Aberrant: 200X - New Home, New Woman

[iamthedave]

Chang Zha-Yang stood on one side of a clean, neat chain-link fence, looking out over the one of the airstrips of Vancouver International Airport. At her back, cars raced by on the road, throwing up dust and the occasional piece of trash.

Today she had covered up, stretching her hair over her body and tightening the strands until they merged, then shaping them into a perfect simulacrum of a black hooded zip-jumper and ripped demin jeans. As a matter of habit she had left her right shoulder bare, betraying the false nature of her clothing and the black spiderweb tattoo that covered her shoulder and part of her upper arm, spreading around to touch her collarbone.

Even though she had dressed to be unassuming, some of the passing people sensed something odd about her. However Chang appeared, all of her existed as part of everything else. From a certain perspective she could be called a criminal; as far as she knew, wearing nothing but your hair in public would breach public indecency laws. She still had eyes, but had no need to use them. She could 'see' as well through the finger of one hand as she could through her eyes. As such, though she 'looked' out over the airstrip, she also watched the road behind her and the flat, neat-cut fields that broke up the roads near the airport.

Because of that, she saw every eye that locked on her, every face that pressed to windows until they could see her no longer. Her ears were sharp enough that the windows and metal chassis were not enough to mask their voices. Just as she could listen to the songs playing in their radios, she heard them ask questions, or exclaim when someone noticed the twin bulges in her clothes; one set for the three round, firm breasts on her chest, the other for the massive cock pressing against her mock-jeans.

Jeans never had hid it well, she thought.

That said, other than a while Chang had spent trying out a burkha, she had found almost nothing that did hide it.

She heard the whine of a plane's engines. A moment later it became visible in the sky. Chang had no need to turn her head to watch the road, and had no need to raise her head to watch the sky. So she did not. She stood, silent and stationary, her hands in her jeans pockets, watching the plane coming in to land. Reaching inside herself to the node, and from there to the quantum energies rushing through her, she directed some of it into her visual centers, as she had done many times already today.

The world changed. She moved from seeing a swirl of dust in the field across the road to picking out the individual grains that comprised it, and the animals brawling in the grass which had thrown it up in the first place. After only a moment or two she could make out the markings on the side of the plane. S-177, written in large black letters on the smooth white metal; the mark of a private plane she had hired to ship her recent purchases into Vancouver.

Chang had been living in Greece over the last few months, journeying into the wild blue yonder of history to see if it could inform her present and - far more importantly - her future. It had helped to remind her of how far she had come since leaving her husk behind in the eruption. As a baseline she had thought the statuary exquisite, incredible. Now, she saw it as quaint, the best product of a bygone culture, but still not very good.

On the other hand, the concepts embodied in Greek literature held some value. Just they needed better expression. She had known, instantly, how to better convey those ideas, how to bring the glory of those fictional gods into concrete, conceptual or musical form. Overall it had been something of a success.

The news of the Victoria disaster had blown that out of her mind. Her holiday, such as it was, came to an end, and she decided to move to Vancouver.

Across the airstrip, Flight S-177 came in to land.

Chang flushed her body with quantum, and felt herself soften. She stretched, sighing in delight, and began to squeeze herself down to push through a single link of the chain fence. A driver that had been watching her too hard cried out and veered away, an act that brought him an inch away from disaster.

She pushed her face down toward the gravel on the other side, head and chest splitting and forming into new legs, while her legs melted together and formed her head and torso as they slipped through the tiny hole. It mattered that she do it this way, that she stretch and compress and squeeze. The eruption had granted her this as her blessing, and she needed to explore it to its greatest potential. In part, that process had begun by making its easier applications an ordinary part of her day.

Besides, it felt great, and high-minded philosophy aside, there remained a sort of primal, irresistable validity to physical pleasure. Given her extra breast, the enormity of her male endowment, and the strange beauty she now exhibited, Chang felt that it was not in her nature to deny pleasure. It had a place - a critical place - in whatever she had become and was becoming.

The trick, as with everything, lay in deciphering excess and steering clear of it.

Flight S-177 slowed, Chang calculated where it would end and sprinted toward the location. She pushed her body as hard as she could, maintaining a flat sprint for the whole duration. Baselines were swarming out to meet the plane, and stopping when they noticed her speeding not-quite toward them.

She came to a stop, her breathing still as relaxed as if her breakneck sprint had been a casual stroll.

