Chapter 7

I got up bright and early on Monday, knowing it would be another day of school but I had to get through it before I could get back to my evil plans. I was keen to get started as soon as possible to get it all over with. Once I had dried my hair and feathers, I put on the day's uniform, selecting a skirt instead of trousers. I was getting more comfortable wearing these girl clothes. the openness of them had been a little startling at first but now I was more used to it they didn't bother me so much. Of course I might feel differently when the weather began to turn colder.

I had a nice breakfast and caught my usual ride in with Dad. Given my early, start we were into school much earlier than normal, so when I got to the class room I was the first there. I sat waiting for the day to get started. The new girl Vicky was one of the first to get in after me. She smiled at me pleasantly but made no move to come and speak to me, perhaps having taken my brush off as my final word on things.

Pretty soon the room began to fill up and eventually my arch nemesis, Tara, showed up. I did my best to ignore her, which wasn't too hard, since she was more interested in harassing Vicky. She said a variety of unsavoury comments and began prodding the poor girl, making fun of her completely covered skin, pulling at her extra long sleeves and trying to get hold of her gloves.

This seemed to upset Vicky more than the verbal abuse. Tara, scenting blood, intensified her attack, but was stopped by the arrival of Mr Roberts. Vicky looked relieved and readjusted her clothing again to make sure her arms and legs were covered. She caught me looking, and self consciously put her hands down and pretended not to notice.

When we got up to leave for our first lesson, Tara tripped poor Vicky and kept hold of her sleeve when she was doing it. There was a ripping noise and the clothing tore as Vicky fell to the floor. Everyone stood stock still amazed at what was revealed. Vicky had no arms! Instead, there were octopus-like tentacles complete with suckers in their place. Her legs flailed around, bending at odd angles now she was knocked down, revealing them to be tentacles, too. It seemed she had no normal limbs at all.

Tara stared at the poor girl on the floor, trying frantically to pull herself back up and laughed uproariously, "Look at that freak!" she giggled. "She's a slimy tentacled beast!"

Many people stood laughing or looking disgusted, while poor Vicky flailed around with tears running down her cheeks. I decided to step in to help her. I pushed my way past those gawking and offered my hand to help her up.

"Oh, the freak is going to get the help of the pervert. What a surprise!" said Tara.

My newly decided Super Villain status making me brave, (Well, I had a lair, so it was surely enough to call myself a super villain). I rounded on Tara, baring my teeth and jumping forward with a growling sound. She let out a high pitched expletive of surprise and fear, and stumbled back, tripping over one of her own friends, nearly falling down herself. Turning bright red with anger, she stormed off.

I turned back to Vicky and offered her my hand again. She tentatively reached out with her tentacles, which had fallen out of her glove revealing she had a hand of sorts, though it seemed to be mostly on one of the tentacles but lacking one finger, the other tentacle performing that function. Her palm and the pads of her digits as well as the underside of her arm were covered in suckers. Apart from that, her tentacles looked very much like normal arms bent into impossible ways. They were flesh coloured, had pores and a fine layer of hair just like a normal girls arms. When she reached for me and her tentacles wrapped around my arm, I did my best not to flinch.

When she touched me though I found her flesh was warm and felt very much like a normal persons touch. The suckers were a bit odd gripping me, but she didn't feel slimy or cold as I had feared. In fact, they sort of tickled. Once she had a good grip, she hauled herself back to her "feet". Now that I looked more closely I could see in the way she moved hints that she lacked a skeletal system in her legs. Her movements were fluid and though she bent her "legs", she tended to curve her legs in a very slightly anatomically impossible manner as she moved. As she got her balance back and readjusted her damaged clothing, slotting her hand and extra tentacle into her glove, she re-established the illusion that she just had normal arms and legs.

"Are you OK? You took quite a tumble," I asked her.

"Yeah, not too bad. Just a little bumped and bruised." She brushed her clothes down. "Thanks for helping me up. My name's Vicky Miller."

"I'm Lexi. Lexi Jones," I said giving her a smile. By silent consent we began walking to our next lesson together, talking.

"Most people don't want to touch my arms. It freaks them out."

"Well, I must admit they did give me pause. Just gut reaction I guess, but they just feel like normal skin more or less."

"They're made up of loads of muscle and nerve tissue, but rather than being adapted for aquatics, they are just normal, more or less a little more elastic than they should be." She flexed her arm a little.

"You don't seem to have any bones, though. How can you act like you do?"

"It took a while to figure that out. Using my hand was the hardest part. Apparently Octopuses in the wild effectively form joints with opposing muscle contractions, anyway, in order to move stuff with their arms. So that was almost automatic, but to get that sort of fine control took time. I still more or less just wrap my hand around a pen to use it, and end up looking like a small kid with a crayon."

