[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I don't own Worm]
I woke up. I didn't get up, I merely became awake in my bed. I felt like shit, I could feel dry tears on my face from the night before, and I certainly was not in a mental state to actually drag myself out of the bed right now, though the constant reminder of my shitty biology at least counterbalanced the depression in terms of motivation, I guess. Not nearly enough, though. The hormone problem needed to be fixed as soon as possible or there was no way I'd make it more than a few weeks, but I was just so tired I wanted to lay there and not get up, which I did for almost two hours, the whole time just spent feeling empty and miserable and also viscerally uncomfortable. Hell, I could already feel stubble and that just made it even fucking worse.
30 minutes of a grumbling stomach, approaching hunger pangs and 2 hours of nothing to do to satisfy my constantly-in-flux attention was finally enough to push me to actually get up and clothe myself - with great discomfort - and begin thinking about tackling some issues I was having. First (and the easiest to solve with the materials I had) was removing any trace of stubble because, frankly, I really hate body hair on myself but most especially facial hair. As such, I thought about what I could do about it, and came to the conclusion that dealing with that problem permanently rather than just getting a shaver was the best option, since I was a tinker and damn if I was going to let the current inaccessibility of technology to the general population stop me.
Hence why, two hours later, I was in the middle of building a machine out of the remaining scrap parts in the factory - several lasers and electrodes were constructed along with me co-opting some CNC control chips and reprogramming them with body hair detection - using an Aesthetic Body Modification specialisation of strength Tinker 10 (a completely ridiculous and overspecced power for the job). Even in a tinker fugue, I recognised how much I hated writing anything in the C programming language and swore to bring Rust and several others into this reality as soon as possible. I also had to type it in on a keyboard with no display at all, which was much slower than using a display (and only possible because of the use of a tinker power in the first place), so another goal would be to obtain a laptop and internet access too.
Another hour of ridiculously overpowered tinker-fugueing later and I had a complete body hair removal machine ready to go. Before I gave in to the depressive urge to curl back into bed and sleep some more, I stepped in the machine I completed, turned it on, and promptly passed out from pain because I was so focussed on getting rid of the body hair I forgot to get a specialty that would create something to dull the pain from having lasers fry every single hair follicle other than those on your head in a matter of minutes. Luckily I didn't scream and attract attention, I just immediately passed out, and was woken up later by intense hunger pangs - far more than what originally got me out of bed - and a throbbing pain across my entire body. My skin was red all over and I bit down a scream and just about avoided passing out again a second time. Impulsive decisions sometimes really suck, but at least it was on something as relatively harmless as this, I suppose, even if it hurt so fucking much. I still had unpleasant skin, but at least it had no hair at all now, which more than made up for the temporary pain, even if I probably couldn't touch it for another several hours without almost screaming again.
I began thinking about how to manage my hormone levels, and threw in a 3 charge hormone tinker specialisation to attempt to solve the problem (while waiting for the skin pain to subside, because doing nothing did not appeal to me at the minute) - I pushed on the tinker power and was provided numerous solutions. Most of them, however, required a major source of biomass to get certain proteins to work from and manufacture hormones and hormone blockers. Wracking my brain for alternative solutions (which was difficult when so much of my attention was forced on the pain I was still in), I eventually remembered a hormone that converted testosterone into estrogen, and poked my tinker power for artificial equivalents to the process, which it gladly provided. Right now though, I had insufficient tools to manufacture the highly structured metal required to actually cause an equivalent process to occur, and there was the safety issue of leaking pure heavy metals directly into my bloodstream.
Solving the first issue was completely doable by just adding another two charges of Tinker Bullshit to my hormone specialisation, but the latter was not something that came under it's purview. So, while still in pain, I entered a fugue and began using literal wrenches, hammers and primitive CNC machines to construct a nanostructured metallic enzyme equivalent. Unfortunately (or fortunately, perhaps) my fugue was rudely interrupted by the sound of fighting, and metal-on-metal outside - far too close to comfort, sending my anxiety skyrocketing.
I quickly shut down the CNC machines - I'd rather not risk someone hearing them - and peeked outside through the keyhole in the door, catching glimpses of Hookwolf absolutely trashing the buildings on the other side of the street as 3 massive, terrifying beasts chased after the Nazi. Because it was just my luck to - apparently - have housed my sort-of-base-lair-accommodation-building right outside a fucking dogfighting ring that was distant enough from me I didn't hear any dogs while walking past here last night. This was really, really bad. If the Empire found me, I'd be so fucked. I was looking at forced recruitment at best, being just killed at worst, although I'm not even sure if the first was better than the second given there was zero way Nazis would allow me to access hormones and related technology, and would most certainly use my technology to murder and harass minorities even more than they already did.
That meant I had to be quiet as fuck and desperately hope Hookwolf didn't notice the squishy tinker in their less squishy but still squishy base, because I really doubted he'd have any trouble getting in it at the moment. First thing I'd do after this was build a goddamn escape hatch at the back if I even survived more than an hour into the future. Then of course if Bitch found me instead, I'd have less immediate problems but I'd be on Coil's radar which was arguably worse - though I might well be on his radar already because of his timeline power. I, while having probably the fifth fight/flight/freeze response within 24 hours, did wonder if conceptual bullshit would fry his precog (at least when changing tinker specialisations), but I had too much of an immediate problem to worry about to deal with that right this second. I was silently cheering for Bitch though - dogfighting is something I hated and I was hoping she trounced Hookwolf at least a bit, even if my main priority was essentially not being found, or shredded by metal blades.
[end of chapter - nya~]