Are You Even Human

65. At Least Julietta Will Feel At Home

"Alright Peter, you ready?" I ask, wading up to my chest in the water as Anastasia zips around my legs and rushes off to Possibility knows where. She's never been out of sight for more than like thirty seconds, though. She understands the importance of not wandering off. "As I'll ever be," he says, his face wearing that same usual smile but his stress obvious to my domain.

"I can only make you so big," I warn. "In fact, the more human-sized you are, the easier everything will be, and the more feeling you'll have in your body in general. I'll have to kind of… stretch out your available nervous system otherwise, which will lead to less than perfect coverage."

"Ominous!" he says with a brightness he doesn't really feel.

"Look, if you end up not liking anything, or want to adjust anything, you can just let me know," I assure him. "Talking underwater will be… similar to talking with air, once your lungs fill with water. And for the first part of the trip, we'll be staying close to the surface to give people time to ease into that. I'm not changing your brains at all, so I can't shut off the part of you that will insist you're drowning the first time you inhale water."

"Well, I might take you up on that, but for now let's just do this," he says. "I'm passing up the opportunity to be a sea monster. That would just be crazy."

"Unfortunately, you won't be crushing any ships any time soon," I tell him, "but yeah, I can make you pretty big. Here goes."

I suffuse his body with my domain, reaching out to every part of him but one, and I start to mold it, shape it, add to it. The style I've decided on for his body is that of a serpent, mostly limbless so that the nerves from his arms and legs can be repurposed into a mix of fins and extra length. It'll feel a bit odd to him; like his pinkies are controlling two simple fins and the rest of his fingers are bending parts of his body, but I'm sure he can either adapt or decide he doesn't want to on his own.

My brother holds back his urge to make a rather unflattering noise as I pull and stretch his body like taffy, squishing his limbs into his torso and using their mass to elongate him further. I doubt it's anything close to comfortable—I honestly wouldn't know what other people's standards are on that sort of thing, considering I place 'the pain of getting shot' and 'the discomfort of eating too complex a food' on similar levels of sensory unpleasantness—but by the end of it I manage to get Peter to an impressive eighteen feet long, and plenty thick enough to look like a monster rather than just a particularly swift noodle.

Rough-scaled and quick as a whip, Peter's whole body has been adapted for aquatic travel at any depth, with small patches of bioluminescent skin in case we get separated in the darkness of the water. He's more than intimidating enough to make a sailor shit themselves if they saw him while in a lifeboat, but frankly the scariest part of the design is probably that he still has a completely humanoid mouth and teeth. Though it's also comically small compared to the rest of his head. Matter of opinion, I suppose.

"That might be the most unpleasant thing I've experienced in my life," Peter says, his whole body twitching as he keeps his head barely above water. "Everything feels wrong. I think I'm on the verge of a panic attack."

"Do you want me to change you back?" I ask.

"Fuck no," he snaps, his thrashing slowly starting to get more and more purposeful. "I am to the

"…Okay," I nod. "Well, just say whenever. The bit is not worth the entirety of your mental well-being."

"Says you!" he wriggles indignantly.

"It okay, Julietta know nothing about mental well-being anyway," Blossom says, floating languidly past us. I send her my wordless irritation over the network, which she gets a kick out of, but then I remember she was supposed to be the one watching Maria. Blossom just points toward the shore, where the girlfriend gestalt is hesitantly stepping into the water, encouraged by her fairy selves as she takes deeper and deeper steps.

"She's walking a lot better than she was before," I note.

"Yes," Blossom agrees. "Shame she have to swim now."

Yeah, despite being able to breathe underwater, Maria's body is definitely not built for swimming. Unless she gets a lot better with her body very quickly, she's just going to sink like a stone. It's not the biggest problem, since I was planning on carrying her either way, but… well, I don't know, it's something. I have mixed feelings about seeing her start to adapt to her body's Angelic form. Were there other Demons who managed to recover their minds after becoming a Demon? If so, what happened to them? Or is it more likely the other Demons just never ended up in a position where they could center themselves the way Maria is starting to, and they inevitably died from conflict with human or alien forces? I'm not sure, and I don't like to think about it.