"So, can you bend your arm any way you want?" anyway

"Kind of." She brushed a stray hair out of her face, allowing me to see her tentacles moving through the torn sleeve. "I don't really have complete control over them it's more like I tell them to do something and they respond on their own."

"So that you set them a goal, and they move to fit it?"

"More or less. I think I have a bit more direct control than an octopus does because some of my original human wiring is still there, but mostly it's like that."

"Cool, so do you have two tentacles with your legs as well?"

"They're called arms, not tentacles, like on an octopus, and yeah I have 8 arms, two where each normal limb would be."

"Do you have feet then?"

"a little bit like my hands. I have a bud at the end with some toes and the like, though they sort of stick straight out. I don't have an ankle as such."

"It must have been weird to change like that. I just got some little wings as my extra thing."

"Wings? Cool. Can you fly?"

"No they're too little." I turned around to show her the outline under my shirt, "See? They are only small."

"That's annoying. I guess it could have been worse. If they were big and useless, they would be in the way all the time."

"Yeah, there is that."

"When I was changing it was the worst. I absorbed all the bones first so I was basically a torso with floppy limbs that I couldn't really move for a few days, while all the additional muscles and nerves grew. Then it took a load of time to learn how to walk again. I spent a few months scuttling about on the floor."

"You move mostly like a normal person now. I never would have guessed if that meanie Tara hadn't attacked you."

"What is her problem anyway? She seems to be a bit anti-MORFS but she is a survivor herself. Then she seems a bit anti-hybrid, but she has them in her little gang, I don't get it."

"She was never this mean when I was Alex, before I changed into a girl. She would throw the odd snide comment but nothing more than that."

"You used to be a boy?"

"Yeah," I said, a little embarrassed. I wondered if I should have told her, and if it would ruin the rapport we had been building up.

"One of my cousins on my mother's side, the more tolerant half of my family, got that same gender switch thing. She was pretty shocked by it, but got over it eventually. I think she even decided she preferred being a girl."

I shrugged, "It's not been so bad, apart from the extra attention from Tara. I got bullied a fair amount before, but nothing so constant and malicious. It wasn't until the day you arrived that I fought back and got some measure of peace. I had hoped I would do better as a girl, since they always seemed to have lots of friends, especially the pretty ones. It hasn't worked out so far, though."

"Oh I don't know," said Vicky with a smile, "I think you are well on your way to making a friend, Lexi."

I smiled back, thinking Vicky would make a good friend. Not only was she a nice person, but we shared a common enemy. When we arrived at our class we sat together, but weren't able to talk much, as the teacher was quite strict. So we made do with the odd glance and whispered comment. Tara was looking daggers at the two of us, and even got into trouble a few times for not paying attention.

Usually I sat on my own at the back, so it was a new experience to be sitting with someone else. I had less desk space than normal, however other than that, there didn't seem to be any disadvantages. I watched Vicky writing out her notes and saw she did have some trouble with pens. She wrapped her hand around the pen and scrawled like a small child would. Her more flexible arms meant she had more fine control than I would have thought, but she still had some trouble making her handwriting neat. As she wrote, she got this intense look on her face and bit her lip. It made her look quite cute, at least to my eyes. I wasn't sure she would appreciate that thought, so I went back to my work. I didn't want to loose my first friend before I'd even really cemented the friendship.

After the lesson it was time for PE where I was on my own, though I now understood why Vicky couldn't do it. With her strange limbs she would have difficulty with a lot of the sorts of things they made us do in PE. I did wonder if Miss Adams would have made her join in if she found out what her real reason for not coming to PE was. I guess Vicky wasn't strictly lying. Having no human arms and legs was kind of a medical condition.

After what felt like a few hours of running around later PE was over and I was hungry. First, I needed a nice hot shower. Tara decided that confronting me when I was soaking wet and clad only in a towel was the best time to try intimidating me some more. She was a little annoyed that I was more interested in drying my hair.

"You and your little freak lover can take a hike! We don't want your kind round here!" Tara spat. When I didn't respond and turned my back on her to dry my wings she got quite hopping mad. "Look at me when I'm talking to you!"

"Oh, were you talking to me?" I asked with feigned innocence.

Tara tried to slap me, but I ducked out the way, causing her to miss me entirely.

"Why is it you are so mean to me and Vicky? What did we ever do to you?" I asked, not really expecting an answer.

