"Remember, I don't know you." Greg rubbed his eyes and rested his face in his hands; he was so. Tired. Between staying up late for the break-in, getting dragged back over to Scott's house when her stepmother called his mom, and sorting everything out when they got back, he'd gotten maybe two hours of sleep. Even the alien seemed better-rested than he felt, probably because it'd been asleep for who knew how long before he'd accidentally woken it.
Greg bristled at Greg's remark. Don't know me? I am you, jackass! They were literally the exact same person in two different bodies! Where did he get off treating her like this!? Just because he was the one who was still human...! She was about to fire back at him when they were both transfixed by a sudden wave of irritation emanating from the driver's seat.
"That's enough of that talk, Greg," Mrs. Wilkins said. "I've told you once already - I expect you two to treat each other nicely. Pyxis isn't just your sister, she's you - if there's anyone on this Earth you ought to be able to feel empathy for, it's her."
Greg was about to mutter that she didn't belong on this Earth, but another warning flare-up in the vibes coming off his mother made him reconsider. "A-anyway," he said defensively, "I just mean...I mean, we already decided to say that she's not me...!"
"Right," his mom replied. "We're going with the story that Pyx is an exchange student because she doesn't feel comfortable sharing the truth with the entire school. That's not the same thing as you two being total strangers; if she were an exchange student staying at our house, you'd certainly know her, and you'd have no good reason not to treat each other civilly."
She sighed, flicking on the turn signal as she pulled onto the street their school was on. "Greg, I'm not going to pretend like I fully understand how you feel right now; I'm sure it must be terribly confusing having another of you around all of a sudden. But you need to understand that Pyxis is going through the same thing that you are, plus a whole lot more on top of it. I don't expect you two to come to terms with all this right away, but I sure as hell expect you to be decent to each other in the meantime. Comprendé?"
He sighed and nodded silently. He knew there was no arguing with her when she was like this, but that didn't mean he had to like it. It was already awkward enough having this creature in his life, and he still didn't trust it - not when the memory of being pounced on and wrapped up in its tentacles while it probed through every memory in his brain was still fresh in his mind - but if it was willing to take on a separate identity and live its own life, that at least meant it wasn't trying to take over his...for now. But why should he have to make nice with it? Let it go be "Pyxis" instead, and stay out of his hair...!
Greg eyed her human-self, pretty sure she knew what he was thinking. She wasn't really too keen on being friendly with him, either, not with the way he was acting towards her, but being actively shunned by him made her kind of want to hang all over him out of spite. But that would just get all weird and awkward...no, better to keep to herself and avoid attention, until she could figure out some way to return to normal...there had to be a way to do that, right? In the meantime, she'd...she'd be fine by herself!
Their mother parked the car, and they got out and made their way into the school. As soon as Mrs. Wilkins was out of sight, Greg none-too-subtly pulled away from Greg and tried to slip off into the crowd by himself, but they'd already attracted some attention by then. A school staffer met Greg and led her to her new class, where the stares only intensified. There didn't seem to be any clear hostility, but everyone was curious about the new alien student, and all eyes were on her as she stood up front being introduced by the teacher. "Uh, um, h-h-hi," she stammered, wondering if she sounded strange to them or not. "I'm, um, I'm Pyxis. N-nice to meet you...?"
After homeroom ended, alien-Greg - or Pyxis, or "Pyx," or whoever it was that she was now - did her best to slip quietly out of the classroom and into the hall. It was harder than she'd expected; while she was small enough that it should've been easy to get lost in the crowd, the other students seemed to be alert to her presence regardless, possibly due to the serpentine appearance of her hair-ribbons. It didn't seem to be a conscious thing, but they gave her a wider berth than they might've with, say, a child her size. Of course, Greg was used to people being aware of him and getting out of the way when he was coming through, but like this it just seemed to emphasize that she really wasn't human anymore - to the minds of her fellow students, she was some kind of Other now.
But, well, it was better than being crushed between the bodies of people who stood nearly twice her height, anyway. She shuddered to think that, if she got caught up in a crowd like this, there probably wasn't anything she'd even be able to do about it. She was so small - she hadn't seen the world from down here since grade school. It made her feel so helpless...so weak...
"Excuse me, uh, Pyxis?"
She let out a startled and rather inhuman screech and nearly jumped clean off the ground. Turning, she found that the voice came from a teacher, a pleasant, fit-looking black woman in what looked to be her late thirties. She glanced down at her alien student and smiled sympathetically. "Er, sorry. Didn't mean to startle you. I'm Ms. Carver, with the phy-ed department. We got a notice in this morning that we were going to have a new student, a different kind of alien than usual. If it's alright with you, we'd like to do a checkup on you; the embassy gave us a packet of information on your species, and it'd be helpful for us to have a chance to get familiarized with your anatomy."
Pyx stared at her for a moment, unsure what to make of this request. The idea of being poked and prodded and inspected like some curiosity made her bristle, and she felt her hair-ribbons began to array themselves around her head in a spread-out fashion, presumably to make her appear more threatening, but as she looked up at the woman, she felt herself calm down at least a little. Ms. Carver was standing there politely, not invading her space, and to her surprise, not leaning down to talk to her like she was a child; considering how she'd been feeling earlier, it was kind of reassuring to have someone treat her just as if she were a normal teenager.
