Metamorphosis, Aer-ki Jyr [best classic literature .txt] 📗

transforming it into the ‘hard’ version and throwing it at opponents.

The combat applications of that were going to be vast, yet she wasn’t able to do much right now than get a little practice in before her body became so fatigued she’d pass out. She kept pressing it to that level, Jason had heard, rather than going easy and taking preemptive naps, and so had a few of the others, but most of them were taking a sleepfest of a vacation right now, Jason included.

Riley-038 was as well, but one day he woke up to find his skin completely albino…after which he realized he had conscious control to change the color of it. Not fast. He had to concentrate and it would take a few hours to process, but he had a wide change of color options beside the normal Human melanin pigment densities. He’d told Jason through the message board that they were communicating through since they weren’t awake long enough, or at the same times, to meet face to face, that he was trying to see if he could do patterns on different parts of his body, but he hadn’t had any success yet. He was hoping that if he tried for it now, the continual updates might add it, and many of the trailblazers were speculating that what they did between the blackouts might affect the new coding.

The bulk of it was suspected to be caused by past actions queued up over the years, but no one knew for sure what was going on and Jason didn’t know whether or not Riley and the others were correct, but he didn’t feel like pushing for anything new. What he wanted was to stabilize enough that the long sleep periods were possible afterward. His Saiyan metabolism had shown considerably lower range than had been possible before, but it wasn’t down to Human level. He was hoping it would stretch lower, and in a way him taking things easy might have been a subconscious effort to train himself to slow down more, but in truth it was just a gut feeling on his part. He needed a break, not logically or biologically, but deep down inside he recognized that this was a long time in coming and he didn’t want to delay it any further.

Jason leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling as tears burst forth. That wasn’t unusual for the past few weeks. His emotional combat blocks were all deactivated now, and it seemed some of the stuff he’d numbed his way through previously in life was being analyzed by his subconscious belatedly and he was feeling the emotional toll from it.

He just let the tears flow rather than trying to stifle them. Opening up was what he needed more of, not closing down and delaying. His instincts were blaring that much at him, and several of the others had posted similar things. Thankfully they were in the safety of Atlantis, buried in the ocean on the capitol planet in the capitol system of the Star Force empire, and arguably the safest place they could be to deal with this metamorphosis…but Paul wasn’t here, and they hadn’t had a single update from him or Cal-com since these changes began.

A pain in his back jerked him out of his lethargy, causing him to stand up and reach behind him to rub a spot around his left shoulder blade as a pinging on his monitor followed.

“What, am I going to sprout wings?” he said sarcastically as he looked at two points on his back that had spontaneously started altering their physical components. He was able to zoom in on the realtime hologram of his body…which was a little weird…and saw that two different nodules of his bioshield psionic Nakane were growing rapidly.

Which probably explained why he was suddenly so damn hungry.

Jason used his terminal to call for some food to be brought to him, and it wasn’t the first time he hadn’t the strength or courage to walk over to the nearest cafeteria. He’d puked twice during these transitions, and had been in the bathroom with the runs more times than he could remember. His body was processing a lot of material in and out, but none of it seemed too extreme. He’d figured out the puking was because he was eating the wrong mixture of foods, and it was his body’s way of telling him not to overload on protein. What he needed was a lot of trace minerals such as cobalt, gold, platinum, corovon, and others that were being added to his cells here and there, some in ways the medtechs were still scratching their heads over what they were for after crafting a ‘finder’ pill containing tiny amounts of all the elements and basic molecules they had on file, then they would track which ones would be absorbed or rejected.

Since that time and his food was altered to match, the transformation had gotten a lot smoother, but there were still spikes of pain like this one that jumped on him without warning, and right now he wanted to play hermit more than anything, and hadn’t even bothered to take a short run in 3 days.

The fact that that wasn’t bothering him was scary in and of itself, but part of him was relishing the doing nothing…which meant that internally a lot was happening, otherwise it would have registered as stagnation and caused him to itch for something to do.

Jason sat back down and just stared at the walls for a while, feeling that the best thing possible was to just become a paperweight and ride this out. A tray of foodstuffs was left outside his door a few minutes later, and he got up out of his chair and walked over to retrieve it, seeing the delivery drone hovering off down the hallway as it left.

He bent over to pick it