I end up sharing all of these thoughts over the network, Blossom nodding along with my morbid musings, but by the end of them I notice one of Maria's heads watching us. I force myself to smile at her, and she reaches out towards me, a couple of her legs staggering forward with extra speed compared to the rest, making the whole body stumble. I immediately start to approach, not wanting to disrupt her any more than necessary, but that head's movements just get all the more desperate, flailing and reaching toward me with all of her might. The struggles accelerate more and more as I rush her way, the calls into the network desperate but incoherent. It's enough to cause me to grow eyes behind my head, extending my domain out to check and see if there are any dangers heading our way, but there's nothing. It's just a sudden, maddened need to be near me, one that somehow causes her more distress the closer I get rather than less. I have no idea what to do other than try and reassure her, but before I can reach out and touch her hand, a sudden, unexpected wave of heat washes over me, hissing against the water and lightly scalding my skin.

And then, floating between us, there is a fairy. An alien fairy, unlike any of the others, a miniature replica of her Demonic form rather than her human body. All but one of its heads sagging as if asleep, their arms limp. The fairy's body is jet-black, but I can tell before I change my eyes to confirm that it nonetheless has a color. Infrared. This Maria glows invisibly with pure heat.

The one head it has that still seems awake cranes upward to look at me, comprehension seeming to dawn in her tiny eyes. She rushes at me immediately, pressing herself into my face, arms wrapped around my temples and forelegs scrabbling at my cheeks. Her body burns me, but I ignore it.

she cheers, then pauses as she notices my flesh bubbling beneath her. She lets out an inhuman screech of shock and regret, pulling away from me immediately, but I just heal off the damage and send her as many reassurances as I can muster.

"It's okay, I'm fine," I promise her, dimly aware of Blossom approaching curiously behind me as the other fairies stare at us in shock from the front.

Infrared Maria reports, and sure enough the heat radiating out of her dims considerably, making her safe to touch. I reach out my hand, assuring her she may do so at her leisure.

"Hey," I greet her softly, "are you alright? You seem… new."

Behind her, I see the head of Maria's main body that she was struggling to free herself from rise like a puppet on strings, its eyes blank and its arms and legs once again moving in tandem with the other parts. Yellow thankfully notices and resumes helping the main body step into the water as I slowly guide Infrared out of the way. Man, that doesn't really roll off the tongue like normal colors. There's gotta be something better than 'Infrared Maria.' Heat Maria? Fire Maria? Invisible Laser Maria? Whatever, we can workshop it. The new Demonic fairy giggles, and I realize I had been letting that, too, slip into the network. Infrared looks up at me and smiles, the expression genuine yet somehow uncanny.

she reports,

Oh, fuck. Okay. So she's like, lucid. In response, she projects both agreement and disagreement into the network simultaneously. It takes her a moment to settle on the right words.

she says.

She floats forward and lands on my hand, and I bring her up to rest on my shoulder, her many segmented legs digging into me to give her a firm grip.

"Yeah, you… don't talk like the other yous," I note. "And I don't just mean how you don't speak out loud."

"Wait, she's speaking?" Pink asks.

"Yyyes," Infrared confirms out loud for both of us, though the word comes out slurred like she's had a major concussion. Which… I suppose isn't too far off.

she tells me.

"That… must be hard," I say sympathetically. "I'm sorry."

"You strong," Blossom says approvingly. "Good job."

The new Maria twitches, trying to agree with both of us at once for different reasons, and disagree with both of us at once for different reasons. Ultimately, she settles on something simple.

"I… did… the only… thing… I could," she slurs out, the effort of vocalizing it aloud seeming to almost physically exhaust her. Pink and Blue start floating nearby, hesitantly approaching her.

"You're… one of us?" Blue asks.

Infrared shrugs with eight shoulders.

"Maybe," she manages.