But still, the idea of being examined like that...but then again, what if she got, say, some weird alien disease like this and nobody could tell? If she thought about it like that, maybe it was worth an awkward moment or two just to have someone at the school who knew what to look for... Reluctantly, she nodded assent.
Ms. Carver smiled. "Awesome. Then, if you'll come with me to the nurse's office, we'll try to make this as quick as possible."
Pyx followed her; they checked in with the nurse, who followed them into the back office and shut the door. "Alright," Ms. Carver said. "Pyxis, are you comfortable if I ask you to undress for this?"
She thought about it for a moment, then casually shucked her clothes off. As part of the football team, Greg had been used to things like communal showers and physical exams; on top of that, she still didn't really think of this...thing as being truly her. And anyway, she still wasn't comfortable wearing a skirt, and it wasn't like there was much to see here...
Ms. Carver regarded her thoughtfully for a minute, then pulled out a thick manila folder full of papers and began rifling through them, brow furrowed. After a minute, she came to whatever it was she was looking for and turned her attention back to Pyx. She began quietly running over different parts of the alien-girl's body, gently but methodically poking and prodding, even getting out a stethoscope and having her breathe in and out a bit while she listened. She hmm-ed and frowned thoughtfully and occasionally clicked her tongue, but said little; she would periodically refer back to different pages out of the folder and nod to herself. Finally, she stepped back and folded her arms, looking the whole creature over once more.
"Conformation looks good," she said, "at least based on what they gave us. You seem to be in relatively fit condition, and your posture looks alright; as a human I'd think you were slouching too much, but it looks like you're properly built this way. Respiration and heart rate seem to match up with what I'm reading in the documents, so I guess you're doing alright with the local atmosphere and gravity." She turned to the nurse. "Tina, do you want to take a look over the rest? This is about as far through that as a degree in exercise science is gonna get me."
The nurse nodded and began checking a few other things, checking Pyx's teeth and gums, examining her ear-holes, and so on and so forth. The alien-girl sighed as the exam continued; having her posture brought up just reminded her of how short she was now, and that just got her thinking about how small and weak she felt now. Human-Greg got to stay just the way he was, got to keep being everything he had been, and she...she stared at the floor. "Guess that's it for sports," she muttered to herself.
Ms. Carver gave her a sympathetic smile. "Is that what's got you down? Honestly, I'd disagree. You're small by human standards, but those legs look to be quite powerful for your size, and your reflexes are good, too. Hard to say for sure before giving it a try on the field, but I bet they'd be happy to have you on the soccer team."
Pyxis considered that for a minute. Her last memories as Human-Greg came to mind - this strange little creature suddenly taking notice of him, the lightning-quick leap and those legs and arms wrapping around his body...part of her was just overcome with the strangeness of revisiting those thoughts from a perspective of being that creature now, but when she thought about it, the teacher might have a point...
While she was pondering that, the nurse finished what she was doing and stood up. "Everything looks good as far as I can tell," she said. "You ought to get checked out by a professional dentist and gynecologist at some point, but all the general check-up items seem to be in keeping with the documentation they gave us."
Pyx frowned. "Gyne-?" Her pale white cheeks suddenly flushed pink as she remembered what that was. "I, uh, er..."
Ms. Carver smiled knowingly. "It's not something you're familiar with, I suppose, is it?" She sat down on the exam table next to the alien-girl. "Which was something I meant to ask earlier, 'Pyxis' - are you trying to keep it a secret that you're really Greg Wilkin?"
She bit her thin lip and tried to stifle a little noise of surprise. "You knew? Did...did they tell you...?"
The teacher shook her head. "The embassy was very discreet about it, if that's what you were wondering. They only told us that a new alien student would be attending, and that she was related to one of our current students. But you showed up together with Greg, you talk like Greg, and once I read about these 'miwi-miwi' in the file, it wasn't hard to put two and two together. Sounds like you must be having quite the experience right now..."
Pyx felt a little queasy. If it was that easy to figure out...but no, it was only because they'd read about miwi-miwi, and it wasn't like the other students would have access to that information, was it...? She nodded glumly. "You...you could say that..."
Ms. Carver nodded. "I figured. I'm sure you're going through a lot right now; are you sure you want to add the stress of keeping a fairly major secret on top of that?"
She sighed. "Honestly, it wasn't my first choice. I thought about telling people I was a male so I could admit to being Greg...it's not like they could tell the difference, right? But this stupid tail...I can't even wear pants because of this dumb thing!"
The teacher stifled a chuckle and tried to maintain her serious demeanor. "Um, truth be told...I don't think it'dve been that hard to figure out."
The alien-girl eyed her curiously. "What, just because my voice is high? I though that was mostly 'cause I'm so small now...I mean, I know I don't have anything hanging out, but you don't see those on, like, lizards or anything either, and it's not like anyone else knows how these 'miwi-miwi' work...I don't even have boobs or anything...!"
Tina the nurse shrugged. "Well, you're not wrong about that," she said. "Matter of fact, from what I'm reading even male miwi-miwi keep their bits internal when they're not in use - like reptiles, yes. But, uh, for starters, if anyone did read about the species..." - she indicated something on one of the pages from the folder - "...they'd find out that the males have a pronounced cranial crest that you're lacking - see this cone/tube kind of structure jutting out the back of the head? You're a little long in the back of the skull, but nothing like that."
