29. Skin Deep

“Okay! So, fair warning, this is gonna be at least a little bit weird, because it’s like, you know, a naked human skinsuit, but we can be professional about this!” Thea babbles, leading me into her workshop. The rest of the Dark Rebellion follows us, presumably out of boredom and maybe also just wanting to see a naked human skinsuit. “It’s a pret-ty impressive technological achievement, if I do say so myself.”

“Well, if I end up being weird about it, I promise to at least try not to voice it out loud,” I answer, stepping inside and immediately spotting the work in question. It rests on a hollow, cobbled-together clothing dummy, similar in shape to the kind you’d find at department stores, but composed of an empty wire frame allowing it to be reached through. The skinsuit is draped overtop of it, the back open as it faces away from us, letting me see some of the electronics and machinery inside. Altogether it’s a lot thicker than I expected, less a bodysuit and more a full-on costume, with quite a bit of padding between the outside and where my actual frame will rest.

“…Huh,” I say. “Is there any particular reason you made me chubby?”

“Well yeah, the suit needs space to hold all the components that make it actually function as a disguise, not to mention the fact that, without the extra space, anyone that touches you will figure out that you’re hard as a rock.”

“Phrasing,” I say.

“Huh?” Thea asks. “What do you mean?”

“Never mind, just breaking my promise,” I wave her off. “I’m a little worried my haptics won’t work through something this thick, but we can definitely try it.”

“Yeah, there’s only one way to find out!” Thea grins. “You’ll need to open your plating to plug some of the wires into your ports so you can control the important bits of the suit. I’ll show you where those are. There’s, uh, also some clothes over there if you don’t want to be naked.”

“Technically, I’ll be less naked,” I point out, making my way over to the suit. Thea shows me how to safely remove it from the stand and step inside, though she assures me that the suit is remarkably resistant to damage, since if it ever does get damaged it’ll reveal the game immediately.

“If you can actually break anything just by putting it on, I’ll have to go back to the drawing board,” Thea explains. “I mean, technically this is just a prototype, but durability is part of function. I’m already aware of a number of things that could be improved on, but I just wanna make sure it all works.”

“Sure, I get you,” I say, slipping my feet into the homo sapiens fursuit. Even my little robot toes have a snug place to wiggle inside the fake human ones. I have fake toenails! It’s remarkably detailed.

“Kind of freaky, ain’t it?” Anath chimes in, a big grin on her face.

“How do I finish putting it on?” I ask, plugging the internal wiring into my ports and slipping my arms through the sleeves, the whole thing clammy and loose against my plating. “I imagine it doesn’t have a zipper.”

“Well, assuming you can properly interface with the software, you’ll seal it up with a mental command,” Thea explains. “You’re going to have direct manual control over pretty much the whole thing, most notably facial expressions and the other minutiae important to blending in.”

“This is very cool,” I tell her honestly as my mind starts to poke away at the data flooding through the link between me and the suit. “Yeah, give me a few minutes, I think I can figure out how to work this thing. I can’t believe how impressive this is, Thea. How did you get so good with magical supertech?”

Thea blushes, shrugging.

“Uh, well, having magic helps,” she says, her tail flicking back and forth behind her. “I’m not really sure how else to explain it.”

“She’s just our little genius,” Melpomene smiles, her own tail reaching out to wrap around Thea’s. “No magic needed.”

This only makes Thea’s blush deeper, of course, but I opt not to comment. The part of my mind dedicated to chewing through the bodysuit’s software has finally figured out the sealing controls. All that’s left is to wrap up my head and pull the rest of the suit up and over my face, blinding me immediately. Well, from normal sight, anyway; most of my sensors still work fine. I send the command to activate, and everything starts to move, the baggy outfit tightening up against my frame and sealing behind me without a trace of a seam. A few moments later, I figure out how to interpret the suit’s built-in camera feed, replacing my usual vision with its own. I look down at myself, seeing something I never expected to see again: the body of a living human woman.

I can measure, but not describe, the emotions that well up inside me at the sight. It’s nothing like how I used to look; I was skinny as a rail and borderline washboard-chested the last time I was breathing, almost dangerously underweight as a result of my self-destructive eating patterns. Not to mention my… let’s call it lackadaisical shaving habits and general hygiene issues. I was, to put it painfully clear, not a pretty girl. But… I am now. Or at least I look like one.

