Chương 15: (Rewritten) Ch. 15 - Tinea Act V; A Body That Tells A Story

Ch. 15 - Tinea Act V; A Body That Tells A Story Now, samurai tend to be rather resilient people. It takes… an awful lot of pain and pressure to make one crack. But it can happen. It does happen. Usually, their AI tells 'em what's up. Usually, a burnt out—or worse—samurai gets the help they need. There are other samurai, those who've already gone through such things, who're really good at spotting it when it happens to newbies. They recognize the symptoms.

The stress, the addictions, the anxiety, confusion, depression. The avoidant behavior and lack of conflict resolution. And one other symptom, something that catches most people by surprise, because why wouldn't it? Samurai are special after all. But therein lies the crux. Samurai are viewed first and foremost as samurai. So much so, that they may develop the false assumption that they, as a person, have no other value. And that's something very few normal people catch, or can even imagine.

It follows that samurai rarely have the skills to recognize it either, unless they've faced it intimately. – Dr. Forthright, respected psychologist for samurai, June 2055 I kept playing with the sliders, changing the features and traits of future me. But again, that strange disconnect crept up. Something was off, and I couldn't put a finger on it. Frustrated, I leaned back and sighed. Perhaps I can help you, Aden?

"I don't know. Somehow this isn't as…fun as I thought it'd be. Something's wrong, and I don't… It's like…it's like I'm doing something I'm not supposed to be doing." And what's that?

"Well, I'm designing how I'm going to look, right? But every time I try to make myself look good, attractive, I start to feel like I'm…not allowed to. Like I'm taking something that's not mine? Or cheating somehow?" I stopped talking for a bit and thought that through.

"Which is stupid because that'd be like saying I can't be beautiful." Well, that does sound a lot like it would fit with how you learned to see yourself as a child. That you weren't worth being liked. Do you see the parallel?

"I mean, sure, I get that. It's obvious. Or well, it is because I've spent years studying myself. But what do I do about it?" Is there anything you can do about it?

"What do you mean?" Let me ask you another question. At what point do you start feeling off?

"The moment I start making myself more beautiful than I would naturally be." And not the moment you look at yourself as a woman?

"A little, but also not. I think what happens there is a part of me thinks 'everything will be fine' once I'm a girl, to which another part reacts with…a bad conscience? Like I'm skipping the steps to earn it. But another, wiser, part of me recognizes that that's bullshit and I'll still have that journey to travel, to finish growing up. That being a woman just means I get a chance at trying it another way. One that I can't even confidently say will be easier.

"And there I gain a balance that makes it feel…genuine. In a sense that just making myself more beautiful does not." How does making yourself more attractive differ from turning yourself into a woman?

"Uh. There's no little me thinking everything will be fine. There's also no older, wiser me thinking things through. At least not naturally. There's just a nebulous feeling bad? The exact kind of feeling I used to get as a kid when I tried to avoid getting punished, whether I'd deserved it or not. That was worse, though." What happens if you were caught for being unnaturally beautiful today?

"... Nothing that matters. Realistically, these days being uncommonly beautiful just means that you've had yourself adjusted. Or your parents had your egg adjusted. And that's so common, so every day, that it doesn't matter. There isn't really any stigma directly attached to it anymore, at least not in the local culture. Maybe if you were in a position where being attractive would give you an unprofessional advantage, but even then, everybody knows how cutthroat the economic numbers game is. So, it's just…

par for the course. In a bad way." And how would you, as a samurai, fit into that?

"Oh. I wouldn't. At all. At most, and at worst, being exceptionally beautiful would just look like PR or something. A pretty face to get more attention. Then my behavior would credit or discredit that assumption. I'm a samurai, after all. Samurai are expected to act unusually, to have twinky reasons for doing whatever. It'd be easy to get people to just believe that a samurai being gorgeous is just something they decided to be, with no thought spared for consequence or advantage." Then let me ask once again.

Is there anything you can do about the dissonance you're currently experiencing?

"I'm…no? I'm not sure, but basically, no. Just do it and get used to it, I guess?" I concur.

"Heh." I chuckled.

"That helped. Thanks." You're welcome, Aden. You would've arrived at the same conclusion yourself, eventually. I smiled and said, "Yeah, probably. Advantage of having lived a few years, I guess. But it's nice having somebody to introspect with." I got back to work, with a new vigor. Some details I decided to leave, like the black hair color. I knew I could change that on the fly, so I'd adjust that once I'd wake up from the chrysalis.

"Right, Tynea, how does the Battle Skin interact with the tail, antennae, and wings?" By default, there would be no meshing in particular. They are their own organs, and they have their own DNA. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. But full integration means not just that the augment adapts to your body, but also that your body adapts to the organ. That usually creates opportunities to mix functionalities.

The tail will be easy, since only the spinneret is the actual augment. The rest of it is going to be covered with the new skin automatically. The same is not true of your antennae. If you want the battle skin to extend along the top two thirds, we'll need to upgrade its design so it won't interfere with the growth of the sensilla there. What were you looking for?

"I wanted to know to what degree I can change the color of my extra bits, after waking up." That'll always be possible, usually through editing of the DNA, via grafting, or by painting them with a hologram or spray. But since the battle skin will be naturalized by the regrowing process, you could extend it onto the wing-arms, for example, which would make altering their texture and color easy.

But extending the skin onto the membranes themselves would require drastic growth feature upgrades—you've seen how complex and biologically unusual those are. Very expensive. I would recommend the use of holographic shader technologies instead, at least until you have many more points to spare.

"Gotcha." I gave the antennae and the wings a last critical once-over. The feather dusters had their refracting shimmering rainbowness, and the wings were a creamy white that would shift with the lighting, framed by decorative black bars glimmering with diamond dust. Those gave the wings some proper contours so they wouldn't just look like sheets hanging from the wing-arms. Good enough. It'll work until I know what I want.

