Outsider, Part 5

"Hi, Artemis," Cirol says from her position sitting up against the wall. "I think we need to chat, don't you?"

"I—"

She cuts me off with a six-eyed glare. "I saw you get off that shuttle. What the fuck is going on?"

I have no lie prepared; the vice of anxiety closes in around me. My breathing shortens, my pulse quickens, digital cascades of hormones in my mind expressing themselves into my biology.

Cirol doesn't wait for my response. "I wake up from cryo, you aren't there, there's fucking Union marines searching the place, the ship computer can't find you, your comm is dead, and the last place anyone saw you was headed towards the airlock! What is happening?!"

"I— I can't tell y—"

"The fuck do you mean you can't tell me?!"

I fight my way past the anxiety and finish my sentence. "I can't tell you here. P— please. Somewhere private."

"What, so you can dispose of my body easier?" She scoffs, then pauses, and I see the briefest flicker of fear over her face as she looks at me. "I guess it wouldn't matter for you, would it?" I realize, belatedly, that my tail-blade is pointed towards her, and I flick it back behind me. This time, when the fear flickers over her face, it doesn't leave. I'm designed to be lethal. I wanted to be. She's right to be afraid of me. How could she not be?

Forcing the words out feels like pulling a railroad spike out of my chest. "I don't want— I'm not going to hurt you, I just, can't explain here."

Cirol's hesitation is palpable. "...then where?"

The ship doesn't have much in the way of privacy. The only place I can think of where we won't be disturbed is... "My sleeping pod? It'll be cramped..." And physically close.

She's silent for a few moments, and then sighs. "You better have a stars-damned good explanation, Artemis."

"I... I hope it's good enough."

I lead her to my sleeping pod, soundproofed and big enough for the two of us, though it certainly will be cramped. I sit on the far end of the bed. Cirol stands by the door, obviously not wanting to be within arm's reach of me right now.

"Cirol, I swear on my life, I'm not going to hurt you."

She sighs, and enters, closing the door behind her.

"So?" she prompts.

Now or never. It takes me a moment to work up the nerve. "...I'm not Askaian. I'm from the Union."

"What the fuck, you're human?" She shakes her head. "No, I've seen—"

"No, I'm not. I was born human, but—"

Cirol stares at me for a few moments, then scoffs. "So, what, all that shit about your species was a lie? What are you?"

I shake my head. "No, most of it was true, just not the parts about the planet or species history. I am fully designed, just... because I wanted to be. I wasn't lying about being a professional fighter for most of my life."

She gives me that rippling blink again, her own expression of confusion. "What the fuck is going on with your whole species?"

Oh, gods, where to start. "That's kind of a broad question."

"Yeah, okay, let's start with how you go from human to whatever the fuck you are."

"Okay. Um. We've been using thaumaturgical bioengineering to modify our shapeshifting for about five hundred years. We haven't really had any distinct biological identity for centuries. At least, most Unioners, I was born baseline so I kind of did."

"I mean, I've read about— hold on, you wanted this?"

"Not initially. I was born pure regular human, not capable of shapeshifting. Fixable, but my family was against it, and I was too young to know better. I only became this after I was an adult."

"...oh. So when I said it was fucked up to be made like that, and you gave me a weird look before saying it was fine—"

"A lot of people worked very hard to make me what I am. Me included."

"So... why lie?! The Orions know what your species is, most people are at least generally aware that your species does some heavy self-modification, why hide all that?!"

Because we're uploads. Because if someone looks inside my head and links it back to the Union, the secret is out. Because several hundred trillion people would bay for our blood if they knew. But that's the one secret I won't, can't, share today. "Because I was always going to head into the Confederacy, and we're at war. Being a conspicuously dangerous Unioner would be... not great."

"Sure, but if you— oh, fuck, are you a spy?"

"More like an undercover anthropologist. I was telling the truth when I told you why I was coming out here."

"...okay. Aren't your people shapeshifters? Can't you just, I don't know, be literally any species and fit in just fine?"

"Yes. I could... reassign my bodies into some other species, I guess. But this," I point to my chest, "is me. And the ways a society treats those who are different are more meaningful than the ways they treat those who are the same."

Cirol's glare isn't quite as harsh as before, but she certainly doesn't look happy. "So, Aska, Askaians..."

"Just a cover story. Sorry." I pause. "...though there's probably a few people wearing this body back on Sunset, if that counts."

She just looks at me, leaning against the pod's door for a few moments. I don't know whether I'm supposed to look at her back or not.

"...I thought you died, Artemis," she says, her shoulders sagging as if the weight of the world has been placed on them. "You weren't in the airlock, you weren't on the ship..."

"I can—"

Her exhaustion briefly flashes to anger. "I know that you can suck vacuum now, idiot, I saw it! What the fuck were you even doing?!"

The instinct to take a deep breath is there, even after thirty years of not needing to breathe to speak. I take one anyway, hoping it helps calm me down. It doesn't, but I continue on. "When I took down that trafficking gang, I lost a lot more than I could fix on my own. I needed a resonator setup to recover what I'd lost, and any Union ship will have one, they're part of how we modify our shapeshifting. I just asked if I could use theirs while they searched the ship. They wiped the logs for me, that's probably why the computer didn't know where I was."

"And then you got your timing wrong." She scoffs.

"And then I got my timing really wrong, yeah."

"Stars above." She sighs, and some of the stress bleeds out of her, and me by proxy. "Okay. Let's start from the top, this time with me being less heated and you being less panicked. What are you, why are you here?"

I take another breath. This one actually helps. "Okay. I was born, as a human, in a small conservative enclave of the Interstellar Union about seventy years ago. I left there when I was twenty, became a shapeshifter, and got into arena fighting—"

"Fuck, just to pay the bills?"

"Huh? No, because it's fun. We're post-scarcity, we don't do bills."

Cirol blinks all her eyes at once. "...fully? I thought half of that was just propaganda, but you're serious?"

I shrug. "It's nice. Most Unioners think it's insane that the Orions and the Confeds aren't at the same level, it's not like their tech isn't good enough to do it."

"Well, there's structural—"

"Yeah, I know. Sorry, let me finish this first." Cirol motions for me to continue. "So I got into arena fighting, dropped off my old body for something a little more dangerous. And our blood sports are extremely full-contact, fixing shapeshifting flesh is a lot easier than doing regen treatments. Eventually I settled on what I am now, with a lot of help to actually make it happen. I was pretty good at it, won a bunch of titles."

