Will frowned. Ever since her transformation, she'd been prone to having gut emotions stick with her, even when she knew better. It was frustrating - the only way in which she really felt as young as she looked, a reminder of her change. Was it a wolf thing, or...was she really actually affected by becoming a...a child? She didn't know.
What she did know was that right now, she was feeling bristly and defensive towards this Agent Hawkins. This was the first time she'd met him, but she'd heard a little about him from her coworkers. Nothing bad, but still...she had to admit it, she was a territorial animal. A stranger, a competitor, was moving in on her pack's territory, and that made her wary and upset.
(And it didn't help that he'd gotten her name wrong - was it that hard to keep straight that she was Will Fletcher, and "Walsh" was Muriel with the armor plating and antennae? Unless he'd been focused on Muriel for some reason or other, but she couldn't think why that would be.)
She knew it was irrational, of course, but even so it was hard to shake the feeling. Still, she wasn't going to let herself get rude and snippy just because she was being unreasonable. She tried to focus her thoughts on the case at hand; what was going on here?
She'd agreed with Jameson out of instinct that there was something bigger going on with the apparently fake bomb threat - Anneza as the instigator just didn't make any sense, even if she was involved in some other way. She was a troubled individual, obviously, but not the kind that snapped and resorted to mass murder. And that wasn't even touching on where she'd have gotten the know-how to build the fake...
Having a Fed come by to check in on a case like this was annoying, but hardly unexpected. Having that Fed be from some new department, wanting to investigate what appeared to be nothing more than a dummy bomb, though, that was unusual. And now that he had come back from...wherever he'd gotten to to go interview the one suspect and/or witness, even though there was a language barrier...no doubt about it, something important was going on here.
Will put a hold on this line of thought as they approached the common area where the orderly had said Anneza was at. All of a sudden Hawkins was just gone. Yet...the wolf-girl had a feeling that someone was nearby nonetheless. She stifled an irritated growl - wasn't it enough that he got some kind of special dispensation, and now he had to go and get all MIB on her?
Then again, maybe he was trying not to alarm the patients - certainly if someone were suffering from delusional paranoia, a shady figure in a trenchcoat wouldn't exactly put them at ease. Will wondered how avoidable it really was, though - any of them, wolf-creature, robot, or government spook, could easily be someone's personal bogeyman. (Or messiah; she found that thought even more unsettling.) Still, she'd let the staff here worry about that, and just work on paying attention if they needed them to get out.
She spotted Anneza over on one end of the room, and pointed her out to Cecilia. The female agent took a good look at her and nodded. "So, uh, how does this translator thing work?" Will whispered.
"It's going to require a fairly substantial acquisition sample," the robot-woman said. It was interesting to hear her lower her voice - it had none of the hoarse, hissing quality of a normal whisper, yet it wasn't just normal speech at a lower volume. It had the compressed dynamics and altered tone of a whisper without the noise, tuned to human low-volume hearing - useful indeed.
(Though it would have helped if Will's ears didn't have a broader range than a human's - the gynoid's speech was quite high-quality, but there was still just a bit of high-frequency aliasing noise that betrayed its electronic nature. Well, that and the tone - convincingly natural, yet still with a synthetic tinge to it.)
"So, what," Will whispered, "we just get her talking? About what?"
Cecilia smiled. "Anything, really. Normal chat, preferably, or at least as close as we can get her without being able to make that request. If it can start picking up conversational patterns, it can try to decode other facets of the language through analysis. No guarantees, though - this thing is still pretty new."
The wolf-girl nodded. This would be interesting...
Andy had spent a long time just staring into the mirror. No matter how long she looked or how much she wished she were seeing something else, the bunny-girl, the little woman with the fuzzy, perky ears, stared back at her. She couldn't escape it, couldn't deny it, couldn't just go to sleep and wish for this all to have been a dream. This was her.
Susan came in to check on her once, but as much as she wanted him...to stay, she couldn't bring herself to face the increasingly-obvious fact of how she felt about her changed wife. To her relief, he respected that and gave her space...he was so good to her...
Finally, with nothing left to think to the woman in the mirror, and feeling as hungry as someone who hasn't eaten in over twelve hours will, she rose and left the room - catching a glimpse of her waifish yet pleasantly-curved profile in the mirror as she passed by.
Andy met one of the dragon-girls...one of her daughters...on the stairs. By the way she was dressed, the rabbit-woman guessed it was Alex. She sighed and gazed at the floor as her child, the son on whom she'd pinned all her expectations, stared back at her. The silence grew awkward, until finally Andy broke it.
"A-alex," she said, "I...I'm sorry."
The dragon-girl gaped for a moment, then hugged her - not an embrace as one adult to another, but as a child clinging to a long-lost parent. "I...I love you, Dad," she whispered.