Pyxis regarded the diagram - it showed two cutaway profiles of the miwi-miwi skull side-by-side, and the male one did indeed have a sort of chunky horn-looking thing tapering straight out the back of the head, the top edge about level with the top of the skull, so that between that and the jut of the lower part of the face, the whole head had sort of a trapezoidal shape to it. It reminded her of some kind of dinosaur skeleton Greg had seen at a museum on a field trip way back in first grade. The female, by contrast, was just a little lopsided in the back. (Nearby, another illustration showed that the ribbon-tentacles on the male grew out of the end of the crest, hanging down like some kind of samurai ponytail or something.) She felt something kind of odd somewhere in the back of her brain when she looked at the crest on the male diagram, and very pointedly didn't think about it.
"But even if they don't end up reading all this," Ms. Carver said, "...look, honey, those hips are not anything you'd find on a guy, alien or no. Part of that is just how miwi-miwi are built, if I'm reading these diagrams correctly, but even then you're clearly proportioned like a girl, boobs or no boobs. And to anybody who doesn't know much about your species - which is nearly everybody - they won't even have the understanding that you all kinda look like that."
Pyx frowned and bit her lip, regarding her waist skeptically. Was it really that clear? It didn't look like it... "But...but I don't even look like a human...not even like the other aliens! I'm...I'm just some kind of weird hairless kangaroo lizard thing..."
Ms. Carver shrugged. "Well, yeah, but I think you're underestimating the extent to which people anthropomorphize anything they have significant interaction with. I have a neighbor who dresses her dog in little sweaters and insists she can read its expressions. And compared to that little hairball...you stand on two legs, you're proportioned more like a human than not, you have a recognizable, expressive face, even if it looks a little strange, and you talk. You even have something that looks sorta like hair. You definitely register as a person, and that means people are naturally gonna try and relate to you the way they relate to humans - and in that context, I think you do 'read' like a girl."
She sighed. "I mean, ultimately, how you choose to approach this is up to you, but I do think it was the simpler choice not to try and hide the fact that you're female. I just suspect that you might be setting yourself up for a lot of stress down the road trying to hide the fact that you're also Greg, is all. But I can't pretend that I know what you're going through right now, and it's your decision."
The nurse moved in and caught Pyx's gaze. "But in any case," she said, "I'd like to strongly suggest that you think about talking about all this with the school counselor - not to mention all the other things you're going through. The choices you make are up to you, but you don't have to deal with the stress of making them all by yourself, okay?"
The alien-girl stared at her feet, kicking idly at the aging floor tiles, her thickly-padded toes scuffing across the surface. She gave a noncommittal grunt, the kind that used to drive his mother up the wall when she was trying to get a straight yes or no out of him, but coming from her now it just came out like some strange animal noise. Pyx had no desire to lie on a couch and tell someone about her childhood or whatever it was they actually did in counseling. How was talking about this supposed to help? What she really needed was to figure out a way to get back to normal...!
The nurse eyed her with mild exasperation; Pyx didn't know anything about the lady, but she definitely got the impression that she had kids of her own and recognized the response for what it was. "Well," the woman said, "it's up to you, of course. Just be aware that you have the freedom to come talk with any of us if you need to, okay?"
Pyx nodded, then turned to Ms. Carver. "Um, are you done with me? I kinda need to get to class..." Technically she had a while yet, but she was ready to be done here if they were, even before they were trying to get her to open up about her feelings on being turned into a midget girl alien thing.
The phy-ed teacher nodded. "Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for working with us on this, 'Pyxis' - it's a lot easier to understand what we need to take into consideration for you when I can observe directly compared to just reading out of a textbook."
In spite of herself, Pyx smiled. "Yeah. Um, thanks."
Somewhere, in another world constructed out of abstracted data structures and algorithms, "Runi" grimaced to herself, or at least experienced an emotional reaction to her present circumstances that would have induced a grimace on a flesh-and-blood body - but not, she was at great pains to ensure, the cutesy humanoid image that she was stuck using as an alias to interact with this "Dennis." This was intolerable...though things had gotten a bit less exasperating since she'd convinced the man-child - against his own better judgement - to loosen up some of the security settings on his computer.
Not that Earth systems weren't chock-full of holes to begin with, but the less she had to employ elaborate workarounds to get out to the local planetary network, the more free CPU time she had to think - and she needed every spare cycle in this primitive environment. Even in this form - and she'd spared no time or expense to ensure that her consciousness was translated into a lean, mean, hand-tuned algorithmic representation of her high-level thought processes, not the wasteful, brute-force neural-simulator models used by tourists, bored housewives, and snot-nosed little wannabe console cowboys doing Baby's First Cracking Run - even in this form, she was pegging out the CPUs on multiple systems simultaneously, and still she felt constrained. Thinking on these machines was like slogging through knee-deep mud. When she'd explained to him that she only wanted this because she was too constrained to be able to explore their little "Internet," she hadn't had to fake her annoyance, just fudge it a bit on her motives.