"So you were telling the truth about being trained, I guess."

"I told you the truth about almost everything besides my species and home." And being an upload. "...including enjoying your company. Just—"

"—between a new friend and endangering your people, your people win. Yeah."

"Kinda fucked that new friend thing up, I guess."

Her look softens a bit. "Maybe not as much as you think. Finish your story?"

"Okay. Um. The Union voted to provide military assistance to the Council about thirty years ago. I eventually decided I'd done all I wanted to do in the ring, and came out here to learn about Confed society first-hand. All the stuff about being from an isolated new Council member, that was at my government's behest. Which I agree with, because I don't really want to get thrown in some hole or dissected."

"And us being boarded by Union marines?"

"Happy coincidence. They didn't even know I was here, the ship's distress signal woke me up five minutes early. Apparently they were here to grab an Illia who tried to do some hack against the Mayday defense network."

She pauses, thinking. Then, suddenly, she speaks. "Okay. I forgive you."

"What?" Why, how, what's her game—

"You didn't know how I'd react, and you had a good reason to keep a secret. Seems reasonable to me."

"But—"

"I like your company too, Artemis. It's... look, I wouldn't be mad if someone lied to me about, I don't know, firebombing a police station. I mean, cool, but that's dangerous to share, right? I understand."

I chuff, a combination of a stress laugh and an earnest one. "Speaking from experience?"

"Mostly wishful thinking. How much do you know about cops?"

"Just because I'm from a post-scarcity society doesn't mean I don't know what cops are!"

"...you have cops?"

"No! Just—"

Cirol laughs, interrupting me. "You're cute when you're flustered, you know."

"Rude," I shoot back, blowing air out of my nose. "But, no, I grew up in an enclave. The Union's a big fan of self-determination, so if you want to go off with your friends and play capitalism, you can, as long as they're free to leave whenever they want. I was raised there, so... I didn't know I wanted to leave."

"And the bigger government doesn't put a stop to that? Why?"

"It's controversial, and complicated, and there's a lot of history there. Most enclaves like that die out on their own anyway, people realize it sucks and leave. The place I'm from, New Earth, will probably be gone in a hundred years or so."

"Huh." Cirol relaxes from leaning up against the pod door. "Okay if I sit?"

I nod, then realize she probably doesn't know the body language. "Um. As long as you're okay?"

She sits down on the bed next to me. "Yeah, I will be. Just, alien body language and all that. You're... really fucking scary, sometimes."

"Sorry."

"Not really your fault for being you."

"It literally is, in this case. I chose my body."

"...I can't disagree with that, I guess."

"Sorry. At least my brain managed to avoid sharing that it would have been a lot easier to dispose of a body next to an airlock."

She chuffs, and sighs. "Okay, yeah, that would have been bad. But, uh, you do this thing when you're about to hurt someone where that spear on your tail points straight at their face and you flex all your claws. I saw it in that office building, and I saw it when I cornered you just now."

"...fuck, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to—"

Cirol waves off my apology. "I figured it was sort of instinctive. But also terrifying, yes." She pauses, thinking. "Actually, I've never even seen you use the blade, have I?"

I shake my head. "I've never used it for its intended purpose since I left the Union."

"Dare I ask what the intended purpose is?"

"Um. Precision strikes, usually to the spinal column or eyes. It's built to slide through gaps in scales."

She gives me a worried look, "How is that not fatal? Even to you—"

I tap my head with a claw, ceramic on ceramic making a metallic clink. "Two centimeters of starship armor around my brain, and the same for anyone else in the ring with me." And also I'm an upload, I wish I could say. Brain damage doesn't really matter to us, but permitting it tends to make the fights too short. "And as long as the brain's intact, everything else is just flesh."

"But if the arteries are severed, don't you get brain damage? I know some species can survive without oxygen for a while, but with no blood to the brain..."

I do have arteries to my brain, but they're there to spin a little turbine to power my spinglass, not bring oxygen to my grey matter. And even if I did need oxygen... "Shapeshifting. I have eight separate bodies that I can mix and match as I like, including moving oxygen between different tissues. And I have some natural thaumaturgical regeneration that gives me enough oxygen that I don't need to breathe if I'm not active."

"Wait, so that stuff about extra dimensions on your body—"

"That was true. It's how my shapeshifting works, I just didn't call it that."

"That's... Okay. That's a lot. I can't even imagine what your combat sports look like."

"Well. I guess could show you, since it's not like it's a secret to you anymore? I have a few of my fight recordings saved."

"Yes? Please?"

I pull out a video from one of my favorite fights, running it through machine translation as I encode it and send it over to Cirol's phone.

"Here. This is my last fight against Emperor, probably one of the best I've had."

"Emperor? A stage name?"

"Yeah, novel design too, you'll see. My stage name was Regicide, we had a little rivalry."

Her eyes widen in a grin. "Regicide? Good choice," she says, tapping play. Cirol watches silently, only occasionally murmuring something in response to the action on the screen.

"Fuck me," she whispers when the fight ends with me holding Emperor's armored braincase aloft in my claw, "that is fucking insane. And he just got better from that?"

"It's not that different from regen, just more efficient. The brain's the only thing you need intact, and there's no danger to that with the armored casing." Not that it would matter if I managed to shatter someone's spinglass, but that's barely even possible when it's behind armor composite like that. "Fighting stuff like power armor with actual guns is way scarier."

"Wait, what the fuck, you fought someone in armor?"

"Oh, a few times, not usually successfully. When I fought that Confed suit and the Ranger suit, that was close. Though I did win, obviously."

"What?!"

"Oh, gods, I kind of left some details out of that whole thing. Um. Remember when we met? In that office building?"

"Yeah?"

"That guy who hired you was a Unioner who tried to... revert to baser ways, let's say. He picked out that I was also a Unioner and tried to kill me for showing up to a picket line, which is why I was ruining his life. Turns out he worked for the Thorns, which they turned into me owing them a favor instead of trying to have me killed. And the favor was fucking up that gang."

"That's not at all convoluted," Cirol replies with a distinctly sarcastic tone.

"...yeah. Um, I don't think the Thorns liked Shane very much. But I also think they kind of expected me to get myself killed."

"Which you didn't, despite fighting two people in power armor?!"

"One Ranger suit with a sandgun and one Marine suit with a shotcannon. They didn't realize they needed to aim for my head until it was too late. Ripped up the first one, got three bodies fried from electricity in the process, grabbed the sandgun's power pack and used it to fuck up the second, lost another body to the shock. And got shot a lot the whole time."

