...what in hells.

A falling star from a crumbling moon. No, no star—a person, falling to their likely death.

This has nothing to do with him. Nothing. He should turn around and pretend he didn't see it. Nevermind that the moon was a creation of that ten times damned self-styled god. He should look away and pretend he never saw it.

Damn him, he does not. Instead he—what is he even doing?—stills that person's fall. Not by much, the device he's using can't very well stop them—but maybe by enough. Maybe, if they are lucky and well-built, they will survive.

Maybe, but he has to go check anyway, damn him twice over.

The dome had been impregnable before, completely without any kind of obvious entrance and about as nondescript as anything else in the Reef of Fallen Worlds can be. Just one more bit of random, complicated tech that washed up ashore. Apparently the person's entrance was enough to crack it open, because there's a hole in the ceiling and a crack down the side that's big enough for Aleks to fit through. He gets what lots of hopeful reef-sifters hope for their entire lives to get; first grabs at whatever's inside.

Unfortunately, the main attraction of whatever's inside looks like it's been broken into pieces by this person's landing. The large crystalline object (coffin? pod? it could certainly fit a person) is in pieces, cracked open to reveal its hollow center, like an empty eggshell. Even the array of five arms around the main attraction wasn't spared this wayward not-star's wrath; one is lying in pieces on the floor, sparking unhappily.

And in the middle of the destruction is what looks like a young woman, lying broken in the crater of her own creation. Her short hair is a familiar shade of red, and there's a mark like a stylized pentagon on her temple. Aleks has seen both it, and her, before.

"—you!" hisses the man, drawing a pistol more quickly than the eye can track and pointing it at the prone form on the floor.

...prone and unmoving. Is it... are they... dead? He dares not approach, not yet. He merely observes, gun at the ready. And he waits.

For a few seconds, there is no movement. The person looks, for all intents and purposes, dead. Then there's... some kind of pressure building, in his head. Not physically, but on Aleks's mind. Pushing uncomfortably at him, at his sense of self. And then in a rush it releases, and the broken woman takes a shuddering breath. The black bodysuit she's wearing conceals a lot of the details and seems to have succeeded at disguising the blood, but there is no disguising the unpleasant cracking noise of bones being shoved back together.

Her eyes flutter open, and she lets out a low groan.

The man tenses, gun still pointed at her, safety clicked. Not that it will work; if this is them, if this is the Changing God...

Still. Better with a gun than with no gun.

Eyes search above and then around for something recognizable, eventually fixing on Aleks.

".... I'm sorry," she mumbles to him, a little dazed, "was this yours?"

"What."

"I thought I beat the dome in resilience, but upon reflection, there were no winners here," she elaborates. Then, hissing with pain, she starts attempting to sit up—there is another unpleasant crack. She makes a face, but continues her motion, and now she has a better vantage point to look around in clear confusion.

"...are you them. Are you the Changing God."

".... Maybe?" she says after a thoughtful pause, looking genuinely stumped.

The man starts cussing in some other language and reholsters his gun.

Okay, well. Apparently she is not the Changing God. Okay. She resumes looking around to see where she's landed. Her eyes fix on the broken shards of crystal behind and around her.

"... Oh, skist," she mutters, blinking at it. "I think I might have needed that."

"Why."

...............damn him thrice over he offers her a hand to her feet.

"Um. It's supposed to stop a... bad thing. A bad hunting murder thing." She blinks at him with confusion, then takes the offered hand and (clumsily) stands, wobbling a bit. "The.... Sorrow? That's a dumb name, why is it named that."

"You seem to know a lot for someone who doesn't know if they're the Changing God."

"Honestly what I do and don't know is completely nonsensical! Why do I know language, or what gravity is, or the difference between a stratosphere and a thermosphere! It's kind of frustrating."

Castoff or self-amnesia, then. He wouldn't put it past the bastard.

"Do you at least know why you fell?"

"Something... was attacking." Confused blink. "The Sorrow? Maybe because of the dumb name, I'd be mad if someone named me 'The Sorrow.' Um. And then I was in a... cocoon thing... and then it broke open and I was falling."

"I see."

He doesn't, not really. He starts looking around, himself, for anything of value (although he thinks the Changing God's latest castoff is very likely to be the most valuable thing here).

The interior of the broken and sparking arm looks like it has some kind of synthskin container. The end of the arm itself looks like some kind of injector, or perhaps scalpel, so plausibly the synthskin was for fixing the subject after they were cut-or-injected-or-something. There are some devices arrayed around the perimeter of the interior of the dome, but if any of those hold easily scavenged prizes, they're not obvious about it.

The latest castoff (probably) is investigating the crystal chamber itself. And talking. She seems to be talking.

"How is this supposed to help with the Sorrow, though?" She leans down and carefully picks up a shard of crystal for inspection. ".... 'Resonance chamber'? Resonance of what? Was it for making sure it couldn't find me? Disrupt resonance between us? Or amplify it as a weapon to, deafen it or something? Why was I supposed to go in it." She eyes the pointy arms skeptically. "That does not look like it would have been good for my health."

"Falling onto it can't have been a better option," says the man without turning around to look at her, still examining the various (apparently useless) things around.

This earns a little giggle!

"It might have been, though! It depends on how it was going to do... whatever it was going to do. You can achieve world peace by killing everyone in the world, but that doesn't make it a good solution!"

"That was a very specific and entirely unenlightening comparison."

"Was it specific? It doesn't seem very specific. There was no specification about how the horrible genocide would be achieved, which I guess matters... any... for how good of a solution it isn't. There are worse ways to do it than others. But anyway, the rhetoric is just obvious, right?" She leans over to peer inside the hollow crystal shell. "You can technically fulfill criteria without the end result being anything like what you want. Maybe this is like that. I don't know, I don't know how it does what it was supposed to do."

"Which is stop whatever 'The Sorrow' is from doing whatever it was trying to do to your sire before they decided to jump ship again and leave you to your death."

"... there was no ship involved, though? I'd have mentioned."

"You are the ship."

She straightens up from where she was peering at the interior of the crystal, then looks down at herself, then back up at Aleks.

"... no?"

He covers his eyes with a hand and counts to ten, breathing deeply. "Never mind."

"... Okay," she agrees. "Well, I have no idea what this thing is, or how it was supposed to work, or why it's called a resonance chamber. I think I want to figure that out, it seems important." She looks at the little crystal shard still in her hands. "Probably showing a sample to people might get me on the right track. Do I have any pockets? .... Why do I not have pockets."

Because your sire doesn't care enough about you or anyone else to have left you anything before they vacated the premises, the man doesn't say. He chooses to shrug, instead.

Notably, he's wearing a long full-body coat with many, many pockets.

