Oh boy. She tries not to look significantly queasier than anybody else, but can't quite get herself to stop looking.

She wants to get across that border as fast as possible.

She also, somewhat to her surprise, wants to destroy the Sentinels until no trace of them is left.

Vengeful fantasies aren't a usual thing for her, and this wasn't even anyone she knew - but they're fucking up an entire country, and she would very emphatically like them to quit that.

The sample drawer opens. She's not sure how to articulate the sensation, even inside her own head. But one dead mutant and a bug are not, it turns out, the only things tucked away in there. It also has - other things. A long coiling worm-lizard-snake-thing with stubby limbs and massive three-part jaws; a stick-limbed whip-tailed skeletal creature with sharp claws and huge batlike wings; a massive hulking beast like an elephant crossed with a triceratops crossed with a nightmare. She flips metaphorical pages, nicknaming them in her head. The worm-lizard feels like a Tunneler; the lanky bat feels like an Imp; the big one feels like a Tank. Next is a scaly worm with fins and a dragon's head; she calls it Leviathan. A muscular hoofed creature with the horns of a ram, the build of a moose, the teeth of a hyena, and the skin of a crocodile gets to be Warhorse. She's not sure what to call the sixth thing; she's not even sure whether it's a plant, a mold, a fungus, or something else entirely. It doesn't seem to fit in among the rest of her collection.

What is she meant to do with all this? She might like a Tank or two, but she wouldn't like to acquire one suddenly in the middle of this busful of innocent bystanders. She resolves not to do anything with her stored samples until she's got some time to herself in a nice isolated spot where she can be fairly sure of no interruptions for a while.

The bus is disrupted several more times on the way to the border. They aren't personally accosted again, but various road damage and two flat tires at once lead to them being put up in a hotel again.

And Sentinels pass by close enough that Naomi is pretty sure she'd be dead if she were a mutant. So the inexplicable powers remain inexplicable. Maybe she is hallucinating it all.

Is 'alone in hotel room' isolated enough to start playing with her little library? ...probably not, but she's curious. Maybe she can start with the weird mold. Weird mold seems a lot easier to explain than horrifying monsters.

She sits in the bathtub in case of weird mold explosions, and tentatively opens the library. ...oh, there's a copy of her in there, that's super weird. Well, she can mess with that later. Right now, she's going to find out what happens if she... selects? extracts? ...the weird mold.

Nothing seems to happen at first. Then she feels a twinge and turns her senses inward, and—that's an egg. A round soft-shelled egg the size of a marble, swelling rapidly in her womb.

That is not the result she was expecting.

The egg grows for half a minute, up to the size of a tennis ball, then stops. Naomi stares at her own midsection in confusion and alarm.

"...well," she murmurs to herself, "aren't I glad I didn't start with the Tank."

The egg remains dormant. When she focuses, she can tell how to make it come out.

Does she want to make it come out?

She imagines herself riding a Warhorse into battle, leading an army of Tanks, the sky shadowed by a cloud of Imps. If she doesn't play with this stuff, she's never going to learn how it works. Okay, egg, out you go.

Logically speaking, it should hurt, maybe not as bad as giving birth for real but definitely more than a papercut. But it doesn't hurt. Instead it feels - like sex, better than sex, a crashing wave of pleasure that leaves her limp and gasping when the egg finally pops out. She has to cover her mouth with her hands to stifle a dizzy moan. It takes her another minute just to gather the strength to sit up.

And there's her egg, round and reddish, covered in clear sticky fluid and filled with mystery goop. She pokes it. It's soft and squishy, but the shell is tough enough not to break at a touch. Tentatively, she commands it to split, and makes the stuff inside huddle in place instead of pouring down the drain. It answers to her will as easily as another limb; its lifeforce is marbled red-black just like hers. She can make it grow a little, although its growth is limited sitting at the bottom of a bathtub without anything to root itself in; she can make it wither, and then consume the withered parts for fuel; she can make it reshape itself, climb the side of the tub, roll itself into a ball, form a tiny goopy castle and then harden its outer surface until it goes 'tick' when she taps it with her fingernail. In its semi-liquid form it's a dark red nearly indistinguishable from black, but when it hardens it lightens to a red-brown that looks almost like clay.

She giggles.

Then she feeds it the scraps of its eggshell, makes it eat its hardened outer covering and squish itself down into a roundish lump and harden again; now it just looks like a weird rock.

"I wonder," she muses, "what my range is on controlling this stuff..."

Well, there's an easy test. Just leave her weird rock here when the bus moves on in the morning, and see whether she stops being able to affect it before or after it passes outside the range of her life-sense.

