A new day, a new meeting room in the PRT building. This one wasn't just an interrogation room playing double duty, either: it was a real meeting room, with a long table and many chairs. Actual windows granted a view of downtown, and a faint drizzle pattered against the glass. Taisto was there, sitting across from Fionnuala and Morven, but no one else was, not yet. But others would arrive soon.
Morven wasn't actually putting any of her weight on her chair, instead letting her suit of stone and steel bear its own heft. It was a little awkward, but better than the awkwardness that would doubtless come from breaking the chair. To help stave off my boredom, she'd split off a thumb-sized piece of basalt from her armor before peeling back the armor covering her hands, leaving them bare. She squeezed and pressed and tugged at the little chunk of stone while manipulating its form with her power, sculpting it into an interesting shape, then destroying that creation to make a new one, repeating the process over and over. The movements of her hands were unnecessary, but it reminded me of how I'd sometimes fidget with pieces of clay back home. Not to mention, the sensation of something so very solid flowing beneath her fingertips like a fluid was really neat.
The stone became a disembodied arm, overlapping plates of finely engraved armor covering it from shoulder to the clawed tips of its seven long, thin, spidery fingers. The arm squished in on itself, then lengthened and thinned to become a saber; its handle resembled a stylized chameleon, its tail forming the guard and its tongue extending to become a blade sharp enough to part her skin. Once that wound was fixed, the saber flowed into a perfect sphere. I quickly made it slightly-less-than-perfect, though, as its extremely smooth surface almost let it slip from my grasp. The sphere unfolded into a flower, whose two dozen petals each thinned and lengthened into insectoid limbs that braided together three at a time. She set it on the table, watching as her power drew forth tendrils out of the rest of the material and wove them together into a lattice-form spider, complete with mirror-smooth "eyes".
Taisto looked up from his paperwork at the soft clack of the sculpture meeting the table. "Oh, that looks neat!" he said in a tone I assumed was admiring. "Did you make that just now?"
Morven nodded. Her hand, once again clad in steel and stone, moved above the sculpture, palm down. She twitched her fingers slightly, and the stone spider twitched in response. More twitches followed, making it slowly crawl across the table in jerky, unnatural motions as if Morven were a puppeteer tugging its strings. The show she was putting on wasn't really necessary; she could make the spider move just fine without any gestures so long as she had an unbroken line of solid matter between herself and it. But the act was fun, in that moment, and that was all that mattered.
Taisto placed his pen on the table, ignoring his paperwork in favor of watching the display. Not to be outdone, Fionnuala cupped her hands over the table, concealing what she was doing before it was finished. Then she pulled them away, revealing another spider: eight legs, a torso, and an abdomen. However, that thorax and abdomen were the off-white of exposed bone, while the legs were fleshy little tentacles, complete with tiny suckers, so flush with melanin that they were practically pitch black. Where a spider's eyes would normally be, two fleshy tendrils were attached, almost like a blindfold, trailing back and fusing together into one before disappearing into Fionnuala's sleeve. On the top of the abdomen was an oblong patch of black flesh, with a ridge of white bristles down the center. All-in-all, a delightful little horror.
Spider of flesh skittered to meet spider of stone. Taisto's face fell a little at the reveal of Fionnuala's little creation, dawning horror only accelerating when the ridge of bristles parted, revealing themselves to be eyelashes framing a very human eye. The spiders paused, as if sizing one another up, before starting to dance, cavort around each other. The stone spider went stiff every time it leapt into the air, only regaining fluidity once more when it came to rest.
"Ah." Taisto cleared his throat haltingly, drawing my selves' attention to him. "Miss Fionnuala, that, ah… You're able to create minions?"
Fionnuala's many eyes blinked at him. Then I realized what he was getting at, and felt kind of dumb. "Sssssort of? I mean, technically speaking, this spider is still me, what with the umbilical and all. I could probably create small creatures that'd separate from myself that'd be viable, at least for a time. But I wouldn't be able to control them, not directly. Also, I think it'd take a lot of effort to design the creatures, rather than being some spur-of-the-moment thing. Y'know?"
While Fionnuala did her best to restrain the urge to babble more, a fragment of myself notified me about the movements of one of the more interesting people in the building. He was wearing armor. Powered armor, stuffed full of little bits and bobs, some of which were kinda… fuzzy to my power senses, as if I were touching different types of fur with varied textures and softness, some of which changed rhythmically or seemingly at random. A few things throughout the building felt similar, like the main elevator, which had components that were an odd combination of fuzzy and slick-tacky, if kind of subdued.
