“The average human has 1 child per year factoid is actually just a statistical error. The average human has 0 children per year. Sex Georg, who lives in a pleasure palace and has intercourse 1,000 times each day, is an outlier and should have not been counted.”

-Gangesh Babu, 2113, Comment on the Dwindling Human Natality.

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I felt my body convulse in pain and rebuttal. The foul wrongness on my tongue urged me to evacuate, to release the contents of my stomach. Even if a single drop had barely caressed my taste buds.

“What in the actual fuck is this?” I slammed the glass on the counter, almost threatening to break it as I was unable to control my newfound strength. An ardor grew into my body as the tincture sipped its way through.

Jill shrugged. “Probably rat poison, Gloria likes it though.”

“Liking it is… an overstatement.” The seamstress said between spasms.

“Rat poison? Are you joking?”

“Eh, so-so.” The barista rotated his hand from one direction to the other in quick succession. “It is alcohol. That much I can say.”

“I...” For the first time in my life, no quip left my lips. “I’m at a loss of words.”

“Thankfully just metaphorically,” Gloria added, only to then have another sip of her beverage and cringe in pain. “It-it certainly hit a spot.”

“Yes, your fight-or-flight receptors.” Jill snickered.

I looked at the transparent liquid, even more water-looking than vodka, with a mixture of fear and interest.

“The second shot is easier,” Gloria whispered in my ears.

Maybe it was the morbid curiosity, or perhaps the fact that a single drop had already intoxicated, but I followed suit.

“Fuck!” This time I had gulped, and I felt it. I fought my body to not only vomit but just stay conscious. My vision became blurry from the repulsion and foulness.

“He’s staying up, so that’s a record?” Gloria told the barista.

“Maybe it’s because of the high-tier evolution, he said he was an Influential, right?” I didn’t have the strength to answer Jill as I writhed in pain. “That certainly goes in the board, haven’t had many people awake after tasting the Extinction Event.”

“Fuck… you…” I moaned with my head on the counter. It was cold. Cold was good.

“Jill, give the boy some water before he passes out.”

“One of water, marching!” The sound of glass impacting against the wood and moving ice cubes reverberated on my ear lobes. I snatched the cold water and down the whole glass in a single gulp. “Damn, I’d like to see you chug beers.”

“Not much of an alcohol enthusiast,” I added. Maybe it was the placebo effect, but I felt infinitely better now.

“Anyhow,” Gloria clapped, the noise ringing in my ears, “we should be getting with your classes on shapeshifting.”

“What do I have to do?” I debated calling her ‘sensei’ considering her background to make her more amicable, but I had the sensation that being called that would make her too amicable.

“As I mentioned before, shapeshifting is like a scuffed regeneration ability, to make a change you need to think about healing, but healing the damage wrongly.”

“That doesn’t sound… safe.” I hesitated.

“It isn’t.” The seamstress responded nonchalantly, then took another sip. It was followed by a near-instant squirm. “Alright, lemme show you.”

Gloria closed her eyes, her face lying dormant and immutable to the foul drink. Now that I stopped to look at her face, she was beautiful. Beauty was subjective and a very skewed concept considering the evolutionary procedure, that heavily changed a person’s physique, normally beautifying them. Her face was round and soft-looking. Unlike many humans, it wasn’t sickly white, but a lovely cream color. The red accents of blushing – induced by the alcohol – only magnified that.

Through the corners of my very blurred vision, I could see Jill smiling smugly, to which I scowled at him. There was no need for words to transmit what we thought. He easily got the message that I would punch him in the face if I didn’t stop.

When I focused back on Gloria, the changes started to be obvious. Her dirty blonde hair transformed – or rather shifted – into a more… pinkish color. It started weak, more like a filter on top of her golden hair, but then the pink overcame the natural color and became the real one. In a few seconds, Gloria’s dirty silvery blond hair had shifted into a bright yet soft salmon color.

“Whatcha think? Neat, ey?” I ignored her change in accent and focused on the tonality of the strands. I… I nervously got my hand close to her mane but stopped midway through. “Come on, go for it. Feel a cope.” The choice of words felt as if I had been slapped right in the face, and feeling my indecision, one of Gloria’s many hands grabbed mine and led it to her head.

Soft. That was my first thought.

If I hadn’t realized I was intoxicated by now, that had been the definitive evidence. I patted her hair, the sea of undulating strands feeling alien against my hand. My logical mind tried to ponder how it was possible to change into this specific color of hair. I knew such hues were possible, flamingos existed. But I also knew their chemical composition and diet were different from humans. Was it that simple to change pigmentation?