"Fuck, Artemis, is there anything you can't do? What am I even bringing to the table here?"

"I mean, I was pretty much running on fumes by the end of that fight. If they'd had one more person with a gun that could actually hurt me, or just been smarter about fighting me, it would have gone different. I got pretty lucky." I'm starting to realize my sense of self-preservation might be mildly dysfunctional. I didn't really feel fear in that fight. I'm actually not sure I remember the last time I felt real fear besides, well, a few minutes ago.

"Girl, you killed two people in power armor with your bare hands."

"...I didn't want to kill them. There's just not really any way to disable armor without killing whoever's inside."

"Ugh, not that, just, you're so far ahead of me that—"

Oh. I understand now. For my sake and hers, I need to fix this. "Cirol, no, don't say that. Or think that. I'm not better than you. You wouldn't think that someone in power armor is superior to you, right?"

"In a fight? Yes?"

"In their worth as a person."

"...no."

"Same thing for me. My body is technology, just a bit squishier than normal. And, uh, if you want a practical example, I have kind of shit for fine motor control, claws aren't great for handling things and nothing out here is designed to work with my neural lace like it is back home."

"...and a big enough gun is still dangerous if it's far enough away from you, isn't it?"

"Yup. Though I don't want to get pulled into merc work in Sandelekon if I can avoid it."

Cirol fixes me with all of her eyes again. "If I know you, you're going to get involved somehow."

"What does that mean?"

"You showed up to Opus and were at a protest within a week. I don't think you're the sort of person to stay uninvolved, do you?"

Cirol's got me there. "...yeah, shit. Well, I'll just have to make sure I don't get in over my head."

"Over your head?"

"An idiom, sorry. Um, in a situation that's beyond my ability to manage."

"Right." She looks at me again, thinking for a moment. "Got any more of those recordings?"

Sandelekon is, from the first glance, not 7720 Rankin. The massive Confed warship docked at the transit station is proof enough of that, strangely bulbous and more like a collection of brownish-silver soap bubbles than the sleek shapes of Orion or Union ships. Perhaps the warship is emblematic, because the difference, the big inescapable one, is scale. The transit station alone is probably ten times the size of the one in Rankin, and even then it's absolutely packed.

Cirol must notice me staring, because she gives me a glance I've been given before, the first time I stepped foot on Sunset.

"Doing okay, Artemis?"

I chuff. "I've seen big stations before, you know. Much bigger. This one is just... different, I suppose." The architecture is stark and boxy and utilitarian, not unlike a quick-fab Union station, but this is obviously more permanent. The dimensions are stretched in odd ways, with hallways built for larger and taller bipeds rather than the dichotomy of human-sized and dragon-sized features I've become used to throughout the Union.

"Bigger?" Cirol asks as we shuffle towards customs with the rest of the liner's passengers. "How much bigger?"

"Well, for inhabited ones... Los Diamentes, I guess? That's about forty kilometers long. But if you mean biggest period, that's the Mars Ring for sure."

"Girl, I have no clue what either of those are."

"Right, sorry. Los Diamentes is a spin-gravity habitat in Sol, basically a big tube with all the people living on the inside surface. Population is something around ten million, I think? And the Mars Ring is just a big ring around Mars that generates an artificial magnetosphere, it's mostly cabling."

"Huh. I would have expected bigger, given everything I've read."

"Oh, there are bigger ones, I just haven't visited them. The most massive station in the Union is the Tau Ceti fleetyards, I think. That one's basically a whole moonlet."

"Huh." Cirol motions at the signs ahead by ways of changing the topic. "I assume you can read Interlang?"

I can. Conveniently, the spelling is phonetic, which really makes you wonder why so many Earth languages never did that. The sign directs "citizen species" over to the left, and "non-citizen species" over to the right.

"I assume I'm not a citizen species?"

"I suspect not," she jokes. "They shouldn't give you much hassle, just, you know, don't tell them what's in your head."

And she doesn't even know the half of it. "Hey, I'm just naive, not stupid."

Cirol tilts her head at me in what I'm pretty sure is her equivalent of a raised eyebrow. "I'll meet you on the other side. Try not to get detained, yeah?"

I give her a toothy grin by way of a response before we separate. The customs booth I'm directed to is manned (is manned the right word for an alien?) by an Astikar, who are best described as a cross between a deer, a centaur, and a bug. They're one of the great misses of evolution, in my opinion. Astikar are physically attractive, at least to me; they're lithe and athletic with beautiful pale-white exoskeletons. But as far as I've read, they universally have no interest in interspecies romance. Tragic. They're strangely reminiscent of myself and other razorclub forms, at least aesthetically, though they don't have any of our other abilities. I wonder if this one thinks I fall into the uncanny valley or not.

"Name?" Their voice is, for lack of a better term, normal, with none of the clicks or buzzes I would expect from a technically-insectoid species, though they have a subtly different accent than the Mahknan I've talked to.

"Artemis Ingram."

"Purpose of visit?"

"Tourism. I plan to do some work to pay my way."

"Duration of stay?"

"Long-term. Several years."

"Species?"

"Askaian."

That gives the agent pause. "Askaian?" They take a second glance at me, presumably realizing that no, they haven't seen my species before. "I don't know that one."

"We don't get out much."

"Do you need to do first contact procedures?"

"...I'm speaking Interlang right now, so probably not?" Admittedly, the idea of a species that has somehow learned an interstellar language without ever having met an alien before is very funny.

They huff. "I meant diplomatic."

"Oh, no, I'm not here on official business, I'm just a tourist." Please don't let them try and get all formal with me.

"Right. Any medical concerns, cross-species contamination, gaseous emissions, etcetera, that we should know about?"

"None. I should be close to sterile by most species' standards."

They grunt in what I assume is affirmation and tap out some notes on his computer. "You understand that, as a novel species, you may be unable to get medical treatment here if you are injured or fall ill?"

"I do." If I manage to get sick, a lot of people will be very interested in that, given that my immune system is engineered to no-sell the nastiest bugs that we can invent. The fact that there's a recreational bioweapon scene is probably one of the more concerning facts about the Union, even if it never leaves sim. But it does mean that we have really good immune systems. Injury, of course, is not an issue for me.

"I assume you're aware with Confederate law on synthetic augmentations?"

"I am. I have one, my voicebox," I tap the speaker in my neck, "which ties into my ventral spinal column. It doubles as a communication device, the link is bidirectional."

