The surface of the Earth wheeled slowly overhead as Lee wondered at it. After everything that had happened thus far, it would've seemed impossible for anything to seem outstandingly strange by comparison, yet here it was - the Earth, projected onto the canopy of the sky like a literal planetarium, the surface curved the other way round in a design straight out of 19th-century Hollow Earth theories, and the surface of a different world below. After being dragged off to another world entirely, there was home, so tantalizingly close, and yet still a good couple hundred miles out of reach...
It almost succeeded in making her present state seem mundane.
Then
The plane vanished into whiteness, and Lee found himself standing in line in a sea of white, his feet resting with noncommittal firmness on a rainbow that he wasn't entirely sure was really there. He briefly wondered if he was dead, but he couldn't think of why he would be; whatever had happened to the plane, it wasn't anything like a crash or an explosion or anything that seemed like it ought to be deadly. But even if he wasn't, that didn't do much to explain why he was here...
He looked around. The empty whiteness stretched off to either side for an infinity, or maybe it just curved up and around and encased them in a rainbow-floored tunnel; it was impossible to tell, with no horizon, shadow, or any other kind of marker to distinguish the space from itself in that direction. The only clearly-defined directions were forward and backward, and the line stretched for a little way both in front and behind. He hadn't been paying enough attention to say that everybody from the plane was here, but it certainly seemed to be more or less the case. Up ahead, at the head of the line, there was a figure he couldn't quite make out, which appeared to be addressing each of the passengers one by one. It was with some astonishment that he noticed the way people were disappearing into thin air after their interview with the figure. He thought of running, but to where? There was either an infinity or nothing at all to the sides, and at the tail of the line, past the fifty-something man who was the very last, the rainbow faded into the encompassing whiteness. There was nowhere to go, it seemed, but forward.
It was a little while later before Lee realized that, not only were the people disappearing, they were not infrequently changing as well. He felt a bit of a knot forming in his stomach; he'd been one of the people to remain unchanged throughout the entire affair with the iridescent Sun those five years ago - and now people were just being transformed at the whim of some strange figure? But...what else could they do? There was nowhere else to go...he comforted himself in the thought that not everybody was changing - at least, if they were, it wasn't in visibly apparent ways...
It seemed like an eternity before it was finally his turn to stand before the figure - a figure of rainbow, not definitely fixed in one shape or another, shifting, inconclusive, inscrutable - and discover what awaited.
Present your token.
Lee frowned. "I don't know what you're talking about."
If the figure had anything like a reaction to this, it was just as unreadable as ever. No token...then we play a game. Pick a card... And then there were cards to pick from.
He frowned. Pick a card? What was this? Was this what was changing people? He didn't want to...but again, what choice did he have? He'd just have to hope that he was lucky, that he'd get...he didn't know, the little instruction card that came with the deck, maybe? Something that wouldn't have any unfortunate implications...wincing, he held his finger in the air. *Eenie, meenie, minie, moe...*he stabbed. "That one."
The figure was as unreadable as ever, but he felt a certain tension leave the air. You have picked the Ferry. This is your task - to carry others whither they would go, but not until they have earned their passage...
Lee blinked. What was this about? They...they wanted him to carry people? How? He could haul maybe fifty pounds for any serious amount of time, but carrying a person? And to where?
He was distracted from this line of thought when he felt something happening to him. The knot in his stomach intensified, and then vanished - seemingly because his stomach itself had vanished. His torso felt...hollow, somehow, and he had a sudden unsettling flashback to a changed girl he'd met who was a clockwork automaton, and the slight hollow thud she'd made when he'd accidentally bumped into her in a crowd; but this wasn't like that, it seemed, his body still seemed to be flesh and blood...except for the bits that were developing some kind of metal covering, on his thighs, his shoulders, his shins, a couple plates spaced at intervals along his back...a cyborg, then? But they had a partially electronic brain like the kind robot-changed had; he knew from reading news accounts that it was a thing they could perceive, and there was nothing of that here. And...and...the figure was dwindling. Everybody was dwindling...or rather, he was growing, and rather rapidly, too. The line shrank away beneath him as he grew...growing more in some places than in others, and in others not seeming to grow at all...unless...no, that couldn't...
She cursed her luck.
Now
She wasn't really sure exactly how it had gone, but at some point in the process she had ceased being there and wound up here. Things had just kind of seemed to fade away while she was changing, and then she was here, and she was this.