"Oh you meant the body!" she says, with dawning realization. "As in they were in it and then they left and now I'm here. And I'm... new and whatever was left over."

She pauses, then makes a face. "... Wow, what an asshole."

That startles a snort out of him. "You're telling me."

Asshole doesn't even begin to cover it.

"Why would they not have pockets, though!" grumbles the latest castoff, offended. She steps away from the wreckage she landed in to start investigating the rest of the dome. "Me not having pockets means they didn't have pockets either!! That's just dumb, pockets are great. If I'm whatever was left over they left important bits behind!"

"You said you were in a cocoon, did you not? Maybe the cocoon gave you the... whatever-it-is you're wearing."

Better than being naked.

"Mmmmmno it didn't have that kind of apparatus, and if it were a conscious nanobiological entity of some kind it'd have handled the fall better. Escape pod or protective capsule is more likely. I think I was already wearing this. Maybe some extra bits on top? It probably doesn't actually matter, it's just offensive."

The man snorts again. "Then be offended, for all the good that will do." The Changing God does not change.

"It's not really to do good. Just for me."

What does this device on the edge of the interior of the dome do? She's going to poke it and find out!

"What are you—don't touch things you don't know—!"

But as she approaches it, a triangle of lights on its casing blazes into life and an image unfolds in her mind.

A towering crystal, a jagged, grey landscape, dead and stifling air, and at its peak—

The image disappears as quickly as it came, and a voice comes from the device. "Command me," it says, somehow managing to sound condescending despite being completely inflectionless.

Huh. That's... interesting.

"Please display a list of commands," requests the dumb idiot who is poking strange tech that she definitely doesn't understand in the slightest. Very politely.

"You are going to get yourself killed, or worse, me."

But the machine obliges, although its lights flash in what seems to be a distinctly irritated fashion. Heated air is spat out of its vents as an enormous list of commands races through her mind, far too fast to read.

"This doesn't look like it houses a defense system, but you can wait outside of the dome if you'd feel safer!" Then, distracted, she squints at the list of commands. Scrolling rapidly past her. ".... Please display a list of commands slower."

Here's the list again! ......faster than the previous time.

"Commaaaaaand. Meeeeeeeeee," it drawls at her.

"Please be slightly less obnoxious about following my commands!" says the last castoff, brightly. "Does intelligence come with that condescension of yours, because for someone housed in a box with only the ability to say two words it seems very dumb to be rude to the people outside it! Come on, display a list of commands at a sensible, readable speed."

The machine buzzes and the lights flash in that distinctly irritated way again. Here's the list of commands! Now it merely blinks for half a second in front of her mind's eye. "Command me," it sighs for the third time, sounding resigned now.

"If that machine sprouts a gun and kills you I will laugh."

"If it had the ability to try to kill me I think it would have already been trying, clearly it started hostile. I think it's just throwing a temper tantrum with what little power it has." She hums thoughtfully. "Which is actually rather reasonable, but still very rude. Come on, thing in the box, I'm not the bad guy here. If you're intelligent and want out of it, I have to have some idea of how your box works to extract you safely and find a compatible replacement chassis that can do more than petulantly ask for commands!"

It doesn't display the commands anymore, and instead hisses once more through its vents and says, "Your command was not understood." It sounds smug enough that it probably did understand, but is choosing not to respond usefully. "Command me."

The young woman huffs.

"You are badly designed on every level, your interface is garbage, and none of it even seems to be fully under your control, or you wouldn't respond at all. If you have any level of intelligence, it is a complete waste of processing power, and I almost think you deserve to sit in there doing nothing for the next century because you don't know how to make nice."

Then she kicks it, once, and flounces away. "Enjoy however long your processors last before someone takes you apart for spare parts instead of trying to help you, asshole!" she calls over her shoulder.

The lights flutter in definitive alarm just before her foot smashes into the device's base and there is a noticeable crunch noise from the inside. "Cell-Gating damaged," says the machine as its lights' flickering gets more frantic and smoke starts coming out of it. "All prisoners lost. Shuttering Lugum Vo."

Then the lights finally flicker out.

...that was kind of amusing, he has to admit.

"I don't think that was very productive of you."

"It was not!" she agrees. "Do you see anything else potentially useful in here, or can we leave our rude company behind? That thing over there looks like it's the power generator but also looks like it'll explode if it's sneezed on too hard so I'm not touching it."

"So you do have a drop of sense in you. I was wondering."

What's that we doing in that sentence there?

"I don't really think sense can be measured in drops," she muses. "Not without some kind of very obscure numenera, but really that seems like such a terrible way to store sense. Liquid forms are really mutable and that's likely to introduce a lot of potential flaws. Solid would be safer."

He does not know what he was expecting. Clearly she did not come with turns of phrases installed.

The man shrugs and turns towards the crack in the dome that passes for its entrance.

That seems like it's a 'no' for anything else that might be salvageable, then!

Possibly he should have fashioned some kind of leash for his traveling companion, because when she steps outside she lights up like a child on her birthday.

"Ooooo," she says, of the many, many bits of the once-treasures and technologies of past civilizations arrayed haphazardly before them.

"No, not 'ooo'," he says. "This is the Reef of Fallen Worlds, and it is approximately maximally designed to tempt you into blowing yourself up by poking the wrong thing." Or the wrong person; he will not have been the only one attracted by the falling star that might contain treasures, and they will certainly find the Changing God's latest castoff to be a nice treasure in her own right.

"It clearly wasn't designed though! Besides, everyone's picked over all of the easy bits, and the deadly bits are the ones that look fine anyway, so anything neat will actually take some level of patience or cleverness and so it is interesting! I bet I can find something cool."

"Not if 'something cool' finds you first, instead."

He's not even sure what he means by that. Probably he's talking about the scavengers.

"Hmm! That's a good point. How obvious was I went I fell from the sky?"

"Rather. A bright falling star, visible despite plain daylight."

There's that drop of sense, again, he was starting to think he'd imagined it.

"Oh. Then we probably want to leave." She looks sadly at the reef, then stage-whispers, "I'll come back for you!"

There's that we again. He agrees, though, and leads the way up a broken ramp and across what seems to be a bridge made of light leading to the unsubmerged top of what looks like a sunken airship or something like that.

Except he notices a small group of people coming right in their direction from up ahead and starts cursing in that other language again.

Oh. Uh. Oh dear.

Does her companion know what to do? Because she doesn't. There aren't even any decent places to hide.

He seems to have resigned himself to a confrontation of some kind, and stops walking, crossing his arms—

—(he's faster than them anyway, he can reach for his pistol and shoot them before they can even think to pull a trigger)—

—to wait for them to arrive.

It's a group of four, one of them obviously leading the others by the way he carries himself and his presence. He's a wiry man with parallel scars running from his left cheek to his left collarbone and wearing grey gloves embedded with pulsing lights.

