Shimmer, Glimmer, & Gleam - A Quest of Loss & Gain

You know what would be awesome? If you had control of your original body so you could bask in how everyone just calls you 'Doctor Heller' now. Whole career of getting first-named by everyone and their mother 'cause you're a woman, world ends and all of a sudden you've got respect. You're decently sure Orchid started it without even thinking, which is par for the course with things Orchid has done that alter the community. Everyone's sure wearing jackets everywhere now, huh?

Unfortunately, with the assistance of various animals and (medical) Doctor Rupert, you have received some bad news on that front. It's taken you a bit to really come to grips with it, and even then you're pretty sure something jagged and ragged has been ripped open in your self-image, but for now it is what it is. You're not going to wake up, at least not like this. Your body has converted into...

...Well, into oneiroscopes and ontological wave detectors and psiometers and all the tools of your trade. The flesh on the outside is only there because there's no reason for it not to be there. Your mind is stored somewhere in there, and can reach out to touch the sufficiently weak or the insufficiently human, but that's it. The whole rest of you is a portable lab for the study of ontology and oneirophysics, and it's under your control. When you're not investing your consciousness in an animal or something with reduced agency such as a pre-awakening spider, the entire world is just waves and emanations and manifestations, a readout that has replaced your five senses, six if you count your uncanny knack for knowing the weather. This is still pretty disorienting and unpleasant, like adjusting to a new glasses prescription, so you spend a lot of time being various birds, insects, and fish. There's an odd lack of stray or feral animals near here, but you suspect the invisible people might have collected them with whatever odd knack they have for urban verm-

- Oh that's a depressing pair of dots to connect.

So here you are in your fucking coma bed, taking up vital resources though, to the eternal anger of the doctors who don't know what's going on, not as many as a human of your size should, and trying to keep yourself busy. Communication is a bitch. The good news is that crows and ravens can be made to speak human language, though with many, MANY pauses because there's not a lot of air in them lungs, and the bad news is you're not sure if you can turn a crow into a person by doing that too much. Efforts by the Station 104 folks, your peers, to get others to learn dot code are slow going. Everyone's busy! They're building a home! So uh.

Yeah.

There's just not time to get everyone up to speed just for poor old Doctor Heller. At least the spiders agreed to learn instantly...

You check in on the perimeters, find them uneventful, and decide it's time to metaphorically get out of bed and metaphorically go on a stupid walk for your stupid mental health and metaphorically shove aside the thought that if Jill could fix up the Threshold girl like she did, maybe she could slap your stomach and convert you into an android or something. Being a stained glass robot wouldn't be so bad, but one leg took her down hard, a whole body? A whole new kind of being? That just might kill her, and...

...Well, Doctor Young was famous for his saying, and you're quite fond of it. Good science is rigorous; great science helps people.

Alright Heller, what're we doing today?

Choose 1
[ ] Raiding smaller churches for holy objects, holy books, holy etc; faith could be a comfort the community hasn't thought to address.
[ ] Find more spiders we must; return personhood to them we will
[ ] Could we attempt first contact with that dragon with deniable assets? The world is dying to know.

In a place where the dead, or something like them, or something made from them, go (or are made), there is a Wasp. It was not there a moment ago; soon, it will not be there again. Young Stella had always had a certain fondness for wild places and natural beauty, and in so doing she had made her dominion amenable to the Wasp; that was, in fact, how they first met. And so, now, in places that are wild within the realm of the maybe-dead or the dreams-of-the-dead or, perhaps, against all odds, immortal souls, the Wasp makes the smallest twist in the dream, and those places are now the Wasp. And then it waits, politely, for its young friend.

She wings in bearing a great pitcher of fertilizer. "Thirsty?"

You will not find me declining your hospitality, young Stella.

She gets that wistful, dreamy look on her face that she always gets when the Wasp uses her first and most treasured name. So few do, these days. And then she pours the drink at many roots which are currently the Wasp, and sits upon a fallen log that is also the Wasp, and crosses her ankles playfully, looking up into the canopy with a delighted expression.

Your work continues unimpeded?

"Oh yeah," Stella says breezily. "Not even a hitch. I'd been worried about the new arrivals causing refractions in here, maybe a cascade into a new satellite, but nah, nothing. Whatever happened to Domus, it's already happened, and they just kinda gotta...deal." Here she slumps a little, and sighs. "I do not like the amount of dreaming that flooded in. It's getting nasty."

You know the choices laid out before you.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. I could manifest like I used to but then I might get refracted, and if I change too much this place comes apart. So I can be brave or I can take care of the friends I have here, who only have me to rely on. Doesn't mean I have to like it."

Should -

"Should the wolf be unhappy, yeah yeah, y'old coot." Stella sticks her tongue out at a flower, where a bee is busily drinking nectar. "I dunno if your failing eyes have caught this but my sexy wolfgirl phase was three thousand years ago, I'm over that."

The wild place that is the Wasp chuckles, fondly. Well then. Consider me chastised. Perhaps I can cheer you; I have found one within my dominion who needs a friend. One I cannot reach out to more than I have already. It is...hurting.

Stella winces. The wildflower and the sunset are of the Wasp, certainly, but in times like that it skews far closer to the wolf and the maggot, and humans tend to not enjoy those reactions to their pain so much. "Can you show me?" A riot of wildflowers grows before Stella, creating a portrait of Marie's face. The Wasp's friend, who insists she is not a god, makes a Face about it. "Oh come onnnn. She's gonna make it weird! She was part of fuckin' Mara's stupid cult that press-ganged my name into its bullshit, she's gonna be like 'oh my lady' and 'forgive me' and fucking - come on!"

