"—how do you know that."

"You're giving off faint transdimensional energy readings every time you move, it's confusing the nearby datasphere networks."

"The—you know what, I don't care," he says, shrugging. "Your sire's fault, anyway."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

  Meuk clears his throat. "So can you show me how to switch back and forth between the modes?"

"Ah! Yes, sorry, hold on..." She explains the process again, and then decides that this is not clear enough. From there, she to solicits little scraps of different cloth to tie to specific parts, along with a little paper of what things go in which order, with reference to the bits of cloth. It is very important that this be very clear.

  "All right, much appreciated. And you just wanted to grow your hair longer...?" The Meatmonger is a little bemused to see someone go to all of this trouble for something so... frivolous.

"Yes, please! Do you need it for anything right now? I don't mind waiting or coming back later."

  "Nah, go ahead."

"Eee," says the castoff, who removes the experimental bat (with a nonorganic hook) from the vat and plops her hair into it. "It might need my actual scalp depending on how it works but—oh, no, it's fine."

  Meuk snorts, then goes and starts counting off shins to pay the strange woman. The Underbelly needs people like her, in his opinion.

Aleks is just leaning against a wall, watching everything with a faintly amused (and amusedly fond) expression on his face.

The Meatmonger's body has been covered in unwanted toes for years and she fixed it in under an hour. Who is this woman, and he wonders if all of the other castoffs would've been similarly capable of such things if they had been so inclined or if this is just a her thing.

She meets his eyes, then turns a little bit pink and looks away, smiling.

...what did he think of that caused that? Was it the thing about other castoffs? He supposes it was a pretty complimentary thought, but he kinda stands by it. She's very noble and altruistic, to the extent she can be said to be anything at three hours old. More people could stand to be like her.

Eeeeeeeeeeee she wants to wrap herself in a blanket made out of his emotions and snuggle in it forever.

Her hair is probably long enough now. She checks, so she can continue not looking at Aleks, even though she wants very much to look at Aleks, except she also doesn’t because feelings are complicated. So instead she'll focus on her hair. Yep! Her hair is long enough now. It could use a trim to tidy it up a bit, but that is not Meuk’s problem.

  Speaking of Meuk: "Here," he says, handing her a pouch of shins. "You did good work, kid. You got a name?"

"Oh! Thank you. Uh. No, not yet, I haven't, er. Figured one out yet."

  "'sfine. You'll be plenty recognizable without it."

"Looking good," Aleks says, and if he sounds sarcastic that's mostly force of habit; he means it.

He's also finding it kind of hilarious that she managed to figure out a way to get paid for getting the hair she wanted.

“Have a good day,” says the castoff, giving Meuk a little wave and returning to Aleks.

“It is pretty funny. I’m kind of proud that I’m already so fiscally responsible.” She counts her available money and raises her eyebrows. “…. He pays way better than the cult.”

Meuk, being one of the most financially secure businessmen in the Underbelly (if not potentially the entire city) gave her a little over four hundred shins.

Aleks gives that amount a low whistle. "He's swimming in more of it than I'd reckoned."

“He has a smart business model! Also he didn’t want me to go back up top.”

"...not go back as in live here? Why is that?"

“Yeah. Because I was clever and helpful, and he thinks having a clever helpful person that figures out numenera would be great for local business, and he sort of thought that they’d take advantage of me up there anyway.”

Aleks snorts and rolls his eyes. "The Underbelly is not all roses." But with someone like Meuk to vouch for her she could in fact go pretty far, here.

“I also have a guide!” she points out, brightly.

"Is that what I am?"

“Yes. As long as you would like to be.”

"Hm."

He's not entirely sure what he means by that. Maybe her mind reading will be enlightening.

If it is enlightening, she doesn’t help him out with it.

“So I do want to figure out a safe place to sleep before I get started on various projects. It seems smart to get myself squared away on that front first before I start trying to reverse engineer how my sire does body creation, or whatever is going on with the resonance chamber.”

Places to sleep are easy. If nothing else she can crash at his, but inns and whatnot are also an option.

"Body creation?" Why does she want that, she has a pretty good body already in his opinion.

“It’s not for me, it’s for my siblings. The clock separated their minds from their bodies, and it did it ages ago. And apparently I have a… mindscape thing… that was built to catch them. So. I would like to get them bodies of their own. Probably the whole thing was built to keep castoffs prisoner to sire-dearest, it sounds like something they would do.”

He's kind of proud of how she has reached the entirely correct conclusion that her sire sucks.

"That does sound like them," Aleks agrees. "It's not even very practical but I don't think they are that practical a person."

“It might have other uses, but I don’t know what they’d be. And of course I concluded that my sire sucks, I don’t see how I could think otherwise?”