Mori snapped awake in an instant, throwing her head forward and sitting up. She took a moment to recollect the meeting with the gods, shaking off any lingering drowsiness. She was able to clear her mind after a few minutes, and decided to observe her surroundings. The room was barren, with the only thing furnishing the stone brick room being a stick with a strange luminous crystal on the end and two beds, one of them occupied by her and the other taken by Fara.

Mori smiled as she looked at Fara, staring at the woman as she slept quietly. She moved to stand, but something felt off to her. It was like her armor, her second skin, was slipping around her bones. She shivered at the image in her mind and reached out to integrate the armor with her body. In an instant, the armor shifted. The smooth metal surface, adorned with carvings and unmarred by scratches, writhed and roiled. Strands of green metal wound around together, becoming yarn-like threads that wrapped around each other in even larger threads. The metal flowed like a horde of alien snakes, forming a shell of armor around her.

Nothing was spared. Her arms and legs, though fine works of mechanical and runical work they were, turned into simple armor with swirling patterns of steel, adamantite, and runic paint. Her chestplate, hiding the dynamos within, followed the example set by her limb armor. Runic paint, steel, clockstell, and adamantite all swirled and coalesced into strands that gathered together into writing armor. Even her helmet writhed, deforming from its crown-like shape and turning into something of a fusion of a knight’s helmet, a crown, and a skull. Though, there were no runes in her helmet, which left her helmet only green.

She stepped back as the process happened, and she was suddenly left in a suit of armor that resembled her soul uncomfortably well. The strands were exactly like the strands she saw in her soul so long ago, with larger strands wrapping around her body and containing smaller strands in loops and patterns that she could hardly describe.

What truly confused her, however, was the fact that the strands were constantly moving. They flowed like ocean currents drowned in a thousand different colors, going around and around. Before long, however, her armor had diluted itself with every drop of runic paint and every drop of errant mana, leaving the green color to come out victorious but letting a rainbow luster shine through when the light hit the armor just right. She tried to take a large portion of mana from the air and make it hers, but it yielded as soon as it touched her armor. The armor lit up with mana, flowing even faster than it was previously.

It was then that a sharp pain struck her. It did not come from a single part of herself, but from everywhere. It was her soul, but it was also her body. Her body and soul overlapped and the pain wracked both, driving her to her knees. Something in her switched, and her sight was cut off. In its place, she saw an ocean of blue, with other colors taking up places like oil spills, with balls of yarn, glowing red, around her. There was one exactly where she thought she saw Fara a moment before. There were others all around her, a large cluster a ways away, above her where she stood by a dozen feet. There were a few beneath her and even another one at the same level as she was. The thing that they all shared was the soup of red stuff permeating them. In stark contrast to the generally docile balls of red, she was a flurry of activity. Her ball was much less a ball and more of a skeleton, with the threads expanding outwards into her armor and becoming the armor.

She smacked the part of her that changed her sight back into its original place and her vision returned to normal, but the pain still continued. Her armor roiled and bits of it were even thrown from the whole, soon merging back into the whole after it violently rolled along the ground to return.

After many agonizing minutes, she felt the pain recede, flowing away from her perception. She breathed a sigh of relief and daintily stood, fearful of a resurgence of the pain. As if to match her fear, the metal of the armor ceased flowing for a moment. She paused, staring at the armor with a critical eye. In turn, the armor began moving once more, this time in short bursts followed by lulls. Staring at it for a while more, a certain sentence from Kel’rk’ath replayed in her mind, ‘you would blur the lines between body and soul.’ he said. She suddenly realized why her armor looked so much like a soul. It was because her body was a soul given physical form. Or she was a set of armor that took whatever form souls did.

She ignored it for the moment, instead stumbling over to Fara. It was as if her body was numb and hyper-sensitive all at once, which did not help her weak attempts to walk. She had almost reached the bed when something latched onto her arm and nearly toppled her over. She looked down and saw her slime, Unio, clinging to her, spreading as if trying to find a place to get into her armor.

Mori chuckled, patting the slime and trying to Connect with him. Instead of the silent snapping of the psychic Connection, a thin tendril appeared in the air between them, rooting itself between her skull and Unio’s amorphous mass. She looked at the strand with confusion for a few moments, reaching a tentative hand out to it and plucking it. A low thrumming came from her Connection with Unio, and she retracted her hand from the odd thing.

She knew it was sentient energy, the thing that proved a being could feel complex emotions, and that it was how she actually used psychic power. She paused. She did not know that. In fact, she never even conceived that. She knew that Kel’rk’ath gave her the knowledge, though. She paused again. She finally understood what had happened. Kel’rk’ath gave her knowledge, taking it upon himself to pick what she would get. She trusted him, so she did not fight him on that point, and she was rewarded richly.

