Chapter 218: Stuck
The meal stretched longer than any of them expected, mostly because Alyssa kept discovering new things her body could do and insisted on narrating each discovery in real time.
"I can reach the salt now," she announced, demonstrating by reaching across the entire table and dragging the small ceramic shaker toward her plate without so much as leaning. "Before I had to ask. Now I just reach!"
"Groundbreaking," Ariana said, not looking up from the folder she'd brought to the table, apparently incapable of fully disengaging from work even during a meal.
"It is groundbreaking, for me." Alyssa sprinkled an enthusiastic amount of salt over a piece of bread that did not need it, took a bite, and made a face. "Oh. That was too much."
"That tends to happen when reach outpaces judgment," Aaron said.
"I will get better at both," Alyssa said, with the confidence of someone who fully expected to master reach-based salt distribution by sundown.
Ariana finally set her folder aside, pushing it to the edge of the table, and studied Alyssa with the same critical eye she'd been giving her on and off throughout breakfast — not quite clinical anymore, but not entirely casual either, somewhere in the middle where genuine curiosity and professional habit blurred together.
"I want to ask you something, and I want an honest answer," Ariana said. "Not a polite one. Not one you think Aaron wants to hear. An honest one."
Alyssa straightened slightly in her chair, the playful energy dimming just a touch as she registered the shift in tone. "Okay."
"Are you scared? About the change. About what's still happening to you, or might happen later." Ariana folded her hands together on the table. "Growing several times your size in under an hour is not a small thing, and I'd rather you tell me now if something feels wrong than have you push through discomfort because you think that's what's expected of you."
It was, Aaron noted, possibly the most genuinely caring thing he'd heard Ariana say since he'd met her. No teasing edge. No theatrical flourish. Just a direct question asked by someone who, underneath all the chaos, seemed to actually want the real answer.
Alyssa considered it seriously, the way she considered most direct questions — turning it over fully before responding, rather than rushing to fill the silence.
"A little scared," she admitted eventually. "Not about being big. Being big is good. I like reaching things and seeing over tables." She paused, picking at the crust of her bread. "Scared about... not knowing what happens next. Will I keep growing? Will I stop being me on the inside, even if I look different on the outside? Sir Aaron said I am still me, but what if 'me' changes too much and I forget how to be me?"
The table went quiet for a moment.
Aaron felt something tighten in his chest at that — the kind of question that sounded almost too perceptive for someone who, an hour ago, had still talked like a delighted child discovering her own fingers for the first time. Maybe that was exactly why it landed the way it did. The body had changed fast. The rest of her clearly hadn't caught up yet, and some small, aware part of her had noticed the gap and didn't know what to do with it.
"You won't forget how to be you," Aaron said, before Ariana could answer first. "I've known plenty of people who changed a lot on the outside. Most of them are still exactly who they always were underneath it. Sometimes more so, actually, once they stop being scared of the outside part."
"You sound like you're speaking from experience," Ariana said, glancing at him with something unreadable in her expression.
"Maybe I am."
Alyssa looked between the two of them, then back at her own hands, flexing her fingers slowly.
"Okay," she said finally, some of the earlier brightness returning, though tempered now with something a little steadier underneath it. "I will believe you, Sir Aaron. You have not lied to me yet."
"Low bar, but I'll take the compliment."
"As for the science side of your question," Ariana said, picking the conversation back up with renewed focus, "I can't promise you won't keep growing. The data I have right now suggests the spurt has finished, at least for this exposure. But your baseline mana saturation is permanently higher than it was yesterday, which means future exposure to similarly potent sources could trigger something again. I genuinely don't know if there's a ceiling, or what that ceiling looks like if there is one."
"Is that bad?" Alyssa asked.
"It's data," Ariana said simply. "Data isn't bad or good on its own. It's just information we didn't have before. What we do with it is what matters, and I intend to do something useful with it — meaning monitoring, not meaning throwing you in more buckets without your permission, before my brother glares holes through me again."
