The assembled ladies then began to fall into their own individual interests, each one of them trying their best to avoid the bathroom for fear of being reminded of its recent usage as a body disposal centre.

  Est and Purity snuggled up with one another on the edge of the bed, watching now a television programme about various trivia tidbits - questions of glamorous nature about the UNAC, and of a notably more disreputable aspect about the ERFS and the PADE. Purity began to trounce Esthrielle in short time, sarcastically spouting off propagandized fun facts with practiced, indoctrinated repetition; Esthrielle, however, often had the 'wrong' answer even about the ERFS questions. She began to grow frustrated after some time... though, once Purity began to kiss her cheek for every question she got wrong rather than right, her mood swung right back up.

  Lulu and Zofi were also snuggled up in their own right, Lulu protectively gathering Zofia close to herself as they laid near the headboard. Soft whispers were exchanged, gentle and affectionate, each of them borne from Lulu's lips to Zofi's heart; the Pole was too dazed by the adoration laid upon her to even think of responding. Lulu didn't mind, of course... if anything, this made it easier to keep her in a little love-puddle.

  Esper James herself was... well, she had decided to drop to the floor and do some push-ups.

  She knew it was silly. Purity had said as much once she began, and all three Waywards had held their tongues but cast a strange gaze EJ's way. Push-ups? She'd need to do a hundred thousand or more for there to be any notable effect; to change the body of a second-living in meaningful ways, morticians and their steely knives were necessary. However, EJ wasn't exactly doing it to get 'stronger' or anything of the sort.

  No, she had decided to drop down and put herself through this mostly-meaningless labour for a different sort of strength. If she was going to train with Khetnep's people in less than a week, and go off to do... well, 'physical labour', she needed to remind herself what it felt like to strain and stress her muscles. Or, at least, so she thought - better safe than sorry, right?

  Right. And so, the push-ups were less to build muscle, and more to build mental fortitude. Up and down, up and down, up and down... Rising and falling, ghoulish musculature flexing with every motion, the actions each almost thoughtlessly easy for her; near the one hundredth push-up was when the slightest ghost of a burn began to accrue within her biceps. By two hundred, it had solidified into the same sort of sensation as when she was back in gym class, long before her death - and even this was little more than mere annoyance to her.

  Purity and Est had finished their trivia show, and were now discussing Christmas gift ideas and plans. Zofia and Lucretia had slipped into the bathroom for an impromptu makeup lesson, at Zofi's behest - though, honestly, Esper James expected her to exit with lipstick applied everywhere but her lips. And still, the physical strain continued. 'Strain', anyways.

  Eventually, the relative silence was broken; Est's voice came thru the humid, hazy air with the piercing power of a clarion call, putting the floor-bound ghoul to pause.

  "Hey, EJ. You're... I mean. Look, I understand the drive to make sure you're ready for physical activity... you've been a desk-jockey for, what, longer than I've even been alive? Haha... but, uhm." Esthrielle trailed off, gesturing weakly to nothing in particular as though there lay her point. She pushed to a stand and let loose a sigh, eyes shutting gently as she made to approach her blonde babe.

  "Look, babe. This... what, 'training' that Khetnep's gonna put you through? I'm sure she knows you're, you know... not used to this sort of stuff. I'm sure she'll... fuck, I'm sure she'll have some stuff for you do go through, get used to it again, it's not like you're her first-" Esthrielle's words cut themselves short like a suicidal thread at the gaze Esper James now cast up at her: one filled with determination, conviction, and an underlying sense of bitterness.

  "No. I... ahh, I... I can't show up a-and, and fucking embarrass myself, Est! I... They're, th-they're gonna know I'm a Tsang defector... They know I'm the most wanted woman in all of fucking Vitus - in all of the UNAC. I can't be fucking lame and weak when the time comes to start showing what I can do, I..." Esper James's words fell like caustic rain, each syllable a drop of acid spat to free the venom from her heart.

  Purity's turn to interject, then, and she did so with little more than a sight and a smacking of her lips. "Ladies, ladies... Esper James, please. Be reasonable, love... hmm, think of this, then, won't you? You've told me of times out of my sight wherein your physical capabilities were... well. More so than most ghouls plucked off the street, eh?"

  EJ's resistance began to fade like Est's smile. She turned her emerald gaze towards Purity's pristine blues, waiting for a follow-up; something had begun to well in her chest, a nameless emotion which drizzled in like rain through an unpatched roof. "Well, firstly... when I was at your apartment, and you bit me... you bit me so thoroughly that it pierced my bone. I had to phone my handler and get an emergency repair done, haha. The bandages you saw, at dear Kristoff's?"

  Purity smirked, then, embodying a detective of grand expertise who now laid out all the evidence for an enraptured audience. "It was real, of course - but the wound below it was from surgery. Surgery because you destroyed my shoulder so fucking badly that, to be quite honest, they had to haul me out of your apartment. I was quite pleased to find you still unconscious when I returned later, with a duffel bag provided to me by... well, you know."

