Chapter 3: 3: Paces

Staring up at the tiled hospital room ceiling, Violet rested her head against her pillow. She focused on her breathing, letting everything that had happened to her continue to sink in. At least she was alone again; only now did it register to her that she hadn't gotten a moment of solitude since she first woke up, so she was glad to have some space. She spent a couple of minutes simply laying awake in bed, keeping her thoughts at bay, just gently inhaling and exhaling.

The hospital room's ambience was a rather peaceful backdrop. The soft, metronomic clicks and whirrs from the various monitoring devices and analysis equipment mixed pleasantly with the gentle hum of the room's air conditioning unit. At the same time, it was a bit unnerving in its familiarity, just like Dr. Wess had been. How did this place look so similar to hospitals on earth? What even was Dr. Wess? Why did she speak English? Did everyone here look like that, or was she just someone who had very particular taste in cosmetic augmentations? The staff here apparently hadn't had any trouble with figuring out how to treat a human, but at the same time... That tail had Violet doubting that she had just been talking to some incredibly eccentric gene-modder. She'd been able to manipulate it as though it was just another limb to her. Violet knew some animals back on Earth had prehensile tails, but come on.

A question, one that Violet realized she had somehow forgotten to ask, now dawned on her as she sat upright again. Where was she?

The doctor mentioned she wasn't listed anywhere in.. Laevonian databases, right? She figured "Laevonia" was probably the name of this place, at least, or at least the name of a governing body, if they handled that kind of information. And they'd found out about the ship through another database maintained by Vo-... Something. What was that? Why did they have records about the Sarlace, apparently before it had even shown up?

Realizing she wasn't doing a very good job of relaxing, she sighed and flopped back down against her pillow for the umpteenth time today. She didn't figure she was going to get any further with deductive reasoning, unfortunately. At least now that she knew what was going on with her own body, maybe she could finally ask the employees here about... literally everything else. She lay there for a while longer, trying to sort through her thoughts, but didn't really get anywhere. Blegh.

Eventually, the curious part of Violet's brain did get the better of the analytical part, and she opted to sit back up and look around the room. It was a pretty fancy-looking hospital, now that she thought about it. Even though she knew it had been at least several centuries since she last saw, well, anything besides the insides of her own eyelids, it was pretty clear that this was a well-maintained facility. Stainless steel paneling along the walls was interleaved with pale grey hardwood and white ceramic tile, the wood making up a set of walls that framed the headboard of the bed from floor to ceiling. The cabinets underneath the room's polished marble countertops were made of the same type of wood, which upon closer inspection wasn't a flat grey, but more of a maroon color that had been reduced to 1% of its original saturation in an image editing program. The large LED fixtures built into the ceiling tiles emanated crisp white lighting with a slight blueish-green tint, which lit the room evenly and clearly without being too overbearing. The calm, muted colors of the architecture were contrasted by the various screens and holographic displays of the room's medical equipment, which flickered softly with bright colors of orange, yellow and green.

A few different things occurred to Violet as she took in the environment of the room around her. Firstly, she hadn't stood up since she entered cryosleep, so it seemed like as good a time as any to actually give these new legs of hers a test run. Secondly, the room was still rather chilly, and Violet decided she'd prefer having something to wear right now. She figured there was probably a closet in here, and if not she could ask Dr. Wess for something when she got back.

All those thoughts ran together in Violet's mind simultaneously, and each of them required her taking the same first step as the others. Literally. Thus, she lifted both of her legs together and tentatively swung them off the side of the bed. They responded smartly; Violet had been expecting some sort of input lag when she first moved them while talking to the doctor, but they seemed to respond with even more immediacy than her original ones. It was a strange feeling. Regardless, she took her time, slowly easing herself over the edge of the mattress with her arms until her toes found the cold vinyl floor. Violet let the soles of her feet touch down, then her heels, and then finally she pushed herself forward the little bit she needed to be standing upright. 

Something that quickly became apparent to Violet the moment she was standing under her own strength was the fact that she was now taller than before. Back on Earth she had been somewhere around 5'2", according to her last medical checkup, but she could already tell she had gained several inches of height at least. It was definitely a bit disorienting, so she gave herself a moment to let her inner ear adjust. The sooner she didn't feel like she was walking on stilts, the better.

Once she felt ready, Violet tried to take a step, followed by her immediately realizing that her center of gravity had shifted as she stumbled forward with a yelp. She thankfully managed to keep herself from falling, barely keeping her feet underneath her with each step as her momentum carried her towards the countertop across from the bed.

She caught it as she approached and steadied herself, her body wobbling a bit as she took a moment to calm down. Yeah, this was going to take some getting used to. She steeled herself and tried to walk back over to where she started, keeping in mind the way she needed to shift her hips back and forth with each step she took. Over the course of numerous laps between the bed and the countertop (and a few more slip-ups along the way), Violet eventually taught herself an acceptably-stable sashay.

As she tried to get the hang of shifting her weight and turning as she walked, a digital height-and-weight scale in the corner of the room caught Violet's eye. She walked over and stepped onto it, and it powered on automatically. Thank fuck it was at least able to give readings in metric; the fewer burning questions she had to ask the doctor about when she got back, the better.