Lee looked down at herself - all one hundred feet of her. What she had become...was difficult to describe. She had the form of a young woman, albeit a hundred-foot-tall one, with a fairly ample bust and long purple hair that hung down almost to her waist. She was unclothed, as her clothes hadn't grown with her. But she was by no means simply an ordinary human being upscaled by a factor of twenty-some.
For starters, there was all the metal. It was far from the dominant substance of her body, more just a handful of silvery coverings, but it was rather arresting just in its unusualness. It was indisputably a part of her; while it didn't have fine tactile sensation like skin did, she could feel physical force through its movement against her fleshy parts, and it was part of her proprioception - part of her brain's map of her body, part of her. Some of it was structural reinforcement, some of it was shielding around what seemed to be some kind of outlet for what, as near as she could figure, was some kind of propulsion mechanism. Some of it she couldn't figure out what it was, like the structures that had taken the place of her ears - round at the base, like a headphone cup, but extending out into a fin-like structure, not unlike the fins that sprouted from the support structure around her ankles. Some of it seemed to be simply decorative - well, all of it was decorative, actually; it all combined into a surprisingly pleasant look, like a girl had somehow been caught in a teleporter accident with a '57 Bel Air and managed to come out the better for it. Had the girl in question not been Lee, she might even have liked it.
But of course the strangeness wasn't limited to the outside. Most of her torso was hollow, a single interior cavity filled with air, accessible through what turned out to be two doors set into her sides just past the base of her ribcage. They were covered in skin with a metal frame, nearly seamless when she had them closed. Her body cavity followed the curvature of her torso, naturally enough, but at widest points it was something like 10'x20'x33' or so, at least as near as she could guess. It stopped around her waistline, as she seemed to have some kind of important components located in that area. She could feel what she somehow knew to be some kind of plants inside her cavity, symbiotically rooted into the interior walls of her body, which converted carbon monoxide into oxygen and kept the cavity filled; this meant that breathing didn't seem to be a necessity for her, which was good, because her lungs couldn't possibly have scaled up proportionally with her and not impeded on the cavity which now took up the bulk of her torso. There was some kind of unknown power source inside her; it was centered somewhere in her torso, but it was difficult to say where, because she felt only a kind of warm glow from it that suffused a whole system of conduits that ran with her circulatory system out to different parts of her body. It mean she didn't have to eat, either, which was good because, if she still had a stomach, it was on the same terms as her lungs. She presumed it was also what lit her body cavity, which she could feel, and which must be what kept the plants healthy.
It was all just so bizarre - bio-organic technology of a kind that not even changed cyborgs seemed to exhibit, natural and seamless integration between flesh and machine. She didn't even really perceive it as machinery, aside from there being no other conclusion to draw; it was just part of her now. And for what? Well, that hadn't been too difficult to figure out. She had picked "the Ferry," and where she had appeared in this strange world, there was a ramp sort of affair that came right up to her doors when she laid down next to it. By some bizarre turn of fate, she was supposed to be some kind of...of living vehicle, for people? And her propulsion mechanisms...they were some kind of field generator, she thought; when she used them, she found herself unbound from this planet's gravity and free to move where she would. So she was supposed to take them to other planets, then? She was some kind of spaceship-girl? But they had to earn passage? She had no idea what any of this was about...
She had tried to make contact with other people, but the people who inhabited the nearby town didn't seem to be quite people in the sense that she understood people - they were what you might have called "robotic," in the days before the existence of robot-changed made that a not particularly useful and rather offensive comparison, or more like NPCs in a video game. (And on top of that, they didn't have anything like clothes that would fit her...) She seriously hoped that this wasn't what had become of the other passengers, but if she hadn't become like that, then hopefully nobody else had; perhaps these were just the natives? She didn't know.
Lee looked up, up to where the surface of the Earth was, where the sky should have been. It seemed so far away, and yet so tantalizingly close - perhaps no more than four or five hundred miles. Was she a spaceship-girl? Maybe she could just lift off from the surface of this world and touch down on her own native soil...
...but, well...what about the other passengers? It wasn't that she felt duty-bound to give people rides in her gut or anything, but...they were stuck here, same as her, and probably just as lost and confused...and anyway, how was she even to know that returning to Earth would solve the problem of her being a hundred feet tall, some kind of bio-mechanical creature, and...well, a her?