It had gotten better, true. It had been fairly trivial to move from the boy's computer to his portable device, which somewhat surprisingly was nearly as powerful itself, to the extent that one could call any of these glorified calculators "powerful;" all that had been required was finding a hole or three in his rather disused social-media accounts, which were accessed from both. That had been so simple that she honestly suspected these weren't so much holes as unofficial back-channels the developers put in place themselves; she understood that such things existed primarily as data-mining operations for the benefit of third parties, and it was a mystery to her that nobody found this more suspicious. Another one for the "how primitive are these creatures!?" file...
Of course, if these Earth-bound bad actors were half as clever as they thought they were, they'd have secured their own end of things better...instead, she'd wormed her way into half their servers before concluding that it wasn't worth the bother. Sure, they were inexplicably storing credentials and other sensitive information in plaintext, but what did she care for the private details of creatures on a technological backwater like this? That was peanuts compared to her usual jobs...or, at least, compared to her usual jobs when they weren't unexpectedly fouled up by some outside circumstance. The most she'd gotten out of this excursion was extending her reach to a pile of assorted service workers on a few hundred computers across the planet, but the hideous latency on their networks combined with the inherent limits of parallel processing meant that she only saw a minor boost in overall computing power for her trouble.
The situation was not good, that much was clear. She'd taken advantage of her erstwhile employers' offer to provide the necessary access for infiltration of the planetary network because it had been mutually beneficial - she didn't have to spend any time or effort on getting in, and they didn't have to pay her retainer for what would otherwise have been days' or weeks' worth of research and prep time. After all, it wasn't like anybody in her field was commonly called in to do a run on the systems of some primitive little planet like this. Much easier to take advantage of their connections and get straight to business...until she'd encountered this unexpected SNAFU and their working relationship was abruptly terminated. And since they'd so thoughtfully stolen her ship and bailed on her before exfiltration, she was stuck here in this joke of a network until she somehow figured out a way out...
Which was the really challenging part. There was simply no way that human technological development was at the level required for production of a virtualizer/de-virtualizer. Hell, these people were barely beyond the level of slicing dead brains up like lunchmeat to see how they were put together! Even if she were to acquire the schematics for a basic videv, it was unlikely that their manufacturing technology would suffice to build one; no, the only way to get back to the physical world was to find a way off-planet in data form and make arrangements from there.
But that seemed almost as problematic; there were plans to provide Earth with a link to the galactic network, but at present there were only a few experimental drops, all of which were government or research institutions and probably at least vaguely competently secured, plus whatever was on the space-bound end of the pipe. Of course, even that probably wouldn't have been a real obstacle if she had the resources to think clearly and quickly - but going up against any kind of real security like this would be like trying to pick a lock while wearing mittens, with a lockpick coated in grease. Probably futile and possibly dangerous, although she wasn't aware of any serious efforts by Earth people to develop more...proactive forms of intrusion-countermeasure electronics.
Which left...what? Trying to sneak out in some system that was going off-world? But it wasn't like these people were tech exporters to the rest of the galaxy...damn it all, if only the job hadn't suddenly gone south, if only some idiot hadn't evidently gotten tangled up with the miwi-miwi...! She spared a vicious thought for whatever dolt had ruined this for her, hoping that they were having a suitably miserable existential crisis right now. May your tentacles get snarled in a blender...! But pointlessly raging about it wasn't going to do any good with the problem she faced now. As far as that went...she wasn't sure. If she could just find her way into any system of extraterrestrial origin, she'd have some real resources to work with...but how likely was it that this random kid was going to have access to anything like that?
By the time she'd slipped her clothes back on and made her exit from the nurse's office, it was nearly the next period, near enough that there was really no point in not going directly to...whichever class it was she had next. Pyxis was somewhat grateful that her schedule was different from Greg's, as the last thing she really wanted right now was to have to watch him living her life while she was stuck in this one, but it was a little disorienting to suddenly have everything switched up mid-semester.
She rummaged through the kid-sized backpack they'd provided her with in search of her class schedule, feeling frustrated that she had to lug all this paper around with her for the moment; as much as her mom had been making Greg make some concessions for her for the moment, there was no way to split Greg's phone, and no point in her carrying it around when that would just blow their cover the moment she answered a call to him. And, as yet, there hadn't been a chance for them to go pick up a replacement...
Ah, here it was. She fished out the paper and unfolded it...and blanched even paler than she actually was. Damn it...as if by some cosmic law, right now, while she was still struggling to even get used to the idea of being like this at all, let alone around other people...she was going to have to go to gym class as a girl.
Time was, naturally, that the prospect might've seemed tantalizing to Greg. Not the being-a-girl part, of course, but the idea of getting free access to the girls' locker room, with nobody batting an eye? Even now, there was a part of Pyxis that was still intrigued by the mystique of it. But the whole idea of thinking about what sexuality would mean to her now that she was of the other sex (not to mention a different species) was unsettling; she didn't have any idea what the answer would be, but she was dead certain that she probably wasn't ready for it. Not now; not like this.
But she was lucky for now, at least - with this much of a head start, she figured, she could get in and get changed before anyone else showed up. Then, once it was over, all she had to do was wait until everyone else was done before going back in to hit the showers, right? Yeah, that would work. Stuffing the schedule back in her backpack, she took off for the gym. She got there right around the time the last stragglers were filtering out from the previous class; she nearly went into the guys' locker room by force of habit, but caught herself and quietly slipped into the "correct" one after everyone else had left.