One of the baselines came running over to her. He wore the usual thick, faceless blue coveralls of the flight crew, with a red cap and a badge that picked him out as the head of the crew. A thick beard hid most of his rounded, fattened face. "Ma'am, you can't be out he-"

His eyes found her chest first. That made him blink. Then his eyes traced down, and widened. "Oh," he said.

As he paused, Chang overheard some of the other crew speaking, then name 'Findley'. It had to be his. "I chartered this plane, Mr. Findley," she said, her voice a smooth, feminine and flawless musical tone. "I'm just here to make sure my goods are delivered to the correct location."

Shock discoloured Findley's features. He probably thought her a psychic. His eyes moved between chest and crotch a few times, then he gave a nod and went back to the plane.

Chang waited for them to do their work, and for the vans to arrive. For their convenience, she turned her head as if to study the airport terminal.

Of course she saw everything they did and heard everything the said, but she saw no need to bother them with that knowledge. None of it came as a surprise. The initial fascination - how often did they get to be this close to a nova? - followed by increasing focus on her aberrations. She had heard the phrase 'look at the size of her cock!' - and hundreds of iterations of it - so often that she once considered putting it on a shirt.

She never had. The thought had amused her for maybe a nanosecond. Her body had chosen to make an issue of itself. Making a statement to emphasize a statement her body already made seemed comtemptably redundant.

While the crew went about their business, she pondered their reaction. It only took fifteen minutes for interest in autographs and ponderings about her identity to fade away, replaced instead with the urge to keep distance. Then they no longer wanted to talk about her at all. She became the elephant in the room, too big to ignore, too big to address.

One of the crew alone kept staring, his eyes glued to her chest. He even moved to get a better angle, working near one of the plane's wheels so he could clearly see the double cleft of her breasts.

Chang flowed a little quantum into her chest, and expanded all three of them. Swelling them up a couple of cup sizes so her hoodie stretched and gave him a good, solid view.

The man paled and lowered his eyes, so Chang shrank back down.

Disgust, most likely. She focused on him for a moment, seeking a sign of erection. Non-visible, but she heard a repetition of the lord's prayer in French. Maybe a little arousal, but it inspired self-disgust.

Chang walked round to the stairs as they unfolded, moving with an alluring, boneless grace. On a whim, she made her legs longer, stretching them several inches, and repeated the movement. Satisifed, she left her body at the new proportions.

The baseline pilot emerged from the plane, looking over his shoulder and speaking to his copilot about some turbulence they had encountered. As a result, he was part of the way down the stairs when he looked ahead and saw Chang waiting for him at the bottom.

He went through the usual motions. Take. Double take. Chest. Crotch. Blink. Widen. Swallow. That was relatively uncommon, actually. As far as Chang could tell, her beauty had been enhanced enough to confuse their bodies. At least for a minute or two, the mind and body were usually at odds, and trying to come to some sort of agreement about what to think about her. It seemed a valid theory, but it occupied no important place in her thinking. She knew, now, that it would not be long before baseline thought melted away into a sea of mystery. At the moment, figuring them out took effort and experimentation. Given a few more steps on her path, the effort would be pointless.

"Captain," she said, affecting a smile. "I hope your cargo is in good shape."

He was a healthy man, clean-shaven, broad-shouldered. His shirt and trousers were white and black respectively, with the various pens and pins and badges that denoted his profession. Once, she knew, she would have found him attractive, imagined heat and sweat and moans in the night. Now he seemed plain. Uninteresting. Boring.

This change confused her. It had come upon her in the troughs of deep thought between artistic peaks, sneaking into her soul with the stealth and cold determination of an assassin. For some part of her had changed, unbidden, unnoticed, and to date she had not been able to pin it down. Unbidden, the face of a baseline came to mind, of a beautiful romanian model she had once thought she loved.

"Miss?" The captain said. He had a quizzical look on his face, his tone wavered a little. Nerves, most likely.

Change realized he had been speaking. "My apologies, captain. A lapse in concentration. Please repeat yourself."

"I was asking who you are and why my cargo's of any interest to you."

"I am White Rain. And 'your' cargo is mine." Her suspicions peaked, her senses refocused, banishing that woman's face to the back of her mind where it belonged.

Chang studied him closely, though her 'eyes' were focused on the bottom step of the stairs as if she were still distracted. She could see an involuntary twitch under his right eye, the tiniest signs of sweat forming on his brow that had nothing to do with the day's mild temperature. She flicked her focus up to the co-pilot, and noticed he had slunk back into the plane's interior.

"What are you worried about, Captain?" Chang said.

"Huh? What?"

