Chapter 8: Chapter Seven: Fractures

After a good couple hours of waiting, the dynamic duo return. Briana has a bag full of clothes and makeup and the like, Sabrina with her hands in her pocket. Both have found the time to change out of their lab coats too; Bianca in a cute little white dress a lot like a color flipped version of the one I met her in, Sabrina in these tight shiny black leather pants, a biker jacket, and a blue silk blouse open scandalously low. 

“Wow, all dressed up? What are you two going as?” 

Bianca turns around, showing off crappy little costume wings strapped to her back, digging a toy halo out from one of the bags. “I’m an angel! Isn’t it cute?” 

Sabrina digs a horn headband out from her inside coat pocket. “Hot.”

Bianca chuckles. “Aren’t you more excited to find out what you’re going to go as?” I shrug, sitting down at the desk. 

“If I look stupid, I”m not going. Fair warning.” They both laugh and I blush hard.

Sabrina pulls another headband and a little tail out from the relatively light shopping bag. “You’re going to be a little kitty cat!”

I squint at them, crossing my arms. “That’s what took so long, needed so many probing questions to get for me? How’s that even going to hide my identity?”

Bianca pushes me gently onto the bed, dragging the desk chair in front of me to sit down on herself. “It’s not. That’s what the rest of the outfit is for. But first: do you agree to test something for us? If you do, I’ll work my very metaphorical magic on you!” 

I look around, a little nervous. Getting to know these two might have eased a little bit of the fear being around magic had on me, but considering how much it was raised by being experimented on that night I’d say I was only at the baseline of where I was before any of this started. I.E.: extremely cautious. “It… can’t hurt me, right?”

She smiles softly, shaking her head. “I promise that this can’t do anything permanent or harmful to you, it’s entirely external.” She pulls out a little ribbon with a box in the middle of it. “It works when you put it on, it ends when you take it off, just like any other tech. It can come off in literal seconds if need be.”

That doesn’t sound so bad, honestly. “It can come right off?” I ask. She smiles and nods. Whatever. What could it do, kill me? I shut my eyes, nodding softly. I feel her clasping it around my neck, hitting a button on the box. A sting of electricity jolts me awake, but it passes in a few seconds. Any more and I’d have probably ripped the thing off. “So what does it do?” I attempted to ask, but it came out garbled, throaty. I’m not sure I made any words come out at all. It was a clash of machine noise and phlegm.

She shushes me, sticking a finger to my lips. “We won’t understand anything you say until we calibrate it for you.” She waves Sabrina over, who stops close enough to grab her hand softly, Bianca’s other one placed against my throat. Again, the illusion on Sabrina’s cloak fails, the lines on her faceplate becoming visible from under the projection, shining bright and blue, a gnarly discordant face tattoo that completes her biker look. And then it fades, Bianca removing her hand from my throat.

It doesn’t much seem like anything has changed with the device from the outside. Bianca holds her hand out, fingers moving upwards, clearly a sign for me to go. “You didn’t answer, what exactly… does it…” My hand slowly reaches up for my lips, my sentence crawls to a stop.

That isn’t my voice.

Bianca gets the biggest smile on her face, and starts flapping her hands excitedly in front of me. “That, my sweet Brainy, is a voice changer! I knew you would need some way of changing your voice for this to work, but I didn’t think an hour or two of voice training was going to last you the entire night, it’s a real bitch to keep up at first trust you me.”

“You… change your voice too?” She laughs and slaps me on my arm, like what I said was some kind of joke.

She keeps going like I hadn’t said anything. “Luckily for you we had already thought ‘well if only I could just download that work into someone for the short term’ and have been toying around with this bad boy for a while now! Me and Seb based a lot of it around the work we did on her digitizer to create her disguised voice. We just took a manalarynx device, retrofitted it with a few basic voice changer settings from a child’s toy, programmed into it what I knew about voice work, and then calibrated it to your actual vocal box to stimulate the muscles with a mana current to properly adjust your speech!”

I’m a little stunned, my mouth falling open a bit. “You built a voice changer? But… What did it do to me? How did you make my voice sound like this? Why is it so high? And…” 

She waves me off. “Don’t worry, it’s not doing anything you couldn’t do with your own vocal chords.” I… what? “Trust me, a few months and I could get you sounding like this all the time, instead of using that crutch.” She unbuckles the ribbon from my neck. “By the by, say something now, see? You’re totally fine.” She fidgets with the device, clicking something onto it.

“But, why?” She’s right, my voice is exactly as it’s always been again. I cringe slightly at the sound. I never realized how… harsh it was before.

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“To go with the rest of your look, duh.” She clicks the ribbon back on me, and I see that she’s fitted it with a little cat bell under the vocal box. “Now! You’re pretty close to Sabrina’s sizes so she’s very graciously allowed you to borrow some of her clothes. I hope you don’t mind a little bit of a butcher look then. I think she owns, like, two dresses tops.”

Sabrina leans over, laughing, mussing Bianca’s hair. “You wouldn’t have it any other way, angel.” She blushes bright red, digging out a relatively cute outfit. Tight black tank top, tighter black jeans with some rips in them, and a flannel shirt that seemed too big even for the android.

“Okay,” Bianca starts, “of course we had to get you your own bra since mine wouldn’t fit and Seb doesn’t really wear them. Luckily I do have the coup de grace to hand down!” She pulls out a couple of silicone looking things and… oh, puts them inside of the bra. “I officially do not need these anymore, so I am bequeathing them to you.”

I just stare at the fake boobs for a second. “Why do you have those? What would you need them for?”

She just tilts her head at me askew. “Seriously? You haven’t caught on by now?” Caught on? “So Brainy is an ironic nickname, huh?” Wait.

The voice stuff. The disguise comment. Her hiding away for years. ‘Girls like us.’

My mouth falls open a little. “Wait… you, you’re–”

She cuts me off, before I could say anything stupid. “The same thing you are. Been through a lot of the same feelings and experiences you’ve been through. And here to help, if you want me to.”

The same. “No, no I’m not, I can’t be…”

She rubs my shoulder softly. “Why can’t you? Who’s going to stop you now? The kids, the old town, they’re all behind you. You don’t have anyone to answer to but yourself.” 

“But, but… It doesn’t suit me. You’re small, cute, you can pull it off. I’m big, I’d just have too many people…”

She shakes her head. “I promise you you’re not. You’re not even as tall as Seb, and there’s women way taller than her too. I don’t know what your body image is telling you, but you’re not some hulking monster. You’re pretty average, actually.” She ruffles my hair softly. “Plus, it’s halloween. Anyone who would think otherwise would just think it’s a costume. You don’t have any reason not to try it out tonight, honey.”

I sit there, clicking my tongue against my jaw, thinking. I… I really don’t, do I? The entire point is that no one will notice me tonight. And even if they did, I won’t be around long enough for it to have mattered…

I blush, looking down at my feet. “Are you sure it’s going to be ok?” She nods softly at me. “Then… I’ll try it tonight.”