"Well, hey," Pink says, reaching forward to pat her on one of those shoulders, "discontinuity of consciousness club, right?"

The newest fairy stares at her with complete incomprehension, but after a moment she at least picks up on the spirit of genuine acceptance and reaches out with two different torsos to hug both of them at once.

she laments silently to the network, mourning for the people alive and right in front of her, because she no longer remembers. But some part of her knows them, so she starts to cry.

"Uh… hey. Am I interrupting something?" Christine asks, and I look up to see her finally out of the van, awkwardly approaching the rest of us. Her voice sounds a little different now, as per her request, though it's still all the same inflection and habits that make her unmistakably Christine. Of course, that's from the only thing I changed about her.

"Christine? Is that you?" Peter calls out, poking his weird monster head up out of the water. "What happened to your face?"

"Like you're one to talk!" she snaps at him, crossing her arms defensively. "And I asked to have it changed. I didn't like my old face. You got a problem with that?"

"Nope. It looks good," he says simply, disappearing back under the water.

"Oh," Christine says after he's already gone.

"Yeah, uh, it looks great!" Emily agrees. "You look like a completely different person, is all."

"I've always wanted to be a different person," she shrugs. "Now I just look the part. I was going to make even changes, but apparently Julietta can't do anything crazy yet."

"She can, she just coward," Blossom butts in.

"I don't want to mess with the nervous system!" I insist.

"Gave Army person new arm," she reminds me. "Had to regrow nervous system."

"That… that's different," I insist. "She already had the neural pathways in her brain to use a second arm."

"Eh, let brain learn old-fashioned way," Blossom shrugs.

"How about you let me take risks with my family at my own pace?" I snap at her. "Quit bugging me about every little thing, Blossom. I I have issues I need to work on, but this is just prudence."

"Fine, fine," she says. "Sorry. Christine look good, but I don't see difference."

"Which I guess is why you think wearing most of Julietta's old face isn't super weird?" Christine asks.

"Eh, she can have it," I say. "I don't really need it anymore."

"You use it, though," Christine says. "You pop back into it from time to time. Your face changes so much I mostly recognize you through your voice or just process of elimination. Even your voice changes a bit here and there."

I unconsciously change my face, but not my voice? I guess that makes sense. Whenever I'm mixing and matching human and alien brains, which is nearly all the time, Lia's brain is my go-to for the human bits. Even if you change the biological structure, a voice stays mostly the same as long as it has the same habits. …Unless the biological structure becomes completely inhuman, of course.

"…Well, I stole it from someone else," I remind her. "So it's no more mine than it is Blossom's. I was lying about that, remember?"

"Yeah, I guess," Christine shrugs. "It's a bit weird, since that's the face I've always known you by, but you're right. How about we get used to each other's new faces together?"

"Sure," I agree. "Though I just kind of wing it when it comes to my face. I don't really think about it."

"Yeah, we can tell," Christine smirks. "Alright, let's get this over with. We're supposed to be able to inhale water now, right? That sounds miserable."

She steps into the water, keeping a wide berth from Maria and, by extension, Blossom and me. The other changes I've made to her body are less obvious than her having a completely new face, but she had a pretty comprehensive list of desired alterations she managed to push through her own embarrassment to ask for. Bigger this, smaller that, those sorts of things. Nothing too complicated, but enough for me to end up changing almost everything. She's completely unrecognizable, and I'm pretty sure that was a big part of the point.

It'll be helpful if we end up hiding in human cities again, certainly. But like she said… she's always wanted to be a different person. I hope it helps her, in the end. So far, she looks happy with it. For now, I turn back to the new Maria. Or, well…

"Do you want me to call you Maria, or A Prism Of Refracting Selves?" I ask gently, as the tearful little fairy starts to pull away from her other selves. She turns to stare at me, managing a small shrug.

"Oh, that makes sense," I frown. "Well, let me know, alright?"

"What?" Pink asks. "What did she say? What's this about prisms?"

