They sat there for a while, neither saying much. Hiro looked down at the strange tiger-taur girl, and she looked up at the person that was hosting her, and from whom she'd inherited...these strange, unfamiliar memories. She knew she didn't know Hitomi, and yet she knew her. Or Hiro's mom and dad, who had undergone pretty strange transformations of their own...it was strange, in a way they felt like family to her, and yet she knew they weren't. It was all still pretty upsetting to her; she couldn't remember her own life, yet memories not her own had found their way into her mind, but now that she knew Hiro's family, she didn't think she wanted to un-know them...
It was Hiro who spoke first. "I...I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he said. "Shi...she gave me your code...she said I was one of the only people who would be able to make you work again, since I'm part human...so I guessed my way through repairing you. I didn't know memories of mine would bleed through...I'm sorry..."
Riko stared up at him. "I..." She didn't want to say "it's okay," it wasn't. But...he hadn't meant any harm...he was trying to save her life, and if nothing else, she wasn't...wasn't a daemon. She was thankful that she didn't remember that - not that she thought it would've been torment, but now that she was alive, a person again, to remember spending time as a thing...
"Mm," she said. "Well...I'm not...not dead anymore, I guess...so thanks."
Hiro smiled slightly. "Yeah...and I'll do everything I can to get this fixed...I just gotta figure out how to talk to Shi."
Riko frowned. "Who is this 'Shi,' anyway?"
Hiro shrugged. "I...I don't know. She's a digital entity of some kind...she manifests sort of like a digital fairy, only human-sized. The weird thing is it doesn't seem like she's running on any particular machine...at least, not that I could tell."
"Great," the cat-taur said. "We're chasing a ghost, then?"
"No, she's gotta be out there somewhere...I just need to figure out how to get in touch with her, that's all. But...I gotta get to class now..."
Riko nodded, sighing. "Okay..."
Steven sighed. This was really starting to get to her...not that she didn't have good reason to be upset, but she did feel a bit bad for snapping at Ben. It wasn't really his fault, she couldn't expect him to understand. Which, in a way, made it worse. He could express his sympathies, but where could she turn for someone who really understood what she was going through? And even if she found someone, how could she feel comfortable sharing such...personal problems?
Would the counselor just tell her that this was normal and she should get used to it? But she knew it was normal, for girls - that wasn't the problem! And her mother would probably say the same thing, if she could ever possibly talk to her mother about what she'd been doing, which she couldn't. She hated this; now that the spell of denial was broken, what was she left with? To accept it? She didn't want to do that. But she didn't want to just sit around brooding about it, either...
Steven wondered if perhaps the only person who could understand what she was going through was someone in the same situation. If she talked with another boy-turned-girl about it, they might understand. But...what if they liked it? What if the only advice they had to offer was "being a girl is awesome and you should embrace it?" She didn't want to think of someone as a traitor just for liking their new form, but it certainly wouldn't be any help to her...
She wished she knew what to do, or what to feel...this whole thing was so confusing, having an unfamiliar body feeding her alien versions of familiar sensations, and trying to determine how to react to that...
