better than bein’ here. After you, then.”