Made of These... (Charlie Closer/Development)

[echidna]

Light came into Eliza's world again, along with the recollection that she did, in fact, have her own body. It wasn't so much that she'd forgotten, but she had been in the Aranomb's body, using it for a suit of sorts, for some time. As the tendrils pushed her barren form from inside, gripping her in tendrils that even then were still retracting their microscopic needles from her skin, returning sensation and consciousness, her mind was aflame, and her vitality restored. It was like... moving from sleepiness to full-on shivering-gold wide awake.

As the tendrils retracted, and the aranomb closed itself behind her, she coughed up a load of slime, and took a moment on her hands and knees to do an inventory. Her head didn't hurt anymore - it was a blessing, to be sure. After Hazama had left her... Hazama... that bastard. The Broodmother muttered a curse, and sat back onto her ankles, willing the shivers to stop, and opened her eyes at last.

Through bleary eyes, she drank in her surroundings. She was alone, in the medical room she'd put together with Ratatat and Charlie's help. She looked behind her to the sluggish, lazy body she'd previously occupied. When she sighed, her breath steamed and strings of goo flew. It was but the work of a moment to convince herself that she did not have tendrils for arms and legs as she staggered toward the shower unit, shutting the door behind her with a clang that was perhaps more forceful than it had to be. She was... furious. The Broodmother bottled up that rage, stuck it behind a dam, walled it up to make sure she had some to use later... when the time came.

Today, Eliza had plans.

Twisting the nobs, cold water surged over her as rain, cutting into the slime and her sleepiness like knives, driving the metrial fluid into the drain. She spat a few times, not that the taste was terribly unpleasant, but because it was just overpowering, taking mouthfuls of the clean, cold water and spitting into the drain repeatedly. Soap was cheap, shampoo was not... but she'd insisted on that point. It didn't have to be fancy, but cucumber melon, laced with patchoulie oil was her 'clean smell' of choice.

It was a reminder, though. It had baggage - not... unpleasant sorts though. She drank in the scent, eyes unfocusing as memories cascaded through the little space. She remembered cold water - in the Warehouse, it had been all she could get. She remembered the scent of winter days, the rush of delving into her powers, the joy of freedom from everything that she didn't choose. And coming here. She'd chosen this life. She'd chosen to follow Slade, to learn more, to get... stronger. Training with him had been hell, but as she washed away the slime from her hair, once twice, three times, and felt the suds run over her pale, lean form, carved of granite, she knew it had been worth it. The man had taught her... tons of stuff. How to fight, how to think, how to be a devious bitch, all things considered.

Clean head to toe, Eliza took a towel from the rack - incidentally stolen en masse from a local hotel, which she was almost certain wasn't a crime - and dried herself, wrapping up her hair. Her room was a short distance away, and she shut the door behind her. It was curiously vacant of her children (they knew she liked to dress in private), and the closet yielded easily enough to her touch.

Today was a day for uniforms. Today was a day to be strong. She selected her apprentice uniform from the rack. Each heavy, armored piece slid onto her clean form, leaving the towels at her feet for the time being. There was a definite feeling of safety in the armor. It... felt good. Slade had designed it for her specifically... and the crimson mask, remeniscient in design to Slade's own, had been his gift to her when he'd accepted her formally as... his.

She looked at it... it was such an elegant thing, black on the right side, bright crimson on the left, with glowing lenses in the eyes that showed no sign if she was using her powers or not, if she didn't want them to. It fit her face perfectly...

(cont later))

[sephiroth]

Charlie sighed to herself she was as usual working on some new device or project she had in her brain. She was happy working with things like devices and machinery, everything was simple, if you made a mistake you could fix it. She didn't care much for the real world if you broke something it was virtually impossible to fix.

She was working on some sort of weapon maybe, she worked alot on weapons she didn't mind they were facinating things and she had a knack for designing them. She grinned to herself as she worked, she was designing some new method of smart bullets. It hadn't been going well lately she had tried microchips, they tended to short out, and were to expensive to fabricate. So she was trying a new idea she had come up with and it had potential.

She was just working up the last bits of the prototype, it had promise in her mind. She hummed to herself as she listened to music on her headset while she worked. She found it was easier to imagine herself alone with her work if she had something to listen to it helped her tune out the world.

"I wonder if that thing eliza created is ready yet?" She said to herself mentally as she was doing her work. It had been a facinating thing watching it being born, it still made her uneasy she disliked magic greatly. She didn't trust it one bit, and she had what she felt a very good reason. Still it was a fascinating creature and had its own unique niche, and the possibility of fulfilling her promise to jericho well that was something to take into consideration.