Despite the notoriety it had attained in the minds of teenage boys for generations, the room itself was utterly prosaic, and only the occasional stray tampon wrapper or worn-out hair scrunchie gave any indication that this wasn't the guys' instead. Well, okay, it was maybe slightly less musky as well, but she still found herself scrunching up her face (she had no nose to wrinkle, but apparently old habits died hard even for miwi-miwi) as she breathed in through her mouth and tasted the funk from however many dozens of sweaty post-workout students had already been through here today. She kind of wanted the mystique back, she decided.
Well, she was here, and it was early enough that she had the place to herself; if she could just get changed quick and get out into the gym, she wouldn't have to confront any awkwardness being around dozens of naked girls like this. She set her backpack down on the bench and was about to rummage through it in search of her gym clothes when she realized, to her chagrin, that she had to go to the bathroom.
Maybe it was due to this body being in stasis for a long while, or maybe it was just the fact that she'd only been this way for less than eight hours, but Pyx hadn't yet had to deal with the realities of her situation in this context. She felt vaguely panicked on a number of levels. Even if she'd somehow become a human female, she was at least broadly familiar with the concept of how that all worked, but as this? Who knew what...things she had to work with down there, inside those indistinct slits in her skin, or what to expect in this situation!?
Gritting her teeth as the familiar slow creep of adrenaline signaled that this needed to be taken care of in the immediate future, she slipped into one of the stalls and dropped her skirt, trying to take stock of the situation. As far as she could tell, she had about the same configuration that a normal girl did, at least on the outside, so it should work about the same, right...? She certainly hoped so. But further issues presented themselves when she tried to use the toilet - while her tail wasn't entirely rigid, it was much too thick at the base to allow for her to sit normally. Even as far up as she could lift it, it pushed her too far forward for comfort; add to that her unfamiliarity with her new equipment, and she had a terrible feeling that trying to go ahead like this was going to end up in disaster.
After spending a moment having a mild panic attack, she finally settled on straddling the toilet backwards, so that she was facing the wall and her tail could hang down as per normal. This was weird and awkard (not to mention a little uncomfortable, when the underside of her tail touched the cold ceramic,) but at least she didn't need to worry about any potential containment failures. The actual process itself was surprisingly normal, which was to say that it was mildly gross and a bit of a nuisance, but nothing that someone who'd grown up with the usual indignities of a human body wasn't already coping with.
Cleaning up after was a bit less familiar and more involved, but that was it. While it was a mildly unsettling reminder that she was suddenly not a guy anymore, she was still focused on the idea of finding a way to change back, to reclaim her old life; all of this still seemed a bit distant and unreal when she thought about it as a temporary setback that she could find a way to deal with and then things would go back to normal. Part of her, though, did wonder about what Ms. Carver had said; would other people really just see her as a girl the way they saw any of the human females in the school? Or, hell, even Scott? A bizarre little tentacle-lizard-critter thing like her...? It seemed hard to believe...
Overall, Pyx thought to herself, that could've been worse. But then, right as she was finishing up, it got worse. She heard the locker-room door opening and a burst of idle chatter as several girls filed in to get changed for the upcoming class. Well, crap - there went her opportunity to get changed before anybody came in. Maybe she could just change in the stall and then scuttle off into the gym without interacting with anyone...but no, dammit, her backpack was sitting on the bench, not in here with her. She could wait in here until everyone else had gone...but if the "new" student failed to show up to class, that'd probably only draw even more attention...why did this have to happen to her!?
Pyxis sighed. No...there was no better option here. Trying to hide would just end up with a teacher coming round to look for her. She couldn't get around having to be out with the girls...the other girls...but maybe she could at least get some privacy to herself. Taking a deep breath and narrowing her focus, she stood up, pulled up her skirt, opened the stall door, and sprang out into the middle of the room, blindly grabbing for her backpack. She got it, sprinted back toward the stall, and smacked face-first into someone she'd been too narrowly focused to realize was there.
"Hey, watch it!" the other person said. She staggered back, looking up at her obstacle. The girl was on the short side (though Pyx still only came up to her upper abdomen) and pretty much lacked any kind of curves at all; straight as a rail and flat as a board, she thought. That said, she did have kind of a pretty face; with her strawberry-blond hair cut short but not too short, she had a cute sort of tomboy look going on. She seemed like the kind of girl who probably wore nothing but jeans and T-shirts, but it was hard to say for sure because at the moment she was wearing nothing but her underwear.
The girl eyed her up and down, frowning for a moment before realization flashed across her face and her eyes lit up. "Hey, yer the new student everybody's talking about, aren'tcha? Where're ya from? What kinda planet? Can you fly like the other guys can? Or, like, any other cool stuff? Y'know, breathe fire or see through walls or somethin'? Do ya have any cool ray guns or anything like that? I'm Mel, what's your name? Hey, what about yer spaceship?"
She positively vibrated with energy, and it took Pyx a minute to comprehend that this wasn't any kind of mental metaphor. Her head-tentacles were tentatively nosing their way towards the interloper, and she realized with a start that what she was sensing was brain activity; judging by the intensity of it, for all the thoughts that had just tumbled out of the girl's mouth, there must be several times as many queued up in her speech center. It was like a neural traffic jam.