"You are sweating, the muscle under your right eye has gone into a small spasm. I believe the strain of hiding it is causing some small degree of pain from the way your shoulders have set. Oh, and now your mouth is hanging open," she said, not bothering to raise her 'vision' to look at him.

"How did you-"

"Answer my question, Captain. This is tiresome, and I'm certain you'd rather I leave." Though the words sounded peevish, Chang's tone remained beauteous, calm, and melodic.

Nonetheless, the Captain swallowed and looked towards the Terminal as though he might be able to flee to safety. "It's about the money," he muttered. "The acquisition account you left with us."

"I see." Chang had attached a substantial sum of money with her order to the company. They were to take a small surcharge from it and use the rest to acquire the goods she had ordered, since much of it amounted to designer equipment they would have needed to subcontract specialists for. "None remains, I suspect."

"Well, no," the Captain said, and scratched his head. He had the look, now, of a man expecting pain, suffering, punishment. The company had most likely put him out as a sacrificial lamb, hoping Chang would take out her anger on him. "Some of the stuff was hard to get. A little got damage in transit to the warehouse, had to be replaced, a-and-"

"The details are of no interest," Chang said in that same flawless and musical voice, betraying no emotion. She flooded quantum through her eyes, her ears, her whole body. She wanted to take in this scene in all its awkward detail, to experience it on every level.

She sensed the held breaths, heard over a dozen accelerated hearts around her, panicked whispers, little clicks from spines arched a little too sharply. She saw them trembling, little white mice in the company of a cat, fearing their lives depended on an entirely fickle sense of play. A form appeared in her mind. This scene recast in a hundred thousand places, in the great halls of ancient Greece, in the vaulting collisseums of the untrod future. A wronged and wrathful god, about to smite those who knew and could do nothing but die. She picked up the faint sound of an engine. The van would be hear soon. The scene ruined.

It missed something as it stood. It missed the wrath. The scene lacked its focal point.

"You do not know who I am, but the company did when it assigned you this flight," Chang said. "The company sacrificed you, expecting my wrath, because it chose to betray my confidence." She elevated her tone, from calm to agitated, from agitated to wrathful. "And I could show you wrath, Captain."

Chang's neck stretched, she curved around his neck in a moment, and brought her flawless features nose-to-nose with his, watched his expression twist in terror. She stretched out both of her arms to grip his shirt and hold him in place, while her hoodie came apart in a mass of black hair that wove into two thick tentacles and surged out to entrap his arms.

"I could pin you down and fuck you until you died," she hissed, opening her throat to echo the words four times, to reverberate the threat in his mind. He struggled of course, and she felt he might well be stronger than her, but her hair was strong, and his arms were pinned at his sides. "That's what you thought when you saw it, right? It's every bit as big as you think, and bigger when I'm horny."

He relieved himself. She stared deep into his hazel eyes, taking in the blizzard of emotion there, the way his tear ducts seeped, his brow hived over. Nothing existed in him but mortal terror now. Around her, the flight crew had leapt to their feet and backed up, all a-flutter, like pigeons fleeing a thrown stone.

She could have done as she said. Scrambler would have wanted her to. A member of the One Race should never allow some dirty baselines to have their way with them.

But Chang Zha-Yang was not a member of the One Race. She was herself, and all else stood as a distant, secondary concern.

She unlooped her neck from his, retracted it, then her arms and her hair. For a moment her torso was bare and on display, her three full round breasts seeming to be thrust towards him. Then her hair wrapped tight around her, wove back into her top, and drew her hood down deep over her brow.

"The van's coming," she whispered, modulating her tone in such a way that only he could hear it. "Give the drivers this address, and this key."

She reached back into her jeans pocket and took out the slip of paper, tied to the spare door key with an elastic band. Again she lengthened her arm, and slapped the little package into his hand. It remained slack. She pushed the package into his pocket instead.

"Don't get it wrong," Chang said, in that same whisper. "I might get upset."

Then she turned and walked away, back across the airstrip towards the road. Chang had no interest in wrath, revenge, or lost money. They lay in the past. Her eyes were fixed on the future.

[iamthedave]

***

The Victoria Crush, as the papers called it, had changed things in Vancouver. People were streaming in to be rehoused, stunned refugees in a first world country, fleeing an incident likened to an act of god.

Even in the Nova Age, disasters of this proportion rarely hit mainland America.

Chang had made a sizable donation to the Crush relief fund before making her preparations to move. It had been made anonymously, of course, but word had gotten out anyway. It bothered her somewhat that her money trails were being followed. Why did anyone care?