I tried various colors for the tail, including some browns, auburns, and blacks that worked with my natural hair color. They didn't look terrible, but I'd come to like the initial colorless white that would be a little tinged by anything behind it, and I kept the soft fuzz. Wonder how long that stuff can grow? Maybe I'll try replacing my hair with it sometime… Then, I returned to the body itself once more.

This time I decided to ignore the nagging feeling of doing something I wasn't permitted, and just went all in, even if I wasn't able to enjoy this bit. I compared various ages from sixteen to twenty-four until I settled at twenty. I morphed the face, partially with the sliders, partially with Tynea's help, and tried everything from plain, almost ugly, to unlikely perfection.

In particular, I focused on finding the moment where the beauty went from feeling merely undeserved, to feeling uncanny, alien, plastic, and took a step back from that to more natural territory. She was quite cute, the future me.

"What do you think would be the adjective that people would say would fit, Tynea?" I asked, studying the doll's face. I went for a somewhat young face, but not so much so that it looked out of place on an adult. Attractive and beautiful in a sweet way. I'd hidden the adult in the lines, in the lack of chubbiness of the cheeks. It was the eyes that would grab your attention and make you feel like you were looking at a younger woman if she smiled, or perhaps the dainty ears in a profile.

But the cheekbones and the lips told a slightly different story. They were quite kissable, I thought. Do you want me to poll the public?

"You can do that?" Yes, and I could even keep the bots from messing with the results.

"Huh…" I chewed my lips, but eventually shook my head.

"Nah, I actually want to keep this face a secret until I reveal it." Understood. I wasn't sure why that mattered. Perhaps I wanted to experience the reactions? See the feedback directly? Having used my immense computational powers to scour your planet's wealth of romance novels, I believe 'lovable' will be a commonly used adjective for your new face, Aden. Tynea put a monumental amount of blitheness into that statement. I snorted.

"Thank you for your noble sacrifice, Tynea." It is good to be appreciated. I went back to studying future-me face. She was a little young, but not so young that the adult in me had no home. Old enough to be considered mature, but not mature enough to be wise. If you didn't know she was twenty, you'd be guessing a wild variety of ages. Every part of her would give you a different answer. The face made you think she might be sixteen. The hips and ass said twenty-five.

The bust said twenty, though I suspected the, uh, bionite storage levels would have their own effect on that particular impression. Eventually I leaned back, and grinned at myself.

"Hah. I didn't realize I had that much vanity in me. I guess I just didn't like my body enough to experience it? I suspect I won't be asking you for plain black overalls anymore, Tynea." I suppose that makes sense. Do you feel worried about it?

"Nah, it's just an observation. I've always just looked in the mirror and tried to remind myself that I had no reason to hate myself. I… imagine the vanity had nothing to hook into. But this is new, and it's kind of interesting. A drive to be more… beautiful that I didn't know before," I wondered. It hooked me, this process of discovery and exploration, and blew away the cobwebs of exhaustion. Made me keep going. It was the hands that ended up giving me the most trouble.

In a way, the hands were a large part of how I perceived myself. They were the part of me I saw most. So… what facet of me should they embody? The lonely child? The somewhat idealistic and chronically depressed adult who'd found a way to maybe be happy someday, anyway? Should they be as sweet as the eyes, hands made for hugging and petting people, or for slaughtering Antithesis with spears? Safe, strong hands that could hold a baby for hours, or long-fingered ones to comb the hair of lover and daughter alike?

I realized that the question I was asking was really, "What did I want to do?" Or was it, "What didn't I want to do?" That sounded a little abstract, but it wasn't, was it? The real question I was asking was whether I wanted to… hold on, or... If somebody loved me, how did I want to react? Did I want to hold onto them with everything I was, or did I want to… what? I'd want to… give them everything and hold tight. That wasn't good. That'd develop into a sick kind of dependency real fast.

I'd need to be careful about that. Yeah, I'd make hands that would remind me to find the right balance, to give only as I was allowed to take. Hands that reminded me that I could be alone, but that would also happily hold love and share it with someone… special. What kind of hands were those? Uff, difficult question. Maybe the other way around first? What kind of hands couldn't they be? Okay, no childish hands. Not overly soft. But not demanding or crude either.

I didn't want large hands, but they did need to feel adult. So… graceful? A bit like a skillful dancer. Somebody who knows to keep the balance. I also wanted them to remind me to be forthright. To speak when words were needed. I had a tendency to just shut up and extract myself from stressful situations. But that wouldn't work if I wanted to get anywhere on my new journey. How did straightforward hands look, then? Or maybe I just needed a metaphorical knot in the handkerchief. A colored nail. The right ring finger?

That seemed appropriate for what I was asking. What color though? Hmm, the idea was to always find the happy medium. That reminded me of an old saying from Germany, where I grew up. To find the golden path. So the nail of the right ring finger would be golden? Hmm, A wavy gold line, like a meandering path, surrounded by black. It'd look pretty, but also remind me to try and stay balanced even if it was difficult. And that it was okay to waver, as long as I'd find my way back to where I ought to be.

And the path will terminate in a bright light, to remind me to always speak my thoughts. The hands would have an adult's grace. A small woman's hands with long fingers that looked like they belonged on a piano, but normal unassuming nails, except for the one. And… that was it. I was done. A body that would tell you a story if you had the mind to listen. Hands that spoke for themselves, and eyes that invited you to love and show kindness. Lips return the affection.

Hips that would carry a shared future, a chest to nurture it. A fine butt, legs and arms that had been amazing anyway. Packed into one hundred and sixty centimeters. I was ready. Almost. A new name would be needed.