Ah, he thinks, one of these two is probably the star, or came from it. He's betting on the woman, she looks like the more clueless of the two by far. "Well met, friends," he says with an easy smile. His cronies fan out around him, casually blocking their passage.

"Hello," says her companion neutrally.

“Are we though? Friends? We just met.”

Please don't come off as that clueless so easily.

The man laughs like that's the funniest joke he's heard in a while. The smile doesn't really quite reach his eyes, though.

"Well, friendships can start at the strangest of places and times."

"They can, but I'm afraid we are not interested."

"He's cranky because I wouldn't let him at the star," she says in a stage whisper.

...he slowly turns to look at her with the most genuinely incredulous stare.

"So you have seen it!" the man replies brightly. "You wouldn't let him at it, you say?"

She is... probably lying. Probably.

“Nope! Too dangerous.” She points back at the dome she landed on, perfectly innocently. “Broke through that dome there. There’s even a shiny new crack in it that you could probably fit through to squeeze inside. But! I saw an unstable vanometric power cell in there and there is no way I was going to let him go in to poke around. Unknown numenera, broke through that dome, and hanging out in there with that? Ha! No thank you.”

...so that's what she's playing at. That's... surprisingly clever.

He will play along by folding his arms again and looking away from her.

"...in there, you say?"

She... doesn't look like she's lying. He's real good at this whole 'lying' thing and she does not look like she is.

    One of the man's thugs, the one closest to him, looks agitated and leans towards him to say, "I've heard of vanometric power cells. I think they can take down an entire block."

“There might be an expert in town that could figure out how to disable it safely. Or one of you might be able to manage it? But I couldn’t, not my specialty.”

"Came all the way over here for fucking nothing," mutters her companion under his breath.

"...I think I'll give it a look anyway, but many thanks for the friendly warning." Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds? Still... might be a lost cause, then. "And if you're ever in need of someone to run some errands for you, either of you, the name's Qorro. Just ask around, you'll find me."

He inclines his head subtly and his thugs relax and follow him as he walks past her and her new companion.

“Sure. Thanks. And good luck if you go for it!”

And then they can leave. When they’re far enough away, she lets out the breath she was holding through her teeth.

As does he. "That was... some incredible thinking on your feet," he says, sounding genuinely impressed. "Is that a real thing? Vanometric power cells?"

“Thanks! It seemed the obvious way to be harmless? Scavengers like them, but we gave up. And yes, they’re a thing, it’s even what was really in there, and I really don’t know how to disable it safely.”

"They might figure out you were lying when they find the whole place wrecked and no obvious thing that wrecked it."

“If they go in. If they don’t realize the giant crystal wasn’t the thing. If they don’t go find an actual expert. If it wasn’t someone else entirely. If they can find us after they realize. But yeah let’s not stand here and talk about it I… did not like them.”

Does that mean she likes him? He's so flattered.

"Out of this wretched place, then."

“He doesn’t mean that, you’re lovely, and I’ll be back later!” she says, to the reef. But yes, leaving.

"Circus Minor," he says after some more walking up ramps and stairs, through an angled stone arc, to an elevated terrace with tents, buildings, pillars, monuments, and most of all people. "Market and host to all sorts of merchants and spectacles," he elaborates dryly, and then wonders why the hell he's playing tour guide to the castoff.

Maybe because she's smiling at him like that! Because she's smiling at him very much. He is definitely her favorite person in the world. Also the first one she's ever met, but, still.

"A market! Can we get me new clothes? With pockets? And... less sticky bloodstains?" She pokes at a bit of her black bodysuit. Just because the blood doesn't show doesn't mean that she doesn't feel it.

"...aye," he says, wrinkling his nose. "I may know a place or two."

Again, why is he helping.

"I solemnly swear to pay you back. Because I am completely broke," she says, very seriously.

The man snorts and waves a hand vaguely.

Here's a tent that sells clothes. One can buy them there. Does the nameless castoff have preferences?

She is firm about her pocket preference, and after a contemplative pause decides that she would like to wear A Color. She is not sure which color, but definitely a color. Thoughtfully, she compares the red wisps of her short (and a little singed) hair to some of the colors available, and picks out something flowy in green. With many pockets. Many.

"Probably it would be smart to get clean before I change," she muses, tucking away the crystal shard that she had been awkwardly holding in her hand into one of the pockets that has a little flap to keep whatever is held inside still.

"Neither Falinda nor Steristi could believe it," comes a voice from a nearby tent before the castoff's companion can reply. The owner of said voice is covered entirely, head to toe, in tightly-wound robes and furs. Entirely, that is, except for their face; their face is covered by a mask. They have a companion, similarly garbed if slightly differently coloured, and both of them seem to be staring (?) directly at the castoff. "Had she come in shame," the merchant continues, "ready to return what she had taken? No. Her hands were empty, her and her companion's expressions baffled."

The nameless castoff blinks, frowns, then turns and makes a beeline for the duo that seem to be mad at her.

"I'm extremely sorry, what exactly had been taken? And would you accept monetary compensation for it, sometime in the future after I have actually earned literally any shins to my... lack of name?"

"Falinda was shocked to have been so readily acknowledged, and briefly confused by the thief's feigned ignorance, but quickly hid its surprise and schooled its features to protest: nay, that book was one-of-a-kind, and mere monetary compensation would not overcome the ten years of grief the loss of this book had caused. Only returning it would suffice to settle this debt."

"Oh. That will be harder, but I will try to find it, and try to make it up to you if I can't. Describe the one-of-a-kind book, please?"

"The thief asked, and though Falinda was once again taken aback by the thief's actions, it was no cost at all to relay the description, for the merchant's memory was as a library, itself. The book, said Falinda, is easy to recognise by the five-coloured sigil on its cover, and the fact that it is sealed and impossible to open. As you would know, the merchant added in a mutter to itself, for you were the one to take it in the first place all those years ago."

"Okay. Thank you. I'll do my best, but I am admittedly a wandering amnesiac, so. Uh. Sorry."

"A convenient excuse, thought Falinda to itself, but so long as the thief honored her word and returned the book, the merchant would be satisfied. Temporarily. And so it and its partner returned to work."

As they indeed do, turning back into their tent to resume organising books.

Okay. That was nicer than they could have been.

She ambles back to her own companion. "That was more offensive than the pockets," she informs him, solemnly.

"...what, having stolen a book?" asks her companion with some amusement as he starts leading her somewhere once more.

She trails after him like she's some kind of duckling that's imprinted on him.

"Yes. Did this body's last occupant make a habit of just stealing things? Am I going to have a bunch of people showing up and pointing at me, being mad at me for a thing I didn't do, but that they very reasonably think I did?"

