As with some previous chapters, this one had embedded music links. I've followed the same procedure here as I did there.
www:youtube:com/watch?v=OJAoaCHdTJY
www:youtube:com/watch?v=bBdx6nvi4Uo
I've bolded and underlined the point in the original where the links were.
"Huh."
"What?"
Randall looked over at his friend who was sitting, as was often the case, in front of a computer, apparently reading an email, then went back to doing push-ups.
"Armsmaster says Taylor, or Raptaur in this case, says we should all get together at her place tomorrow at ten AM. She suggested you should come, apparently."
"Well, my skills are legendary, so I'm not surprised," Randall grinned, getting a look of amusement back from his friend and partner.
"Just keep thinking that, if it helps you deal with life," Kevin chuckled. He rapidly typed for a few seconds, then nodded in satisfaction. "OK, I've said we'll be there." Turning around in his chair he faced the other young man. "I guess I should take the audio inducer and the tricorder as well, just in case the right opportunity comes up to talk to Dragon about them."
"Might be an idea, yeah," Randall replied, finishing push-up one hundred and lowering himself to the floor with relief, before rolling over and sitting up. "Should be interesting to see how far this weapon design has come."
"Knowing those two, probably pretty far. She's very good and he's very efficient, so I bet they're been working on it practically non-stop."
"Think you can get that wormhole widget working again?" Randall asked, standing up and heading for the jug of ice water he'd left on the table next to the sofa. He poured himself a glassful and chugged it in one shot, before grabbing a towel and wiping sweat from his face.
"I… don't know. It was playing up when we were using it, there was something wrong with it at the time anyway, and the radiation didn't do it any favors." Kevin tugged at his lower lip thoughtfully. "If it was just me, I'd say, no, definitely not. But with Armsmaster and Dragon looking at it?" He thought some more. "Maybe. You can help as well, hopefully, and I don't know how much Taylor knows about tech in general, but she's scary smart, and might be able to come up with some good ideas. She certainly thinks sideways compared to most people. That might be what's needed."
"Interesting girl, for sure," Randall smiled as he sat on the sofa and relaxed after his daily exercises.
"Oh, yes. Very." They shared a grin. "I can see some amusing possibilities from knowing her. And Amy."
Both of them started snickering as they considered the possibilities. Brockton Bay was going to have a very odd expression on its collective face in the near future.
Lisa watched as Amy squatted under the large construct in the middle of the second room, poking at something on its underside, while Taylor lifted the half-ton thing a couple of feet off the floor and held it there. She was impressed, the girl was in her base form and didn't look anywhere near strong enough to do what she was doing but clearly had no trouble with the weight.
The end of Amy's new tail was flicking around as she concentrated, something Taylor did as well, which made the blonde smile. Taylor looked over at her, cocking her head quizzically at her expression, then followed her eyes, before smirking a little. They shared a grin while the oblivious Dallon girl kept working. "OK, that's got that sorted, you can put it down again," Amy said, scooting out from under her creation and standing up.
Taylor carefully lowered her burden to the floor and stepped back. The thing twitched weirdly and made a peculiar grumbling sound. "I need to tweak the bone structure here, here, and here," Amy carried on, leaning into the half-covered skeletal system and pointing. "Those ribs need to be moved about six inches to the rear, that set of vertebrae need to be twenty percent larger, and the pelvis needs to be lowered slightly and widened a smidge."
"How much is a smidge?" Taylor asked curiously.
"Two and a half about-that-muches," Amy smiled, holding her thumb and finger roughly a quarter of an inch apart. Looking amused Taylor shook her head, then turned to the job.
"Tell me when," she said.
Watching with a critical eye, Amy nodded with satisfaction, saying, "That'll do it. Great. OK, that's the structural modifications all done. The neural systems are finished, most of the musculature is all ready, it's mainly the outer skin to do." She turned to Lisa, waving at the pile of bags of onions in the corner of the room. "Can you start opening them and pouring them into the hopper there?"