Thea’s appreciation for freckles is apparent when looking down at the top of my new breasts. They’re quite a bit larger than any I’ve ever had before, though I can say the same for my stomach, thighs, and… well, everything else about me. I won’t deny being the sort of basic bitch that wishes she had a flat tummy and huge tits, but the way I look now is considerably more realistic, and that somehow makes it a lot more… personal. Like it’s more than just a suit, more than just a… a dress-up fantasy. This could be my real body, in some weird, ephemeral, yet still meaningful way. It certainly does its best to play the part.

All sorts of unconscious processes run while the suit remains sealed, working to sell the illusion. My chest lightly expands and contracts to mimic breathing, air flowing in and out of my nostrils. A fake heartbeat thumps throughout my body, making it possible to check my pulse. My eyelids blink automatically at semi-random intervals if I don’t take manual control. None of it would withstand an actual medical examination, but even if I were to give someone a hug they wouldn’t suspect a thing. I poke and prod the outside of my body, testing how well I can feel it through all the layers, and yes, propriety be damned, I grab my boobs. They’re squishy again! Hell yes. Hard metal plating just isn’t the same.

“Do you really need to grope yourself?” Melpomene scowls.

“Oh, sorry about that, do you wanna grope me instead, Mel-Mel?” I ask her innocently.

“Excuse me!?” Melpomene roars, while at the same time Anath bursts out laughing, Thea lets out a high-pitched, kettle-like squeak, and Nanaya simply pinches the brow of her nose, shaking her head. I, having just figured out how to wiggle my eyebrows, wiggle my eyebrows. Woah do I have a lot of face muscles! This is wild!

“Well, I am clearly not needed here,” Melpomene grumbles, crossing her arms and moving to exit the room. “Please let me know how it all goes when you’re done.”

She leaves, which is always nice, though Anath and Nanaya opt to stick around. I suppose they’re also a lot more welcome; Anath is annoying and Nanaya is callous, but I am regrettably growing to like them both, at least a little. I continue playing with my face muscles for a bit, eventually noticing a rather major issue.

“I can’t figure out how to open the mouth,” I tell Thea.

“Yeah, that’s intentional,” Thea says. “Or I guess more accurately, it’s unavoidable. There’s no way for me to fit a realistic-looking mouth, let alone a throat, into the space we have available. It’s going to be the absolute biggest weakness of your disguise. I’d recommend covering your mouth with something as often as possible, and probably also pretending to be mute.”

Wow. That’s some crazy irony. It’s almost like we’ve come full circle: as a human I wasn’t mute but kind of wished I was, then I became completely unable to communicate with anyone, then I finally got my ability to speak back, and now I’m going to have to go around acting like I’m mute again anyway.

Oh, well. I can’t be too mad about it. There shouldn’t be anything stopping me from learning sign language, or writing notes to people, or any of a dozen other methods to communicate. It’s not that big of a deal, it’s just kind of depressingly funny. There are definitely other problems, though.

“Not being able to eat will make it a little difficult to pretend to be human,” I point out. “That’s probably a bigger deal than not having a realistic mouth structure.”

“I thought of that,” Thea nods. “I can’t give you a working jaw or anything, but your lips can be parted a bit. You can kinda press food in there a little and the self-cleaning systems will slowly obliterate it.”

“What!?” I gape. “What do you mean by ‘obliterate?’ That sounds super dangerous!”

“Nah, it should be fine,” Thea assures me. “Like I said, it’s a pretty slow process, and you have to manually turn it on so it’s not like you’re going to accidentally annihilate someone’s finger if they try to shove it in your mouth. They’d just feel a sharp pain like you were biting them a little, and they’d have plenty of time to pull their hand back before there’s any permanent damage.”

“That doesn’t answer my first question,” I point out.

“What, the obliterating? Don’t worry about it, it’s not important,” Thea insists. “What matters is whether or not it works. You’ll kind of look like a chipmunk the way you nibble everything slowly to eat it, but I figure eating weird is better than not eating at all.”

“I… suppose,” I say, the back of my mind still poking through the suit’s available functions. “Do you have a mirror? I should probably practice these facial expressions.”

“Yeah, right here,” Thea confirms, setting up a sizable mirror on her desk so I can look into it. I turn my head and… woah.