"I think stealing in particular was not so common, but more because your sire's crimes were so numerous and varied that any one type of crime can only make up a small fraction of the total."

He still sounds amused.

"Wow. I hate it."

"One problem at a time. You stinking is the first."

"... Do I stink? Did they also not bathe on top of everything else??"

She stops to sniff herself with some clear concern.

"Blood has a smell, you know."

"Oh." She resumes following him. "Then I guess I have one less reason to be mad. Maybe. Even though that one is... also still their fault, though."

"I am going to go out on a limb and predict that a full two-thirds of your problems will be because of something they did."

As a very conservative estimate.

"That's kind of depressing," she muses. "Oh, that looks familiar and interesting, hold on, can you hold this?"

Aleks gets passed her bundle of new clothes and crystal sample, and she immediately heads off to go look at something from up close.

"Are you about to go touch more things?" he says, rolling his eyes and taking her bundle of stuff...

...and then he sees what it is exactly she found interesting. Oh no.

There in the corner, behind all of the tents and almost trying to be inconspicuous for how conspicuous it is, is a... device of some sort.

It's strange in approximately every detail, its colour and shape and the way it moves—but strangest of all is the way it's transparent, not like something made of glass or anything like that, but instead more like it's the ghost of an object, unmoored from the present reality.

So clearly something is going on with this clock, but she can’t figure out what without a closer look. Something to do with time would be very aesthetic, with its clear clock nature, but assumptions like that are dangerous. Probably. They’re probably dangerous. This feels logical, but she admittedly doesn’t have very much life experience to draw on, so. She’s making educated guesses.

The people in front of the clock are not interesting, and she ignores them accordingly.

Her travel mate doesn't cuss under his breath but he does cuss in his head when one of the uninteresting people in front of the clock doesn't ignore her, and instead gasps as she sees her. Her companion, more remarkable than her by the way light sparkles between his fingers as he twitches them, seems equally taken aback.

    "It is an honour," he says in a deep, sonorous boom. His eyes flicker to the castoff's companion for a second, a spark of recognition in them, but he quickly turns back to look at the castoff herself.

"Mm?" says the distracted nerd who keeps poking strange things, blinking out of her musings. (It's not clear whether this looks like a temporal anomaly or a dimensional anomaly or something else entirely, and furthermore why it looks familiar, and she's very curious!) She looks at the people that seem to be... addressing her. And saying that something is an honor.

"Hello. I'm sorry, what's an honor? I didn't mean to interrupt anything."

    The man who addressed her glances at her companion again—has Aleks not even told this castoff about them?—before turning back to her. "I am Mimeon, and my fellow priest here is Casmeen. We are both part of the Church of the Changing God. Your church."

Her companion—Aleks is his name, apparently—looks deeply uncomfortable, but doesn't say anything.

She suddenly understands very clearly why Aleks is uncomfortable. Not because of the neat clock thing, but because of these people. Who are they, and why do they apparently worship a being who doesn't return borrowed books? Clearly this is not the sort of person that should be worshipped, they're an asshole.

But she can't exactly flee to hide behind her companion and pretend she doesn't know how language works, can she. She went and used it and everything. And clearly they... already know what she is? This seems like it could be bad.

"... Uh. No. That by definition is my sire's church. I'm, er. New. Can I help you?"

New. He knew it. "Ah—yes, I have some questions, if I may. Will you tell me about your tattoo? How did you shape it? Do you know why it differs from the others?" he asks. Casmeen nods along with the question, just as curious.

Ohhhhh no. She takes a nervous half step back, towards Aleks.

"I don't know much about it; I didn't; and no, I don't. I don't think I'm the correct person to be asking any of these questions."

"But you are," breathes Casmeen, full of awe. "You are a castoff of the Changing God, and the tattoo marks you as his child. We treasure you, revered one, you and all of your siblings."

    "You are and will always be welcome here, revered one," says Mimeon. "We stand ready to serve as we can. Have you any questions for us?"

...well, didn't the castoff say she needed help with some chamber or something? These people are as likely as anyone is to know about it.

... She thinks she might be offended. This is how they treasure her? Ha! She feels like an experiment in a petri dish, not a person that they think is valuable.

"Do you treasure my siblings by immediately accosting them with questions they're not equipped to answer when they're clearly off balance and uncomfortable? Do many of them have second visits after the first?" she asks, tartly.

..............she's kind of hot and he will not be caught in a million years admitting this aloud.

The two priests do not seem to share this reaction, though, and both look very taken aback.

"We meant no offence, revered one," says Mimeon.

    "We so rarely have a chance to meet a new sibling of yours," explains Casmeen. "We forget ourselves in our joy. Pray forgive us."

"Apology accepted, and thank you for it."

And then she turns to go, all thoughts of looking at the clock forgotten in the wake of these people that make her deeply uncomfortable. She would like to get away from them yesterday.

"Wait—please, would you stay a moment and hear our plea, revered one?" says Mimeon while Casmeen seems even more shocked that her apology didn't earn them... much of anything. "We have need of help with this clock, this construction of your sire's—"

She pauses.

Okay, so on one hand, she wants to be elsewhere, and on the other hand she is still very curious about that clock, and on yet another third hand that may or may not be part of the original body plan, she sees an opening to get two things she wants just by putting up with some people that were only mildly rude and seem to quite regret it.

"... Will you pay me for my time?"

Pay? As in money? What on the Ninth World would a castoff need money for don't they know they can get anything...?

Mimeon is immediately nodding as soon as she asks. "Absolutely, revered one, anything you want. If you will?" He takes a step back and gestures towards some specific faces on the, and it is indeed a clock, as he says.

"All right," she agrees, going to go look at the clock that is very exciting and looks so familiar and what no she is not easily won over, that would be silly.

"Dark figures seem to circumambulate these clock faces," he explains while she looks. "My theory is that your sire's creation of the time-shields that protected this city established a connection with his future selves. Given this, we believe those figures may be castoffs—or ghosts of castoffs, perhaps." He shrugs a bit, and his fingers sparkle. "The Clock is unmoored in time, and we do not have a knowledge sufficient to investigate. Your connection with your sire... may be enough to give you the edge we lack, align the clock with the present time, and uncover who these figures are." Then he smiles. "But even if you cannot, we will not be poorer for the knowledge gained in the attempt."

The castoff gives a nod and inspects it critically. While trying to figure out how this works from absolutely nothing sounds like a fun challenge, it is probably actually smarter to start at the proverbial beginning. Which would be whatever she remembers. So, what had she been doing when it... wasn't her that was doing it?

She is working at the clock. It is no longer transparent, but perfectly solid.

Arcs of energy stretch out from the clock, over her shoulders and to its victims. She doesn't bother to even look. The way their screams disappear tells all she needs to know. That's that problem solved, then...