"Sure," Lisa replied, taking the folding knife Taylor pulled from nowhere and flipping it open with an easy flick of her wrist, which made both the other girls look at her with interest. "I'm actually not bad with a knife if necessary," she grinned, before moving to the pile and beginning to slit the tops of the bags open. Picking one up she tipped it into the wide mouth of the odd looking device that Taylor had obviously made to Amy's design.
The healer put her hand on the pile of onions which rapidly turned into a mass of protoplasm, the goo running into a second funnel and down a tube which Taylor was pointing into the middle of the construct. Amy's other hand was on her creation guiding the formation of the new living system.
Between them they used most of the remaining bags over the next twenty minutes, until Amy called a halt to the process. "That's enough. I just need to finish this up and it's ready for the test." Lisa pulled the goo producer out of the way while Taylor finished folding up all the empty bags, both of them moving away while Amy moved around the now-complete synthetic creature standing in the middle of the room making small adjustments to it.
They watched as the shape kept altering a little and the thing twitched every now and then in a rather unnerving manner, Amy smiling to herself as she worked. Lisa watched with mixed interest and worry. Her power was telling her a number of things that were more than a little peculiar, so in the end she stopped trying to work out exactly what the healer was doing. Her head was aching again aside from anything else.
Taylor was whistling a tune under her breath that sounded familiar, but it took Lisa a few seconds to place it. When she did, she grinned, shaking her head, and unable to help herself, began singing in a low voice to accompany the tune.
Amy stopped, then turned to glare at them both. "Stop that," she sighed. "Anyway, it's not undead."
Lisa immediately started singing a different tune, which Taylor quickly began whistling the accompaniment for, until both of them started laughing too hard to continue.
"Idiots," the brunette muttered, turning back to her work. Eventually she stepped back, nodding with satisfaction. "Done. It's finished. The first version, anyway."
All three of them looked at the thing. "Turn it on, then," Taylor said with a smile.
Amy grinned, moving forward to put a hand on her creation's head. A moment or two passed, then it jerked a little harder than the reflexive motions it had intermittently made during the final work on it, the head lifting. Lisa took a step back without meaning to, although Taylor didn't move. "It's looking at me," Lisa whispered.
"I know," Amy chortled, as the large head moved from side to side, the glowing eyes studying them all, then dipped, nudging her in the ribs. "Auxiliary neural control system is working perfectly. Blood flow nominal, closed-loop respiratory system nominal, oxygen recombination subsystem functioning to specification, energy generation organs online..." Her voice trailed off into mumbling as she seemed to lose track of the other two, her hands moving over the skin of the thing she'd made. Taylor and Lisa exchanged a glance.
A few seconds later Amy blinked, smiling widely. "Everything is working exactly as it should. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic."
"Stage two complete?"
"Stage two complete." Amy grinned over her shoulder at Taylor, who looked pleased.
"Stage three, then."
"Yep." Reaching out a hand again, Amy tapped the creature between the eyes. It lowered itself to the floor silently, rolled onto its side, then closed its eyes and appeared to go dormant. Taking a deep breath, the healer started taking her clothes off again. Taylor had produced a new pair of jeans for her with a tail-hole in them, which she now handed back. The taller girl folded them neatly and put them on the small bench running down one side of the room. Amy's shirt joined it. Clad only in her underwear, the healer moved to the side of the new creature.
"You sure about this, Amy?" Taylor asked. She sounded slightly concerned.
"Yes. It'll work, trust me. The tail was the final test. I need to make some more modifications, I'm sure there will be things that aren't quite optimal yet, but without functional data on this version I don't know what they are, so I have to do a live test." Amy looked at them with a smile. "Don't worry, worst case I shut it down and try again, but I know it will work."
"Fair enough."
"Give me a hand here, will you?" the girl asked, leaning over the now-still construct. She put her hand on the thing's belly, a long slit opening up from throat to just in front of the legs, Taylor gently pulling it open. Lisa watched with interest and a small amount of worried squeamishness as the Dallon girl reached inside the creature and felt around, then nodded. "Not the most elegant system yet but it's only a prototype," she commented, before sitting on the floor and sticking her feet and tail tip into the cavity.
"That looks very wrong," Lisa remarked, shaking her head.