[echidna]

The Broodmother knocked once at the doorframe, nodding to Charlie - she was wearing her mask. She... rarely did that in the base - when she did, it was like somebody flipped a switch that said "Serious Time". Maybe it was the power of masks? Maybe it was her training and personal associations of the mask? Maybe it was just hard to read her behind the mask because it concealed everything but her eyes? Probably all of it at once. The few times she'd worn it in Charlie's presence had meant, each time, that shit was going down.

"Charlie..." she said in a level tone, and nodded to the scientist. "The Aranomb is ready - it is time. Is Jericho prepared?" she asked. This day had been a long time coming. Much had been done in preparation of this, and a lot of thought had gone into designing the Aranomb... so now it was time for Eliza to fulfill the promise she'd made to the woman when she first came here.

[echidna]

((With Kitsu's permission, I'm going to continue this solo.))

Jericho hadn't been happy - and Eliza had to admit that the Aranomb did NOT look welcoming - it, frankly, looked like a mass of jutting crystals, tentacles, and sharp bits, but with minimal fuss, Charlie had convinced the werewolf to sit still long enough for the monster to get its poison into his bloodstream - in the end, the werewolf only whined and struggled weakly as the Aranomb enveloped him and connected to his body.

The shock of his consciousness connecting to her own was... not unexpected, but certainly more than she'd thought initially possible. Rushes of instincts, heated waves of fury and fear collided with Eliza's psychic walls like the sea crashing on a beach, and her knees went weak. Almost immediately, she was caught, though - Bitingston had been on hand for the proceedings, simply because he did not trust Jericho around his mother. Truth be told, few of the devourer-kin did, even if they had come to like the werewolf during his long stay in their home with his mistress/friend/mother/whatever she was, Charlie. The king of Raveners set her delicately down, And Eliza almost naturally slipped into meditative lotus position, fingers interlocking in her lap.

Jericho.

Suddenly, she saw through him. He hadn't been a complicated creature beforehand, but looking at him now, she felt... well, that at least was complicated - he loved Charlie. It wasn't... romantic love. It was a dog's love, a child's love. It was pure. So little remained of a conscious mind... but what did remain seemed to look back at her - at least a part of him, it felt like, understood what she was doing to, for, him - it seemed... expectant. Just the same... even an unconscious mind needed to be spoken to - it would sink in, at some level.

Across the link, echoing into the simple creature's mind, Eliza explained. The creature surrounding him was not going to hurt him... he had nothing to fear in that place, safe and warm and protected. She told him she was going to fix his body, give him his flesh back, make him whole again. She... couldn't tell if he understood, not really, but the expectancy never wavered - as if to say 'well, get on with it, little girl!'. Eliza couldn't help but smile.

Tendrils of thought explored his body, touched over the exterior, like a massage artist feeling out his patient, touching over his muscles and the metal that merged with his flesh, a marriage of flesh and steel that... well, it was beautiful! Eliza was honestly impressed with Charlie's work - it was... elegant. This was well done, even if it was artificial. It was all wired into his nervous system - it felt strange, going from perception of natural nerves to perception of metallic ones, but... it worked, oddly enough - she could feel his cybernetics.

That was... not expected. She'd expected to be able to feel nothing from them, but here they were, being inconveniently perceptible. This would be a little harder than she'd originally expected. Opening one blazing red eye, she gazed at her son, thoughts too taxed to spare a link with his mind wide enough to communicate her desire to him.

"Son... get my soda.... and my book-bag..." she muttered, and the Devourer's ears perked high, eyes blinking in surprise and incomprehension, but... he obeyed, knuckling off into the darkness at speed.

He returned some time later, and he didn't need telling what to do next - he simply cracked open the drink very carefully and tipped it to his mother's lips gingerly. Eliza barely paid it any heed at all - she was lost in a reverie, an agony of understanding. On the werewolf's body, mechanical muscles tensed and relaxed very slightly, synapses firing seemingly on her own, but at her direction as she tested the connections, felt out how everything was built. Amazing... An understanding of how the connection worked, how living muscles and nerves could interact, how grafts of metal and wire could understand messages from the brain.. she'd never dreamed of something like that until now - the possibilities! Her understanding would be tested.