They tap at the computer again. "That's fine. Anything else that's likely to show up on an x-ray? You'll have to get scanned, it's easier to get it out of the way now."

"Um. Most of my body is x-ray opaque, my scales are ceramic. And I have a secondary skull made of battlesteel, which I think is also opaque. And, uh, my nerves are mostly metallic filaments, so if you're looking for wires you'd probably find that too if you get past the scales. But I don't have anything else with actual circuitry."

The Astikar stares at me, a quartet of yellow eyes trying to figure out if I'm doing some sort of strange joke.

"Is ultrasound an option?" I volunteer. My spinglass has miniscule sonic emitters that will decoy an ultrasound scanner into seeing a normal brain behind my armor, a feature only present in the exploration model that I have.

They sigh, as if they can't be bothered to deal with any of this, and I'm struck by how remarkably human the exhalation is, even if it's from mandibles instead of lips. They type a bit more on the computer again before looking back up at me.

"Our technician for that is out sick today. I'll do the normal scan, and then a waiver for being opaque, but if you get into any sort of trouble, the police will scan you, and you'll be in very serious trouble if you've hidden anything."

"I plan on staying out of trouble, if anything. Where do I go for a scan?"

"Stay right there and hold still." There's a brief buzz, and the customs agent looks at their computer again. "Stars, you weren't kidding. Alright." They hit one last key with an air of finality, and a boxy printer next to him whirrs to life, spitting out a plastic card with my name and picture on it. "Here's your card. Keep it on you and don't lose it. Do you have any luggage to declare?"

"Nope."

"Good. Next!" I take my leave, just one curiosity in what must be an endless tide of them. As soon as the two streams of passengers merge again, I find Cirol waiting for me. I've started to pick up on her distinguishing features, the spacing of her eyes, laid out in two sets of three like points on a pair of upward-facing triangles, and the stripes on her forearms. All Mahknans keep their arms bare from what I've seen, wearing sleeveless or short-sleeve tunics by default, though I know they have some more interesting (and attractive, to me) formal wear.

"Didn't get arrested," I greet her as we make eye contact. Eyes contact? Cirol has six eyes, which feels like enough eyes that it should be plural.

"That was fast!"

"Easier than Rankin was. Probably because that guy felt like he had more time to ask questions."

"It's mostly just that it's cheaper to let you stay than it is to send you back."

I give her a quizzical look as we head towards the planetbound side of the station. "How? There's no way a ticket is more expensive than a lifetime of drawing on government services, and—" Cirol interrupts me with a chuffing laugh, "—what? What's funny?"

She stifles her laugh. "What government services?"

"Well, housing and food for one. And I know healthcare isn't cheap for other species that don't body-swap like we do. And then there's public transportation, and—" Cirol starts laughing again. "What?!"

"You said you grew up in some conservative enclave, and you still had all that?"

I nod, confused. "Yeah? I mean, it wasn't as bad as old Earth back before the war, but that's just because if they made it any worse, people left." People certainly did want to make it worse on New Earth, too. Collectivist luxuries like cheap housing and free healthcare existed to make leaving for the Union proper not seem like much of an improvement, and every once in a while, someone in charge would forget that. Back then, I saw it through a different lens, but I was a child who didn't know any better. They didn't have that excuse.

"Void... Okay, none of the stuff you named is going to be free here. They might not let you go homeless or hungry, but they'll put you to work to earn your keep if you can't pay for it yourself. The rest, medicine and transit and all that? That costs money."

"Wait. So if someone like, loses an arm and can't work to pay for the regen—"

"They're basically fucked, yeah." Cirol uses the Council expletive for fornication rather than anything in Interlang. From what I've read, Council Standard tends to integrate loanwords from new species much more readily than Interlang does, and their fuck equivalent, jyun, is a loanword from a pre-Council Vikoan language. "But regen isn't that expensive. Permanent physical disability isn't any more common than it is in the Council, a severe injury is just a lot more likely to bankrupt you."

"That sounds... awful? Why don't they do anything about it?"

She snorts, "You should know the answer to that, unless that big education of yours skips economic and political theory."

"Well, yeah, I know that the system maintains a hierarchy. I meant more, like, why does any action to change it not work?"

Cirol spares another eye for me as take our places waiting in line to board the planetbound transport. "The Confederacy isn't a democracy? You don't... get a say like that." She says it like it's obvious, which it isn't.

"What? Don't they have elected representatives and a voting body?"

"Those words have different connotations when translated, at least for Standard. They're not elected by the people, they're elected by the rest of the Confederate government." A third eye snaps over to look at me, "Where'd you learn Interlang, anyway? Your accent is concerningly good."

"Immersion class on the trip over. And I think the accent is because I don't speak with my physical vocal cords. It's sort of like fancy mimicry, so it's easy to copy someone's voice directly, accent and all. It's actually a little harder to use my own voice than it is to use my memories of someone else's."

"Does that mean you could mimic mine?"

"Probably? I've talked to you for long enough to get a good handle on it." I fiddle with some settings on my speech module. "How's this? Should be pretty close, I—"

Cirol makes a face. "Oh, I don't like that at all. It's that easy?"

I switch my voice back. "I have a lot of practice. This has been my body for three decades, remember. Most of my people can speak with their biology, so they never have to learn how to use this setup." I chirrup. "I can't naturally make a lot of noises that aren't... well, bestial, for lack of a better term."

"Couldn't you just engineer it in? You're literally growing ballistic plating, I can't see how it'd be difficult."

"Oh, definitely, I just wanted to be able to purr more than I wanted to be able to speak. They're not really compatible, at least for my native tongue."

Cirol does that rippling blink of confusion again. "Your people are crazy."

I chuff, "Yup."

The line slowly progresses, eventually enough for us to take our seats on the shuttle down to the planet, another day or so from the transit station. This shuttle is more cramped than the one we took off of Opus, though I'm unsure if that really has anything to say about the culture here, beyond "sometimes they use cheap stuff".

I get my first real-time view of Sandelekon itself (the planet, not the star) on one of the shuttle's screens. It's a common feature of propaganda from both sides of the war, a blue-green dot not too unlike Earth. Sandelekon was settled some three hundred years ago by the Orions, a little scientific community dedicated to researching the biosphere. If there was anything particularly interesting on Sandelekon, they never found it, because the Confeds annexed the system within the decade, moving millions of settlers and mountains of industry in overnight. To the Council, it's an example of Confederate rapaciousness, a pristine ecosystem ruined in favor of naked expansionism, and one of the first systems to fall to their enemy. To the Confeds, it's a monument to their own industriousness.