"Everything we do is very wrong," Taylor giggled.
"Can't argue with that," the blonde laughed, watching as Amy wriggled into the construct like it was a sleeping bag. It was close to the size of Raptaur, so there was plenty of room. Lisa had studied it closely and knew the amount of protective living armor surrounding the life-support area deep inside the synthetic life-form was sufficient to prevent almost anything causing her harm. She wouldn't be as tough as Taylor was, but Lisa's power told her that she was far tougher inside this thing than almost anyone else around, probably somewhere around the equivalent of a Brute seven or better. Even considering how severe an impact she could survive in the costume Taylor had made for her, this was simply ridiculous by comparison.
Almost entirely inside the chest of the new construct, only her head and arms outside, Amy looked up at them. "Don't worry about the delay. It's going to take about a minute or so for all the neural linkages to form and the support systems to connect, but I'll be fine. Stand back a bit, Lisa, just in case, it'll take a bit to get used to the new sensory input and I might flail around a little. I don't want to hurt you accidentally."
"I'll be here behind Taylor, then," Lisa remarked quickly, moving to the relevant spot with alacrity. "Good luck."
"Luck? I don't need luck," Amy grinned. "I'm a professional. Trust me, I know what I'm doing."
"Do you?" Taylor snickered. "Really?"
"Nope, making it up as I go along," Amy replied cheerfully. "Here we go." She disappeared entirely inside her manufactured life-form, Taylor releasing the entrance and stepping back. There was a short pause of a few seconds then the slit sealed up and disappeared entirely without trace. The two remaining girls exchanged a glance, then went back to watching. Lisa was checking her watch every few seconds, unable to stem her worry even with the assurance from the expert and her own power which insisted things were proceeding to plan.
"This would make Piggot pop an aneurysm for sure," she muttered, causing Taylor to nod with a small smile.
"Probably. But I'm not planning on telling her, are you?"
"No fear of that, believe me," Lisa chuckled.
The seconds ticked past, until at the minute-ten mark the biological construct flinched violently, making her jump despite herself. It shook all over then the head lifted on the long neck, looking around and blinking wildly. "Holy shit that's weird," it said, the voice totally unlike Amy's, but still female. It wasn't quite as deep as Taylor's Raptaur voice and had a faint hissing accent very similar to Saurial's voice. There was no way that Lisa would associate it with Amy, which of course was by design.
Squatting down near the front of Amy's temporary new body, Taylor reached out and poked her head between the eyes. "You in there OK?" she asked.
"Apparently," her friend muttered. A long forked tongue came out from between razor-sharp teeth and licked the snout of the new creature, before vanishing again. "This is very, very strange. But also very, very cool." She laughed wildly.
"Help me up, I need to get used to this," she added.
Lisa moved further back as Taylor helped her friend to her clawed feet, then slowly and carefully led her out of the workroom block to stand in the middle of the main office. Amy looked around, blinking, then lifted her hands and studied them.
"Oh... My... God... It actually worked," she said in a stunned voice.
"Fucking right it did," Lisa exclaimed, staring at her. "Unbelievable. Just… unbelievable."
"Cool as hell, though," Taylor grinned. She moved a few feet away and made a huge mirrored surface grow out of the floor. "Have a look at the newest Family member." After a moment's thought, she laughed, and added, "Cousin."
Amy turned her head to inspect her friend, then looked at the mirror and froze.
"Shit..."
She trailed off with an awed squeak.
Taylor watched as Amy felt herself with her hands, turning her head from side to side.
"She does exceptionally good work," the Varga commented, sounding both slightly astounded and very pleased. "Your world is fascinating. I have never seen anything even close to this achieved without a truly remarkable level of magic, yet this has no magic at all involved. I must confess I'm not sure exactly what it does use, but it's definitely not magic."
'Powers are bullshit, that's pretty well established,' Taylor replied, shaking her head a little. 'But I'd have to agree. She's outdone herself, especially considering how fast this all came together once she worked out the basics. It'll be neat to see what she comes up with after some more practice.'
