Pail Posting

A bell rings as I open the door. I’m at the Heart Mender Boutique – the shop Sandy told me about at the Hyper Light Festival – and I’m looking for something special.

There’s so much packed in here that it almost feels bigger on the inside – and who knows, here in Hyper City, it might actually be. They specialise in clothes for all kinds of nonhumans – some tiny, some huge, some with holes for tails or wings or other limbs. There are fireproof clothes, waterproof clothes; things to help you breathe underwater; fabrics I’ve never heard of from a dozen other worlds; and even, according to the labels, things with patterns in ultraviolet or other colours that I can’t even see. They have everything.

There’s the faint scent of perfume. I run my hands over all the different fabrics and rub them between my fingers, feeling the differences in the materials and the weaves, all the tiny details I would never have been able to notice before. I’ve been noticing this in my own clothes for a while now. It would be easy to lose track of time here, just touching everything.

I’m looking mostly human today – just pointed ears and horns that I’m trying out. It’s just… easier, not doing more, thanks to the human clothes I’m still wearing while I can’t form clothes myself. That’s why I’m here. They have clothes for shapeshifters, too, just as Sandy said – but when I stop at those shelves, the tops and trousers there look very plain, and very human-shaped. I don’t know what I was expecting.

“Can I help you?” a voice behind me says.

My first instinct is to form an eye on the back of my head – but of course I can’t, not yet. I still have to face whoever I’m looking at.

The person standing there isn’t human. I’m sure of that immediately. But it’s subtle. A real human might not be able to tell. Instinct tells me this isn’t someone trying to pass – as I might back home – this is a disguise, and it’s only my sharpened senses and eye for detail that let me see through it. Who and what is she? Another kind of shapeshifter? Instinctively, the little mistakes she’s made, the little tells that give her away, feel different from the kind of mistakes someone like me would make. Here in Hyper City, with its connections to so many different worlds, she could be anything. But her smile is pleasant. She’s as fascinating to look at as the fabric was to feel, and I try not to stare.

“I want to try these,” I manage to say.

She takes down a top that seems way too small for me, and explains how it works. I go to try it on. As I pull it on, it expands to the perfect size. I form a tendril and push against the fabric; and as I do, the fabric splits into a hole that wasn’t there before. I form two whole arms, and the fabric splits just as easily at the shoulders. It’s comfortable. It’s responding to pressure, as far as I can tell – but it’s neither too loose, nor too tight. I pull the arms back into my body, and the holes seal up behind them. It’s completely seamless, even to my senses. It’s perfect.

I can’t help but laugh. I form half a dozen tentacles all over my body – all of my skin has turned, now, so that’s a thing I can do, no problem at all – and the shirt adapts to match. I haven’t felt this free in months.

I take three whole sets – tops, trousers, even some underwear. It’s expensive, but oh so worth it. The shopkeeper explains that they can change colour, too, though I don’t really understand the explanation she gives. Colour is something I haven’t really figured out yet. I leave with two small wings and a little tail, wondering what the truth is behind her ever-so-slightly nonhuman smile.

But I don’t think about that for long. I’m hungry. My stomach is making all kinds of strange noises. So I stop at a fast food place and eat a whole double cheeseburger. That doesn’t seem to do anything, so I eat another, and I’m still hungry afterwards. I’m thinking about food all the way home.

* * *

“You’re going to be hungry,” my provider said at my one-year checkup, just recently. But I had no idea it was going to be like this.

I ransack the cupboards. I eat as much as I would normally eat in a week, and I still want more. I go to the supermarket three times in as many days, and come back each time with a full load – and by the end of each day I’m hungry again. By the end of the week I’m even munching down all the dry stuff that a human wouldn’t be able to stomach without cooking, just so I don’t have to go shopping again. My cupboards are completely bare.

And frankly I have no idea where any of it is going. If I’m putting more in one end, you’d expect there’d be more coming out the other end, but it’s the exact opposite. Even with my body awareness showing me in excruciating detail everything that’s going on in my innards, most of the food is just disappearing – or, more likely, going somewhere I can’t see.

Because all of this eating is definitely doing something. More of my body is turning to goo, as usual, but when I change my form, it’s clear I’m not just moving around what’s already there, like I was before. I can change my mass. Only by a tiny amount, but I can tell. The more I eat, the more that amount slowly increases. Don’t even ask me how that works. Mature shifters can change size massively, from tiny rodents all the way up to huge dragons, so eventually that amount is going to increase a lot.

I don’t know for sure if it’ll even stop. Maybe it’ll keep increasing as long as I live. Everyone agrees we’re long-lived, and some of the old stories even claim we’re immortal (as long as nothing kills us in the meantime), but I have no idea if that’s really true. I’ll need to ask my provider, next time I’m there.

I can feel something I couldn’t feel before. I feel… bigger, somehow, even when I’m not. Or maybe it’s the potential to be bigger? It’s like another new sense, to go with the full awareness of my body – awareness of my size limits. As a human, where my size couldn’t change, that wasn’t something I would ever need. Now, it makes sense.

And I can add or subtract the extra matter from anywhere. If I want to make my arm longer, I can just make it longer, without having to take goo from anywhere else. But even when I really focus, I can’t tell where it’s coming from or where it’s going. I can just… make there be more or less of me, and conservation of mass be damned. Theories online say extra dimensions or pocket universes or something. I’m clearly becoming more than your standard three-dimensional blob, somehow or other – and there’s a certain satisfaction in breaking our best understanding of fundamental physics, just by existing. If I’m burrowing into the foundations of spacetime or something, well then no wonder I’m hungry.