...she could make some more, in case the amount of goop involved has anything to do with it. And, you know. It's not like making these eggs is exactly a chore.

Five eggs later, she's exhausted enough to have trouble sitting up. That probably makes it time to stop. She sighs regretfully, piles her lumpy red rocks on the bathroom floor, hauls herself to her feet, and takes a shower with the last egg for company. Just to see what happens, she hatches it and pours it down the drain. Its journey through the building's plumbing doesn't seem to do it much harm, although being diluted with water makes it lose some cohesion.

She finishes her shower, drops a rock out the window, packs the rest in her suitcase, and goes to sleep.

The next morning someone comes to get her again.

The blob of goo that she washed down the drain has either gone outside her range or been diluted past recognition overnight. Or both. She can't see it anymore at all.

As the bus pulls away, she makes her abandoned goop-rock split itself in half and eat its shell and spread out and grow and form more rocks. This stuff is pretty versatile. Maybe she should call it Clay.

Something interesting happens as she gets farther and farther from the pile of Clay next to the hotel: she can see it, but she can also kind of see... from it? If she concentrates, she can shift her life-sense viewpoint to the rocks, or split it and see from both angles at once. It's kind of unsettling. No, scratch 'kind of': it's unsettling as hell.

She maintains control of the pile of rocks right up until the point where she and they can barely see each other, but as soon as they're out of mutual life-sense range, she loses the second perspective and is back to just herself again.

They finally reach the border.

There is a Sentinel blocking the border crossing.

Well at least it's not murdering everyone in sight.

...is anyone allowed through?

Well. No one has actually gotten close enough to check, yet. The woman who got brains on her is curled up making whimpering noises.

Curling up and making whimpering noises honestly seems like a pretty rational reaction to the situation at hand.

...all things considered, Naomi really doesn't want to be the first one to go say hi to the giant killer robot.

Everyone seems to agree with her.

Eventually someone tries to make a break for the border, but instead of approaching the murderbot he sprints at a diagonal towards the un-boothed forested area of the border.

The Sentinel turns its head and fires a laser at his feet. The ground explodes in a shower of dirt and rock; he isn't killed, but he is left moaning in pain and clutching his leg.

"Next time the world starts ending," Naomi mutters to herself, "I'm leaving a lot sooner."

Then she grabs her suitcase and starts walking. South. Fleeing the country by legitimate means has clearly failed her as a solution, but at this point she's confident enough in her mysterious and slightly disgusting otherworldly powers that she's willing to strike out into a random bit of wilderness to experiment.

As long as the wilderness she makes a break for isn't in Canada, and she doesn't suddenly turn up more powers, these ones actually mutant in nature, the Sentinel ignores her.

She is getting very far away from that Sentinel, and heading into the nearest patch of woods until she can no longer detect humans by their lifeforce or man-made structures by their ground footprint anywhere inside her range, and then she is unpacking her Clay and making it break open its rocky shells and eat some shrubs.

...as soon as the Clay has munched a few leaves, the bush it's consuming gets added to her internal library. It's not quite as fast as touching things herself, but that's interesting. (If she made a plant with her powers, would she give birth to a seed...? She can experiment later.)

Viscous red goo spreads out to carpet the forest floor, eating all the grass and bushes and fallen twigs that it finds. Her library expands by several more plant species. Then she makes the Clay heap itself up to form walls and a roof, and harden its outside and inside while leaving a layer of free-flowing goo in between, and she steps into her lumpy new home and heaves her suitcase onto a Clay shelf and and double-checks that there are no people anywhere in her range. There aren't. She takes off her clothes and packs them away and sits down to make a Tunneler.

Its egg grows to the same size as the Clay eggs, and emerges in just the same fashion. She lies there for a minute, panting, then sits up to examine her new creation.

The baby Tunneler hatches itself at her command: a foot-long squirmy pink lizard, tiny legs flailing. Its every movement is controlled by her will, and as easy as moving her own body; when it opens its beady little eyes, she can see through them.

"What the fuck," she says, and hears her words echo dimly in tiny lizard ears.

Okay. That's... more convenient than otherwise, really. She sends the Tunneler outside; the Clay on the ground tastes pleasantly sweet to it, so she has it lap some up, then sends it burrowing into the dirt. Its fearsome jaws and sharp little teeth chew through rock with hardly a pause, and she can feel it growing, its tunnel widening from a pencil-thin hole to a burrow big enough for her to crawl through. That's around the point where its growth starts to slow. Rather than having it keep digging around at random, she brings it to the surface a little ways south of her cabin and sends a glob of Clay rolling over to follow it, then has it chew its way back underground and start making a Clay-coated tunnel out to the approximate edge of her base range. Her lifesense expands to follow it, relayed by the Clay.