  EJ's eyes widened little by little as Purity told her own half of the experience. Esper James... didn't like to think about it very often, much less what came afterwards in the back rooms of Kristoff's deviant diner. They had spoken of it only once, when Purity was first apologizing and begging EJ for her forgiveness, back at Kehler Complex. There had never been any need nor desire to touch upon it again... or so she had thought. It seemed now that things were not quite so.

  Purity continued, undaunted by her ghoul's shock and her Wayward's surprise. "Then, well... You kicked me, and I won't go into the details of that particular little incident. It was, again, my fault, and I would hate to dredge it up any further than it needs to be. However... ha. Well, there was the... the cat, and the officer that tried to intercept you and Est. You were on him almost without thinking, right? On both of them? Resisting the cat urging you to eat Est, and moving faster than the officer could even react to?"

  Purity sat and waited, her questioning hanging in the air like a sun apprehensive to set. Esthrielle's mouth, once agape, shut tightly now so as to focus on her own recollection of the events - of awakening in Judas's manse to find Esper James hunched over a cat the size of a hound, its flesh between her fangs, and of the way EJ had tackled that Product Reclamation officer like a bullet given teeth.

  EJ could only nod in response at first; after the silence lingered further, she found the wherewithal to speak. "Y... yeah. It was like my body was moving on its own, like I wasn't fully in control... but like I was compelling myself, convincing myself to do it. I was so preoccupied on trying to... to direct myself towards what I wanted to do, that I never even thought about the actual movements."

  Purity nodded in response, casting a self-assured wink EJ's way. She took a deep breath, then, crossing her arms and turning her torso to face Esper James more fully. "Right. So, as you may know... being ex-Tsang and all... not all second-living are the same. Like a flavor of ice cream, or a breed of cute puppy, or a disease, there are different... types. Different strains. They each have different aspects... and it's never clear what type someone will become when they are revived."

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  "You, my dear," Purity said with new growth to her smirk, "Are, ah, 'Phobos' strain. This means you are... well, I'll be blunt. You are one of the sort for whom high-stress situations can cause you to become unrestrained and uninhibited. That is to say, well... ah, like a video game or something, you go berserk. Your body moves on its own based off of your impulses, when stimulus gets too high. Biting me when you saw the cat... thank goodness Tsang had an auto-feeder for sedative put in my spleen, eh? You would've eaten me down to the bones if I hadn't been made bite-proof."

  That unknown emotion only swelled further and further, a balloon pumped full of greyish fluid that sloshed and strained at EJ's sternum from within. It had been so easy to forget, Esper James thought - forget that Purity was, by all accounts, an expert on this sort of stuff. It had been her 'job' for years, and Tsang had put a heavy investment to their corporate neo-slave. And, while EJ momentarily considered being angry that Purity had never mentioned any of it... well, why would she? It wasn't exactly peak bedroom chatter.

  Purity put the final nail in the coffin with a shrug, eyes shutting as her pink lips dished those final details. "Plus, your regenerative abilities are insane. You got shot in the head with a handgun so potent there was almost none of your skull left, or so we were told... and you recovered in less than a day or two. Ghouls regenerate quickly, yes, but... I mean, you've even taken to biting your tongue - sometimes completely off - to deal with stress, because you know it won't matter in the end. You can bite that thing off and within the hour, or maybe slightly into the next, be speaking again. Have you ever stopped to consider that?"

  No. In truth, no, she never had - she'd always chalked up such things to her ghoulish nature and never pondered it any further, allowing it to fade from her mind as a simple fact of second-life. Even... ah, even in the alleyway, when she'd first met Est... she was really fucked up back then, her nose broken and face likely fractured. She had been a fucking mess. And, by time they'd made it back to her apartment, she was nearly good as new again.

  Why hadn't she ever paid attention to this shit?

  The nail had been hammered, but Purity had more yet to say - not to drive her point home, but to try and comfort her lover from the shock of these revelations. "Ahh... erm. I guess what I'm trying to say is this: EJ, you are so much stronger than you think you are. We live in a world where people get modified out of agreed-upon 'personhood' every day, in myriad ways, and yet... gah. And yet, you've been bludgeoned into submission by those fucking bastards at Tsang, so that you forget how strong you are. You forget, or ignore, the advantages you have. Babe, have you read Kafka's 'Metamorphosis'?"

  At this, Esper James burst into shocked, bewildered laughter. Purity was taken aback at first, but soon joined in; Esthrielle, seemingly the most dazed and confused of the trio, eventually followed suit. After a time, all three women were howling with uncertain, sourceless mirth, with neither Purity nor Esthrielle quite sure of why they were laughing in the first place.