She did the necessary conversions to imperial in her head, happy that she hadn't forgotten them. She'd drilled herself on them quite enough during her apprenticeship, after all.

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The scale quickly confirmed to her that she, indeed, now possessed at least four inches of added height compared to her previous frame. Maybe even five, but the exact height measurement from her last checkup wasn't high on the list of things that Violet had prioritized remembering. Additionally, one thing that was now clearly apparent was that her assumption about her legs being lighter than before had been incorrect. It wasn't that they weighed less than they used to, it was that her new muscles were stronger than before. She had deduced that earlier just by looking at their definition, of course, but now she was fully aware of how much added mass she was now moving around, yet she was doing so as effortlessly as she'd ever moved her old legs.

As she got off the scale and continued to walk around the room, the curious part of her brain told her that it would be absolutely awesome to try and kick something right now. The entire rest of her brain asked her to please not get herself thrown out of the hospital over random property damage.

Violet's path around the room was soon interrupted by a two-note chime that chirped from a small sensor above the wall panels, causing her to jump at the sudden sound. A motion-activated door she'd inadvertently triggered retracted half an inch back into the wall, before sliding to the side to reveal a shallow storage closet. Inside of it were a few sets of hospital gowns and a simple one-piece garment that Violet assumed to be a unitard. Curious, she reached into the closet and pulled out the coathanger it was on, running her free hand along one of the sleeves.

It was a minimalistic white bodysuit, titanium white with black accents and made of a soft, stretchy synthetic fabric. Black pinstripes ran down the length of the seams on each sleeve. She hoped that it was meant for her to wear, seeing as her old clothes probably didn't exist anymore (nor would they have fit her if they did). Either way, it looked infinitely more comfortable than the gowns would've been, so she stepped into it and pulled it up over her body. It was easier said than done, getting the outfit past her hips while keeping herself balanced; she ended up having to prop herself up against the wall as she pulled the suit up and fastened the zipper on the back, but once it was on it seemed to fit her figure well. The bulge in her crotch was a little prominent for her liking, but she decided she'd worry about that once she had access to underwear.

Looking around to see if there was a mirror in the room, Violet felt slightly embarrassed when she realized that one occupied the entire back wall of the closet. She pushed the racks of hospital gowns out of the way, and finally looked at her new reflection for the first time.

To put it mildly - Holy shit. She knew she'd seen them already when she was still in bed, but no fucking wonder her center of gravity had changed. The contours of her hips bowed out from her midriff and smoothly shifted into sweeping curves as they traveled down towards her calves. She turned around so that she could look at her rear, and her mouth fell open in disbelief for the second time in only a few hours. The fact that her shoulders and ribcage weren't that much wider than her waist to begin with only further emphasized the truly battleship-size displacement her ass now possessed.

As for the rest of her body, her shoulder-length lob of black hair sported the same layering and messy fringe as it always had, flaring out slightly below the ears as the cut became more voluminous near the ends. Aside from a bit of lost weight, everything besides Violet's legs was pretty much the same as she had left it when she boarded the Sarlace.

Shifting her gaze downward again, it turned out the jumpsuit hadn't added any subtlety to her figure either. If anything, the slight pressure it provided around her waist just made her contours even more exaggerated. Violet had never been a good judge of fashion, but even she could tell, to put it bluntly, that she absolutely rocked this suit. It hit her all at once as she realized... she wouldn't have even come close to pulling off a number like this before, not the way she did now anyway. She imagined her old body, her old parallel-lines build trying to fit into this outfit, and shuddered in quiet revulsion at the reflection in her mind. It hadn't been until she felt the coalescing of droplets under her chin that she realized she had begun to cry.

Why had seeing herself like this affected her so much? Why had a change as simple as her body adorned with wider hips been enough to rock her to her core? The brakes failed on her train of thought from earlier as it barreled towards her, Violet now clawing through the underbrush of her sense of self to piece together what she was feeling.

Her body was now radically different than it used to be, and she was happy about that, despite it not having been her choice to make. And if that was true, that meant what she'd thought was the insignificance of - or her indifference to - her appearance all her life had actually been... complacency? Apathy? Ignorance? Even if there was little else she could've done to affect change in her body in the years before she departed Earth, the dysphoria had still been there, and the fact that she'd thought she was okay with that this entire time was a hard pill for her to swallow. Violet didn't usually mind being proven wrong, she'd thought to herself, but it was different when it was about her identity. This shift had been so sudden, and yet it now felt right, even if it went against everything Violet had considered sacred about her own autonomy.

She tried to close the floodgates, to reassure herself that she'd handle these emotions once she was somewhere isolated, where there wasn't the risk of someone walking into the room and seeing her vulnerability like this. But it was no use, the breakwalls in her mind now subjected to a veritable tsunami as she sank to her knees. This feeling wasn't something she could just put off and come back to later. Not this one.

She knelt on the hospital room floor, well and truly crying now, quietly sobbing as she hugged herself with tears streaming down her face. Her breath hitched intermittently with every inhalation of air, droplets slipping away and falling down to stain the sleeves of her jumpsuit as she held her arms tightly across her chest.

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