The fluid in my pills merges directly into me now. I’m not taking estrogen anymore – my provider told me to stop last time we spoke. Not enough human left to need it. That feels good, though it’s funny how easy it is to stop taking something that was such a big deal when I started it.

I’m hungry again. It just doesn’t seem to stop. Time to go eat.

* * *

One morning I crawl out of bed even groggier than usual. I make myself a big pot of coffee, and it takes a few attempts to get everything in the right place before I can pour it out. I stick my hand in the cup and drink the lot before I even realise what I’m doing. It’s only the feeling being so different from usual that finally shocks me into awareness. That was absorption, not drinking.

My instincts have been telling me to do this for months – and now I finally can. I want to absorb everything. Through every part of me that’s fluid, that’s a thing I can do now. I grab a handful of cereal and really pay attention this time. It’s totally different from flowing around things to hold them inside me – which I’ve been doing increasingly often, as a poor substitute until my body caught up. Instead, it’s like I pull on them somehow, and feel them coming apart, layer by layer, piece by tiny piece, dissolving and becoming part of me. I taste them – though it’s perhaps less intense than tasting things while eating normally – but that’s not the main thing. Not by far. It’s the… knowing. All the tiny little details – the materials, structure, colour, texture – everything. It’s wonderful. More than I could ever have imagined being able to comprehend, but I can.

I can’t even begin to describe it properly. I don’t think anyone could – there just aren’t the words. No wonder shifters don’t describe that part in the stories they write.

And so I stumble around the flat all morning, absorbing everything I can get my hands on. And not just my hands. At some point I notice I’m putting a lot less effort than usual into looking human, or even humanoid, and I don’t care – I’m a muddle of human parts and fluid and limbs. I empty out the cupboards yet again, and this time everything feels new. Familiar things experienced in a whole new way. And not just food, but metal and plastic, wood, ceramic, bits of paper, some of my old clothes, dishes, everything. By the time I eventually slow down, I’ve even taken chunks out of the furniture, the floor, and the walls – oops. Maybe I should have thought twice before trying that one. It’s so much. So much information, and none of it in words. Every little thing I’ve absorbed has its own feeling to it. I’ve already noticed that some things take longer than others – organic materials are fast and easy, but metal and stone take much longer. I didn’t find anything that felt like I couldn’t absorb it at all, given enough time. This, for sure, is what I’ve been missing these last few months.

I lie on the floor in the middle of the chaos – yup, I’ve made rather a mess – grinning massively with what’s left of my human face, slowly absorbing a cup and an old shirt at the same time. I could become that cup. I can almost feel how. Except when I try, nothing happens. My body can’t do that yet. Still too much human left in there. Instead I form a little replica on my palm – and it’s easy. It’s crude – I’m not skilled enough yet to reproduce the immense amount of detail I got from the original – but it’s far better than what I could have done before. From everything I’ve learned today, I feel like I could start extrapolating to other forms. This is how I’ll learn.

And, for once, I feel slightly less hungry.

* * *

The urge to absorb things is intermittent, and sometimes I can’t make any sense of everything I get from it. Sometimes I get weird feelings of movement or vertigo, even when I’m lying still. I blame my brain. It’s still there, and though more of me is fluid, it’s still holding out. Don’t want it going till the new part of me is able to take over, I suppose. But I’m sure all of this confusion is from thinking with two different things that don’t really match up. Can you believe I’m looking forward to my brain dissolving?

I’ve been practising other things, too. I’m learning to move while fluid – sliding around on the floor, in other words – and I may still be mostly human-shaped, but look at me go! I can see with the parts of me that are fluid – not well, but it’s slowly improving. All my senses are there – though not as sharp through goo as if I form dedicated sense organs for them. As for that, I can form extra eyes, but they don’t connect up yet. I mean I can’t see out of them – which is pretty pointless, unless I want to go around freaking people out. I blame my brain for that, too. I bet I could make my eyes much better than a human’s, though I have no idea how.

I even had the possibly crazy idea to try absorbing a book. I’ve been told this is a very me thing to do, and I guess that’s right. Normally I would never even write in a book, never mind eat one, but curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to know if I could absorb the knowledge in it directly – but, no, it doesn’t work like that. I know what every single page looks like, but I’ve got to imagine them – or become them, as far as I can – and actually put in the time to read them. Two different parts of the mind, I guess?

Sometimes the urge to absorb things is really strong. I’m still hungry, and I’m still eating a lot, but this is more than just wanting nutrition. I want to know. I want the forms. I’ve found myself watching animals outside much more closely than usual, and that worries me. There’s a story going around online – though I don’t know if it’s true – about a boy who started off human and became a shifter, years ago, long before shifter HRT was invented – Adam, they call him, the first one; how appropriate. Or at least that’s what everyone thought had happened. In fact, or so the story goes, a young shifter who had been kept in isolation all its life, and never allowed to experience anything, had absorbed the boy on instinct and had, in effect, become him – was convinced he was him – even though the original boy was dead. Is it true? I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone online knows, either. But either way, it’s a warning of how far absorption can go.

* * *

It’s been weeks. The changes are still too slow. I thought by this point I wouldn’t mind so much, but there’s still so much human left in me, getting in the way. I wonder if I can speed it up a bit? Maybe if I just pull—

Fuck. I accidentally absorbed half my liver. It hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I didn’t know I could even feel pain there!

I am never doing that again. I’ll be patient now, honest!

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Featuring the Heart Mender Boutique from Black Arms HRT by @home-sweet-hive.

And it's back! ...a year and a half later. The whole story is written now, and I'll be posting the remaining chapters, one a day, for the rest of this week. The story will end with part 13 on Friday.

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