"I wasn't glaring."
"You were absolutely glaring. I could feel it through the sunglasses."
"You're wearing the sunglasses. I'm not."
"Glares have a way of transmitting regardless of eyewear, brother, it's a documented phenomenon." Ariana waved the point away and turned back to Alyssa, her tone softening again. "For now, you're stable. Healthy, by every measurement I've taken. If anything changes — if you feel that warm sensation again, or anything else unusual — you tell Aaron immediately, and he tells me. Deal?"
"Deal!" Alyssa said, brightening fully now, the earlier seriousness folding back beneath her natural cheerfulness like it had simply been waiting for permission to recede.
The rest of the meal passed more easily after that. Alyssa experimented further with her improved reach, her improved grip, and at one point her improved ability to climb out of a chair and walk to the window — a small, reinforced porthole near the ceiling that Aaron hadn't noticed before — to look out at whatever lay beyond the facility's walls.
"It's mountains," she reported, sounding faintly disappointed, as though she'd hoped for something more dramatic. "Just mountains and rocks and a little bit of snow at the top of one."
"What were you expecting?" Aaron asked.
"I don't know. Something exciting. We are in a science place. I thought science places had more lights and things happening outside."
"Most of the exciting things happen inside, unfortunately," Ariana said. "Outside is just rocks. Always disappointing, in my experience."
Alyssa accepted this explanation with a small shrug and returned to the table, sliding back into her chair — still slightly miscalculating the distance, given her newer proportions, and catching herself against the table edge with a small huff of surprise before settling properly.
"I will get used to my size eventually," she said, mostly to herself, though clearly also as reassurance.
"You're already doing better than you were twenty minutes ago," Aaron pointed out.
"That is true." She seemed pleased by this observation, sitting up a little straighter.
Ariana checked something on her wrist — a thin device Aaron hadn't noticed before, presumably some kind of clock or schedule tracker — and made a small noise of acknowledgment.
"I have another obligation in an hour," she said, standing and gathering her folders into a neat stack. "Real work, the kind that pays for buildings like this one. You two are free to explore the lab wing, within reason, or head back to your quarters if you'd prefer. I'll send for you again once I've processed today's results properly — give the numbers time to actually mean something instead of just exciting me."
"That's a surprisingly responsible plan," Aaron said.
"I have those occasionally. Don't tell anyone, it'll ruin the brand." She paused at the door, looking back at Alyssa with something that, for just a moment, looked almost soft beneath the usual sharp edges. "Take care of yourself today, little one. New bodies take some adjusting to. Don't push yourself too hard trying to prove you've already got the hang of it."
"I will be careful!" Alyssa promised, though the promise came with enough enthusiasm that Aaron privately doubted how literally it would be honored.
Ariana left, the door hissing shut behind her with the same dramatic finality as everything else in this facility, and the room settled into a quieter, more comfortable silence.
Alyssa looked at Aaron after a moment, swinging her legs again, though with noticeably more control than she'd shown earlier.
"Sir Aaron," she said.
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For what you said earlier. About still being me, even with the changes." She picked at the edge of the table, suddenly a little more reserved than her usual chatter. "I was more scared than I wanted to say in front of your sister. But I believed you when you said it."
Aaron reached over and, with far more care than the gesture used to require given her new size, rested his hand briefly on top of her head — careful of the cap, the way he always had been, even now that it was significantly larger than it used to be.
"You're still you," he said again, simply. "Bigger, sure. Still you."
Alyssa smiled — a real one, settling into her new face in a way that suited her, the same warmth just wearing a slightly different shape now.
"Okay," she said. "I believe it properly now."
Outside, somewhere beyond the porthole and the rock and the thin line of snow at the mountain's peak, the day continued on without much concern for what had just changed inside one small metal room. But for now, that seemed like enough — a meal finished, a fear named and addressed, and a strange, transformed creature settling, slowly, into the shape of who she was going to be next.