She needs a friend, Stella.

"You can't do this to meeeee - ughhh I'm just bitching to bitch now, I'm gonna, you know I'm gonna, I know I'm gonna." Stella kneels, and brushes the flowers with her hand. "...She has such haunted eyes. What happened to her?"

So the Wasp tells young Stella a story. A long, bad story, about how it's never been easy to be Marie.

Okay. Today will be a day of adventures. Sort of. You think, probably, that a real adventure involves putting yourself at risk, and while losing a body you're inhabiting sucks it's not uh. It's annoying? If you're being permanently damaged thereby you can't notice; even when your main body goes into sleep mode as it does every five days or so and you dream you don't really have nightmares about the nineteen or so times you've 'died'. Lots of nightmares about being buried alive and unable to speak the same language as your rescuers though!

Ha ha! HA!

You get your thoughts in order and filter through the available animals in range. Once you've got a mind your range piggybacks off it, but until then you've got about half a mile. The closest are, of course, your habitual uh...familiars...but no point in risking them. Second-best are the gulls and crows that the community is using for eggs, having proven shockingly amenable to the local apex predators providing free food, free shelter, warmth, and petting, admittedly with help from some of the agri-science students who had manifested useful refractions and also the spiders of all things? You have lost hours at a time in bird form listening to them sing like a cartoon princess and watching the birds perch on their arms and shoulders, sometimes singing along. And not just the 'la la la la laaaaaaa' shit either, you did not know how much you needed to hear a stripper sing heavy metal with a backing chorus of crows until you heard it the first time. Wild shit.

Anyway, no-gos there. But there's plenty of crows and gulls that hang around in the periphery, so you seize about nine minds, mug the light behind their eyes, and throw it in a metaphorical closet to sleep it off, and then you send your flock winging off towards the near-center of the city, where a dragon waits on a tower.

This is going to take hours, so you also seize a raven you usually use as your mouthpiece and send it winging off to go watch Orchid train Asset Protection. Strangely, the habitual ease with which you are now multitasking is the thing that bothers you the least about your new situation. It's just...kinda cool? You hope that in the hypothetical future where you get a bangin' robot body that this sticks around. Being a weird hivemind has some downsides, not the least of which is that it might, possibly, maybe, be animal cruelty (genuine maybe there, you're still tracking the effects on your familiars), but it's also the sort of experience you've long pondered and maybe even fantasized about. Back then you'd thought that having no main body would be the best thing, but the reality of basically having no main body now fucking sucks, so.

Anyway.

Orchid is trying to get Asset Protection up to some kind of non-supernatural snuff. For understandable reasons of the large glass lances growing out of their backs, other people don't train when Asset Protection trains. Today's lesson seems to be more of the close-quarters combat stuff, which is where Orchid really shines. It's...you're pretty sure it doesn't know what it is doing, is the thing. Not consciously. But from the outside everything about this enthralls you. Orchid is right-handed in day-to-day life, but it switches to mirror the handedness of its opponent, without thinking, and while most people struggle to fight like that, Orchid thrives. It moves with this strange, smooth mirroring that it can unexpectedly disrupt at any moment, 'training' opponents only to then break the pattern and take them out. And the thing is, as they start making this two-on-one and then three-on-one, Orchid can just stop doing that at any time, and move with a smooth brutality that you've come to associate with reef sharks.

As a teacher Orchid is dog shit, but as an experience you could take in this doppleganger dance all day. And you burn a few hours doing exactly that before you notice that you're coming up on the dragon, so you switch your attention. It's a gorgeous thing, up close, all color and light. The sunlight streaming through its body highlights pictures in the glass, but the color vision of these birds isn't the same as a human's so aside from a nagging feeling of familiarity you don't manage to pin it down. You land most of your captive flock and send a single gull towards the wyrm, hoping against hope that it will consider the bird a dirty thing unworthy of being ea-

Nope. Crunch.

Wait a minute. Were those molars? That seems familiar. You switch your attention again; Orchid is sitting heavy on a bench, smiling and trying to offer advice to Asset Protection. You wing down to its shoulder and caw super fucking loud to get attention; it jolts, and turns its head to you, giving that confused but beatific smile it wears so often. "Doctor Heller?"

More reasonable caw.

"How can I help?" Orchid asks automatically.

So you make the raven say: "Dragon. Notes."

Switch back. Does the dragon do that every ti - mother fucker it's in the air. Oh that bitch is gone-gone. Over the 'burbs. Headin' for the mountains. It's gonna be a week or more before anyone sees that scaly little cocksucker, URGHHHH - it's fine! It's fine! Your entire life is waiting and watching like the world's thirstiest straight nerd, you can just WAIT AND WATCH SOME MORE, who cares! Whoooo FUUUUUUCKING cares you're gonna beat that dragon to death with dildos how dare it just LEAVE -

You find yourself back in the eyes of your familiar again. Son of a bitch. Got too frustrated and lost the flock, now you need a new one and whooooo goddamn knows if that one will come back to this area again or if it understands what happened on any level.

You can't even take deep, calming breaths.

You know what, no, no, we're still having an adventure today. We are STILL having an adventure today. We're gonna do something concrete and good and also we're going to stop thinking in terms of 'we', that's post-possession bleed from the unsafe breaking of the connection and it's bad for us - YOU, bad for YOU. Okay.

How to go about this...

Choose 1
[ ] Grab a new flock and go looking for spiders
[ ] Some of the previous spiders you helped seem to have deliberately provoked compatible refractions. Maybe one would like to be your eyes?