Of course, in reality it's neither of these. The system was, at the time of its discovery, on the very edge of Council space, far too impractical for them to colonize, and the Confederacy was a distant threat that would only concern future generations. When the Confeds took it, they recognized it as a new fleet base from which they could expand into Council space; it never would have been this heavily industrialized otherwise.

We disembark in another transit station, this one in planetary orbit. We're going to be headed to Ocean City, a name that's so creative I can name at least three places on Earth and one on Sunset that share it. Cirol apparently has some friends there, who will hopefully let us crash for a few nights while we get accommodations sorted out.

"Do your friends know we're coming?" I nudge her as we board a shuttle headed down.

"Yeah, I sent a text ahead. They'll be fine with you, don't worry."

"If not, I think I can probably afford a place to stay for a while. I still have like twenty thousand hepts left from Opus."

"Ah," Cirol says. "Hepts won't do you much good here, that's Orion money. You'll need to get those exchanged for gold."

"Gold? You're serious?" There's practically infinite gold when you process entire planetoids, being on a gold standard after inventing FTL is insane.

"Not literal gold, crygold. You know, money..." She looks at me, and I give her my best clueless look in response. "Okay. Cryptographic gold. Abbreviated as cg, crig or crygold. It's a cryptocurrency, same thing that hepts are."

"I'll be entirely honest, I don't know what that means." I know the root words, cryptography and currency, but not the compound word of both.

"You and your blessed post-scarcity naivete. Okay, you know how regular money works, right? The government prints some bills or coins, hands them out, that sort of thing?"

"Yeah, I got that, we have community-run currencies for artisan stuff."

"Right— wait, what?"

"Well. We don't have to pay for basic stuff like food or housing or any sort of industrial output, but for stuff like commissioned artistic works? It's a way to trade those sorts of favors around without having to barter directly."

"I think I hate that you invented money from first principles just for art."

"We did have money before, you know. I mean, shit, I grew up with it."

She gives me a mildly exasperated look before continuing, "Okay, anyway, cryptocurrency is just doing some cryptography tricks to make account records distributed, so you can exchange currency without real-time links to a bank's servers. Got real popular back in the 4000's, but it was basically all scams and speculation markets, so the Chamber eventually stepped in and standardized it all. Thus, crygold. And then the Orions came to the same conclusions with hepts."

"Huh. What'd they use before crygold, then?"

"Holmium alloy coinage. It got counterfeited a lot, from what I've read. You'll still see those used for cash, but the modern ones are stamped so that you can crack them in half to get the redemption key out. Which you shouldn't do because it makes the coin worthless. Anyway, the crypto part of crygold is for businesses and the wealthy. Unless you're making interplanetary deals, it's just a regular bank account, you don't have to worry about the details."

"How bad's the conversion rate?"

Cirol chuffs. "Usually it's close to even, at least in terms of spending power. Did you get your, uh, comms implant working with the wireless here yet?"

"I think the protocol is just cross-compatible." A quick check reveals that yes, I can reach out to the internet, though the router asks for subscription information before it lets be browse. No free lunch here in the Confederacy, I suppose, I'll have to get that sorted once I have money that spends here. "And don't say it like that, it's a normal comms implant."

She gives me a glance that says, no, it is very much not, but doesn't press the issue. Instead, she motions out the window, the reentry plasma clearing enough that I can see the surface below. It's night, not that it would matter to my eyes, but the city below is shining like day. Unlike Opus, the city here is titanic and sprawling, full of massive towers covered with neon lights and advertisement screens. Even the urban sprawl itself is tall— downtown is monolithic, but the outlying buildings are probably a dozen stories each, making the density downright impressive. A rough guess says Ocean City has a population in the twenty million range, not too dissimilar to a decent-sized Union city.

"Now that's an actual city. How's the nightlife?"

"It's been almost twenty years since I was last here. From what I remember, it was corporate and expensive, for all the stuff you'll see advertised. The underground venues were better, though it might be best if you didn't immediately get involved in an illegal fighting ring."

"Is fighting illegal or something?"

"No, but running a betting operation on it without a license is. And nobody shows up to those just to watch a fight."

"I guess they probably wouldn't want me back after the first time anyway."

"Why— oh. Yeah, you'd probably fuck up the odds. Anyway, it's been forever, we'll get to figure it out together. Though I'll probably be working most of the evenings."

"I take it you'll be participating in the corporate war?"

"Probably. Merc work pays well, and I've got the experience. I probably need to renew my weapons license, though. Did you have plans for work?"

"Not at the moment. What's actually going on with the corporate war, anyway? It's not the first time I've heard of it, but I don't know the details."

"Stars, that's a long story. Big corporations are always at each others' throats out on the frontier, and the Chamber's never bothered putting a stop to it unless there's a lot of collateral. I think Sandelekon's whole thing started a decade or so ago? Not sure on the timing, I wasn't here, but some important Yelen ship went missing, TulCo got blamed, RREC tried to evict both of them from the belt refineries for fighting, and now it's just a big three-way spat. It probably doesn't help that someone," she looks pointedly at me with an extra pair of eyes, "keeps intercepting freighters."

I nod. "I saw an article on the ride over. Something like ten percent of the system's trade volume gets interdicted, but the corps won't work together for any sort of convoy agreement because they keep fighting."

"Fighting over scraps, anyway." There's a pulse and a thrum as the shuttle transitions from aerodynamic flight to agrav, swooping in over the port. "Everyone wants the border trade to themselves, but there's less and less border to go around. Especially since the Rankin cluster has been out of Confed hands for most of the last decade."

The shuttle clunks ungracefully as it docks. "Speaking of the interdiction, actually, those articles I was looking at say that the Orions are raiding freight here, not the Union. What's up with that? It's kind of hard to get them mixed up."

"Ah. Your first encounter with Confed media, I take it? The official position is that the Union is a particularly proud client state of the Council, nothing more."

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. "Not entirely wrong, I guess, at least as far as their interactions with them would go. "

"One of the things with the government here, I guess. They're sort of... fundamentally incurious. The apparatus that controls the media isn't particularly interested in the culture of the next expansion target, they're interested in othering them, and that extends to pretty much anyone in power here. You're not going to find any experts on Council internals outside of academia or the military here, much less the Union."

"That's... insane?"