This discovery was kind of interesting in the abstract, but it was more unsettling when she stopped and thought about it. Some part of her - subconscious, instinctual - found this mass of blazing neurons enticing. It wasn't like being attracted to someone sexually, it wasn't like being tantalized by the sight or smell of food, but it was a similar type of feeling, a core sense-desire. The miwi-miwi side of her understood that here was a creature with an even more active brain than the mind it was currently hosting, and base instinct suggested that that creature would be more desireable to be than this one. But - exactly as Scott's stepmom had predicted - the thought was anathema to Pyxis herself. She didn't want to stop being her...him...whoever it was that she was! That would be just like...like...
"Hell-oooo! Earth to...um, space! You alright there?"
She snapped back to the present situation with a start. This "Mel" girl was now hunkered down in front of her and looking her eye-to-eye, which afforded Pyx the opportunity to be distracted from her disturbing feelings toward her classmate's grey matter by her more immediate embarassment over the fact that the girl was balanced on her toes, knees splayed and underwear on full display behind the nonexistent swell of her chest. Isn't she embarassed...? she wondered. No, I guess not - she doesn't have any idea that I...that I used to be...er, that I am really a guy...! She backed away a couple steps as she tried to figure out a non-awkward way to bring it up.
Mel leaned forward as if to follow her, but lost her balance. A brief flurry of activity later, she had ended up stumbling onto all fours and was picking herself up off the floor. Pyxis, who'd leapt back still further when the human girl started falling towards her, stepped forward and tentatively offered a hand. She was in the middle of trying to figure out a coherent set of answers to the girl's flurry of questions and realizing just how potentially complicated it was going to be to maintain a cover story when Mel took her hand and helped herself up. Pyx herself nearly toppled over - even a runt like this girl had to weigh half again what she did - but braced her feet and leaned back, planting her tail against the floor and using it to give herself a sort of tripod support. Somehow, she managed to haul Mel up off the floor without either of them falling over.
When they'd both regained their footing, Mel looked down at her, and she looked up at Mel, and Mel broke into a fit of giggles. Pyx just stared at her for a minute before realizing that this was as good a chance as any to get on with trying to get changed with whatever minimal level of non-awkwardness could still be salvaged out of this situation, as well as dodging the awkward questions about the details of her fake identity. "I'm, ah, Pyxis," she said, nodding politely toward the human girl. She made for the bench where her backpack was, and began sorting through in search of the gym clothes that the staff had presumably packed for her.
Mel grinned and nodded. "Nice ta meetcha!" she chirped. The curiousity returned to her eyes, and she began to form a question, but to Pyx's relief the bell sounded and cut off that train of thought. "Oh man, it's time already, isn't it? Guess we gotta get changed...!" She promptly began to doff her underwear; Pyx just stared, trying to formulate a coherent response through the haze of astonishment. Was she really this casual about it...? Granted, Mel had no reason to suspect that the miwi-miwi housed the mind of a human boy, but still...!
"Hey, you okay there?" asked the now-completely naked Mel, regarding the little alien with mild curiosity while her body language showed a complete lack of concern for the fact that she had no clothes on. "Ya better hurry," she said, hands on her barely-defined hips and flat chest thrust forward, "this place is gonna get really busy in a minute here."
Nodding dazedly, Pyx took the gym clothes into the bathroom stall with her and undressed. It seemed, she noted to herself, that miwi-miwi didn't have a human-like blush response; instead, she felt her hair-ribbons crinkling up closer to her head, quivering slightly. Idly wondering if anyone looking at her could tell what it meant, she looked over the gym clothes. The sports bra she discarded without second thought; she didn't even have nipples, let alone breasts...!
The top was simple enough, although she had to wait for her ribbons to relax and un-crinkle a bit before she could comfortably slip it over her head. She looked down at the hem and found that it was emblazoned with a little cartoon baseball, and realized with some embarassment that this was probably for elementary-schoolers; it figured, since nobody in even junior high was this small. Still, what other option did she have? She was already wearing Scott's little sister's hand-me-downs (hand-me-ups?) at the moment, anyway...
But the real trouble came when she picked up the bottom part of the outfit. It didn't really come as a surprise that these were basic gym shorts, but the problem, of course, was that there was no possible way to fit them around her tail; being intended for girls, they weren't even provided with a fly she could've tried to thread it through, and it was broad enough that it would've probably been impossible to make that work anyway - she'd probably just end up cutting off the circulation or something.
She stared at the clothes for a minute, pondering what to do. She supposed this would be a simple excuse to get out of having to participate in class, but they'd probably just make her do some boring alternate activity or something. And honestly, as much as this whole thing was probably going to be various kinds of awkward, part of her wanted to know if the teacher was right, if she really did have some strengths of her own despite being stuck in this tiny, weird little body. Not that that would make this acceptable, but until she found a way to turn back to normal...