Can she control two of these things at once? Let's find out.

When she makes another one, she has to pause the excavation while she lays the egg, but once she's through with that part, she can send out the second Tunneler and control it just as easily as the first. She makes a third, a fourth, a fifth, and sets them all to expanding her network of tunnels, digging deep beneath the earth and avoiding anything that looks like civilization. They can sense buried pipes and cables - something about the way the vibrations of their digging reflect back to them - and she has them route around those. It would be a bad idea to attract attention by breaking something.

By this point her life-sense has such a wide coverage from so many angles that she's starting to feel like an all-seeing goddess. She's pretty sure the radius of her network isn't much more than half a mile, though, and that is insufficiently all-seeing and goddesslike for her purposes - barely twice her base range. She hatches five more Tunnelers and sets them to work.

Eventually a Sentinel wanders by.

The reaction of the wildlife within sensing range is enough to tip her off long before it gets close enough for her to personally see or hear. She has her puddle of wet Clay soak itself into the ground; the hardened stuff is enough like real rock that it probably won't be suspicious, but a puddle of oozy dark red stuff thirty feet in diameter might look weird enough to be worth investigating.

...is that the setting sun, shining in the open door of her Clay cabin? Yes it is. She has been here all day and she's not hungry, thirsty, or sleepy and doesn't have to go to the bathroom. That's... convenient? Hopefully this Sentinel isn't about to come kill her and make it a moot point.

The Sentinel wanders closer by.

Well that's nerve-wracking.

It wanders reasonably close to her hut and then wanders away.

Okay. Still not a mutant. Cool.

In her distraction, she stopped tunneling; she starts that up again. The sun sinks below the horizon, and her tunnel network steadily expands. She discovers that if she needs a Tunneler to retreat along its tunnel, it's much faster to cover it in liquid Clay and have the Clay slide it along than to make it crawl backward with its own stubby limbs. Maybe she can slime-scoot herself across the border in a tunnel deep beneath the earth. The Sentinels probably aren't watching for that.

For now, though, she's too nervous to dig that far north even if she does it two hundred feet below the surface. She stays a respectable distance away from the border and digs her tunnels out and down, sneaking under roads and cities, dodging around pipes and sewers.

Some hours into the night, she blinks and realizes she's been daydreaming, running the Tunnelers on automatic. None of them seem to have gotten in trouble. She keeps the pattern going with the fraction of her attention that is apparently all it needs, and turns her thoughts to learning more about her power.

It would be useful to have some normal animals as scouts and spies. She has some Clay ooze up through the ground, then sends it sliming around to trap and eat some wildlife. Her library expands by six squirrels, some miscellaneous less-identifiable forest-dwelling rodents, three raccoons, and an owl. She's glad she doesn't have to watch the Clay dissolve them; seeing their struggles with lifesense is bad enough.

...somehow it just seems so much more gross to lay raccoon eggs than horrible demonic worm eggs. Why? She has no idea. But if she wants raccoons, she's going to have to make them herself.

The raccoon egg hatches twins. She feeds them wet Clay; they reach adult size in less than a minute, bright-eyed and slimy. She sends them scampering out into the forest and hatches two more. A coyote stumbles across one of her Clay puddles; the Clay engulfs it, and now she has a coyote in her library too. The raccoons seem more useful, though. She has them wash the Clay from their fur and hide in bushes to watch for trouble.

Owls next? Hmm - no. First she wants to see if she can make creatures that make other creatures. Otherwise this project is going to have one hell of a production bottleneck.

Half her raccoons are female. She tries to figure out how to make them grow eggs. It doesn't work, not even if she tries to have them hatch more raccoons - not even if it's the same raccoons, the child a clone of the parent - not even if she has the prospective mother sitting in her lap at the time.

The floor of her hut is almost an inch deep in egg-related fluids. As soon as she notices, she has trouble forgetting again; it's very attention-grabbingly gross. She has the floor crack to release some liquid Clay, and the Clay absorbs all the fluid. Sitting in Clay feels much nicer.

What else could she try? ...she's in that library; she could hatch a clone of herself, see if Second Naomi inherits all of First Naomi's otherwise-unique powers.

No, she decides, she's not in nearly enough trouble yet to make that experiment worthwhile. No hatching creatures with human brains until she expects to need a big army in a big hurry. —That, or if she thinks she might need an extra Naomi for the brainpower, to handle all this hatching and tunneling and spying and wildlife-grabbing; she's definitely doing more things at once than she would've been capable of yesterday, but it seems like there's still only about one Naomi's worth of real conscious creative problem-solving attention.