"Biggest and oldest star nation in the galaxy. They're pretty sure they've got it all figured out."

"And we can talk about that openly?"

"Yep. There's not any real censorship in what people say to each other, not like that. Someone might make some noise about seditious behavior if we had any actual power or a big following, but... well, we don't. Right now we're just unemployed bums."

I laugh. "Very competent and dangerous bums. But, uh, speaking of bums—"

"Right, yeah, Naja will meet us dockside, they're the only one of us who has a car."

"Naja?"

"Oh, you'll like them. A little surprise for you, I think."

The surprise, I find out as we dock and disembark, is that Naja is a Majat. They initially appear Mahknan, and it takes me a moment to figure out what's going on as they gain and lose bits of white exoskeleton when an Astikar passes by them.

"Naja!" Cirol exclaims, rushing over and wrapping them in a hug. Naja's form immediately mirrors hers, flowing like water to fully replicate Cirol's shape. I'm immediately captivated by them. Majats are reflexive shapeshifters, instinctively mirroring whoever's closest to them, but as far as I know there aren't any that live in the Union, so they're mostly an unknown.

They exchange some greetings before Cirol introduces me, and I can't help but watch as they mirror me, starting off with my scales and plating, then slowly assimilating the rest of my shape.

"Naja, this is my friend Artemis," Cirol motions towards me, "and Artemis, this is Naja."

I try really hard to have the first thing I say to them not be a question. I am mostly unsuccessful. "Hi— sorry, I've never met someone of your species before, this is so cool, I have so many questions—"

"It's okay!" Their voice is, unexpectedly, not a mirror of mine or Cirol's, but rather something softer and with flatter vowels compared to what I'm used to. "Cirol told me about you, but not what you looked like. It's always exciting to meet someone with a new shape!"

"I have... probably infinite questions, honestly. I guess we should get out of the terminal first, though."

They laugh, I think, with a sort of cheerful bubbling sound, their form shifting back to something between mine and Cirol's. "Did you not tell her about Majats?" Naja asks Cirol.

"Nope. I figured I'd let the surprise be mutual."

"Well, she certainly is a surprise," Naja replies before turning back to me, "I think I might have as many questions for you as you do for me. But, right, car first, I'm sure you'd both love to not be traveling."

A brief car ride through awful city traffic later, and we're at Naja's apartment. It's not massive, at least by Union standards, but they have a spare room and a couch-like object, which is more than you could say for anything where I grew up. There's also apparently another roommate, a Nolansh named Thonnek, but he's at work at the moment. Cirol is not one for relaxing, and immediately heads out to go get her weapons license renewed. Naja has a few hours before they have to go to work (they work at a clinic, I learn), which leaves us time to do our mutual interrogation.

I volunteer to go first— I'm the guest, after all, it would only be polite that they know who they're hosting. I share the official story: I'm an Askaian, an engineered species designed for combat by a dead civilization, out doing anthropology and exploration of what the Council tells us is a hostile power. Cirol's outright stated that her friends are still on her side, as far as politics go, so I don't bother mincing words when I tell my story.

"...well, that explains some things," they say when I've finished explaining myself, "I get this feeling like I'm not actually mirroring you correctly, but if you're a shapeshifter, that tracks, there's more of you that I can't mirror."

I nod, "I'm not surprised. You only mirror appearance, right? Not biology?" I don't know a lot about Majats beyond what the internet says, but it's not like basic species data is hard to find.

"Yeah. These," they tap their armored scales with a claw, "are just keratin, bone, and chitin, even though I know you've got some sort of ceramic. And since you don't appear to have vocal cords, I have to use Cirol's right now." They pause, sensing something unseen. "There's... I can tell you have some very weird nerve setup that I can't copy either."

"Biometallic nerve filaments. I basically grow little wires." I realize in a flash there might be a problem here. If they can sense the glassy cube in my skull, they haven't said anything about it so far. "What about my brain?"

"I'm getting nothing at all, but that's normal. I assume you have some sort of warding to stop folks from poking around in there? I can feel that armor layer you mentioned, though."

I nod, relieved. "Yup. Big disruption pattern on the inside of my skull." In Union parlance, this is called a counter-control pattern, a fractal that snags any magic that attempts to touch your mind. It's not strictly necessary for uploads— the assurance processor makes outside interference impossible —but it still prevents people from taking a look inside.

"On the inside— oh, I guess if they had to open you up to put in your armor, it would've been easy enough to put in a disruption pattern too?"

"Mhm, exactly." Or at least close enough. This body was printed, and the armor around my mind installed during assembly, but that's not that different from surgery.

"Neat. Your turn!"

"...for questions?"

"Yeah!"

"I might actually have more than you did. I'll probably take notes, if that's okay? Most of why I'm out here is learning about what life is like outside of the Council."

Naja nods, mirroring my body language as if they've been doing it their whole life. "Go right ahead."

"Well. Um, is your name just Naja? And have you lived here for a while?"

"Naja s'Onalawe. And technically I was born about a thousand lightyears coreward of here in a system called Thak 19, but we moved out to Sandelekon when I was little."

"Okay, I have so many questions just from that. Can I start with your surname, s'Onalawe? Most people I've met here don't have a surname, or at least don't use one."

"It's a Majat naming convention. Most other people in the Confederacy use localities or accomplishments for a surname, and those can change over one's life. Our surnames are a reference to our lineage; my parent was Ona, their parent was Alawe, it gets combined to Onalawe, and then s'Onalawe means 'child of'. Some Majats will extend it out for as many generations as they know, especially if they have important family ties, but traditionally it's only extended out to those who were there when you were born."

"Does your family still live here? How does that relationship work for Majats?"

"We still talk! Majats are k-strategists like basically every other intelligent species, so family tends to be important. My grandparent is still kicking around somewhere in the Thak cluster, and my parent lives in New Thak, I visit a few times a year."

"...I assume New Thak is named after the Thak cluster?"

"Because so many people there were immigrating from the various Thaks, yeah. The city didn't get anything more than a numerical designation before the new name stuck."

"And Majat are asexual, right? You only have one parent?"

"Well, asexual isn't really the right word. Agender is probably more accurate, but we still do something close to sexual reproduction, at least on a biological level. Half my genes are my parent's, and the other half is made up of all of their partners throughout their life. It's not really, I don't know, egg and sperm? But the genetic effect is similar."

"So you're not a species with sex chromosomes, but you wouldn't describe yourself as asexual?"