She rooted around her mind for whatever he gave her the foreign knowledge, and finally found it after a few moments. It was like a little piece of sentient energy, which she decided to relabel as S. energy for her own sake, that was embedded deep within her soul. It was the source of the knowledge, but she found a roadblock. She wanted to make the little nugget of S. energy part of her, to truly ingest the knowledge embedded within it, but she was clueless as to how. The best she could do for the time being was to let it radiate random tidbits of knowledge.

With everything within her sorted out, she turned her attention to Fara. She was only a few feet from her bed, so she sat down and stroked the woman’s hair as she slept. She recalled her adventures with her, how everything had gone previously. She wondered, for a moment, why Fara decided to befriend Mori so quickly. In fact, she wondered why Molly was so candid about welcoming her into her home. As far as Fara went, she followed along with Molly since she trusted her mother, but that left Mori pondering why Molly was so happy to host her. Fara’s friendliness could have been explained with her weird sixth sense for probability, courtesy of the random laws of the universe creating her soul that way, but her mother could not have had a similar soul. That was what Mori thought, but she had no way of ever finding out unless she met Molly once more, which would be for a long while yet.

Mori noticed, as she stroked Fara’s hair, that her armor, and therefore soul stuff, was molding itself to coddle her face and head, much to Mori’s both amusement and delight. She did not want Fara to wake up to a cold hand stroking her head with stiff movements, though it was likely that exact desire that led her soul to make such changes automatically.

It was then that another thought came to her-- which reminded her to make a list to keep track of everything she had noted, thought up, or discovered in the previous twenty minutes. If her unconscious desires could be accommodated by her body, she wondered if her conscious desires could receive the same treatment.

She quickly thought of having six fingers, simply wanting to feel what it felt like for a while, and was surprised to see her body morph in the blink of an eye to cater to her whim. She tilted her head and examined the new digit. It was a second thumb on her right hand, her free hand unoccupied with stroking Fara’s head. The process was far too… easy. She could already imagine a scenario where she would want to lash out at an annoying person and her soul eagerly responding despite her more rational desires wanting nothing of the sort.

She shrugged to herself, willing her hand back to its natural configuration and going back to stroking Fara’s head, feeling the primitive emotions flow through her Connection with Unio. She simply stayed there, basking in the simplicity of being allowed to wait.

Her enjoyable position could not last forever, however, as Fara began to stir a few minutes after Mori sat down. Her eyes opened dreamily, staring up at her for a moment before she squinted in confusion, “Mori?” she asked.

“Yeah?” Mori replied, her voice far smoother and far less dead than it had been before. 

Fara rubbed her eyes once more, opening them up wide and looking at her armor, as gnarled as it appeared, up and down, for a long moment, “What happened!?” she cried, scrambling up and tracing a hand over Mori’s armor, “It’s almost like the metal turned into snakes!”

Mori chuckled, “It definitely felt like that,” she remarked, “So, how do you feel?”

Fara took a moment from her frantic examination of Mori’s body to examine herself over. Fara had not changed much, gaining a few inches and her silver irises being replaced by a golden pair. Apart from her eyes, Fara retained her dark, sunkissed skin, her blonde hair, and her soft facial features. Fara, however, found much more changed than Mori did, “Oh… wow, everything feels so clear…” she remarked, “I can see everything… I can even see the little dust bits that’ve gotten on you… Also, why is your armor pulsing?” she asked, poking at the metal as it followed Mori’s content emotions.

“That’s-” the door at the far end of the room suddenly opened and VII walked into the room, smiling happily, “Hey, VII,” Mori greeted, “How do I look?”

VII paused, her smile suddenly weak, as she studied Mori’s new armor, “Well… it’s certainly distinctive… Okay, what happened?” she asked, shutting the door and walking over to Mori’s now-unoccupied bed, “How did your adamantite armor become… that?”

Mori rolled her eye-flames, “‘That,’ as you say, is my soul taking a physical form while at the same time occupying my armor, like a wraith occupying a building, a curse occupying an artifact, or a living armor inhabiting a set of armor, though none are known to be able to bring their souls into the physical plane, away from the alternate plane where most believe that the soul resides,” she recited from memory. She paused, “Oh yeah, I also have a bit of knowledge that Kel’rk’ath gave me- Oh, the censor thing is gone!”

VII stared at Mori for a few, painful moments before turning to Fara, “Please tell me you’re not as weird…”

Fara smiled brilliantly, “I can feel the future, and I am already coming up with a design for a new and improved warcasket ripoff,” she said happily.

VII shook her head, “Gods help us,” she grumbled, “Please, just go over this with me. Also, elevator pitch, not a full length novel.”