Chapter 219: Trying
The Wing Question
They didn't go back to the quarters right away.
Alyssa wanted to explore, and Aaron — lacking anywhere better to be and mildly curious himself about what a place like Oscar's House of Science kept tucked into its hallways — agreed, on the condition that she stay close and not touch anything that looked like it might explode, dissolve, or bite.
"Everything here looks like it might do one of those three things," Alyssa pointed out, not unreasonably, as they walked.
"Then use your best judgment."
"My judgment says touch the shiny one."
"Don't touch the shiny one."
She didn't touch the shiny one, mostly because Aaron physically redirected her hand at the last second, but she gave it a long, lingering look of betrayal as they passed by.
The lab wing turned out to be larger than Aaron had estimated from the outside — a honeycomb of sealed rooms branching off the main corridor, each one presumably containing its own version of barely-contained chaos. Most of the doors were locked behind fingerprint scanners identical to the one outside his quarters, which meant most of what lay behind them stayed firmly a mystery. A few doors stood open, staffed by researchers in the same style of white lab gown Ariana wore, none of whom paid Aaron or Alyssa more than a passing, professionally disinterested glance.
That, more than anything, told him something about how this place operated. Strange sights were apparently routine enough here that a sunglasses-wearing man walking beside a golden-capped mushroom girl didn't even register as worth a second look.
"They are not curious about us," Alyssa observed, echoing his exact thought a moment after he'd had it. "That is strange. People are usually curious about me."
"I think curiosity gets trained out of people who work in a place like this," Aaron said. "Probably a survival skill. If you got curious about every weird thing walking these halls, you'd never get any actual work done."
"That sounds sad."
"Probably is."
They circled back toward the quarters eventually, mostly because Alyssa's new body, despite its improvements, still tired faster than she expected, and she admitted as much with a small, embarrassed mumble that Aaron pretended not to notice too closely, letting her keep whatever dignity she could salvage from the moment.
Back in the room, she curled up — still capable of curling, even at her new size, though the position required considerably more room than it used to — on a section of the bed, and was asleep within minutes, her breathing settling into the deep, even rhythm of someone whose body had spent the morning doing something genuinely exhausting, regardless of how delighted she'd been about the process.
Aaron sat at the small table near the window, the porthole offering the same uninspired view of rock and distant snow that Alyssa had reported on earlier, and let himself actually think for the first time since waking up.
Layered. Two inheritances stacked on top of each other.
Ariana's words from the morning kept circling back, refusing to settle into anything comfortable. He'd known, in the vague way you know something without having fully examined it, that he wasn't simply human anymore. The eyes had told him that. The wings folded against his back had told him that, more insistently with every week that passed. But hybrid implied something more deliberate, or at least more complicated, than a single straightforward shift from one thing into another.
He thought about Alyssa, asleep on the bed behind him, transformed within the space of an hour by nothing more than a night spent in the wrong water. If something that simple could rewrite a creature's entire physical form that quickly, what exactly was sitting dormant in his own blood, waiting for the right trigger to wake it up the rest of the way?
He didn't have an answer. He wasn't sure Ariana had one either, not yet, though she clearly intended to find it with or without his full cooperation.
The telephone rang.
Aaron answered before it could wake Alyssa, keeping his voice low. "Yeah."
"Brother." Ariana's voice, though quieter than her usual register, still carried that particular note of I have found something that Aaron was beginning to recognize as a permanent fixture of conversations with her. "I need you back in the lab. Just you, this time — let the mushroom girl rest."
"What is it?"
"I went back through your bloodwork while my actual obligations were happening, because apparently I cannot focus on anything else when I have an active mystery sitting in front of me." A pause, papers shuffling faintly in the background. "I cross-referenced the layered pattern in your eyes against our archive. Found a partial match."
Aaron's grip on the receiver tightened slightly. "Partial."
"Partial," she confirmed. "Enough to narrow things down. Not enough to give you a full answer yet, which is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, so you understand my urgency here."
"I'll come."
"Good. And Aaron—" she hesitated, which was unusual enough on its own that he waited, "—bring the sunglasses. Not because you need them here. Because I think you're going to want something to hide behind when I tell you what I found."
The line went dead before he could ask anything further.
Aaron sat with the receiver still in his hand for a moment, the dial tone humming faintly, and looked back at Alyssa — still deeply asleep, one arm flung over her face, completely unbothered by anything happening beyond the boundaries of her own dreams.
He set the receiver down gently, found a spare blanket in the closet, and draped it over her before heading for the door. Whatever Ariana had found, it could wait the extra ten minutes it would take for him to make sure his sleeping companion wasn't going to wake up cold and alone in an unfamiliar room.
He locked the door behind him, the same way he had the bathroom the night before, and made his way back through the maze of identical metal corridors toward the lab.
Ariana was waiting when the hatch hissed open, but this time she wasn't seated casually on the operating table or flipping idly through a folder with theatrical enthusiasm. She stood near the far wall, in front of a wide screen Aaron hadn't noticed during his first visit, arms crossed, sunglasses still in place but her posture carrying none of its usual loose confidence.
(AN: I don't know what's going on with the story anymore, but hey! How you doing readers?)
"That bad?" Aaron asked, stepping fully into the room as the door slammed shut behind him.
"Not bad. Just—" she searched for the word, which was itself unusual for her, "—significant. Sit."
He sat, on the same cold metal chair as before, and waited.
Ariana tapped a panel beside the screen, and an image flickered to life — a diagram, intricate and layered, depicting what looked like two overlapping genetic or magical structures, rendered in different colors that bled into each other at the edges rather than staying neatly separated.
"This," she said, gesturing at the left structure, rendered in a deep blue, "is a documented bloodline pattern. Old. Rare. Associated with a race that mostly kept to themselves in records I have access to, which isn't saying much since most records about them are incomplete to begin with."
"And the other one?"
She gestured at the second structure, rendered in gold, woven through and around the first in a pattern that looked less like two separate things and more like they'd been deliberately fused.
"That one I don't have a clean match for. It's similar to something in our demonification archive, but not identical. Close enough that I'm confident it belongs to that broader category. Not close enough that I can tell you exactly which branch."
Aaron stared at the overlapping shapes on the screen, the blue and gold bleeding into each other in a pattern that, now that he was looking at it directly, bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the shape of his own eyes.
"So I'm not one thing," he said slowly. "I'm two things, wearing one body."
"More or less." Ariana turned to look at him fully. "Which raises a question I don't have a comfortable answer to yet, brother. Whether these two things arrived in your blood at the same time, through the same event. Or whether one came first, and the second is something that's still arriving."
Aaron felt something cold settle low in his chest, the kind of cold that didn't have anything to do with the room's chilled, metallic air.
"Arriving," he repeated. "You mean there's more coming."
"I mean," Ariana said carefully, "that based on how your physical changes have been accelerating — the wings, the bone density, the blood composition — I think you might still be in the early stages of becoming whatever you're going to fully become. And I have no idea what that endpoint looks like, because I've never seen a hybrid pattern arranged quite like yours."
The screen hummed quietly between them, the blue and gold patterns pulsing faintly in some rhythm that Aaron couldn't quite identify, like something breathing slowly beneath glass.
"Find out," Aaron said finally, his voice steadier than he felt. "Whatever it takes. I want to know what I'm turning into before I'm turned into it without warning."
Ariana studied him for a long moment, and for once, there was no teasing behind her expression. Just the quiet, focused intensity of someone who had just been handed exactly the kind of problem she'd spent her whole career hoping to find.
"Then let's get to work, brother," she said. "We have a lot of testing left to do."