She walked now down a busy alley in one of Vancouver's Chinese districts. It reminded her of Nanchang a little, the city that had been home to her husk. Stalls lined it at haphazard intervals, with the attendants bawling their wares to anyone in the vague vicinity and serving all their customers with gusto and energy. She listened in on conversations at random, powering quantum through herself to absorb the sounds and sights of this place.

Shop talk mixed with business talk and local news. Everywhere the Victoria Crush leapt from people's lips. They had lost someone there. They had lived there. They had been out of the country. They have been planning to move there. The business' warehouses had been there and they were very sorry but the special menu had to be changed because of it.

Then there were the conversations Chang really listened to. The ones that mentioned XWF, TV, and general media star Bombshell singing in the devastation.

Beauty born of horror. Art born of suffering. Creation out of devastation.

Scrambler had always hated Bombshell. He said everything she represented stood in opposition to the Teragen. A media whore, he said, letting the baselines think they could have and hold, eager to accept their adoration.

He had been displeased when Chang asked if maybe that lay in her nature.

It seemed an odd thing, she thought, that in all those talks about 'true nature' and 'following one's own path' the idea that said 'true path' might take a nova towards baseline superstardom never occurred to Scrambler, nor to most other Terats. It did not count unless it led away from baselines.

A flaw with the philosophy, or a flaw with the philosophers?

Or perhaps, as Scrambler had said, lust clouded Chang's eyes, and she had not seen Bombshell truthfully. Years had passed since those talks, however, Chang had rarely seen or looked for Bombshell and certainly never met her, yet her meditations had only reinforced her opinion.

Chang intended to visit the ruins of Victoria before too long. If it made one artist sing, why not her? Disaster sites had worked in the past. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the like. They helped stir the music inside her, or shook loose some other vision.

She moved from the alley onto the street and turned toward the city center. Her chosen home lay in that direction, near but not in this particular district. She always positioned her domiciles on the edge of two districts, ideally ones filled with different or opposing cultures. Another reminder, and reinforcement of her path and her place. Chang walked the edge of human culture, leaning toward something frightening and new. Yet, though not really a part of human culture any more, she still dwelled inside it, and at least for now it was a part of her.

It had taken years to construct this system of checks and balances in her mind. While Scrambler had been in her ear whispering to give in to taint, to embrace change, she had been meditating on deconstructing the weaknesses of her soul and forging them into something stronger, better, more suited to the rigours Teras demanded. Nothing could go unexamined, nothing unexplored. Everything had to be a reminder of everything else, reinforcing choices, decisions, possibilities.

When change came on her, she had to feel it as intensely as possible, and she had to know why. Change for change's sake served nobody.

Chang paused at a lamp post.

Why this one?

It stood at an intersection, at a corner of the road. Thousands of people passed by it, and cars under it, every day. The post leaned out over the road, and a set of traffic lights were hung from it.

Then she saw them. Of course she had already. She could see all about her. The people at her back who paused to stare, who opened their mouths to speak because they were certain she was a nova, and who didn't for that exact reason. The birds flying overhead, going about their own simple ways, the cars flying by to right and left. None of that mattered, though.

She stopped because of the wreathes.

Someone had died at this junction.

Unthinking, Chang stretched out her neck, emerging from her hood to look on the other side of the post and see the commemorative card. His car had gone off the road, he had hit it and died.

Then it was more than her neck which stretched.

Chang did not quite know what she would do, even as she did it. She coiled her neck and torso and legs around and around the post like some kind of serpent. She squeezed tight to slip under the traffic lights, and lengthened so that she coiled around the entire thing. Then she squeezed herself completely flat, exulting in it, glorying in this gift. For a moment she wondered at her own purpose, morphing into this fleshy band. Certainly the baselines, who had begun to crowd, were asking that very question.

She shifted the colours of her skin, and as the first hints of shading spread over her body, Chang understood, and with that understanding found instant peace.

Moments later, that band of stretched out flesh, coiling up around the simple grey metal of the post, flushed yellow and black. Nature's danger colours.

Do not approach. Death may be near.

[iamthedave]

***

Chang uncoiled around evening time, filling the night air with a soft rubbery groan as she swelled and contracted.

She could feel her quantum reserves waning, as they usually did towards the end of the day. Word had spread that a nova had 'taken up residence' on the lamp post. People had come and taken pictures, gone away, returned. A local news crew had popped in as well. Chang supposed it may have been a slow news day. Watching her compressed into a flat coloured band on a street post surely would not have featured high in their list of exciting things to watch a nova do.