"Nope, we fuck." They giggle at that, using my own vocal cords. "Or at least most of us do. Y'know, it's fun and feels good... actually, do you know? I suppose I don't have any clue how you reproduce."

"Oh, I do, I just have to switch to a form with the proper equipment." Or at least, I would like to. But the only options here for me are interspecies, and that isn't quite as trivial here as it is back home. "But, you enjoy sex as other species? With other species too?"

They wink. "Are you flirting?"

I wasn't, but I wouldn't be opposed, either. I give Naja a toothy smile, which she mirrors. "Perhaps."

The way Naja replicates my body language is uncanny, lashing their tail the exact same way I just did unconsciously. "Perhaps... but to answer your question, yes, we do. I couldn't produce offspring with another species, our shifting doesn't change our DNA, but it does replicate enough of the nervous system to share sexual desire and pleasure."

"So, to ask the question that I assume everyone else does... how does your shifting work?"

They pause for a moment before speaking, gathering their thoughts. "The quick explanation is that Majat is the word for mirror in one of our old planetary languages. We evolved shapeshifting for a combination of predation and evasion, mirroring nearby objects and prey reflexively. But as we started to develop tool use and intelligence, it became more and more vestigial, until it was a social adaptation rather than a survival one. By the time we had any sort of civilization, we could only mirror each other. We didn't realize it applied to all sophonts until first contact."

"Wait, you... oh, no."

They laugh. "Yup. We were as shocked as the contact party was. It's no trouble for us, it turns out we can adapt to pretty much any body plan, but the first Majat to see a Kor in person was very confused."

"So your normal form—"

"Is bipedal, like you. You'll probably never see it outside of pictures, I can't return to it even if I want to. I'll never fully lose the bits and pieces I've mirrored, they'll just fade together into something new."

"Huh. So there's not any control over it?"

"Oh, I usually have decent control! I can choose what gets added or blended in, though it takes some focus."

"Is it... weird to never be yourself?"

Their reply is suddenly cold, rather than the bubbly eagerness they've held throughout the conversation. "My species has been like this since before we had the barest idea of civilization, our culture is adapted to it. I am myself all the time, separate from whatever I happen to look like. Our physical selves are very separated from who we are; they have to be."

"Shit, sorry, I didn't realize. Or think it through." Of course they wouldn't care about being their original selves when they've never been physically able to do so. Even most Unioners barely give a shit about that, and we've only left our own genetics behind in the last five hundred years.

"It's alright," they wave off my apology, "wanting to understand already puts you in the top half of the galaxy. Just a bit of a sore point."

"Do you have problems with other people often over what you are?"

"Hm. Problems with people, not frequently. Most sophonts are friendly anywhere you go, Confederacy or not. It's more that there's friction between us and society. Like... some people don't want to be mirrored, period. Kor in particular, they hate it. So they just use disruption patterns that break our ability to read them. But for us, that reads as sort of an intentional snub of everything we are." They sigh. "I understand different species have different cultural expectations for privacy, and there's other factors too. Other sophonts are geared to recognize someone by things that don't change, and we can't not change. But people get uncomfortable around us, sometimes."

"Sometimes people don't like seeing themselves in the mirror, I guess."

Naja scowls, then breaks into a sharp grin at the pun. "Damn it. That's good." I realize, suddenly, that they're not just mirroring body language unique to me, but to posthumans in general. Lashing the tail like they did earlier, I could see that coming instinctively with the body. But the inhuman smile I do occasionally is purely coming from the part of me that was human. Other species don't display teeth as a friendly expression.

"Do you... somehow know my body language?"

They nod in a particularly human manner. "I'm surprised it took you this long to notice. The sense that allows us to mirror is... complex. It's not purely physical, it can access behavioral patterns too, some sort of tangled pre-language symbolic linkage. The magic's over my head. But the end result is I can replicate body language and the ways you move in addition to shape. Or, I say I can but it's really I do, it's not something that happens on a conscious level."

I blink. "I don't think I have much to say in response to that besides, that's incredible." And also vaguely concerning, when it comes to concealing uploads. I'm not at risk, I've been in biological bodies my whole life, but someone who is usually a machine? That might be immediately detectable, ships and such have their own body language that doesn't translate to organics.

"Oh, the mirror-sense is why so many of us work in medicine, it's very useful. Any Majat has basically perfect awareness of whatever body they're mirroring. So if you had some hard-to-diagnose internal injury, all a Majat doctor would have to do is get close enough to you to mirror, and suddenly we know everything that's wrong with you."

"Holy shit?" It sounds fully the same as the self-sense an amalgam shifter like me has, just for everyone in close proximity to them.

Naja smiles forlornly. "I have most of the education to be a doctor. Surgeon, actually. My money ran out before I graduated, so now I just work as an assistant at the same clinic Thonnek does. And maybe do a bit of chop shop work after hours."

"Chop shop?"

"Surgeon for grey- or black-market augs and other things people can't go to legit places for. Most of it's benign, just installing open-source or jailbroken stuff, but sometimes you end up doing trauma care or putting some real expensive shit in for a gangster or corporate type. I've definitely patched up your girl more times than I can count, she ate a lot of lead back in the day."

"Is everyone in this friend group doing insane stuff for work?" Before they can reply, I manage to belatedly process their entire sentence, "—wait, Cirol's not my girl."

Naja tilts their head like a confused dog, and I get the distinct impression they're choosing that expression to fuck with me. "Are you sure?"

"I've known her for two weeks, I don't even know if she dates outside of her species!"

"What a curious choice of words," Naja smugs. "Is knowing whether she'd be interested the only thing stopping you?"

I hate how easily they've cornered me on this. It feels like it's somehow karmic retribution for how easily I corner everyone else physically. "It's... I don't want to fuck up our friendship. And I did kind of get caught in a pretty big lie, earlier today."

"Hm. What'd you lie about?"

"My past."

"No specifics?"

"It's... sensitive."

"Hm. Is she still mad at you?"

"I don't think so. She did say she liked my company too, later..."

Naja rolls their eyes. My eyes? It's a little odd to look in a mirror, but I've shared my body before, it's nothing I haven't come to emotional terms with already. "You know I can read both of your body languages and sexual preferences at the same time, right?"

"...right." Of course they're using all that to play matchmaker. I don't think there's any escaping it, and I would be lying if I said I wanted to escape... but if I fuck it up somehow, Cirol knows some damning secrets about me.

"Well," they say, "I won't force it any more than that. Do you want me to keep what I can sense about you to myself?"