Okay. So. I’m a little embarrassed by how often I’ve been looking at this Silence of the Lambs-ass skinsuit and going ‘omg pretty.’ It’s not an especially great mark on my reputation, I think. But also: omg pretty. Is that my face!? Aaaah! It’s so cute! I have pretty green eyes and a little dollop of a nose decorated with cookie-crumb freckles. My straight brown hair is a little shorter than I personally like, only making it down to my chin, but I suppose that’ll make it easier to manage. I can always ask Thea to make it longer, I suppose.

Seeing it in the mirror like this, I feel embarrassed for the first time since my transformation about having so many other people in the room while I’m naked. I quickly glance around and find the clothes Thea pointed out earlier, standing up to start putting them on. It’s a pretty good test of manual dexterity, letting my digital mind get used to the changes in balance, weight, and proprioception from having a thicker, padded frame. Of course, the clothes are in a lot more danger of being ripped than I am of falling over; my body’s perfect precision with balance isn’t going to be tripped up by something as trivial as a slight load. Slipping on underwear with so many people watching definitely manages to make me anxious, but by the end of it all I’m dressed in a simple blouse and skirt, looking even prettier than before.

Shit, I kind of love this.

“This is awesome, Thea,” I tell her. “Really. I have no idea how you threw something like this together so quickly. I actually just look like… a person!”

“Uh, I mean, that’s the idea!” Thea chuckles awkwardly. “And well, once you feel like you have a handle on expressions and generally looking normal I figure we can head out for a field test! If you can blend in among normal humans, get through basic public interactions, maybe buy some things and stuff like that without drawing any suspicion, we’ll consider the prototype a success!”

“I couldn’t really do most of those things back when I was actually human, so I might need someone else to be the judge of that,” I admit. “Otherwise, yeah, that sounds like a plan.”

“We’re probably good to start the test if you just get down a few basic expressions. Obviously, if you’re going to stick around anywhere long-term you’ll need an entire range of microexpressions in order to seem normal, but we don’t have to worry about that today.”

“I mean, I could just go for kuudere vibes and keep a low emotional range,” I suggest.

“What vibes?” Thea asks, furrowing her eyebrows.

“Oh my god that’s right you’ve never seen anime,” I say, trying out a shocked expression. “Gosh, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. You would be such a weeb, but like, in a super adorable way.”

“What’s a weeb!?” Thea gapes at me. “Are you making these words up?”

“Um, well to make a long story short there’s sort of an entire little mini-culture around Japanese media, particularly animation, and a lot of little elements of that use Japanese loan words to describe things. It’s not actually important, but you would probably like some of the stuff. It’s also kind of relevant because it’s where the term ‘magical girl’ comes from. It was coined in the eighties by a show more or less about a child beating up evil things, and it became particularly popular in America because of Sailor Moon in the nineties, and then in the early two thousands the Earth Guardians actually started showing up in real life. It seemed pretty obvious where the inspiration came from. Like, I assume the Preservers giving powers that trend people towards shooting pretty lights while wearing short skirts is not an accident.”

“…That’s quite interesting,” Nanaya hums. “Knowing the Preservers, it was likely an active move on their part to introduce themselves in whatever way seemed most compatible with our culture. I suppose that kind of thing does show up most commonly in cartoons.”

“Yeah, I don’t think it really worked,” I shrug. “Like, only idiots looked at the actual child soldiers and went ‘oh my god, real-life magical girls, that’s so cool and good!’ Societally speaking, the Earth Guardians are basically the answer to the question ‘what if Omelas tortured thousands of kids instead of just the one.’ Most people just sort of collectively do their best to not think about them.”

“…Okay, what’s Omelas?” Thea asks. “That one doesn’t even sound Japanese.”

“Oh, that’s not weeb shit, that’s philosophical literature shit,” I answer.

“I’m actually familiar with that one,” Nanaya says, and it is somehow the least surprising thing I’ve ever heard. “I understand what you’re saying. There are many people who would be very interested in changing the current status quo, but the Preservers operate at a level that is extremely difficult for governments or any other organizations to interfere with. Many major politicians would like to replace the current system with a less abusive one, but they have no capacity to petition the Preservers for change. Earth Guardians cannot be arrested or forced into foster homes; they can simply blow up anything in their way and fly back to an Earth Guardian base to live outside the legal system entirely. It has generally been better to let the Preservers do what they wish, so that Earth Guardians are still encouraged to do things like go to school.”

“Yeah, that’s my basic understanding of the politics, too,” I nod. “So what are we doing about it, exactly? I’ll be taking over a lot of your Earth operations, right?”

