...honestly every time she opens her mouth she makes it intensely obvious how much she is not the Changing God, but that's not a bad idea in his opinion. She'd probably look prettier with longer hair anyway and HE WILL STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS AND LEAD HER AWAY TO A BATH OR SOMETHING RIGHT NOW.

She giggles.

“Sorry. I would look prettier, though! … probably. I do not entirely know what I look like.”

"Your mind reading isn't visual?"

“No. I can kind of see things if people are thinking of what they’re seeing? But I can’t just tune into their senses.”

Well what if he thinks about what he's looking at right now?

She beams and says, “Oh, thank you! … and I am pretty, wow.”

"Not all castoffs are, the Changing God seems to experiment with appearances."

But yes, she is.

“I think they try to do different things with them! For different purposes. They seem to like to make them specialized? So probably pretty was supposed to go with the mind reading. … Which makes sense.” She makes a face.

"Charming."

“Isn’t it just! … I’m sorry, I distracted you from taking me to have a bath. We can go do that now.”

They can, yeah. Back where he lives, where it's quiet and dark and people can be sneaky and quiet and away.

"Oh this is much nicer," agrees his companion, once they're underground and properly in the Underbelly. "No creepy purple guys."

She speaks of the local law enforcement, the levies. They all wear purple, and disturbingly similar smiles.

It is indeed underground and most importantly quiet and dark and dangerous if you don't know what you're doing and who you're meeting, which he does.

Keeps everyone away, anyway, and he likes it like that.

So he can take the nameless castoff somewhere where she can get herself rid of the blood and all that.

A scrawny, malnourished mutant girl called Crooked Qeek is fishing nearby, but amiably shrugs and says the fish are only nibbling today, anyway. She thinks that maybe even the blood the pretty new girl is cleaning off might get them to come out and actually bite, so there's every reason to be fully supportive.

"I can keep watch for a couple shins if you want," she offers, glancing between them and wondering if the pretty new girl is here for the reason she thinks she is. (The reason is that Mr. Grumpy Speed Man has a girlfriend which would be so cute but she will never never bring this up to him because he would be grumpy about it.)

Mr. Grumpy Speed Man will entirely fail to produce words and instead merely offer the mutant four shins then wait for the castoff to be done with a look on his face that should hopefully keep everyone away.

His castoff companion seems to find his expression very cute, and also Qeek to be very cute. The former gets an amused smile, and the latter gets a couple of extra shins before she goes.

"Thanks!" she says to Qeek brightly. (Qeek is surprised that the pretty new girl wants to talk to her, and decides that she approves even more of Mr. Grumpy Speed Man's new girlfriend, now.)

Then the castoff retrieves her stuff from Aleks, and goes and cleans up. After a little while, she comes out wearing her new set of clothes. Predictably, they suit her better than her nondescript black bodysuit. While the bodysuit did hug every single one of her curves, her layered green thing (with pockets!) contrasts nicely with her hair, and has more of her actual personality. ... Also some cleavage, which the previous outfit did not provide.

Aleks...

...will go help her find someone to grow her hair rather than have any thoughts about her new outfit.

Well, probably someone up top could provide this service, almost certainly by paying through the nose, but there are a couple of promising avenues here in the Underbelly. The most obviously promising of which is Meuk the Meatmonger. While this might be a major logical leap to anyone that is not a local, everyone who lives down here knows that Meuk has a numenera that regrows meat from three carcasses in vats. Like a sensible person, he made a business out of this, and chops off slices of them to cook up on his grill to sell for a very competitive price.

"I don't think you want your pretty friend to use one of my vats for hair growth," he says apologetically. "It's not good for anything complicated."

"Really?" She blinks and looks at the vats. They are, respectively, a vat filled with throbbing muscles, a vat filled with some kind of flapping leathery monstrosity made entirely out of wings, and the last is a bundle of wriggling, meaty tails. "It looks like it's fine at complexity, it just likes repeating body parts. Does it do that with everything you put in it? Is there a pattern to what gets regrown over and over?"

  "Uh," says Meuk, who is not used to anyone asking technical questions about his vats. "... Yeah? and extremities, mostly? Even if it's not what was cut off in the first place. I had to throw out a promising carcass because the vat was giving me nothing but hooves."

"Huh! That's interesting, I wonder why it's doing that. Can I look at its internals? I might be able to fix it."

  Meuk is Highly Skeptical, and looks at Aleks.

"She seems to be 70% made out of wanting to fix shit," shrugs Aleks. "And she seems to know how. She fixed that clock the cultists were obsessed with, upstairs," he adds.

"It actually wasn't really broken," she clarifies, because she feels that judging her fixing abilities by figuring out her sire's memory aid is incorrect. "But I won't touch anything unless I know what it'll do, and before I do touch anything I will ask and explain to you what I think will happen."

  "... Hm. All right. But I'll have your hide if you do break it, understand?"

"Absolutely, I'd be heartbroken anyway. You have such a nice business model!"

And then she gets to looking at it. Carefully.

"Ohhhhhh," she says, after a lot of peering at internals. "Okay, so, what I think is going on here is that there is only one processing unit for three vats? And it looks like these were built to have one each. So spreading out the processing power to three different apparati is causing it to make incomplete blueprints of the things it's regenerating. So if it sees a hole, it just fills it with the only thing it knows how to make, over and over."

  "So how would you fix it?"

"Mmmm it's not really broken? I think this is just flat better for what you're using it for. But I'd want to let you switch between one or the other in case you want to open a healing business as well as a grilling business. In a perfect world I would also want to be able to tell it which things to regenerate endlessly, but I don't know how to pull that off without grafting a lot of tech onto here that might not even make friends with it. I do think that if you have another hoof problem you should try two vats instead of three and seeing if you can work from that."

  "And... what about things that have already been regenerated with a bunch of hooves? Could that be fixed by changing its, er. Mode? And then chopping off the hooves?" Meuk is really invested in this question, for personal reasons. The personal reasons are why he is wrapped head to toe (to other, unwanted toes) even though his entire profession is standing over a hot grill.

"I would want to test that to be sure, but I think it might fix it. Do you want me to try it?"

  Meuk lets out a breath. "... Yeah. Please."

"Okay!"

There is fiddling from there, which the castoff takes very slowly, explaining as she goes. She turns the whole thing off, disconnects two of the three vats from the network, then turns it back on. Then the bundle of wings gets tossed into the singular vat, and some wings are sliced off. After a lot of wings, there is what looks to be some sort of dead bat.

  "Well, I'll be. Guess I can branch out into doctoring after all."

"Yeah! But be careful. I don't expect it'll know what to do with anyone with cybernetics, or anyone that's been modified after birth by something else. So, person that was born a mutant will probably be fine, person that was mutated by something else is risky, and I wouldn't recommend it. Also anyone or anything that's made out of anything particularly weird. You," she points at Aleks, and says seriously, "should not get into this vat when it's in doctoring mode."

"...me?" He has absolutely not thought about his tragic backstory in her presence, he's sure of it. "Why me?"

"You're extra special complicated with transdimensional nonsense on top, and I don't think it'd know what to do with you at all. The results might actually be dangerous. So. No vat for you. Probably not for me, either, it might work but it also might not. Depending."