For now, though: owls. They come out three to an egg; she hatches twelve. As far as she can tell, none of her creatures are hungry, not after that first meal of Clay to get them up to adult size.

...come to think of it, if she hasn't eaten in almost a whole day, where is she getting all these eggs? Never mind eating for two, she's not even eating for one! She starts another Tunneler growing inside her, and this time pays close attention, but she can't quite tell if the rest of her is lighter by one Tunneler egg once it reaches laying size. If only laying them wasn't so distracting, she might be able to gather better data. As it is, she hatches three more and still can't quite figure out if she's wasting away. Maybe she should eat some Clay herself, just to be sure. She does that. It tastes nice. Sort of like fruit syrup.

The sun rises. She hatches six more raccoons and sends them sliding through her tunnels to lurk by the sides of roads as spies. With bellies full of Clay, they're walking relays for her life-sense. (When she sends one out with no Clay, just to check, it's as much under her control as ever but she can't use it as a sense relay. She sends it back into the tunnels to fill up, then has it scrounge through somebody's garbage for discarded newspapers.)

The situation has gotten steadily worse for the country, the newspapers report, although they don't actually frame it that way. Humans who support mutants (and maybe even humans who are just suspected of supporting mutants) have started to be killed by Sentinels as well.

There are plenty of Sentinels in her range, but none of them have reacted to anything she's done.

Well. That's some fucked up news. And kind of changes the game as far as hiding in the woods is concerned.

One of her Tunnelers makes it to what she thinks is probably Lake Champlain. She closes off the tunnel behind it and has it break through into the water, just to see if it can survive there. Result: nope, it drowns. She lays another one to replace it. It occurs to her to retract all her visible Clay patches belowground, to avoid them being spotted in the daylight; she does that.

Okay. Is 'Sentinels might randomly murder me even though I'm not a mutant' enough imminent danger to make cloning herself worthwhile even if it results in a helpless infant twin sister in an adult's body? ...Yes. Yes it is.

She tries that.

The egg grows to the size of a watermelon, with a thick hard shell and a nearly-finished human infant inside.

Getting this one out is going to hurt, isn't it.

Well. No point chickening out now. She pushes.

It hurts. It hurts a lot. She's fortunate that there's no one in earshot, because she screams at the top of her lungs, screams and screams until her voice gives out. Her raccoons go idle; her Tunnelers stop chewing. She isn't doing anything except shove this fucking egg out of her body, inch by agonizing inch.

But the pleasure isn't gone, either. It is a transcendently glorious and awful experience, the longest and most painful orgasm of her life.

When it's finally over. she rests for a few minutes, then resumes all her tunneling. A few minutes after that, she sits up and looks at her egg. There's blood all over it; she vaguely remembers sensing real injury on its way out, but whatever might have happened to her, it's already healed. She has the Clay on the floor consume the blood and weaken the shell, then hatches her new... baby.

She can see through her infant clone's eyes as soon as it opens them. She pours Clay down the baby's throat, feeding it as fast as she can. Soon she has a toddler, a child—two minutes of fast-forward puberty, and she's looking at a perfect copy of herself. And looking back at herself through the copy's eyes. There's twice as much Naomi to go around, mentally as well as physically, but still only one perspective; her two brains share every thought, merged into a single 'I'.

"This is weird," she says from in her original body.

"Tell me about it," she agrees, this time from the new one.

"Would it help if we put some clothes on?" (Being naked and covered in goo is a fair bit weirder when she has to see it from an outside perspective.)

"I don't think so."

"Straight to business, then," says First Naomi, and each of her selves starts gestating a Tunneler. It works perfectly. Two simultaneous egg-layings are twice as distracting as one; she staggers the next round by a minute, checking to make sure Second Naomi's offspring aren't detectably different from First's. As far as she can tell, her second self is fully functional, indistinguishable from the original in every way.

First Naomi starts gestating another clone. Second Naomi climbs down into the tunnel network and sends herself slime-sliding away; if any one of her is as good as the next, her odds of survival are greatest if she doesn't keep any two of them in the same place. A Tunneler near the northeast edge of the network angles itself downward and loops around to carve out a small cave. Slime-sliding is unpleasantly reminiscent of her nighttime encounter with the invasive slime-thing that started all this, but she can keep most of her attention on other things, take deep breaths with her aboveground set of lungs to remind herself she's not suffocating. The pitch-dark tunnels aren't so bad when their liquid Clay lining glows so vividly in her life-sight.