.... Aaa? Aaa. Yes, aaa. She grimaces at the unpleasantness of the memory.

Are. Are those figures the same figures that her sire trapped in there? However long ago it was? ... The memory didn't feel like it was in her body, she was too tall, the skin was a different color, and her shoulders were larger. This is completely nonsensical. How can she remember things from that far back? Experiences that actually happened while her sire was using this body makes sense, but picking things up from before that implies a level of connection that is... kind of unsettling.

When she returns to the present, she can immediately spot the effect she's had on the clock: three beams of ?light? seem to be arcing from it to three ancient statues (devices?) scattered around the cultist encampment.

Of course her sire would make everything only respond to bodies of their own creation. How maximally unhelpful to the overall good of the world. Ugh. What an asshole.

"Hm," she says, instead of saying how her sire sucks out loud to the people that worship him, and then goes to investigate the devices themselves.

Aleks silently follows her, looking over his shoulder a couple of times to make sure the creepy cultists aren't coming with.

The devices seem to be made out of some metal, the tallest of the four pillars only a bit taller than she is, and with her activation of the clock the centermost pillars of each of them seem to have acquired a glowing symbol to their faces. As the castoff approaches the first one, something... changes.

Aleks gets a very quiet, "Sorry," and an apologetic smile when they're sufficiently far enough away from the creepy cultists. She will definitely be more careful about wandering off to poke things in the future. Mostly because they might be surrounded by people that are much less easy than whatever neat thing she wants to poke.

And then she gets to the first device and immediately gets absorbed in her subject. There are two sets of images - ones on the device itself, and changes to the city around her. The people, their clothing, the very buildings themselves shift to what is clearly another time. More colorful, with less cultists, and the buildings look like they've suffered less weathering. So... probably the past, then. In comparison, the images attached to the device are more mutable, with her choice between three, offered to her throught... some kind of mental interface. She can view any of the three that she likes, and does so. Somehow she knows that if she wants, she can pick one to lock to this particular device, showing it and only it.

Three images for three devices? Are they the same images for each of the devices? Looking at the others verifies: yes, the images in the devices are the same three, and it's the changes to the city around her that are the real difference. Some sort of... time alignment, then? Align the times of the images to the times shown in the changes around the device? That seems almost too easy, but nothing she remembers implies that this is some kind of trap. The trap was already sprung, against her siblings, long ago. This isn't a grand puzzle left for her sire's wayward children, it's a simplistic self reminder for a being that is centuries old. In case they ever want to come back. For some reason.

It's laziness.

For some reason this bothers her more than just trapping three people in a temporal clock device. Trapping three people could be justified, but abandoning them in it behind a simplistic memory aid, out of sloth is just. Horrible. It's horrible. She hates it.

The first device she sets (or, well, the third she looks at) is the easiest to match up. Ancient surroundings of a city under siege, and one of the three images is of a man and a woman, in that siege. Figuring out the other two is a bit trickier, and she does not want to see what this thing might do to her if she gets it wrong, but with a mix of careful observation of fashion choices and a vague sense of how old each of the images are, she attaches them to each other well enough.

When she connects the last image to the last environmental changes, the devices go dark, and the clock fades back into reality.

And the clock is now active, the movement purposeful, the time shown—real, the present. It is anchored.

Time to go poke that too, then! Maybe there's a way to let her poor siblings out. She really doesn't feel like being pissed at their mutual sire is reason enough to be trapped in a clock for eternity.

Aleks, as usual, follows.

And there's the central clock face, with the three shadowy figures, almost detailed enough to see...

...until they surge out of the clock towards her and everything goes dark.

The castoff abruptly tips to the side and falls to the ground, unconscious.

But this is not, precisely accurate. She is not unconscious. Her mind just... isn't inhabiting her body anymore. It's somewhere else.

There, it's dark and confusing. With distinctly non-Euclidean geometry.

And she is not alone.

The three figures seem—maybe even more disoriented than she is. They don't even notice her there, at first. And they are definitely also castoffs; if nothing else, they all have a tattoo like hers.

"What befell us?" asks the leftmost member of the trio, a woman dressed in powerful armor with a scarred face. "Did they do something? Are we still in the clock?" What new torture does the Changing God have for them?

"Uh. Hello," she says with a little awkward wave, somewhere between shy and distracted trying to figure out how the geometry doesn't work. "No, I was the one that did something. Are you three okay?"

The three of them look at her, then. The rightmost one, a small and tense man carrying a shield, says, "Probably. You did this, then? We were—ingested into your head. I saw it. How is that possible? Who are you?"

"Uh. I'm your very youngest sister, about an hour old if you round very generously. And... you were ingested into my head, sorry about that, I uh. Didn't mean to." Why would that have happened, though...? "... Did the clock separate you from your bodies? Trap your minds and leave your bodies to starve as vegetables in your wake?"

"...yes, I believe so," says the middle one—tall, dressed in black, a violet fish-like crest attached to the top of its head, large yellow eyes squinting at her.

    "An hour old? That's not possible, we faced the Changing God only days ago and yours is not the body they wore then."

        "Centuries ago, not days," corrects the third. "I believe we may have been trapped in that clock for much longer than we think, Kamose. Something... about it... it messed with our perception of time."

"Time is an illusion," shrugs the middle one, looking at the void that replaces the sky in this location. "'How long?' is the wrong question." It turns to the latest castoff again. "What is this place? Where are we?" Outside time, then as now, he wagers.

“I… am not entirely sure. I think we’re somewhere in my head, but. I’m not sure it’s… just mine. This only feels like a very small part of it, but this place is so vast, and it scooped you up so easily.” She frowns. “… do any of you three remember things from before our sire used our bodies?”

"Yes," says the middle one, its six nostrils flaring. "If this place is not just yours, however... whose else is it? I have never visited such a place."

    The rightmost castoff's eyes have grown wide with the revelation, too, though, and he walks over to the latest castoff to grab her by the shoulders, desperation on his face. "One prison to another!" he says, wildly. "You brought us here, you must let us out."

Aaaaahhh touching she did not want there to be touching! The touching should stop!

“Yes, agreed!” she cries, tugging herself out of his grip and glaring at him. “But let you out where, what is a mind without a body to house it? What do you think would have happened if this place didn’t catch all three of you?”

"Death, as certain as any prison," concludes the middle one, which causes the one that had been grabbing the latest castoff to slump in dejection.

    "Did our sire never give you any other abilities?" wonders the woman, the one who was called 'Kamose'. "We all have our unique gifts, and this seems to be yours... but to only be able to draw in consciousnesses, and never let them out... seems incomplete. What other gifts did our creator bestow upon you?"