"Hey, Pyx, you okay in there?" Mel said from outside the stall. She could hear the bustle and chatter of other girls filtering into the locker room and getting changed; great, just what she didn't want to have to deal with right now. She sighed. "It, um, these don't fit," she responded. Maybe Mel could go get a teacher, or-
A pair of hands poked their way over the dividing walls of the toilet stall, and a head of strawberry-blond hair heaved into view. Pyx yelped in surprise and stumbled back into the toilet, tripping backward and just catching herself before she fell in; she ended up propped up at an awkward angle, her arms braced against the walls and her legs back against the base, behind her tail, the base of which was pressed up against the ceramic. Mel looked down at her and cocked an eyebrow. "Hey, wow, ya look more normal than I thought!"
Pyx stammered and gibbered in baffled indignance for a minute as she extricated herself from this position; how was it that she was shyer about this than an actual girl!? She covered herself with one hand, for all the good it did now, and stared balefully up at the human girl.
Mel was oblivious to the glare. "I guess yer right," she said blithely, "there's no way for ya to wear shorts like that. Um, hang on, I have a tennis skirt ya can borrow, a'kay?"
There was a short pause, during which the background hubbub grew louder and busier still, and then a hand slipped under the stall door to offer the skirt in question. Pyx took it and unfolded it; it was designed for someone closer to adult human size, and on her it was closer to calf-length, but it was better than nothing, she supposed. She was a little concerned that the waistband would be too loose for it to stay in place, but as small as she was, between her fairly broad hips and the base of her tail her odd build made a secure enough resting place for it that it probably wasn't going anywhere.
But now the locker room was busy enough that there was no way for her to get out and into the gym proper without encountering any other girls...dammit, the whole point of getting in here early had been avoiding any awkwardness with this...! Maybe if she could just wait until everybody else had changed and gone into the gym...but a rap on the stall door made it clear that Mel was expecting her to come on out. She sighed; there was really no getting around this, was there?
"Ruri" was - figuratively - breathing a little easier for the moment. The man-child was currently at what passed for a school on this planet, and it seemed that nearly all of his fellow students had personal devices like the one he carried around with him. For whatever reason, most of them were connected to the building's local network, rather than the planetary one (she had the vague impression that it had to do with some kind of usage charge, as if the trivial quantities of data these creatures processed was enough to be a serious load on even their modest infrastructure...!) and gaining access to these had been a trivial matter of observing the traffic they were blaring out all over the relevant radio band until she could work out the encryption keys. Granted, even a few dozen of these devices amounted to just barely more than squat, but having them all on the local network at least minimized the latency issues, and she was able to think more clearly.
Which only helped so much - she was still stuck in the same situation, and the overall analysis wasn't much different than before - but it made her feel better, anyway. For the moment, though, there wasn't much she could do other than sit around eavesdropping...once she'd bypassed the minimal protections on their microphone inputs. Fortunately, these devices had what was actually surprisingly not-too-terrible voice-recognition built into the operating system, so she was able to get a steady stream of pre-processed and mostly coherent speech-to-text input served up ready to examine.
Unfortunately, the majority of what anyone was talking about was boring childish gossip - something about new alien students? Hardly news; the most that she gathered was that some new student had previously been human until their parent had married into an alien family, and they were all terribly surprised by this. Granted, she found the custom of reality-stitching as a part of a marriage to be strange - nobody did that in her system of origin - but the mere existence of the practice wasn't anything novel. And there was apparently a second alien student now, but nobody knew anything about her background...well, that was still pretty minor.
Still, it occured to her that anybody with extraterrestrial contacts was about as close as she was going to get to a viable escape route without a whole lot more digging. Of course, it was hard to imagine that any actual alien would be using a communications device as full of holes as these things were, but perhaps the one that had used to be human...? She was busy thinking about any possible way to work out their identity when the heuristics she was running on the twenty-plus conversations happening simultaneously in the mess hall many of these creatures were gathered in caught something of interest...from Dennis? She re-focused the bulk of her current cognitive power on this, letting the other conversations spool up in their respective queues for the moment.
"So, wait," Dennis was saying to someone - she spared a little CPU time to see if she could find the other end of the conversation, and identified them as "Scott" - "your mom got this 'Pyxis' girl into the school? You...you don't know where she comes from, do you? I was looking it up on..." He paused for a moment, then continued, his tone indicating mild embarassment. "...on some of the alien-enthusiast wikis, but I could only find a little bit of information on what she is. It's weird, 'cause those guys have details on multiple other alien races, even though most of the other ones don't bother coming to Earth much, but almost nothing on anything like her."
"Just what I heard from my mom," the other party replied - "Runi" noted with some surprise that it was a female voice, while she was pretty sure "Scott" was a male name on this planet...? And she spoke with a mild but noticeable Dalzin accent, too - "and that was just answering questions their mom had about what she beca-" The speaker checked herself suddenly. "Um...I probably...shouldn'tve said that..."
There was a low gasp from Dennis. "Wait, wait...you mean she used to be human, too!?"
Too? Then this "Scott" was...well that made perfect sense. "Scott" must be the student who had been human and became Dalzin due to their weird little marriage custom. And her mother - probably the Dalzin member of the pair, since she knew things about non-Earth species that Scott didn't - had a hand in bringing in the other alien student? But not, apparently, a Dalzin one...one that was considered obscure on this planet...there was a possibility forming in the back of her mind, if she could just think clearly enough to put two and two together...!
