Minus-four - no, Melanie - no, was that right? It felt right, but it didn't make sense that it did. Didn't she already have a designation? But "minus-four" was a functional designation, and that was no longer her function. "Melanie" was not a functional designation - what was a Melanie? And yet it stuck. It was like a name had some kind of staying power, like it would persist of its own accord. She couldn't think of any reason why that should be. Was it some fundamental property of this universe? Or perhaps it was merely a function of the body she now inhabited...perhaps she was now bound by human-like psychological effects. Whatever the case, it stuck. It filled the void left by her old designation and it stuck.
And...somehow, it did feel as if it reduced her. She was bound to it as it was bound to her. It was a handle by which others could refer to her...but not, thankfully, a True Name - as existed in some other planes - that would bind her actions. But...she was now indisputably a Thing, a single entity, in this world, and a name somehow reinforced that. Reduced...defined. But in some ways, she found herself deriving comfort from that...why?
This raised the question of what had changed between her old nature and her new nature. Her mental functions had been deviating from the established pattern almost since the moment of her arrival in this world, in this vessel, but now the vessel itself was changed. She had seen the changed limbs, alien and yet no less a part of her than before, and seen other changes in the mirror. What she didn't know was what, fundamentally, she was.
She was not a Number, or a negative-Number, that much was clear - even though she retained some Four-like external traits, she no longer connected to the power of Four. She couldn't feel it, she couldn't access it. But she wasn't sure that she didn't have some connection with other forces...she could still sense some things, she had still been able to sense the power in Four and the pale girl. But if she was aligned with something, or what it might be, she didn't know.
It was frustrating, in a way; before, she had simply known what she needed to know. Now, knowledge was something that had to be obtained from external sources, when it couldn't be derived by internal reasoning. Even though some new part of her desired the action of obtaining knowledge as much as the knowledge obtained...it would be so much simpler if she could simply know again!
And the only sources of knowledge she knew were the creatures that populated this world...so many of them swayed by emotions she didn't understand, even though she herself was beginning to fall under their influence. The squirrel-creature would tell her nothing, seemingly due to emotional issues, which seemed to stem from their earlier confrontation, even though she had inflicted no harm upon her! She couldn't understand it. Why would this be a problem? And how else could she obtain information? Was all information even obtainable?
Melanie sighed. What was she?
"What was that about, anyway?" Abigail asked. "Lilly seemed scared of her...have they met?"
Muriel nodded. "They did. Lilly followed Jenny and Harriet out, and she came across her in the park. She..." She paused. This was...this was tricky territory. She wasn't all that good at selective truth-telling. Luckily she was just a beat cop, and not someone who'd have to interview suspects, but...that didn't help her much now. "Somehow Lilly fell unconscious; she blames the girl for that, but there wasn't any sign of physical struggle. A passerby found her and brought her to us. I think she's mostly creeped out by the girl's atypical behavior."
Mr. Gordon frowned. He still didn't get that. Muriel was right in that the girl didn't act much like a typical child her age, but she didn't act like a newborn, either, or even an underdeveloped child. Nothing at all like what might theoretically be expected from a clone if it were, somehow, impossibly, raised to instant maturity. She used full sentence structures and correct grammar, but spoke haltingly, tersely, as if speech itself was something she wasn't really used to. She seemed to look around at things a lot, and toy around with her own limbs as if they were unfamiliar to her...it just didn't make sense. Muriel couldn't be failing to see that, could she?
"Anyway," he said, "this still doesn't really add up. She can't possibly be a simple clone of Jenny. We don't have the equipment, and nothing was scheduled to make use of the sample, once we'd done a simple analysis, which was completed well before today. And most obviously, she's visibly not a clone of Jenny. There's an unusual resemblance, yes, but really, she looks as much like-"
He cut himself off at the prompting of his wife, via a gentle kick in the shin. She was right, that was going too far. He'd meant it as a simple observation, but their guest might take it as an insinuation of something. Though...now that he thought about it, she did look somewhat like Muriel, and not just in the species aspects. But that made just as little sense as the cloned-from-Jenny theory...why would she hide the existence of her child, if the girl was hers? What could she hope to achieve by passing her off as a product of the lab? That made no sense at all.
Muriel tried to think about what to say here. He was right, of course; from their perspective, it didn't make sense. Probably if she pursued that line of thought, she'd seem like she was engaging in paranoid raving based on resentment over his having taken a sample from her daughter without permission. Selective truth wasn't cutting it...and she didn't want to lie, and wasn't very good at it anyway, and in any case, how would a lie that covered all the necessary points be any less implausible than the truth?
But...she didn't want to just tell them, did she? ...did she? Maybe they were trustworthy, but it wouldn't be fair to drag them into this...but then, Lilly already knew. How likely was it that she'd be able to keep that secret from her parents indefinitely? Even if she didn't tell them, surely they'd gather that something was up. Wouldn't it be just as unfair to leave a rift between them and their daughter, one that might make them worry if she insisted on its truthfulness when they believed it to be a child's game, as it would to bring them into this? Maybe she should tell them. But...how on Earth could she get them to believe it?
She took a deep breath. "Um, listen," she said. "There's something you should know..."