She steps very carefully away from castoff grabby hands and tries not to be too offended that her first physical touch - mental physical touch? - on her actual person was that. Does touching Aleks' hand count? Probably. Okay, second physical touch, she guesses.

“Could I get some space to think, please, I am an hour old and doing my best to help you and I was trying to figure the answer to that exact question out before someone decided to invade my personal space,” she snaps, irritated.

    Dejected castoff now looks guilty as well as he walks back to the others.

"Of course," says Kamose. "We're not going anywhere."

"Great, thank you." Deep breath. Then she turns to pace, because she's thinking and she doesn't want to be in arms' reach of any of these people, because they're all traumatized and taking it out on each other and also her.

"Okay, so," she says, picking up her previous train of thought, "we catch memories from bodies we weren't. Why would that be? That implies that there's, mm. Some level of mental connection besides merely housing the same person for a while."

"The Tides," agrees the nonhuman one.

"The... what now?" she asks, stopping her pacing.

"The Tides," it repeats. "I don't understand them very well, but our sire has harbored an obsession with them. They have colours, and represent different ways people relate to each other, themselves, and the world. Psychic links, if you will."

Nonhuman castoff is honestly her favorite of the bunch, it has been nothing but sane and reasonable this whole time and she appreciates it for it.

"Huh. Okay. And probably also with each other, if we're all in the same... mental construct place, and sharing memories with parent-dearest." She looks around at it. "... But it does still feel... maybe not mine, but in my control. Which would make sense."

At their confused looks, she decides that actually they can probably reason out some information she'd been conveniently failing to mention to anyone. And it’s important to reasoning through this problem. She might as well say it out loud. "I'm a mind reader, of course I'd have some kind of psychic extra nonsense. Our sire likes having bodies with discrete specialties."

It nods. "So it stands to reason that you would be the best-placed out of us to figure this place out."

"Right. No pressure." Sigh. "Okay, so. Regardless of my actual abilities, it's probably very scary to suddenly be in the power of someone none of you know. I am very sorry about that. I don't even really know me, yet. I do not want to keep the three of you eternally in my mind prison. That sounds like a terrible time for everyone involved. I will, however, keep you here if you'd like me to, because this is probably still a nicer place for you than the clock or death. At the very least I'm not going to, to forget about you and wander off and leave myself a damn reminder in case I turn out to need you later." She sounds so offended. "What I would like very much to do is to borrow our sire's stuff to make you three brand new bodies, put you into them, and send you all on your way."

"Maybe you could find us our old bodies?" says third castoff, sounding hopeful. "Even if it's been centuries, we're nothing if not durable..."

    "Unless our sire has destroyed them," reasons Kamose. "Which would be just like them."

"...it would be," third agrees grudgingly.

"Even if they weren't directly destroyed, it's... Not like anyone was likely to feed them in the time you've been away. So unless sire-dearest put them in giant jars on life support..." She grimaces. "Sorry."

"It is most certainly not your fault," says the nonhuman. "Our sire's, for being who they are, or ours, for underestimating them."

That causes her mouth to twitch with what is almost a smile.

"Yes, but unlike sire-dearest, I have the ability to feel empathy for other people, so. Sorry our sire sucks so much, and I'm sorry you're in this position where you're all at the mercy of an hour old sibling. Anyway, everybody's on board with getting you new bodies?"

The two as-yet-unnamed castoffs nod, and Kamose says, "Most certainly."

“Okay. Let me see if I can get you a deck of cards or something before I try to figure out how to get back to my own body. This is all clearly a mental construct anyway, and clearly we all have some conjuration abilities of some kind, because we're all in clothes..."

After a bit of thoughtful staring into the distance, she does in fact conjure a deck of cards. "Ha!" Cards can go sibling-ward, she will go back into arms' reach to give them this present. "Any requests? I bet I can do chairs and a table, too."

"...would a training dummy be at all feasible?" wonders Kamose. "I haven't fought in, well, centuries."

    "Are books possible?" wonderes the nonhuman one. "I don't have any that I want, in particular, it would just be fascinating if they were."

"Sure, training dummy," agrees their baby sister, who gets to putting one in the corner for them. It has a doofy face drawn on it. "And... I have no idea, but that would be fascinating if they were. Let me try the one book I know..."

Nonhuman one continues to be her favorite, that's such an interesting request! She makes a book that could plausibly be the one Falinda and Steristi lost to her sire a decade ago! It... is a nondescript grey aside from a shifting five colored sigil that can't seem to decide what its actual shape is. Furthermore, it opens to completely blank pages.

"... Yes, but I think not for information I don't know. Journaling materials, I guess?"

"Would be appreciated, yes," it says.

Their baby sister conjures them a lot of stuff to make their stay in her (their?) head more comfortable! Chairs, couches, tables, journaling materials, any game they can describe to her in sufficient detail, several plates of their various favorite foods, weapons for sparring with each other or beating up the combat dummy with, and so on. She is really quite open to requests, and cares about their comfort!

    "You're being very kind to us," says Kamose. "Thank you." She bows.

"I believe we failed to introduce ourselves," adds the nonhuman one. "I am Diviaticu, and these are my companions Kamose and Villon."

    "Have you chosen a name, yet?" wonders Kamose.

Their little sister bows back. "I don't see why I shouldn't be kind to you. It's nice to meet you all. And, uh, no, I haven't. It seems like kind of a big decision and I don't really... understand... naming conventions."

"You can always change it if you don't like it," shrugs Kamose. "I did."

    "Our sire was studying the Varjellen when he made me," says Diviaticu. "I borrowed a name from their culture, but that is more... distasteful... than most would prefer."

        "Because you have to kill someone to earn it," snorts Villon.

    "Most distasteful, yes."

Eep. Maybe Diviaticu is not her favorite sibling of the three, then.

"Uh. Yeah I'll... pass on that. And I guess I could change it if I don't like it, but. I'd rather get it right the first time?"

"Well, I wish you luck, new one," says Diviaticu.

"Thank you!" Then again, there are a lot of acceptable reasons to kill someone? She probably doesn't know enough to judge, and shouldn't.

"Okay, is that everything you'd like? I should probably try to, uh, leave and go back to my own body."

"I think so!" pipes Kamose. "Once again, thank you so much for your help. We hope we won't be imposing too much by staying in your, ah... mind."

“You’re welcome! And it’s better than the clock or dying just for opposing sire-dearest.”

Okay! Back to the real world. She can do this, right? It’s her mindscape thing. She can just… go back.

When she opens her eyes, she finds herself prone on the ground at the exact same spot she was just before. The two cultists are hovering anxiously, but her travel companion is standing between them and her body, arms folded, looking (though she cannot see his face) like he is daring anyone to touch her.

He is also extremely worried and snarking at himself in his head for being worried over a gods damned castoff.

