Max drifted aimlessly through the shelves and racks, hesitant to actually take the step into looking for anything. Girls' clothing was always one of those zones of forbidden knowledge that men were expected not to understand, and she'd had no reason to venture there until now...
She was hardly planning on getting a wardrobe full of pink and frills, but the plain fact was that her old clothes just didn't fit right. Tight around the hips, loose around the waist, no place for her tail, too tight for her expanded chest, no support for her new mammaries, other than what the lower ones provided for the higher...it just wasn't going to work trying to make do with what she had. There was really no getting around this. The cat-girl sighed and began looking over the brassieres.
That didn't last long. "Uh, Jon?" she asked. "Do you...um, know what would...fit me?"
The slug-girl frowned - she didn't actually have any clothes-shopping she needed to do, and she didn't think she was qualified to offer technical assistance, but she figured Max might need moral support, and she was more qualified for that than Karyn, at least.
"Not a clue," she said. "I haven't been a girl long enough to have any kind of an eye for that. The saleslady could help you, though." I haven't been a girl long enough...there was a phrase she'd never imagined coming out of her mouth. It was strange to suddenly be in the role of advisor and not advisee...but Max seemed to connect better with her than with Karyn, probably as they'd both been guys before.
Max frowned at the suggestion; she didn't want to get measured, didn't want to have anybody handling her but her (and really, not even her.) But she needed clothes...but she didn't want to...augh, how could something like getting clothes become so complicated!?
It wasn't too difficult for Jon to figure out what the cat-girl's expression meant. "They're not going to be feeling you up or anything, you know," she said. "They're professionals."
Max sighed; she knew that, intellectually. It was just...all the strangeness of the past week, and now this...it was more than she could handle. Still...if anyone could do clinical detachment, surely a couple of robots could, right?
She went over to the mannequin-like gynoid. "Uh, um..." she stammered, feeling timid as a mouse, "I...I don't know what...what size I am...?"
The saleslady smiled gently. "Of course. If you'd just come with me, I can get your measurements so we can figure out what you need." Max took a deep breath and followed her back to the measuring room.
With no cat-girl to support for the moment, Jon slithered out of the store over to where Tim was waiting. She felt a little bad for leaving him there by himself, but he was being pretty understanding about it. He turned to see her. "Hey," he smiled.
"Hey," she said. "Sorry, didn't mean to abandon you, but Max...kinda needs someone to empathize with her right now."
He nodded. "That's gotta be hell, for sure...nice of you to support her like that."
Jon shrugged. "It's nothing...the least I can do, really." Indeed it was - faced with someone going through a difficult time as a result of her actions, she could hardly gripe about being asked to offer a little emotional support.
The drow-boy smiled. "Well, I'm sure she appreciates it. By the way...she's not mad at me or anything, is she? I didn't mean to...I mean, Karyn seemed to think I was..."
The slug-girl shook her head, and he noticed amusedly how her antennae followed along just behind. "She's...just confused and scared, that's all. And don't mind about Karyn. She gets...kind of protective of people sometimes, but she doesn't mean anything by it. Really, I'm surprised she didn't try to take me under her wing."
"Guess she could see you're coping pretty well," he said. Jon blinked, unsure what to make of that. Was that a good thing, or a bad thing? But...he'd meant it as a compliment, obviously, whatever she thought of it. "Th-thanks," she said.
There was a brief pause as her thoughts stuck on that - did he mean that she was...what, getting used to being a girl? Convincing as one, even? Or was it just that she was living like this without any major emotional or mental issues? She almost wanted to ask, but she knew she didn't really want to know.
"Um," she said, hoping to change the subject, "so...you see in the infrared, then? What's that like?"
Tim shrugged. "It's...kind of hard to describe," he said. "It's not false-color stuff like in Predator, if that's what you're thinking. It doesn't affect the way I perceive normal-spectrum colors or interfere with my vision, it just...it lets me see the colors heat makes, I guess is how I'd put it."
Jon nodded. "Interesting."
Max took comfort in the fact that Jon was right - the gynoid saleslady was pure professional, gently lifting, prodding, and draping the measuring tape, but never in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. Well, no more uncomfortable than she was being naked as a girl in front of a total stranger, anyway. It was so weird that clothes were no longer instinctive, but she wasn't stripped of the urge to preserve her modesty...what was she supposed to do?
"So...couldn't you just, like, tell the measurements?" she asked, then cringed - she hoped that didn't sound rude to the robot. The saleslady didn't seem to mind, however, and nodded her head.
"Technically, yes," she said. "I am capable of auto-measurement based on visual data. But I also have enough years of experience with this to know that that's not the whole story - I want to get an idea of how the structure deforms as it changes position. Besides, fur tends to throw off visual measurement acuity."
"Oh." The cat-girl really didn't know what kind of response she was expecting - would the saleslady even be doing this if she didn't have a reason to? She noticed that in addition to the other measurements, the saleslady was checking the distance between the pairs of breasts - what was that for?
But before she could think too much about it, the measuring was finished. The gynoid thought for a moment and then scribbled some figures on a piece of paper, pointing to a set of three number/letter combinations that meant nothing to Max. "Those are your bust size...er, sizes," she said. "The others are some specific measurements and a general clothing size that should suit you."
The cat-girl nodded. "So, do I just grab...three, um...?" She couldn't even bring herself to say it - it was weird enough to think of!
The saleslady shook her head. "That would be a workable stop-gap solution, maybe," she said. "But off-the-rack brassieres are going to need some modification to support your lower breasts - they'd need quite a bit added to the straps, and it wouldn't be comfortable for the straps to just pile up on your shoulders. Luckily, we've been working on the problem since we were first aware of girls like yourself."
She made a quick trip to another room, leaving Max feeling more than a little awkward; talking about the practicals of her new anatomy was something she'd hoped to avoid, though she supposed that wasn't really a realistic expectation after all. It was weird enough experiencing this, feeling six distinct objects on her chest where two might be expected, and where none had been last week. But...there didn't seem to be a way to address the problems without going into some detail...
The robot-woman returned with a cloth-and-elastic contraption that Max couldn't even begin to figure out until the gynoid unfurled it in front of her. It was...it looked like three normal bras strung together vertically, sort of. The lower pairs were structured a bit differently, with a single elastic strap where the shoulder-straps ought to be...Max had to admit, she didn't even understand a normal bra.
"It's our best attempt yet," the saleslady said. "The side straps are a continuous piece running down to the bottom, to help weight distribution, and the lower cups are reinforced along the edge to maintain support without full shoulder-straps; the individual back-straps might be a little complex, but they should help hold things in place. We've run them off in a variety of arrangements based on what we've heard...this one ought to work for you."
The cat-girl just gaped. This...this was what was supposed to work for her!?
Jenny smiled and sighed contentedly as she walked alongside Muriel, clutching a plated hand. Tetra was riding on her shoulder, and that felt nice, too - everybody in her life was together and happy, and Muriel said they were going someplace fun. For the moment, her troubles from earlier were banished from her mind - and even that weird feeling she'd gotten looking in the mirror had subsided.