  Esper James, first to laugh, was also first to calm and speak. "So... so, fuck. I... I mean, I never really thought about that. You live in a society that... well, that kicks you around, I guess, a-and it... It clouds your perception of yourself. I guess I was trying to fit myself into a box - the box of a normal girl who was just a secretary for a big company, and was otherwise normal. Fucked up, isn't it? Aha! Haha, ha... normal."

  Normal. It was an ironically strange concept nowadays - that the world itself should be so divided on the concept of normalcy that this whole sequence of events would occur in the first place. Est wouldn't be here, in Vitus, if the ERFS thought the UNAC's second-living were 'normal' - and vice versa, their rift likely wouldn't exist if the UNAC thought the ERFS's Waywards were normal. But, in Vitus... they still clung to old-world ideas about normalcy.

  The undead worked desk jobs. Cannibals cleaned the streets and taught schoolchildren; vampires gave vaccinations and sold cars; zombies waited tables and fixed cars. It was something that... to be honest, every citizen of the UNAC was slowly indoctrinated into from birth - that this was simply the way things were, and that the gifts of second-life weren't worth thinking about more often than not. In modern society, how often did someone need to be able to regenerate bullet wounds or missing limbs, anyways?

  But it was that grasping for 'normalcy' that was what clouded the vision of anyone outside Tsang's employ. Everyone had been so used to things being a certain way for so very long, that even with eternal fucking life on the table, nothing truly changed. No one truly made use of their gifts.

  EJ thought back, not for the first time, to Judas at the manse. Her body had deformed into a monstrous figure, claws and fangs bared like a wolf keen to hunt, muscles pushing against the skin like they yearned to burst through. And then... fuck, then the next time EJ had seen her? She was normal. They never spoke of it again, and Esper James tried not to think of it - remembering the way Judas had spoken to her, and the conversation with Esthrielle afterwards, always chilled her blood. Maybe it was time to toughen up, EJ; maybe it was time to start thinking of this shit.

  "Normal. But none of us are really 'normal', are we? If normal even exists anymore. I'm a fucked up bio-weapon, more or less... Esthrielle's more machine than woman, and Purity, you're... an odd mix of the two, right? A bit of Judas, a bit of tech, a bit of unaltered human. We're pretty fucking weird, in a sense." Nods were proffered all around. Est flexed her right arm and hand, steam hissing from unseen vents as she did as if to help drive the point home; Purity simply shrugged once again, though when next she blinked, her irises shifted to a gentle pink glow.

  "So... fuck. Fine, Fine, fine, fine, I'll... I'll stop with the stupid push-ups. I'll just... just trust myself. Trust my body. Trust my instincts. I've been getting way better at actually directing and controlling myself ever since I got off my meds, haha... hrm. I'm gonna start telling people I'm 'off my meds'. Would that be funny?" A cocksure smirk began to work its way over EJ's face, drawing the edges of her mouth wide apart as it did.

  Purity snickered and nodded, putting a hand over her mouth to hide her laughter; Est rolled her eyes performatively and marched over to EJ, unable to suppress a grin of her own. She hunched down and gathered the ghoul up in a firm embrace, both to hold her and to drag her to her feet. Once both parties stood, Est gave EJ a playful, open-palm bonk on the forehead.

  "Oh, you're off your fucking meds, weirdo? Huh? Just a weird little blonde girl off her meds versus society? Haha, I fucking bet. Now, my little weirdo... come cuddle. You, too, Purity; I bet the bed's still pretty warm up by where Zofi and Lulu were trying not to suck face." Esthrielle gestured with her head up towards the headboard of the bed, denoting the little pillow-pile that the Waywards had occupied before EJ started her push-up spree.

  Est's suggestion was accepted without a shred of protest. The three women snuggled up comfortably with one another, finding that there was no warm spot to be found; Est noted, sarcastically, that plastic bodies may not be as warm as meat ones. This was deemed an acceptable explanation.

  As EJ laid her head against the crown of Est's, her arms taking as much of the Easterner as she could while Purity did the same to the ghoul, she set her mind to wander - willingly, this time. Intentionally.

  Just three weirdos against the whole fucking world, eh? The chances they could really do anything that would make a difference were slim to none, honestly, and they would almost certainly get fucking killed by Tsang goons in the process. Was that worth it? Was death, in the desperate and foolish pursuit of change, truly worth it? They could just lay low forever, maybe find their way out to a cattle farm outside the city... up north, maybe. Back in Nova Scotia...

  No. It was worth it. Tsang would never let them escape - never let her escape, and she knew it would be a futile errand to try and convince Est and Purity to go off without her. Whatever was soon to happen, the three of them would all need to be in on it together. And, in that togetherness, they'd need to try and do more with their weirdness than Esper James had ever even considered.

  Fuck it. They could do it.

  Even as Esper James's heart swelled with the nameless emotion she knew now as pride, she settled down into her lovers' closeness. If nothing else, this was worth fighting for. It was worth dying for, she reckoned - truly dying. She'd never had anything worth dying for before.

  Better late than never.