"Indeed." He gave off an air of thoughtful consideration. "I suspect that this may well cause a certain amount of confusion to the public at large and the PRT as well. It's definitely going to be seen as positive proof that the Family exists, since there can now be two of them at once."
'Which is also part of the idea,' Taylor snickered. 'This should be amusing.'
"I suspect so, yes," he chuckled. They watched as the large reptilian creature studied itself, while Lisa stared at it from a safe distance, looking impressed, slightly disturbed, and just a little envious. "Without knowing the truth, I doubt very much anyone will ever work out that Amy's in there," he added approvingly.
The thing Amy had made, with Taylor and the Varga's help, stood about seven and a half feet tall, being patterned on Raptaur with some modifications. It only had four limbs plus a tail, unlike Taylor's Raptaur form's six, but had a slightly longer neck. The head was very similar, a little narrower and longer, the main difference being that the slit-pupiled eyes glowed a virulent faint green color rather than her characteristic orange-yellow. They were a bit more slanted as well, giving an overall very predatory look.
The scaled skin looked and felt exactly like her own did when she was in the equivalent form but was a much lighter dark blue with violet overtones when the light caught the scales at the right angle, shimmering through dozens of other colors in places. It was peculiarly beautiful.
Overall it was reminiscent of a cross between Saurial and Raptaur with a little fantasy dragon thrown in. The front limbs were very much arms, with long elegantly-fingered taloned hands, but the jointing was different from a human arm to allow her to walk on all fours if needed for speed. The legs were not human in the slightest, the feet the same as her Raptaur ones, while the tail was long, slender, and muscular.
The end result was clearly from the same source as Saurial, Raptaur, and Kaiju, but sufficiently different to be a distinct variant of its own. As Amy got used to her biological exosuit, her movements were becoming more and more fluid and natural, rapidly heading towards looking entirely normal.
"This is so cool," she whispered in her new voice. "Everything is working perfectly."
"How is the vision?" Taylor asked curiously.
"Fine. Beyond fine, I can't believe how clearly I can see everything," Amy replied, looking around. "Can you turn out the lights?"
"OK."
Taylor went over and flipped the switches on the wall, the warehouse plunged into darkness lit only by a few leds from the computer equipment around the place. To normal human vision it was damn near pitch black. Her own vision was barely affected, of course, but she could see by the way Lisa was looking around blankly that she probably couldn't see anything at all.
"Well, that works amazingly well," Amy laughed. "I can tell it's dark, but I can still see fine. The colors are a little muted, I'll have to tweak that, otherwise it's like it's only a slightly dimmer than normal room."
"Impressive," Lisa noted, staring at her, her own pupils entirely dilated. "Those glowing green eyes are even more disturbing than Taylor's yellowish ones, by the way."
"Great, that works as well," the healer giggled.
"I can't work out which one of you is a worse influence on the other," Lisa sighed. "Can you turn the lights back on? This is a little too creepy for me right now."
With a smile Taylor flipped the switches back, the room fully illuminated once again. "How's the sense of smell? And your hearing?"
"Both excellent," Amy reported. "I can smell a hell of a lot more than I can with my own nose, although I suspect nothing like as well as you can. And I can hear people talking outside, vehicles moving around… Much better than normal. We'll have to figure out some proper tests for it."
"We can use the computers," Lisa suggested. "Find a program to generate different frequencies at different volume levels and test your hearing properly. Not sure how we'd check your smell, though." She got up and approached Amy, putting her hand on her scaled skin and feeling it. "I have to say, it feels entirely alive and natural, just like Taylor does as Raptaur. I'd never guess in a million years it was synthetic without my power, and even it is saying it's alive."
"It's totally alive, just not from a normal source," Amy replied, looking down at the girl touching her. "Wow, this is weird, looking at things from nearly three feet higher than normal. And I can see my own face." She felt her muzzle with a hand. "Which is just strange."
"Talk me through it all, my power is still having some trouble putting it all together and I'm getting a headache," Lisa asked, stepping back, then walking around the large reptilian form.