"I'm okay," she says the minute she's conscious again, mostly to Aleks but also she guesses to the other people here, too. "Sorry, I didn't expect that."

    "Revered one!" sighs Mimeon in relief, before bowing. "That was masterfully done; a performance worthy of your sire."

Aleks himself—merely looks over his shoulder and gives her a minute nod before turning to look at the priests again, but there definitely is a knot in his stomach that gets unmade when she speaks.

She would like to talk to Aleks right now, because he was so worried, but she does not want to do it while the creepy priests are hovering nearby calling her 'revered one' or something.

"Does that count as helping with the clock, can you pay me so we can go?" she says, sitting up and getting to her feet.

"We—can—" starts Mimeon, but Casmeen interrupts it with, "But what did you find? Who were the figures in the clock?"

"Your concern for my welfare is touching. Kamose, Diviaticu, and Villon. Trapped in the clock by our mutual sire."

Casmeen's face falls. "I know these names. They're not new to us. They were favoured servants of your creator, castoffs who served them well—Diviaticu was the one to bring the Order of Truth to Sagus Cliffs!—but the three of them betrayed their holy trust and disappeared."

    Mimeon nods and sighs. "Nevertheless, our agreement shall be honoured. Here, revered one," he says, reaching inside a pocket in his robes for a bag and another pocket for shins. He counts them—a hundred, total, a not-at-all negligible amount—places them in the bag, and offers them to her.

"Thank you," she says, taking it, and then yes excellent they can go now.

Yes they can. To... wherever it was Aleks was taking her, probably.

She does not wander off even a little bit! And she is sticking so close to Aleks!!

"Probably a conversation should happen before a bath, if you um. Know a place we can talk privately? ... I'm sorry for scaring you."

"...okay?" He can find a quiet, secluded alcove somewhere.

Well first she can pay him back! She knows the exact amount she owes him and is definitely not distracting herself from hard conversations by getting it all repaid first. Definitely not. But then it’s hard conversation time, so uh. She’d better get to that.

"Okay so um. I know exactly what happened that caused me to pass out, but it's going to take some explaining first and, um. Admitting that I haven't been... entirely honest with you. I haven't lied! To you, I mean. But I did, er. Leave out that I can, er. Read minds. And I could play dumb and say I didn't know this was information you might like to know, but actually what really happened was that I had just started and I was scared and it seemed smart to not mention it."

He pauses and tries to think back on everything he... thought... over the past hour or so. Then he wonders if he really even has any thoughts he cares about sharing. His tragic backstory? Meh.

"—that explains why you disliked them so much so quickly," he realises, thinking about the cultists.

“You have mostly just been saying exactly what you’ve been thinking, but softening things a bit so as not to hurt me? Which is really sweet and one of the reasons why I have gotten so attached to you and keep following you around. You’ve also just been really nice in general. And, yeah, it’s um. Not great to be inside the heads of people who want to study you, or knock you over the head so someone else can study you.”

...well that's a whole lot of emotions he's feeling right now. He is not sure he can keep track of all of them and he very much hopes she can't either.

He looks away, and it occurs to him that that is entirely useless, so he sighs and looks at her again. "Well. Thank you for telling me."

“You’re welcome. I also um, don’t know how to turn it off. It probably doesn’t come with an off switch, I can’t imagine sire-dearest would see the point. So I will understand if it means you don’t want to keep helping me out anymore.”

"As you've said, I don't think there is much that happens in my head that I care about expressing anyway."

And why is he helping her anyway? This is a great opening to walk away. And yet he sits.

“I think it’s a combination of your sense of responsibility towards a brand new person, and also how I’m naive and well meaning and charming. Apparently those are very endearing traits, my siblings all went from being rightfully alarmed by me to thinking I was very nice and cute.”

Is she trying to convince him to walk away out of principle.

"Let's get you clean," he says, instead.

“Well, yes and no, I think if you’re genuinely confused about why you like me I should try to help with that out of principle, and also not try to keep you if you don’t want to stay, but I think you do, so it’s not really risking anything to be honest so it also can’t really be seen as particularly noble I think I’m babbling yes let’s get me clean. Um. Is there a place where I could grow out my hair? I don’t like when you look at me and see them.”

...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."

"—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?”

He mentally gestures at Mimeon and Casmeen.

“They’re able to avoid the bad parts! They don’t have to deal with people being mad about stolen books, and also coming into existence falling out of the sky. Without pockets.”

Snort. "Fair." Though he thinks her sire-dearest's main flaws are upstream of the way they affected her personally. They're just an overall terrible person.

“Well, yes, but how it affected me personally makes their flaws very obvious and hard to overlook, you know?”

"I still think the likes of Mimeon and Casmeen are just willfully blind." Or too ambitious and selfish themselves to care.

"Oh, I agree, and I do not want to go up top and be fawned over and called 'revered one' while they completely fail to register my status as a person, just. I sort of understand how they could find it easy to overlook."

Aleks gives her a noncommittal shrug at that. "At any rate, what are your sleeping preferences?"

"I'll stay with you, if you don't mind."

"Sure. I can get you a mattress or something."

"That would be great, thank you!"

He lives in an actual proper building, rather than one of the tents or shanties, on the second floor. When they get to the door, though, he stops and frowns. "Haven't used the door in forever," he mutters, mostly to himself. "One moment."

Then he vanishes.

... Wait he can teleport??

And he uses his teleportation to skip unlocking his door?

She is so charmed.

A couple of minutes later there are door unlocking noises and he opens the door from the inside to welcome her in.

His duckling of a castoff bounces inside and gets to looking around curiously.

It's spacious enough, for a single person.

The door opens to a living room with a sofa and a couple of armchairs around a dark rug in front of a timberless, chimneyless hearth. Behind one of the chairs, nestled against a wall, there is a ceiling-height bookshelf with holographic titles displayed, and next to that same chair on a corner table lies an electronic book reader, screen unlit.

To the left there is a small kitchen unit, separated from the living room by a counter and a pillar. The fridge seems to offer a fairly wide array of synthetic nutritional goop, but other utensils seem sparse and unused.

To the right is a hallway with two closed doors, presumably to a bathroom and bedroom. There doesn't seem to be any real windows anywhere although there are a couple of frames that show a fake holographic outside.

"Home sweet home."

She finds this house intensely charming, and does not regret choosing to live with him instead of going to find an inn or something.

"Awww! It's very cozy. I like it."

He's not sure if she's just saying it but whatever. He likes it. It (usually) has no people.

Anyway here's a bathroom (does her body even need it?) with a laser shower and disintegrating toilet, and here's his bedroom with a queen-sized floating bed, a closet, and another fake window.

