Andy shook her head, slightly amazed, as she left her new workplace. It was good to get this preliminary stuff taken care of before her actual first day, but it had really driven home a point she hadn't thought much about - she was going to be living and working among the changed.
Up until now, her interaction with this strange daylight world had been limited - first by necessity, since he had to avoid the sun, and then simply because she wasn't ready to go back out into the world after her change. Of course she'd interacted with some transformees, and of course she and her family were dealing with some of these issues on a much more personal level, but the idea of actually being on the other side of things was one she hadn't really considered before.
The safety interview, for instance. She knew that safety people tended to err far on the side of caution, so who knew how much of that stuff was really going to be an issue in daily life, but even the fact that it had to be considered was a bit astonishing. That her ears might be a hazard (they wouldn't, they were well-tracked by her proprioception, but as far as the mouse-lady knew they might,) or that an employee simply might not have a solid body...
She just hadn't even considered that. How would she react to having a slime-thing for a coworker, say? If she were to continue with her new policy of trying not to lie to herself, she had to admit that she wasn't sure if merely having been changed herself was going to be sufficient to shake her free of old habits - and they were old habits, she had to admit, a mindset predating the whole sun-change, merely focused on different targets. She'd...she'd have to keep that in mind, have to try and hold herself to a better standard than she used to.
But...well, she supposed she could draw a little comfort from the fact that she had been a bit better than before - not a lot, maybe, but a bit. That wolf-man she'd encountered on the day of her interview, for instance...she'd been intimidated by him, but she'd managed to avoid letting that fear turn into hostility, and ultimately it had turned out alright. Maybe she could manage this after all...
She pulled out the ID they'd printed for her and looked at it again. The face that looked back at her was strange - familiarity in the recognizable elements of her own face, but also clearly something different. It was cute...not little-girl cute, but the face of someone just this side of being a "young woman," but not quite far enough to have lost that bit of youthful vigor and freshness. Really, the face itself was pleasant; it was just the idea that it was her own that she wasn't used to. It was like everything else about her change; she wasn't as uncomfortable living in this body as she was taking it out in public...she'd just have to get used to it, she guessed.
Mikey closed the article she'd been reading - the cafeteria was one of the few places in the school with good wireless reception, so she often pulled up something to read when she was in here. This time it had been an account from emergence.org with a subject line that had grabbed her interest. The young gynoid had been wondering for a while now about the question of her apparent age; she looked about twelve, which she was, and that was all well and good (even if being a robot and a girl was still strange for her,) but she wondered if she was going to remain looking about twelve for the rest of her life. It would be embarassing to look twelve when she was entering her teens, and she supposed that the older she got, the more that would veer into creepiness.
Anyway, according to what she'd read, one android had just undergone a sudden and significant change in structure; by his account it looked as if he'd undergone a growth spurt covering a year in human terms in the space of about a day. He wasn't much older than her, just on the other side of the start of puberty, and he'd covered so much ground in this spurt that his internal skeletal/mechanical structure had torn right through his outer coverings (which had not grown.) Those, he wrote, were in the process of being regenerated, but he was staying inside for the time being - Mikey could understand that, the idea of going out in public looking like the end of The Terminator wasn't a very appealing one.
This news had created a bit of a stir on the site; Mikey was hardly the only person who'd been wondering about this exact question. People were comparing it with ecdysis, the process where insects and other creatures shed their outer covering in order to grow out of it. Everybody was wondering whether they'd undergo something similar, but the sheer variety found in the sun's changes made it impossible to say for sure whether anyone would experience it, or experience it the same - perhaps she might grow in a more gradual, human-like fashion, or undergo this change, but at a different interval than (apparently) a year, or...who knew?