"She said they both feel like names given to her by other people," I answer. "A Prism of Refracting Selves is apparently the Angelic name Omnipresence as Worship decided on."

"Uh, Pink asks.

"Are you talking over your network thing?" Blue clarifies.

"Yep," I nod. "I can't really translate proper nouns all that well, sorry. It seems like it's easier for her to talk the alien way, so… I can be an intermediary if you want?"

Infrared sighs.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"Shouldn't we help her… I don't know, re-learn English?" Blue asks.

"She knows English, she just… doesn't prefer it," I say, not wanting to vocalize 'she has brain damage so it's really hard for her to say the words out loud.' Thankfully, Infrared nods to confirm the point for me. …With all her heads. It's weird how sometimes they hang completely limp and sometimes they function in a way that almost seems natural.

Maria's main body, meanwhile, starts to screech and fight with herself as Yellow tries to get her deep enough for the water to touch her waists, her network emissions even more nonsensical and contradictory than usual. Blossom approaches to try and help, but a stray swipe from Maria breaks her jaw… which is repaired in a flash, of course, but it does convince Blossom to keep her distance.

Infrared says hesitantly.

I assure her.

Blossom says, rubbing the phantom pains on her face.

Infrared says.

"…She says she needs to return to the body to help out," I translate. "How many are there in there?"

She shrugs, this time with only two shoulders.

"As many… as there are," she answers.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Blue asks.

"It… was… nice… meeting you," Infrared answers, and zips back into the main Maria body before anyone can respond.

As soon as she does, the thrashing and screaming gets one of the heads in particular scratching at itself with terrifying fervor… before suddenly halting. Slowly but surely, the rest of the heads start to calm down as well, and Maria continues her descent into the water.

"…You in there?" Blue asks, flittering towards the main body. One of the heads turns to stare at her, but none of them answer. "Oh, god. Okay."

"She said she'd be okay," I say. "We should trust her. Have you and the other fairies practiced swimming yet? I can handle your body while you do that."

"Oh, uh… yeah, I guess we should," Blue agrees. "You really think we can just… fly through the ocean?"

"Your wings are energy constructs, they shouldn't get waterlogged," I say. "So the principles should be similar, if not the same."

"Alright. Um… good luck."

"Thanks," I nod, reaching out to Demon Maria and offering her closest torso a hand. She wraps a claw around not only the hand but most of my wrist, too, and I lead her in deeper. One of her heads visibly starts to get frightened as the water gets up to her chin, but another reaches out a hand and awkwardly paws at the frightened head's cheek, which seems to help calm her down.

The two of us… or the five of us? Well, Maria and I dunk our heads under the water at the same time, and I start taking cold, slow breaths of the liquid to demonstrate to her that she can safely do the same. There are a few false starts and panicked surfacings, but honestly not any more than I'm seeing from Christine and Emily, neither of whom are taking to the water quite as well as Peter and Anastasia. The two of them are playing, actually. Zipping around each other in the water and enjoying the excitement of three-dimensional mobility. Which, I have to agree, pretty fun.

Still, the time has come to get going. We have a long swim to cover. Nobody has fun taking their first breaths of seawater, but once everyone gets used to the fact that it isn't going to kill them, they manage to calm down a bit. For my part, it's finally time to take a form I've only used once but am already kind of missing. Long and serpent-like, with four tentacles trailing out from what would be my scalp if I had a head, with countless eyes emerging across the length of my form to watch in every direction at once. My skin is a scintillating tapestry of color, bright and ever-shifting.

I build myself to be much larger than I was the last time I took this body, since I know I'll need to carry far more people than before. I grow carefully-positioned spikes and tentacles out of my back, giving those who will be riding me proper handholds and effective seatbelts. For practical reasons, I'll probably swim at the surface and keep them mostly above water; they'll slow me down a with sheer drag if I don't.

Everyone seems very upset with me when I ask them to cough up all the water in their lungs, so I just replace it all with air myself. They're such whiners, I swear.