That said, she had listened in and they sounded enthusiastic enough. They had even guessed her identity, going by a couple of similar incidents in Greece - mostly taking the form of 'completed' versions of ruined statuary. That had gone down well with the public.

Cars still drove by, and she clearly heard the driver's exclamations as they drove by this strange, naked vision at the roadside. Somewhere along the line, her cock had hardened. Maybe it was the cold.

Chang stood completely still, her head unmoving, but her vision roaming all around her. She wound her hair tight over her body, formed a modified leather corset and ripped up mesh underweave, with gothic-styled leggings. The get up emphasised her bust and her cock both, she made a conscious effort to swell both, making her chest crowded, her cock gigantic. Why not?

People responded.

Somebody called her name. She pretended not to hear and walked to the facade of a nearby building, then stretched up onto the roof and made her way towards her new home, going roof to roof with long, rubbery legs.

***

She arrived at her new home an hour later.

The removal people had been professional. They had used the key to get inside, put all of the boxes and crates in a neat row, and left the key on top of one of them.

Originally this apartment had been a warehouse that had been shut down when a worker went postal and killed four people with an axe. It had nearly been demolished before a private contractor bought it up to use as an administration office. This time, it turned out the contractor had been running an insurance scam out of the building, and they got shut down by the IRS. A professional gamer later bought the place up for a steal and made a training house out of the place for several months before relocating to New York.

A random, but colourful history. Perfectly fitting.

The floor had a dark carpet, white, high walls, and a short spiral staircase that led to a small second floor on the left side of the main room. Two side rooms were situation on the right side of the bottom floor, for the bedroom and toilet, while the kitchen and main room blended together.

Chang spent a while walking around, getting a feel for it all, placing out where things would be done here.

Then she set to work.

With a flush of quantum through her whole being, Chang became a blur of motion. Crates and boxes came apart under her hands, the contents lined up in their proper places. She abandoned clothes, warping her breasts and head into additional tendril limbs, and using in conjunction with her hair and arms to unpack and set up.

Realizing it felt comfortable, she sprouted additional tendrils from her body, pushing them out of her back and belly, enough that her mind struggled to balance them all, to even control them properly.

With experimentation she found the perfect number, enough that her mind felt taxed, but that she would not err in her tasks. She barely moved from her place in front of the crates, just stretching herself out as far as needed to go to work.

An hour later she compressed back together, retracting all tendrils into herself, and let her lush black hair fall unhindered down her back to her calves.

A formerly empty apartment had been transformed. Pots and pans now occupied kitchen cupboards, the upper floor had been transformed into a place to compose her music, with her flutes and guitars set on separate stands in front of a small red lacquer box that held a pen and pad to write with. The ground floor had now been cut up into areas marked with different colours, showing room for possible scupture, painting, dancing, and so on, with some unclaimed areas to be marked out later.

The only unpacked crate held the needed equipment for her photography. The area that would have been a bedroom would be converted into the red room for their development. She carried it through, closed the door, and a flurry of motion later walked back out with her new home created.

Chang felt a little tired now. Her reserves were running a little low, and she had never been very strong. Heavy lifting marked one of the few easy ways to tire herself out, at least for now.

She walked in front of the TV and reshaped herself for the final time. Her body warped and expanded, stretching out into a long, plush couch. Her torso emerged from it, skin flowing back into black leather. She had no need to form the torso of course, but preferred to. Motion felt good.

With one hair tendril she found the remote and turned the television on, flipping through the hundreds upon hundreds of channels searching something of interest.

Quite at random, she came upon a news report from earlier in the day, showing up on N!, of all places. The reporter was a blond American woman dressed in a warm woolen sweater and a light overcoat.

"This is Gillian Aress, reporting for N! Vancouver. I am here on the corner of Keefer street, where the somewhat mysterious nova artist known as White Rain has apparently attached herself to the lamp post in the background."

The camera fixed on herself, a band of yellow and black surrounding it. Chang wondered if maybe she had drifted off a little. She could not recall seeing an N! van at any point. Her perceptions had developed to the point that she rarely missed much of anything, and something as large as a van? Never.

"There's not a huge amount we can say right now," Gillian continued, "save that there was some kind of incident involving a nova at Vancouver International earlier in the day, and now she's turned up here. As you can see we're not in much of a situation to get an interview, she's apparently been sesile for three hours already. Nonetheless, nova watchers are gathering in force to take pictures and maybe find out what's going on here. Going by what we know of her, though, I'd expect explanations to be thin on the ground. This is Gillian Aress, reporting."

Chang leaned back into her soft couch-self, and let a faint smile cross her lips. It must have been a very slow news day.