But that was enough of thinking about that for now; if she let herself dwell too long on unpredictabilities she'd wind up drifting off into a fugue of potential-path analyses, and if there wasn't sufficient information to begin with that'd never get her anywhere. She looked intently across the table at Becca. Normally, she sat with Caitlin and Bryan at lunch, but the plant-boy was out in the sunlight right now, and she wasn't sure where the statue-girl had gotten off to. That was okay, though - she still wanted to talk with Becca about her secret. The robot-girl knew that there were a lot of people who got turned into strange things, not least herself, but a real actual magical girl? She could hardly believe it, but Becca didn't seem to be joking or simply playing pretend. And she supposed it wasn't that much more far-fetched than anything else these days...
"I wonder," she said, "why you wound up with us."
The eight-year-old bit her lip, and Mikey realized she might've hurt her feelings. "I...I'm stayin' with you 'cause you found me," she said. "An' 'cause my mom and dad...don't know how t' take care of me anymore..." Becca hadn't thought about it in a while, but the fact that she needed someone to take care of her now was embarassing; in some ways being a magical girl mitigated the indignity of being a kid again (let alone a little girl,) since it wasn't like she was completely powerless, but in other ways...
"N-no, I didn't mean it like that," Mikey stammered. She knew, both from her own experience and from many accounts on emergence.org, that there was nothing about her robotic nature that impaired her emotional faculties, but that didn't mean that she was as good with people as she would've liked. Reading expressions to determine feelings, yes, but knowing how to deal with all the complexities? "I...I mean, why us and not somebody else? It was kinda just luck that I found you... Maybe since you're a magical girl, there's a reason for it?"
Becca frowned slightly. Was there? She couldn't think of one. She glanced down at Trident in the pocket of her jumper. The doll-sized girl looked around cautiously - she knew Mrs. Crawford was angling to integrate her into the student body here, but for the moment she'd much rather keep a low profile. "I don't know," she whispered. "I knew where I'd find you, and I feel like that's where you're supposed to be, but I don't know if there's a special reason for it. If there is, it's...it's so closely wrapped up with our mission that I can't tell it apart."
Becca tried to think that through. "So...I'm s'posed to be with...with Mikey's family t' help keep the world safe from th' Enemy? How's that work?"
Trident shook her head. "I don't know...I can't tell. I don't know if there's something important about them, or if it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time..."
"Huh," Mikey said. It was hard to imagine that anybody in her family could have anything to do with this kind of stuff...it wasn't like any of them were very far out of the ordinary (well, not generally, aside from the oddities the sun had brought about in the three Madison siblings...) She knew Grandpa Jack had had some wild stories that teetered on the edge of believablity, but she wasn't sure she'd put any stock in them.
Anyway, whether or not there was a reason, she was glad that her family had the protection of a magical girl against whatever this "enemy" was. She was sure that it was what had attacked Hiro, and that was a bit frightening - even someone made of metal, synthetic "skin," and electronics instead of flesh and blood could be vulnerable...she was taking every reasonable security precaution she could, but it was still reassuring to have Becca here.
Haru fidgeted nervously as they approached the table where Brittany and her friends were sitting. It was inexpressibly comforting to have Ken there with her, but she still felt nervous. If there turned out to be nothing going on with them, then she'd look stupid, not to mention having tipped her hand about her own abilities. But if there were...well, that was a whole other set of questions.
She assumed that they must have some potential interest in her, from the way Brittany phrased her suggestions. Not that she thought the older girl was only playing at being friends to get to her, but she supposed there were a lot of reasons a group might want a...a seer. She pulled up a chair and sat down, and Ken sat next to her.
Jon eyed the three-eyed girl a bit warily as she sat down across from her. It was clear from her expression that she had a question, and somehow Jon had a pretty good idea that it was about them. She tried to keep her hands still, tried to breathe steadily, but she was nervous. This was it, this was where she had to begin to seriously weigh the merits of having someone on their side against the risk of exposing her secrets to the wrong kind of person. And if Haru was trustworthy, then...then she had to...to tell her the truth. All of the truth, about the sun and how it got that way...
Haru leaned forward and took a deep breath. "I want to talk to you about a dream I had," she said.