"OK. Basically, my real body, or my human body at any rate, is in a sort of suspended animation state inside this one in the life-support pouch," Amy replied, tapping her lower chest. "I'm both conscious and unconscious at the same time. There's enough neural matter in here to make up two normal human brains, which is currently linked through my spine to my own brain and is the thing actually running the body and processing the extra sensory data. It's seamless and allows insanely quick reaction times as well. The two circulatory systems are linked, as are the neural systems, respiratory systems, everything like that. It'll keep me alive more or less forever, I could stay in here for the rest of my life if I wanted to."
She smiled slightly. "I don't think I will, of course, but I could. There are ultra high pressure oxygen reservoirs made of EDM in here as well which hold enough oxygen to keep the body running for weeks even without breathing normally, plus a whole series of systems to reclaim and reuse it. I almost don't need to breath at all, I should be able to stay underwater practically indefinitely. The digestive systems are ridiculously efficient as well, they work on completely different methods than almost anything living. I can eat more or less anything organic and extract every last bit of usable energy from it."
"Wow. But not quite like Taylor, who can eat basically anything at all?"
"No, not to that level. This is still an organic organism, just one with stupidly efficient systems and a very weird genetic structure, wrapped around synthetic nearly indestructible bones, ligaments, and muscles." Amy shrugged. "Taylor could tank a nuke and not even notice. I might survive a tiny one at some distance, but I sure wouldn't want to try it. But normal chemical explosives won't do too much damage unless it's stupidly large quantities, I should be able to take some pretty intense heat for a while, massive impact, that sort of thing. And damn few toxins would do anything much. It's even insanely radiation resistant due to the quad-helix DNA and the redundancy. Not to mention that with me in here I can repair it on the fly and make upgrades."
"But you can't change the bone structure, presumably? If it's made of EDM foam, I mean."
"Yes and no, I can rework it a bit because it's modular, but there are some fairly large restrictions." Amy looked around, then back to Lisa. "If I need to be a different thing, I'll build a different thing to be. Taylor cheats, I have to do it the hard way at the moment."
She grinned with a wide toothy grin. "I can live with that. I've still done something incredible."
"You sure have," Lisa laughed. "And something that's going to make PHO go totally insane. Again."
"It's basically a poor man's version of a Family member, but it'll do for the time being," Amy smiled. "I'm not as tough, or strong, don't have the shape-shifting and matter generation powers, and I don't have the stamina that she does, but I should be stronger than almost anyone else in the city, this will take a shot from a tank main gun and only bruise, my healing abilities work fine through it since it's part of me at the moment, and I have wildly better senses than a human even if they're nowhere near Varga senses. I'm happy."
"Obviously my cousins have different powers than my sisters," Taylor laughed. "A different branch of the Family, of course. They have their own talents. Our biotech comes from them, after all."
Lisa looked thoughtfully at her, then Amy. "That… is a very interesting idea. If you want to make people think that those symbiotes are Family technology, that may well work. Which gets around some of the possible issues you might have otherwise, and hides Amy's involvement in it all."
"I'd prefer that," Amy noted.
"I'm not surprised," Lisa replied. "The PRT gets very weird about Biotinkers. Too dangerous in their view, because of things that have happened in the past. But on the other hand, the Family is already an extinction-level event waiting to happen if you piss them off, so a Family Biotinker..." She shrugged with a smirk. "Probably not too much extra worry for them, since they'll already be shitting themselves anyway."
"We're not that scary, are we?" Taylor asked, taking on a form identical to Amy's current one, only with yellow eyes, then standing next to her and draping an arm over her shoulders. Lisa studied them for a few seconds.
"I'd have to go with 'yes' on that one," she sighed, shaking her head. "I can see some very peculiar things coming from all this."
"Life's not boring anymore, definitely," Taylor smiled.
"No, I'd have to agree there." Lisa grinned at them. "All right then, let's do some tests. You need to see how your new toy performs, after all. And..."
"And?"
"And you need to come up with a name for the new Family member."
Amy and Taylor glanced at each other, green eyes meeting yellow ones. Taylor grinned.
"Hmm. Purple..."
"You are not calling me Barney," Amy snapped, folding her arms and baring her teeth.