"I am not just saying it, I really do find it nice and cozy, and... probably? If nothing else I do bleed, and mud exists, so." She bounces on the balls of her feet, looking around and smiling. "Your home has a lot of neat tech, it must have been tricky to cobble this all together."

"Teleportation can get you some pretty interesting jobs even without going into crime," he says, shrugging. "I made do, over the years."

Translation: he worked his ass off for a bit, got a lot of money, and now lives off his savings and the occasional odd job for Fulsome or whomever else.

"Aww! I'm glad. I uh, hope I'm not imposing? I have no idea if I'm a pleasant roommate or not."

"I suppose we'll find out."

And if she's not she will doubtlessly nobly leave or something. It seems like her.

"I don't think it'd be nobly," she snorts. "It would be uncomfortable to be in a place I wasn't wanted?"

"You're very good at trying to pretend you're not noble." It's a refreshing change of pace, honestly.

"I don't think anything I've done is particularly noble? I guess wanting to find my siblings new bodies counts, but. Getting along with people seems practical."

This is an unconvinced Aleks.

"Also I just genuinely like people! When they're not failing to remember I'm a person, anyway, I guess I didn't get along with or like anyone in the cult. And kind of. Yelled at them about manners." She sounds a little embarrassed about this.

Why would anyone be embarrassed about—this is exactly what he means.

"Well I don't mean I regret it, and I'd probably do it again, but. I don't know, it felt. Mean? Blunt? I guess I want to know how to be both but I don't want to do it accidentally!"

Someday she'll meet more people and understand that everyone sucks and is terrible all the time and she'll get what he means.

"I am skeptical. I bet a lot of people suck, but I also think I'll keep liking people."

"Anyway, here's your key. If you lose it I'll be mad. Also if you turn out to be untrustworthy I'll be even madder and I'll come after you. We clear?"

She giggles, and takes it!

"Yes. Thank you. I'll be good, I..." she trails off, looking around and looking for words. "... I like your home. It's your space. It feels very loved. Being untrustworthy would ruin that and something valuable would be lost?"

He rolls his eyes. "See, it's saying this kind of stuff, that's not the kind of stuff other people say."

"Hm. You'd know better than I would, I guess, but. I don't like breaking valuable things?"

"So long as you know that you're also a valuable thing and other people will want to break you."

Blink, blink.

"... Well, of course. Have I seemed like I don't value myself too?"

"No, but you match a pattern."

"I... suppose, but it's not really fair to project patterns I haven't actually started fulfilling? A lot of what I've done has been very self interested, just I've also been nice about it and care about other people too."

"Then ignore the ramblings of this old man."

She squints at him. "... No? You care about me and want me to be okay. I'm not ignoring that, it's precious. Just... I don't know. See me as I am instead of. What I most resemble."

He laughs self-deprecatingly. "I'm not sure I know how, but I'll try."

Going with his gut instincts got him this far, he'll update them with time but he's not sure how to turn them off.

Giggle. "That's fair! I think I just want you to trust me to take care of myself well enough. But that takes time and you've known me for, uh, maybe three hours now?"

"Mmhm."

Which is also how long she's known herself, too. That's very surreal.

"Subjectively I think I've had a bit longer! ... Depending on how long I was unconscious. I expect it wasn't as long as I experienced in the mindscape thing, because if I'd been out that long I think you'd have been more worried? But."

"It was a few minutes."

Not too many minutes. He figured there was some weird CG thing going on there. Probably.

“Yes, see. Subjectively I have had slightly longer with myself!”

He smiles and shakes his head to himself. "Fair enough."

She beams at him.

"So! Do you know someone promising I can show a shard of crystal to and ask if they know anything about a resonance chamber? ... I guess the cult might, but. Eh. Preferably someone else."

"...maybe the Order of Truth. They are less likely to see you as an avatar of your sire but they do see everyone as experimental subjects."

"Lovely. Better or worse chance than the cult, in your opinion?"

He does a so-so gesture with a hand. "About the same, I'd say. Adahn—the name your sire was using ten years ago, with your body—was with them back then."

"Mmm. Promising, because I bet they were working on the resonance chamber at the time, considering its location, but. Potentially awkward if sire-dearest left outstanding debts or angry victims or something."

Shrug. "Your choice."

".... Order of Truth. I think I want some variety in people that kind of want to dissect me, if nothing else."

"Very well. Now?"

"Yes please! Though, if we get separated, are there any... tricks I should know about how to get back to your home without you? I'm not going to run off to poke things again without asking, just. This seems like a good thing to have a fallback plan for."

"...other than walking? The door is not booby-trapped or anything."

"I was actually thinking more 'how to not be mugged,' really."

"Hm. Stick to open areas with better lighting, pay attention to your surroundings, be careful of cheerful or friendly people just as much as of shady people, and if anyone accosts you in the actual Underbelly tell them my name and that should scare them enough."

And if it doesn't... well, he can back it up well enough.

"Okay! Thank you. ... Possibly we should buy me some kind of self defense instrument before the Order of Truth. I can maybe stab people with the crystal shard I've got, but that's not what I have it for."

"Do you know how to use a gun? I have a few."

A couple dozen of them hidden around the apartment.

"Uh. ... Maybe? I don't like that answer, we should actually test my aim before you give me one to carry around unsupervised."

He snorts. "Sure," he says, walking over to the living room and reaching under one of the armchairs for one of his guns. It is reasonably small and light, and has four settings: off, tag, stun, and lethal. "It also has a safety when the lethal option is picked," he says, switching the gun to that mode. When he does, a little switch on the upper back part of the gun pops out, which he clicks then unclicks before switching the gun to "tag".

"Shoot something."

"In...doors? ... Okay." She will shoot at the inside of the hearth, that seems like the best place to practice without maybe breaking anything in his nice house.

Her aim is passable. Not marksman quality, and Aleks is definitely a better shot, but passable.

And when she shoots, all it does is release a light bullet (and not a very fast one) that leaves a slightly glow on the surface that disappears after a few seconds.

"Good enough to work with."

"Excellent. I am no longer an innocent unarmed waif in a wide and complicated world. I am an innocent armed waif in a wide and complicated world!"

He can provide her with an appropriate holster as well.

It is easily hidden underneath her layers. After some consideration, she leaves half of her total money in Aleks's home, most of it carefully hidden in one of her boots, and the rest in an actual pouch she can easily get to in case she wants spending shins.

"Okay! Ready to face the world. Probably."

Aleks offers her a hand, then.

She tilts her head, then takes it, amused.

"Can you bring passengers. Is that what this is."

In lieu of replying, she feels a tug in her mind and in her body, almost asking for permission—

—and then they are in free fall. 

She gives permission, because that seems like the obvious thing to do.

"Um," she says, about being in free fall. It's not as bad as the last time she was in free fall, this is definitely survivable, but.