"My species has no problem with interspecies relationships, at least not while I've been alive. It wouldn't even be the first time I've dated an alien. Unless you think it'd be a problem here, I don't mind."

"I wouldn't scream it from the rooftops, but it's not going to cause problems. I mean, literally my entire species fucks across the species barrier. It's not that strange. Except for Kor, they get real upset about 'species purity' and stuff like that." Naja suddenly gets a conspiratorial look about them, "...but I wonder, how has someone who's never left their quarantined homeworld until now dated an alien before?"

God fucking damn it, why did I feel the need to say that? "Would you believe me if I told you I misspoke?"

"Not really, no."

I shrug. "Then sorry, but I can't really talk about it. Ask Cirol."

"So it's something Cirol's fine with, but you don't want to tell to someone you just met? Well, I won't press. Want some food?"

"Uh. Yes, now that you mention it. I haven't eaten for the last six weeks." I'm a little off-center, I really expected more pushback from that slip-up.

"Then if you'll follow me... wait, you're an omnivore? With those teeth?" Of course they can tell. Naja can just read my biology like a book, after all.

"I'm not designed to chew," I open my mouth to show them, which I quickly realize is pointless because they already know me via their shapeshifting sense. "They're mostly for shredding flesh. I can handle just about anything, but soft foods are easiest."

"Hm. Sugar melon okay?" They indicate a large greenish melon, probably twice the size of a human head, on the counter with a bowl of assorted fruits.

"Never tried it, but sure." I wash my tail-blade off in the sink while Naja looks on.

"Do you actually just use that instead of a knife?" they ask, incredulously.

I shrug, chopping up the melon. "It's sharper than most knives and holds an edge better. And I have difficulty holding most utensils with these claws."

"What even is that blade made of? I can tell it's ceramic, but not the structure. My replica here is just bone with a chitin layer."

"Polycrystalline boron nitride. Um, a mix of hexagonal, cubic, and wurtzite, specifically. There's a little bit of thaumaturgical reinforcement to reduce the brittleness, and obviously the biosynthesis pathway is also magic." The melon slices easily, revealing orange-red flesh. I toss a test cube into my mouth, revealing that it tastes like a vaguely fruity caramel. "Okay, definitely a fan of sugar melon." I shovel more cubes in as I dice the rest of it.

Naja gives me a look. "You know that one blade would probably cover half a month's rent if it were separated from your body, right? A good ceramic blade that size isn't cheap."

"Huh," I say between bites, "Is there a market for that?"

"For one-offs like you? Probably. I'd tell you to be careful, but..."

"Yeah, I'll probably be fine, what's someone gonna do, corner me in a dark alleyway?"

"Um. Yeah, maybe. It's not likely, but people do get mugged here."

"Then they'd have to be real stupid or real brave to try it on me. Anyway, you want some of this?"

"Sure." Naja and I share the rest of the melon quietly, and are eventually interrupted by Cirol returning.

"Hey. You two all settled in?" Cirol asks, and her greeting almost slides over my perfectly smooth brain because my attention is drawn to the massive pistol on her hip and the chunky case she's carrying.

Naja grins, shifting into something between me and Cirol. Noticeably, unlike the last time I saw them blend the two of us, they keep a lot more of my form, really only changing their face and hands. Hm. I look pretty good with six eyes. "Can we keep her? Please?" Naja pleads, like a kid fawning over a puppy they found. Perhaps a very sharp puppy.

Cirol chuffs. "Hopefully Artemis doesn't mind you borrowing her."

"Not at all," I answer, "The reasons are... complicated, probably, but for someone else to like being me? That's a big compliment." Hopefully Cirol picks up on what I mean. Everything I am is intentional, chosen and designed. Twenty years ago I would have wanted to keep this form more to myself, but now? It's legitimately an honor for Naja to go to the effort of holding onto my shape.

"Somehow I'm not surprised. Wanna see the new hardware?"

"Absolutely." I wouldn't really care if it was back at home, but alien guns? Yeah, I'm interested.

Cirol thunks her sidearm down on the table, a revolver with a titanic bore size and a four-shot square cylinder. If I had to guess, it probably weighs fifteen kilos, it's oversized even for Mahknans.

"What in the void is that thing, girl?" Naja asks. "Are you trying to hunt armored vehicles for sport?"

Cirol gives her a sly look in return. "No, the gun in the case is for that. This is because my new friend here can eat bullets and flechettes for breakfast, and I'm tired of being shown up."

Naja gives both of us a worried look. "Uh. What?"

"I can't really express to you how little a normal gun scares me," I reply. "What's that thing shoot, anyway?"

"Either a shitload of buckshot or an explosive round. I found out that I've been a good little Confed and met the qualifications for an explosives license. Couldn't have it going to waste."

"What exactly are you planning on shooting with that?" I ask.

"Nothing, hopefully. Corp work here is mostly bloodless, but it's extra bloodless if the other guy doesn't think he can survive getting shot. Speaking of which." Cirol pops the latches on the larger case, and if I still had a human mouth, I'd whistle. Inside is a gorgeous blue-steel, wood-furniture railgun, complete with a boxy digital sight.

"How did you even afford that?!" Naja exclaims. They're having the same reaction that I am, there's no way that was cheap, not with the wood furniture. It's clearly some sort of rich person's toy, or perhaps an enthusiast's pet project.

"Because it doesn't work," Cirol explains. "Whoever sold it to the store didn't want to fix the electrics, and the parts are so bespoke that the store didn't feel like fixing it either. The whole thing only cost me 500cg, I figured it'd be something to keep me busy."

"Along the lines of keeping busy, did you manage to get a lead on a job?" I ask.

"For me? Yeah, I hit up an old contact, he's still in the business. For you... well, you don't want to do corporate work, and I assume you aren't looking to get into organized crime, which doesn't leave a lot in the way of my old merc buddies."

"Actually," Naja interrupts, "I might have something? Artemis, you said you're basically sterile, right?"

"Pretty close to it, yeah, after initial disinfection I'm basically clean-room ready. I only shed dead skin and scales in large pieces, all the aramid backing makes it come away as a single unit."

"Well, I could use an assistant, as long as you don't mind some gore. Especially a big intimidating one. The after hours crowd can be a little... rambunctious."

Before I can say anything, Cirol starts cracking up, a continuous stream of her chuffing laughs. "Yeah, I think she doesn't mind."

I can't help but join in. I certainly don't mind some gore, after all.