Bitingston pressed a pen into her hand, and her sketchbook into her lap. Without opening her eyes, Eliza began to sketch, feverishly, hands shaking as images flew beneath her fingertips, things that were in her mind, organizing her thoughts on paper - it... helped. They weren't exquisite art, but they didn't have to be - she didn't need anyone else to understand what she was drawing. They looked... real, though, in their own way, as if somebody had taken a neural map and overlaid it with a wiring schematic, and tried to express three dimensions of space in two dimensional media... and had done a hell of a job. It was what it looked like - cybernetic cardiovascular systems, artificial musculature, delta-metabolic structures. The Broodmother's hand paused though when she took another sip, carefully holding the sketchbook out of the way of an awkward little dribble, perceived with no more than a grunt before she kept working, flipping a page irritably, without looking at it.

Jericho was coming apart in the womb of the creature - his body was in a sort of stasis, his heart wouldn't shut down, and his tissues were kept alive... but the metal had to come off - she didn't expel anything until she'd studied it closely - all four limbs had been replaced, much of his nervous system and vital organs cybernetic, so this... was arduous.

Something caught her attention though - something... unusual. She knew he was a werewolf, but even in stasis, his body was... throbbing? Thrumming with a kind of inner energy? Intrigued, she examined the flesh and blood internal structure of the beast, and more than that, his very essence. She examined him closer and closer... until at last she saw what she was looking for. His... essence, she didn't have a proper word for it... was different. Vastly different. It was like... he had two genetic structures closely laced, two beings in one body, one so heavily damaged it was nearly gone - a human. The Broodmother's brow furrowed... how could she begin? Good grief... it was like hunting a little silver string in a sea of white string, trying to pull a delicate thread from a clinging quagmire. In the end, she decided... it was best to let that heal on its own. She had... no idea where to even begin to heal a soul.

The body, though, the soul's house... that was interesting as hell. To her understanding, there seemed to be a something separating the two essences - that at least was intact, even if the human portion was mere scraps, shards of glass in the sand. She touched over the barrier, felt it with mental fingers... and mentally, she called it "L", for Lycanthropy. This was the barrier that held the two forms apart, and suddenly, she knew more about werewolves than probably they did about themselves, at least from her unusual perspective. Her hands flew as she sketched what she perceived, testing that barrier - it held the secrets of shapeshifting. She mentally apologized to the human bit of Jericho that watched and waited, and set to work healing the wolf - at least she could give him a whole body.

Metal parts were arrayed for comparison as she grabbed that squirming, living force of Jericho's natural healing, taking little pieces of it and squishing it in her mental fingers. In the real world, her hands set aside the sketchbook and reached out to the Aranomb even as it slid a tendril from its petals and wrapped around her hands. Like a zombie, she stood, and thrust her hands into the creature's body, already rubbing her fingers together and forming a geneseed. Much had to be done. She held her understanding of the wolf, and what little bit of the human she could and formed... well, not a new body, but... sort of formed the missing spaces, using the body's understanding as a template, the cybernetics' framework as a stencil. The organs had to come first. Lungs... heart.. liver... kidneys... the squishy bits came first, pulsating in rhythm to the rest of Jericho as she pressed on, sealing his chest and abdomen cavities with caring hands, forming new flesh from her own material. It was working! She smiled beatifically as she went arms-deep into the Aranomb, lying her sweating forehead on the leathery outer hull of her fistborn bio-laboratory.

Bone pieced itself together at her direction, and muscle and sinew stretched over that, networks of veins and arteries, nerves and glands, they came more and more naturally as she worked. So this was what she was making before? She'd be interested to see what she could do for a devourer, knowing what she did now - what had she put in her own children? Opening her eyes a little, she gave Bitingston a look of keen interest that quite put him off his stroke - he knew better than anyone in the world what he was thinking. The creature swallowed and grinned at her nervously... he could feel Jericho, all torn apart and piecemeal inside the Aranomb... he knew it didn't hurt, and that Jericho was being healed... but that kind of image is still... unsettling. Skin stretched rapidly over Jericho's body, the Aranomb creaking and groaning as it stretched. Eliza let it push out bits of metal - components of Jericho's cybernetics she didn't need anymore to make room - One Jericho was quite enough. Fur exploded over the new flesh and muscle, the mighty werewolf's hide thickening considerably as at last... he was whole.

Seven hours. The whole process had taken altogether too long. But Bitingston was there to catch Eliza again, and carefully shut and stowed his mother's sketchbook into her bookbag. She was weak as a kitten... but grinning waxenly, staring at nothing in particular from wherever she was at the moment... but mom got like that, Bitingston reminded himself... After a long bout of creation, she got nearly catatonic with exhaustion... but each time it worried him.

The King of Raveners held his little mother against his chest as he carried her and her precious bookbag, and she in turn gripped him, fingers entwined with his rough mane as behind them, Jericho was being born again... whole at last.