God of Marriage Saga: Chapter 15
Imported from SF2 with no description.
"Qualities repurposed, remarried, re-arranged." Fleur added.
A froglike, alien proboscis emerged from my mouth.
"Why are you afraid of that?" she asked. "You can see it well enough."
"I afraith o wha I thoo wih ih." I muttered.
Reunion. Reunion wasn't supposed to be forced.
"You're afraid what that is, isn't really you then, calling for transformation. Why listen to it, then?" she asked.
...
Labeling what I was, wasn't going to help, much, but it helped my audience to understand.
"You are the morphed, they are the unmorphed." she elaborated. "You see form change, and crave it, and covet it, and they simply go about their lives none the wiser."
Gavrill had taken to sitting back with popcorn, fascinated with what was going on. At first, we'd had to fight with her to get her past being 'irritated' that we'd aborted the original operation. As for Fran, I couldn't tell where she'd gone off to, but she had seemed very preoccupied with her own thoughts.
There were about a half-dozen conflicting personalities of Gavrill, meanwhile, all echoing out slightly different responses, many denying the claim that she was interested--but what mattered was that... for what I could tell, the 'real' Gavrill... whatever 'real' meant--was just sitting back letting things play out, while an enormous, green-eyed, rust-red werewolf wearing a red spaghetti strap and brown hooded robes with the hood turned down, and brandishing a big silver crescent-headed staff studded with a large green jewel, sat and gave me pointers on seeing the changes I was making to myself.
"We may need to take a break and see the changes, some more," Fleur continued.
"So while I 'do' this for a living, you just sit and visualize it all day, and jerk off to it?" Gavrill asked--half wryly amused, half interested.
Fleur gave her a stern look, and a hand raised in a 'hold' gesture. We'd had to curb Gavrill's curiosity ever so slightly, just to get things to proceed.
It wasn't that I wasn't a transformer--not someone without a will to change my body. It was that there were so many changes to choose from. And I wasn't always sure what was choosing, or how best to listen.
"At its most base level, there is just imitation. Seeing others in yourself. Seeing yourself in others is something somewhat different... it's fundamentally an important thing, but at your level, it leads to misunderstanding."
I flicked around my proboscis, while trying to sprout a pair of animal ears. "How tho?" I asked.
Fleur smiled, happy I was paying more attention to the fundamentals, than the immediate reward of changing, and continued:
"You begin to see yourself in others as an act of pride. Of having asserted yourself in others."
"I gueth thath badth?"
Fleur shook her big fluffy head. "Ultimately, no--it's a gift to us. A new way to experience ourselves. Unfortunately, at a basic level, it means you breed like rabbits, the quality or qualities you want us to express. And craving change is one of the odder, and more basic ones."
Howth it odd? I asked, flicking the tongue around in the air, pursuing a fly semi-autonomously. The tongue had its own mind, somehow, even though it was still 'mine'.
This is not a frog tongue after all, I concluded, snaring the bug adhesively and swallowing the whole mess back inside.
Fleur smiled. "I'm glad you asked, but that's what's odd. It's not for me to tell you. It's for you to show us."
Several ridges of horny, sharp, bone growths emerged from the skin of my right arm. Fleur saw this, and put her half closed fist, thumb up, to the bottom of her muzzle, in concerned contemplation.
"You seem to be seeing yourself as a dangerous weapon. Might I ask where you got that idea?"
... "Wethker." I added. "Andth Thamura Reiko."
My eyes darted around in confused thought.
"That doesn't seem entirely the case with Tamura, but we may need to talk about both of them, soon."