I was finding that I liked feeling tinkertech. It was interesting to feel the ones with textures that diverged from those of mundane matter, though, of course, not all tinkertech did feel different. I hadn't been able to notice any tinkertech anywhere I'd been in the city outside the PRT building, but what was here was very stimulating to my power-granted senses. Much of the tech I found in what I assumed was the Wards' basement HQ felt like if water was salt crystals but still fluid, like if I stuck a finger in it'd part around it and scrape a bit against my skin, but when I pulled the digit back it'd flow back together with no sign of my intrusion. Something in me was tickled pink by that.
The armored figure, though, was approaching the room my selves were in, and he wasn't alone.
Morven's head tilted, and Fionnuala fell silent and turned to face her. "I didn't know Armsmaster was going to be present for this," Morven murmured, her soft tone hiding the spike of dread I felt, the slumbering worm of anxiety in my guts starting to stir. The person accompanying Armsmaster was walking ahead of him, implying that she (I assumed, based on the underclothes I couldn't help but feel) was of a higher rank. That, of course, did not help my mood at all. Nor did the pair of what I could only assume were PRT agents in full kit following behind them both.
One fragment of my mind, the smallest unit of myself that I could split into, flitted her attention over to their guns, observing and memorizing their mechanisms. She'd return later, on her own time.
I've never been able to sit still, not entirely, even when I'm as calm as I ever am. But the rasping of that worm, metaphor it might be, in the pit of my stomach gave me an energy beyond what I usually had which I simply had to release. An impulse forbade me from letting it show on my faces or escape through a jittering leg, but it still needed an escape. While Taisto babbled something about a sudden switch-up that I couldn't bring myself to spare any attention for, Fionnuala jerked her arm back, the sudden tug on the umbilical launching the spider-thing into a momentary mouth on the palm of her hand that sealed up behind it, while her other hand's fingers were left to drum on her thigh. Cushioned and rendered silent by flesh as they were, I could still hear the taptaptap, taptaptap, taptaptap ringing in my mind, and I clung to it for the calm it promoted. Clung tight, with teeth and toenails, even the two drew ever closer.
Blades of bone speared out from my lumbar vertebrae, piercing and slicing into where my guts had been and sending shocks of no-longer-pain scything through those unproductive trains of thought. The only external reaction that managed to slip through, thankfully, was Fionnuala's hand clenching hard enough to make her knuckles pop, though that did manage to startle Taisto into silence.
Repairing the damage and re-absorbing the blood took but a few moments of work from another fragment.
But even though I'd managed to disrupt the spiral of anxiety, it didn't dissipate entirely, not with Armsmaster's group coming to a stop outside our room's door. The agents took up positions on either side of the door, while Armsmaster opened it. He entered first, followed by the woman.
Emily Piggot, Director, ENE. So proclaimed her badge. All those fanfics I'd read must've had more of an influence on me than I'd thought, because I'd been expecting her to be, well, larger. She was heavyset, yes, but in a way that spoke to a failing, if still hard-fought, battle to retain the muscle she'd once had. She might, possibly, be close to or in the range of obesity, but I'd learned not long before I'd ended up here that the lower end of that scale was lower than I'd thought. She wore a dark gray skirt suit over a white blouse, and her shoes, from what I could feel, were sensible, without any more heel than necessary. Her expression was decidedly neutral, though it grew a tad pinched when her gaze fell on Fionnuala.
She walked around to Taisto's side of the table, a slight wave of her hand causing him to vacate his chair, which sat directly across from the two of me, for its neighbor. She settled into the seat he'd left and placed a folder, the type with accordioned sides and a lid secured with string, on the table in front of her. Her hands came to rest on it, one atop the other. Armsmaster remained standing, taking up a position behind her and slightly to her right.
"Hello," she said. "As you no doubt have gathered, I am Director Piggot." She said it with the 't' silent, putting the lie to how I'd pronounced it in my head for years.
Fionnuala inclined her head. "I'm Fionnuala, and this is my sister Morven, though I'm sure you already knew that and more about us."
The corner of Piggot's lips twitched upward. "Yes, quite. I am always glad when parahumans choose to use their powers for the betterment of society, be it through heroics or otherwise. I must say, I do respect what you've stated you wish to do with your power, miss Morven." She leaned back in her chair, giving each of me an appraising look. "That said, precautions must always be taken. It will be some time before our tests can determine whether or not your plan is viable, but that's the price we must pay for the sake of public safety. In this line of work, we cannot afford to not look a gift horse in the mouth. I'm sure you agree."
Morven nodded slowly as the worm started to reform, while Fionnuala said, "Trust, but verify, no?"
"Indeed. Even those parahumans who approach us in good faith might have aspects to their powers they don't know of, ones which could force us to add restrictions or even reject them. Which brings us to an awkward situation."
"Oh?" Fionnuala asks as I dial down the amount of dread I can feel at once to stem its growth.
Piggot let out a soft sigh. "We want to trust the two of you. We really do. But like I said, we still have to take precautions." Her expression hardened. "It's rather difficult to place my trust in someone who lies as often as you."