"Fuck!" Christine coughs, even though I know for a fact her airway is completely clear. "Why did you have us inhale all that water if we weren't going to be breathing it!?"

"Because I might need to head underwater at any time in an emergency," I answer. "So you needed to already know what it felt like so you could adjust without another thing to panic about."

"Ugh! Can you at least explain stuff like this at least?" she asks.

"She did," Blossom says.

"Right, I… oh. Damn it. Yeah, I'll vocalize it next time, sorry," I groan. This using-two-languages-at-the-same-time thing is so weird on my brain sometimes. "I'm weirdly used to being around people who can basically read my mind."

"Could have fool me," Blossom jabs, poking one of my eyes. Fortunately, alien eyes are much more resilient than human ones, so I blink hard enough to pinch her finger in retaliation, earning me a high-pitched squeak. Hehe.

Once we're finally out in the open ocean, though, things quickly get a lot less lively. We keep ourselves far enough out from shore to still be able to see it, but overall the navigation aid isn't super important since Blossom and I both have a mental compass pointing toward The Divinity of Wonder. It's more that, in case there's some kind of emergency or problem with one of my friends' bodies, we might need to return to land in a pinch.

We'll have to get further out into the open ocean by the end of the journey, though. Right now, we have the continental shelf below us, meaning we're swimming through relatively lively water that caps out at a depth in the mere hundreds of feet. Even the ocean floor still has light here, and the general density of life is far higher than deeper waters.

It startles me a bit when Anastasia suddenly hops up onto my back and vomits water all over one of my eyes, but when she takes a breath of air her face just lights up with excitement as she points towards shore.

"Look, look!" she says excitedly. "Dolphins!"

Woah, really…? Hey, yeah! Sure enough, a pod of dolphins is heading our way, seeming curious enough about our group to start swimming alongside us. Ana leaps back into the water before I can get a word in edgewise, rushing towards the wild animals with the intent to play. Oh geez.

"She be fine," Blossom says, patting my back.

I know, I know. She wouldn't be in danger from a pack of frenzying sharks, let alone dolphins. It just makes me a little anxious every time I see her head off on her own. It… also makes me happy, though. Seeing her leap over waves, twist through the water, and happily spiral around me as we swim is just… so refreshing. is what a girl her age should be doing. Just… playing.

The dolphins are pretty wary of her at first, keeping their distance as she approaches, but the more she laughs and flips through the air, the closer they start to drift. Soon enough, everyone is watching as Anastasia and the dolphins swim alongside each other, splashing her with water whenever she surfaces and dancing around her as we all swim north. I'm kind of surprised to note that Peter doesn't try to join them, but he seems a bit more sedate than usual in general. I keep a few eyes on him, but best I can tell he's just struggling a bit with his new body and too focused on that to do much else.

We haven't even gone more than a few miles before the dolphins abruptly break off, though, refusing to follow Anastasia any further. Anastasia is sad, of course, but I'm mostly wary. I hear dolphins are smart creatures, and their brains back up that claim. I doubt they'd be inclined to go anywhere they've learned to be dangerous, and it's easy to imagine what would be both dangerous enough and stationary enough to ward their whole pod away from an area.

Blossom says.

I ask.

Blossom says.

Blossom answers with a wordless dump of nuance and information, outlining the various issues we may encounter and the several ways this could turn out to not be a big deal at all. Generally speaking, entering another colony's territory when they worship a different god is not something that happens very often. Colonies of different gods rarely intermingle outside of war, and when they do it's usually due to some equally serious purpose.

Of course, as it so happens, we do have a pretty serious purpose. That's the sort of world-shattering news that can easily explain why a bunch of weird-looking chosen from different gods are traveling together. It just isn't necessarily the sort of news that means a bunch of weird-looking chosen from different gods will be allowed to pass through the fastest route to our destination. Like yeah, it's pretty serious, but is it 'allow several heavily armed foreigners through your borders without prior notice or affiliation' serious? That's debatable.

Blossom corrects.

I say.