“How?” All those doubt-laden thoughts summarize in a very drunken word.

Perhaps Gloria understood the confusion of my voice because her answer was more complex than I expected. “There are many ways really, this isn’t the most natural one. We could say I cheat. As you can see,” she floundered her nails in front of me, “I like using metals. Whilst toying with a few ones, I found that Bismuth had a really nice pink. And I only need like a few milligrams to get all my body hair pink, far from a toxic level. Not that bismuth is that toxic.”

Her words made sense to me, bismuth took many colors, pink – in fact – being one of them. But that wasn’t what piqued my interest. It was her cadence and knowledge. Her childish façade and cheerfulness had made the wrong first impression, but she was a human with a considerable life under her belt, and wisdom to back it up. There weren’t uneducated humans. Even the craziest one could be more knowledgeable in more fields than me.

“Will you stop patting me?” Gloria said, breaking my trance. “Not that I dislike it, but we have better things to do. The only one who can afford to waste their hands is me.”

It took me a few blinks to react. “Sorry!” I meant it with every fiber of my body.

“No problem whatsoever!” She smiled satisfied. “I am proud of my hair, after all! Anyway, has this helped you?”

“I… think so?” Shapeshift was complex, even more so than I had initially imagined, but an example did miracles to straighten my mind. “Though I need more help.”

“My, my?” Gloria hid her mouth behind a hand. “Do you need to experience my body more?”

“I meant alcohol.” Refusing to elaborate, I took another sip at my glass.

It hit with more strength than before, but I could take it. I wasn’t a connoisseur of alcoholic beverages, but I wasn’t weak to them nor did I waver at drinking them. Especially now that my body was superior to most. An enhanced lifeform.

Regeneration. The word made sense in my mind. I needed flawed healing. If Gloria could grow two extra pairs of arms and coat her nails in metal with it, then I could technically do more. But it was clear that I wasn’t on that level yet. Instead, I decided that the best course of action was to induce real flawed healing.

The human body was an incredibly complex machine, but it did mess up. A lot, in fact.

Cancer was the pure representation of it, even if it had only existed in textbooks for centuries now. But there were many other shades of flawed healing, some that may be considered beneficial, or at the very minimum, appealing.

Taking note of Gloria’s basic display of shapeshifting, I dyed my hair.

But I didn’t have a deposit of metals in my body like her, nor did I know how to create pigments, not consciously. So I opted for the other path.

No color at all.

Black was the absence of color in nature. The deep nothingness in the void. The black hole of radiation of perfect blacks. But when dealing with living organisms, the roles switched. The absence of color was its antithesis in nature, the presence of all colors.

White.

Like Gloria had said, I had to think about healing myself in the wrong ways. So maybe my hair got burned and I wanted to rebuild it, only that I modified the natural color, not letting be in its default state. Like the decolorization of hair from stress, I could feel an itch in my head as the process took place.

I had no mirror whatsoever, but I knew I had succeeded.

The warped healing was limited to my hair only, but the rest of my body tried to restore back to its default state, my vision unblurring in consequence. I looked at the two observers. Gloria’s eyes were wide open with bewilderment and unbridled joy. Jill, on the other hand, squinted at me and sighed.

“Bad play, mate. Bad play.” His tone was almost… pitying?

“Oh. My. Goodness!” The seamstress's screeches were so loud that they threatened to pop my earlobes. She grabbed my shoulders and arms with her four extremities, only to then start thrashing me around. “Ichiro-kun! Ichiro-kun!” Gloria chanted frenetically.

“W-whaaat?” She may look feeble, but her grip was deadly. And that was a single instance of it. My body rocked back and forth with such violence that I was incapable of forming a single word. I looked at Jill with pleading eyes.

“You’ve just unknowingly completed the cosplay.” The man shrugged and forsake me, leaving me alone and deciding to clean the counter.

“Ichiro-kun! Ichiro-kun!” Gloria’s chants were addled in fanatism, her mouth panting if she wasn’t screaming.

I thought evolution had made me stronger, but I could barely move myself, let alone free myself from the grip. That’s when I noticed that the healing was a bit superficial. And that I had a bit too much alcohol.

Like a responsible student, I had never had too much alcohol or gone partying. Though more than a role model, it was because I lacked interest in such affairs. Yet now I felt a tinge of the horror stories.

Let us say that, projectile vomiting isn’t an exaggeration.

I had a single meal the whole day, yet it left my body with ease as Gloria continued swaying me, still unaware of the calamity she had unleashed. Everything moved in slow motion. One moment I was far from her, the next I was next to her face. And with a mouth full of vomit.

Mount Vesuvius sounded like a joke when I was over.