“It is nothing terribly complicated, because there is little we can influence directly,” Nanaya answers. “In essence, because the issue is humanity’s inability to resist the Preservers’ will, the first step is to improve humanity’s capacity to resist. This is why we locate and sell artifacts, hoping they end up in the right hands to be reverse-engineered. Then we use the money from those dealings to encourage a little targeted incompetence when it comes to keeping the Preservers informed of any magical arms dealing, as governments are supposed to do. We are, in essence, funding the majority of magical research in the country by selling the very items being researched. It takes the cooperation of an enormous number of very influential people to keep that research away from the eyes of the Preservers.”

“Can’t Thea just reverse-engineer this stuff?” I ask. “She seems to understand it pretty damn well.”

“It’s different for me,” Thea says. “Half of working with magitech involves using magic; I don’t have any way to, say, craft the crystalline cables necessary for making most of this stuff work without straight-up conjuring it. Well, technically I’m just condensing the necessary energies under my own power, I’m not forming it out of nothing or anything like that, but the point is I don’t have any way to teach a human how to do this stuff. I don’t even fully understand a lot of it, I just tinker with Antipathy tech so much I can ape their designs and put them together in ways that create new stuff without ever really opening the black boxes.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“It is probably better for humans to be the ones to figure out the first magical tools designed to be used by humans, as well,” Nanaya hums. “There is so much about magic we do not know, as the nature of Earth Guardianship is to be granted control over forces explicitly without understanding them. All we can do is give the puzzles to people smarter than we are, and hope they can solve them.”

“Just sort of putting magic out into the world and hoping it all works out doesn’t seem like a particularly solid plan,” I can’t help but point out.

“Well, we are four—now five—young women with little world experience, little capacity to travel freely, and next to no schooling, yourself excluded. I have no doubt that there are countless people who could accomplish what we wish to accomplish far better than I. That is precisely why I have no better plan than to support them in doing so. We provide the magic, and the money. Humanity has to do the rest.”

I guess I can respect that. It’s surprisingly humble, especially for a group audacious enough to call themselves the Dark Rebellion, but if anything I think that lends it a level of self-awareness I wasn’t really expecting from their plans.

“Well, that makes sense,” I admit. “How do I look, by the way? This is my happy face.”

It seems pretty okay in the mirror. The thing about making facial expressions is that whenever I would try and do them on purpose in the past they would look really unnatural, and now that I’m a robot and literally all of my facial expressions are unnatural, I can just get the minute tweaks down until there’s a smile that looks good in the mirror. Then I can save it and pull it out whenever I want.

“The smile itself looks fine, but the transition to the smile is plainly robotic,” Nanaya says. “Perhaps something less uniform.”

“Oh, right, that’s a good point. Hey, smile for me real quick so I can see an example.”

“No,” Nanaya says.

“Here, I got you! Check out my chompers!” Anath says, grinning brightly.

“Unfortunately, Thea didn’t make my teeth that big,” I joke.

“Oh no! I’m sorry, should I have?” Thea panics.

“I was kidding! The teeth are fine, thank you very much.”

“Well, there’s really no point in having chompers if you can’t actually chomp anything,” Anath allows regretfully.

“Just—everybody just let her practice!” Thea whines. “This is serious engineering we’re dealing with here!”

“Yeah! Thea worked really hard engineering my fat tits! Show a little respect!” I declare.

“I needed the space to fit the heart spoofer!” Thea squeaks, her whole face turning brown. “Y-you don’t have to say it in such a vulgar way!”

“Okay, I suppose I won’t, but only because I can tell you put a lot of love and care into them,” I allow, doing my best to seem contrite. “I mean, you put so much detail work into both of them. You must have stared at them for hours.”

“Aaah stop it stop it stop it!” Thea begs, burying her face in her hands. “It’s not like that! It’s not like that at all!”

I’m very tempted to measure her emotions, to determine exactly how honest she’s being, but even though she’s grown up around nothing but empaths it feels like a disgusting violation of her privacy. What business is it of mine, if she’s attracted to the artificial skin she designed? Maybe she doesn’t even want to be; I was the one who asked her to make it anatomically accurate. I mean, after she offered, but still. And ultimately, do I even really want to know? Or would I rather just keep teasing her and pretending that the truth doesn’t matter to me?

I shouldn’t even want to be romantically involved anyway, right? Isn’t my plan to stay as far away from this place as possible?

“Alright, alright, sorry,” I placate, making sure to not let any of my fears into my tone. “I was just joking around.”