She stared at me for a few seconds, saying nothing, then all of a sudden turned and ran off. She seemed to have tears in her eyes, though why, I had no idea. It all seemed rather odd, and having her run away with tears in her eyes further painted me as some sort of nasty bully, so I got quite a few unpleasant looks from Tara's friends. Still, I had done nothing wrong. Besides, super villains don't care what other people think of them. I dressed and headed over to lunch.

When I arrived at the lunch hall Vicky was waiting for me at the door. I noticed she had repaired the damage to her sleeve and now you would be hard pressed to spot that her limbs were not normal. She waved to me and we walked in together to get lunch. After picking out a table that was not too busy, we sat eating our lunch and chatting.

"Tara was acting a bit odd earlier," I said.

"How could you tell?" Vicky said with a wicked glint in her eyes.

"He he. Well, she tried to have a go at me, but when I asked her why she was always so mean to you and me she ran off crying."

"Wow! That is odd. Did you scare her with your teeth or something?"

"I don't think so."

"Your teeth are a bit scary. It's a bit odd to watch you eat with those things. It's like watching an industrial shredder tear something to bits."

I covered my mouth self consciously, "It's not my fault they're like that!"

"I know. I wish I had scary teeth like that."

"Why?"

"Then I could bite Tara and scare her off."

"I'd never bite her. Someone so bitter is bound to taste nasty." At that, Vicky burst into gales of laughter, so much so that several people at near by tables gave us odd looks.

We finished our lunch and headed over to the library. Vicky didn't see why I wanted to go there till I explained it was a sort of Tara free zone. After that she was keen to get there, and even took my hand in hers, and began pulling me along with her. For someone with no legs in the conventional sense she could really move when she wanted to. Once we were safely ensconced in a quiet corner of the reference section, I decided now was the time to introduce my new friend to my robotic friend Kittybot. I had been extra careful of late making sure my robotic feline companion was hidden but in the library I felt safe enough to take her out for a look around.

"This is Kittybot. I built her myself," I placed my artificial cat gently on the table.

"Wow, she's so shiny! What do the lights mean?"

"I'm not sure. She makes them up herself. She has her own neural network and self configuring hardware, so she does what she wants."

"So, is she alive then?"

"Well, depends what you mean. She can react to her environment, and can certainly seem alive. But then it's surprisingly easy to make something seem alive just with a small amount of programming. You can make simple facsimiles of insects with a few lines of code and a light sensor. I tend to invest her with a personality even, if she hasn't got one."

"Cool. Can I pet her?"

"Sure, go ahead. She has sensors on her skin so she can feel it, so just be gentle."

Vicky reached out one of her hands and gently stroked Kittybot. After being a little unsure of this stranger, Kittybot warmed up to her now that she was getting stroked.

"She's amazing, Lexi. You're really smart to make something like that." Vicky grinned at me as she stroked Kittybot behind her ears.

Kittybot made what I thought of as her purring display for a while, sweeping her tail about as she sat on the table in front of Vicky. Eventually she seemed to tire of this and wandered over to me and prodded my hand with one of her paws. I held out my hand and she clambered up to sit on my shoulder.

"How'd she do that?" asked a gobsmacked Vicky.

"Oh. I have some magnetic powers. I can make magnetic fields. So since Kittybot is metal, I can make her stick to me."

"Neat! I can make illusions, but only for a short while."

She got the same intense look of concentration on her face she got when writing, then gestured at the table top. A kitten appeared out of thin air and meowed at me for a bit before exploding into pink sparkles.

"It's not much, but at least I got something else other than crazy arms."

"I think it's a funky gift. You can make things with your mind. My power was a pain when I first changed. It kept turning on at random and I would get covered in spoons."

"Spoons?"

"Well, that or any other small metal object. Cutlery has been the most common so far." I told her about Tara's mean trick.

"With me, the biggest problem was learning to walk and use my hands again."

"Oh yeah here I am moaning about getting a few forks stuck to my bum, and you had to learn everything from scratch again. I'm sorry, that was insensitive of me."

"Hey no problem. It was tough. My extended family had been fairly anti-Morfs. While not purists as such, they had leanings. My parents were not actively that way but sort of went along with it, as it was what everyone else in the family believed. When I changed, they had a revelation of sorts, that I was still me, and still their daughter, and they still loved me very much. Most of the rest of the family didn't take things so well and we were forced to move to escape the abuse. I spent a few months learning to move around like I did before, as well as learning to hide and fit in. When I was sure I could pass as normal, I started here. To be honest, I've been getting tired of hiding so much, and it's nice to be talking to someone else who has been through the same sorts of things as me. I have to say though, the first few days I was really wondering what sort of place I was joining. I was more than a little afraid of you."