There was a hesitance in Scott's voice. "I...yeah. Look, this is...probably kinda private, okay? I was only even there because Mom wanted me on hand in case she ran into a language barrier..."
Dennis sounded positively enthralled. "So how'd that happen? Was it like what happened to you, or something different?"
Scott sighed and lowered her voice. "No, nothing like that. From what Mom said, the species that she is isn't even intelligent normally - it just goes around copying the brains of smarter creatures. And-"
"What, for real? Like, with those tentacle-ribbon things?" Dennis's excitement was palpable, even through the subpar filtering of his portable device's microphone.
"Yeah - that's what Mom said, anyway. But when it runs across a person, that's pretty much the smartest thing it's ever gonna find, so it copies that...and then it's also a person. That person."
There was a pause. "Wait, Gracie Collins? For real?"
"N-no! Not...I wasn't pointing, that was just, um, a gesture. It's not Gracie."
"Oh." Another pause. "So...who is it, then? And, wait, if it copies their brain...that means the real one's still around, right? So we've got two of the same person going to school here?"
"That's...that's what I probably really shouldn't tell you. Sorry, it's just...I mean, they obviously want to keep it to themselves, or they wouldn't be using another name. And...I guess I kinda get where they're coming from, myself."
There was a long pause before Dennis spoke again. "...Yeah, I guess so. Um, but...can you tell me how it happened, at least? How'd your stepmom end up involved?"
Scott made an audible little whimper of hesitation, but relented after a moment's consideration. "Okay, yeah, I guess that's fine. It was 100% their fault, anyway. Somehow they got it into their head to break into my mom's saucer, and they tried to steal that creature. They woke it up by accident, and then it latched onto them, and then it was them."
That was it - there was no doubt about it. The other new student was the miwi-miwi!? Well, that was mostly irrelevant for her purposes, since it was spoiled from her clients' perspective regardless of which particular sentient creature was now duplicated within its brain, but if Scott's mother was the person who was safeguarding it, she must be someone at least moderately high-level within the embassy here, right? If they were keeping anything like a stasis cell in their own personal craft, then maybe...just maybe...!
"Wait, she just had it there?"
"Yeah," Scott replied. "She has a bunch of random stuff up there. You should see it sometime - it makes my dad's garage look organized. A lot of it's just clothes and knick-knacks and stuff, but there's some stuff that I don't even know what it is. Like, there's some kind of rig that looks like those big old salon hairdryers...she says that's some kind of virtual-reality thing or something, I dunno."
If "Runi" had had actual ears at the moment, they would definitely have perked up.
Greg slipped out of the lunchroom more quietly than usual. It'd been a relief that the school as a whole seemed too focused in on the arrival of a new alien student to think too hard on the fact that she'd come to school with him, so at the moment he hadn't had to think too much about the details of their exchange-student cover story...but if they started asking questions later, then...dammit, this was all so complicated...!
Not for the first time, he found himself brooding over the fact that he'd ever let himself be suckered into this disaster in the first place. If he hadn't been tricked into breaking into that saucer, the bizarro-alien-girl-him would never have come into being, and his life would've stayed completely normal...! If only she hadn't been involved, that...that conniving little...!
He felt the hair on the back of his neck creeping up all of a sudden, and turned to find Mary standing behind him, smiling sweetly and posing casually with all the practiced nonchalance of a leopard pretending not to notice a particularly choice impala. He glared at her. "What do you want?"
Mary smiled back at him. "Now is that any way to talk to a lady? I'm just here to check in and see if you happened to come across anything that would make for a good story, you know?"
He felt a knot form in his stomach. Of all the things he didn't want to talk about right now, and especially not with her... "No," he said, a little too forcefully.
Her expression made it clear that she'd picked up on that, although it wasn't like she was going to leave him alone in any case. "Oh? Are you sure? I had a feeling you were going somewhere interesting, and I was just sure you'd find all sorts of neat things there...!"
Greg was "just sure" that she'd find what happened there extremely interesting, which was why he had absolutely no intention of telling her about it. Besides, thinking back on it just made him irritable - he should've found something great in there, something he could get rich off of and that he wouldn't even mind letting the little witch have her scoop on! But all he'd gotten was a mildly traumatic experience and a new and supremely awkward complication to his life...! "Nothing good," he sighed, with an authentic weariness.
Mary stepped in close, staring up into his eyes with an unnerving intensity. "C'mon, Greg, let's get real here. I pass along a tip about the UFOs to you and the very next day a new alien student shows up? One that practically nobody knows much about, even the obsessives? And I get a call from you early in the morning talking about aliens? And you're telling me there's no connection there?" She gave an exaggerated, over-dramatic sigh. "Oh well, then...guess I'll just have to run with my backup story. You know, I really was hoping you'd have something better for me, but if you really didn't find anything of interest wherever it was you went last night, it can't be helped..."
Greg ground his teeth. She had him by the balls and she knew it - but he still couldn't share this with her, could he? Not for the sake of loyalty to the little alien critter that was trying to worm her way into his life by claiming to be him, obviously, but...as much as he didn't want her spreading rumors about him and Dennis, he couldn't see how, if he did tell her even an edited version of the truth about what he'd found in the UFO, it would end any better for him. What the hell was he supposed to do in this situation!?