Blossom asks.

I say.

she hums.

I ask.

I say.

Blossom hums.

I send back.

Maria chimes in.

Blossom continues,

I agree.

Blossom says.

Oh. She's just making fun of me again. Alright. I guess I can't deny I'm not super used to people wanting to reward me for things, but I doubt something like that would be People who want to reward you are usually feeling some obligation to, so you just sit there and let them do whatever makes them feel better.

Blossom bursts out laughing when I have that thought, so I toss her off my back only to find her back on it as if I hadn't done anything at all. Little shit. It's cynical but it's not wrong!

Blossom answers, which gets me to roll several eyes. That's just pretty-sounding sophistry. If you don't think I'm right, then prove it, don't taunt me about it.

Blossom hums, weighing the term 'sophistry' inside her mind.

I say.

Blossom says.

I ask, projecting how painfully common that is in my culture.

Blossom says.

Well that's… true. Sort of. The idea of 'better' is purely subjective, but a lot of important things are subjective. Yet subjectivity can still be justified, and generally speaking I think it be.

Well one, I'm not sure I agree, and two, I don't think my own personal happiness or lack thereof is enough justification to change a viewpoint by itself.

Okay? Good luck with that. I don't currently have a neck.

Blossom whines, to which one Maria head responds by screaming and another responds by leaning over and chewing on one of my eyes.

Blossom says, radiating smugness.

I point out.

I sigh, opening myself up further and… still not really understanding any of the chaos coming out of Maria's physical form. Blossom starts trying to help me identify the mostly-overwhelmed subtleties to her scent, but the whole process is interrupted once we suddenly smell a new node in the network.

Blossom immediately sends.

Blossom answers before I can decide what to say.

Blossom says.

Blossom says, reaching out and pointing with her hand. "That way, everyone."

I start to move, motioning Peter and Ana to follow.

I say.

Blossom says.

I protest.

Blossom says.

Hnng. Well. As much as I want to argue that I'm plenty capable of getting through whatever social situations we end up stuck in, I can't deny Blossom probably knows more about this than I do. Our Queen came from a colony of Bliss, if I recall correctly, so it's probably like dealing with The Divinity of Wonder turned up to eleven. Which honestly doesn't sound bad, but I suppose if our Queen wasn't an exception to the rule, she wouldn't have been blessed by Possibility.

Regardless, as we follow the Raptor toward their colony, I am soon reminded of the terrifying scale alien colonies truly have. Sure, I've seen Queens flatten the Chicago skyline with nothing but their own momentum, and I've been close enough to them to crane my neck upward and barely be able to see the sky, but there's something about realizing that one has become a that still shakes me a bit.

The ocean floor is hundreds of feet below us, and yet the bottom of the Queen's form rests on it while the top peeks above the waves, creating a fleshy landmass that must be at least a hundred square miles in size for us to see it from this far away. Most Queens have been… spread out, to some degree or another. A collection of tentacles or ever-shifting cells, but Joy is Reality isn't like that at all. She's blocky and porous, reminding me of a giant sponge, pockmarked with holes that appear to be tunnels leading deeper into her body.

The 'island' atop her body is a lumpy, grayish mess, with patches of vegetation interspersed with barren stretches of pliable skin. The closer we get, the clearer it becomes that the plants growing from her scalp are almost certainly not from Earth… not unless they've been heavily modified by some power or another. And ultimately, who knows what the chosen of Bliss can do? The powers I've seen from that god have been everything from temperature manipulation to creating glue to straight-up mind control.

"We sure it's a good idea to head toward the terrifying flesh island?" Peter asks, sticking his head up out of the water.

"I figure Emily would have said something if we were being unacceptably stupid," I answer.

"My power is mostly telling me to hang on and shut up," Emily says. "So do whatever, I guess."

"Terrifying flesh island it is, then," Peter says. "Well, at least Julietta will feel at home."

"Ha!" Blossom laughs. "No, she going to hate this."

Oh, goodie. I can't wait.