Host gently fluttered to the ground. Her contact hurried to keep up with her, and she felt genuinely bad for that. She wasn’t flying fast but she was flying, and she supposed she had tragically neglected to take into consideration the way that fleshy legs weren’t capable of quite the same kind of speed as, say, her anti-gravity jets.
(They weren’t really jets. She wasn’t sure what else to call little gadgets along her back and legs, though. They looked like miniature jets. They worked, though, by concentrating the concentrated ignorance around her so hard that gravity completely forgot about her. She was thinking of swapping out the design for something a little more mundane; every time she had a fly-around, the neighborhoods below her started walking into doors and believing whatever people told them.)
She stood on very small feet, almost like soft scythe blades, extending out the bottom of legs that started out enormously thick and narrowed into something like toothpicks; the overall impression was of someone whose legs probably packed a really nasty impact, and who should be making scissor sound effects wherever she walked.
Host’s present body was not particularly tall; it was broad, in a few select areas (mainly the hips and the twin power cores that, for whatever reason, she’d mounted as a pair of psuedo-breasts), but it wasn’t much taller than the average human. She still stood notably taller than her contact, who came running in a huff. She politely waited for him to come to where she was; he did and stopped, bent over and panting.
She started to speak. He held a finger up, pleading with gesture to hold on a moment. He continued panting heavily, and she waited until his breath was caught.
Finally, he took in another deep breath. “Please stop moving so fast,” he said wearily.
“I will do my best,” she agreed, hands on hips so massive that doorways were a serious problem. She refused to compromise on this structural detail, however. She could have; this particular body was made not as a single piece, but its soft metal twitched in random places, tiny fragments popping off or rearranging themselves... and if you looked close, it was plain that she was made from many tiny robots. Thousands of them, the smallest no bigger than a fingernail, all merged together to create a much bigger robot when combined with the basic chassis she’d created for it.
Since such a body could rearrange it’s shape within some limitations, it made her very flexible. Presently, some of her components reshaped themselves into sensory units. She sniffed at the air, and caught a familiar scent. “She’s here.”
“How can you tell?” Her contact replied.
“Believe me. Her scent is...” She sought for a polite word. “It sticks in the mind, believe me.”
It wasn’t a bad smell, really. It just didn’t seem... right.
Now, Host turned aside, and made a hand signal at what appeared to be a large trash can.
The trash can hobbled over to them. It wasn’t much higher than a normal man’s waist, and yet when the lid came off, a seemingly endless amount of black, amphibious flesh swelled out like an inflating balloon, rising into the recognizable form of Tia.
She was also wearing a large hat with blinking neon lights that said ‘PAY NO ATTENTION TO ME’ and, across breasts roughly large enough to mount patio furniture, she could make out a stretched shirt with a recognizable logo of ‘HUMAN PERSON - NOT IN DISGUISE’.
The contact gawked; he looked vaguely offended at such a bad disguise. Tia beamed, still somehow packed into the trash can from the waist down; she must have made herself very pliable to fit into it! “That’s your disguise?” Host asked, dubiously.
“Yes, absolutely!” Tia said proudly. “A good job, yes?”
“Erm. You don’t think the little sirens on your hat stick out?”
“Ah,” Tia said, raising a brutish finger scoldingly. “That is tricky part! If peoples see the sirens, and the blinky hat, and read my shirt, they will KNOW something is up! And they will also think that no one being so bad at disguising could be up to no good, because if I WAS up to no good, I would actually be good at it! So, they won’t pay attention to me!”
A dreadful silence met her pronouncement.
“I think you might be overthinking it a little,” Host said. “And also... not thinking it through enough. At the same time. That’s kind of impressive, really.”
“This is the lady we’re supposed to meet?” The contact said, disbelievingly. “You’re the leader?”
“You’re the greatest and most powerful heroine in this entire arm of the known galaxy?!”
“...I refuse to put my faith in someone who actually uses the word ‘yuppers’ with a straight face.”
Tia frowned. “Hey, my face doesn’t HAVE to be straight. Watch this!” She promptly punched herself in the face, and when she was done, her facial features had rearranged themselves into something out of abstract artwork. She had her snout poking out the other side of her face; one ear flap hung over her brow like a misplaced hair lock; her mouth was positioned in the center of her face; she’d grown an additional few eyes, somehow, and they were now scattered around her face like freckles. Freaky, creepy freckles. They blinked.
The contact looked physically nauseous. “Fuck this shit, I’m OUT.” He walked away.
Host went after him. “No, wait, hold on!” She hurried back to Tia, urgently. “Please, don’t move! Just... stay right here! And please try not to upset anyone!”
“I’d like to but I probably will,” Tia said, honest as always. “I mean, this shirt’s pretty thin. I’m probably violating a few public decency laws just by wearing it.”
Host groaned. “Please, we need that guy! He is our only lead on this! So, please, just stay still!”
She ran off, and really regretted not having Sekhma around to be semi-sensible.