Lisa nearly fell over laughing.
Danny looked around at the activity in the yard, pleased with the way things were proceeding. The filter towers were humming gently as the massive pumps pulled water out of the wrecked ship and pushed it through miles of synthetic fiber to remove contaminants before dumping it into the bay, the job close to completion now. The work of extending the rail line was coming along well, the rails being placed into the bed that Taylor had left in the new surface by gangs of workers, while another group was erecting a number of storage units for tools and consumables near the area where the scrapping would happen.
Yet more people were putting up the last of the extended chain link fence around the newly expanded yard, having taken down the old one and moved it. Overall, everything was coming along well. Tomorrow they could begin the main decontamination of the ship, removing all the old insulation, asbestos, any wiring that was still left, and all the other oddments that got in the way of cutting the thing up.
Nodding to himself, he resumed walking, stopping a few times to check with various shift foremen, heading towards the BBFO office. He noted that Amy's truck was parked outside which presumably meant she was in there with his daughter, and most likely Lisa who he hadn't seen all day. He'd heard that a number of shipments had arrived for her, so she was probably installing the new computers with the other two.
Knocking on the door, just in case something odd was going on, he waited. A few moments later it opened, Lisa peering out, then smiling at him in a way that worried him.
She was good at that.
"Come in, Danny," she invited, stepping to the side. He entered and watched as she locked the door again, then turned around.
There was a very long pause.
"Um..."
He pointed, then looked at Lisa, who was definitely wearing a smirk of annoyingly huge proportions. "I think I might be having trouble with my eyes," he began. "The weird thing is that I could swear I can see two versions of Taylor at the same time."
"Hi, Mr Hebert," one of the two huge lizards said in a pleasant voice, wandering over and holding out a large scaly hand which he shook reflexively, not sure what he was doing. "I'm Raptaur's cousin, I thought I'd come and visit to see what was going on up here on the surface. She's told us a lot about you humans and all the interesting things you do. I'm looking forward to trying something called.. Is it a burger?" she asked over her shoulder.
The other huge reptile, which was lounging on the other side of the room watching with a small grin, and was definitely his daughter in her Raptaur form, nodded.
"Yes, a burger. They sound tasty. Dead animal wrapped in some sort of plant-based foam. We don't have them at home."
She smiled widely, exposing many, many teeth. "Oh, sorry, you can call me Ianthe if you want. It means violet flower, in some old human language, my cousin tells me. You probably couldn't pronounce my real name, but I like that one. Because of my scales, of course."
Danny was still absently shaking the hand in his, looking up at the chatty reptilian creature and wondering when he'd hit his head. He clearly had suffered some sort of cranial injury since there were two members of the, to the best of his knowledge, entirely fictional Family in the same room at the same time.
"Ianthe?" he asked numbly, feeling like he'd completely lost the plot of the day.
She nodded. "Ianthe. It's Greek, whatever that is." Looking down at his hand, she then looked at Lisa, who was making muffled snorting sounds. "Does this ritual go on this long normally? Seems a little weird."
"You can let go now, Ianthe," Lisa said.
"OK." She did so, turning and going back to Taylor, her long tail trailing behind her. Danny watched, his hand going up and down a couple of times before he consciously realized that it was now empty and quickly retracted it.
"He seems nice," the self-proclaimed 'Ianthe' said in a whisper to his daughter that he still heard, "but a little confused. Is he all right?"
"He's fine, Ianthe," Taylor said, patting the other lizard on the shoulder.
Lisa wandered over and sat next to them, putting her feet on the table and grinning at him. All three waited.
"What the hell is going on in here!?" he finally shouted, pointing at the new reptilian female, who cocked her head to the side and peered at him. His daughter did exactly the same thing except in the other direction. Lisa looked at them, then him, before she dissolved into hysterical laughter, going vaguely purple in the process she was so amused. Feeling that life had become much stranger than was entirely fair without having the decency to even ask first, Danny crossed his arms and glared, waiting for an explanation that made sense.
"Funny story, actually," Taylor giggled, reverting to her base form and leaning on the other reptile, who was now also giggling. "It's like this..."