Seeing What Bites

[Ryan Foley]

"Damn. You think we should look around first; cause some selective mayhem before they know what hit 'em?"

[Robin Stanton]

"Nah, they'll be on alert then. Better they just think something's wrong with the engine, yeah?"

[Ryan Foley]

"Well, you're the superhero, not me. Maybe I should go try to wreck the radio or something while you play motorboat?"

[Robin Stanton]

"If you think you can get it, yeah. There's gotta be an antenna or satellite dish or something, yeah?" she says and a pink arm pushes out of the radio's speaker, grasps around for something to brace itself against and pushes the rest of Robin out from it in a stream of protoplasm slowly shaping itself back into human form. She coulda done it faster but a little showmanship never hurt anybody.

[Ryan Foley]

"Right...right, OK. So...I go in and do my whole kamikaze with a bat thing, while you turn this bitch out to sea and kill it dead, yeah? Alright. OK. Alright," Ryan said, pumping herself up.

"...Anyone ever tell you you look freaky like that?" she said, reacting to Robin's slow emergence.

[Robin Stanton]

"You know what... No." she realizes a bit more flatly than she perhaps intended. Weird, strange, unusual, annoying, there's no shortage of questionable adjectives she'd heard to describe her before, usually at least somewhat jokingly or kindly, but never 'freaky'. Never something that carried this much of a negative connotation. It weirdly stings more than the outright bigotry she'd faced down in Paris. Maybe because it's coming from another mutant. There's not really much time to dwell on it as they close in on the much larger ship. "First time for everything, right?" she jokes cause she doesn't think Ryan meant it to hit as hard as it did and it's what you do. Everyone would (not entirely incorrectly) assume it's a habit she picked up from her Dad but what has made it stand out in her own mind as the cope it is was her Mum's obvious adoption of the same thing to fall back on when she got angry.

"Alright, let's go!" she brushes right past all of it and climbs up on the railing, winding her legs into springs and throwing herself against the larger ship's hull. She impacts with a splat that deforms most of her upper body against the metal with her legs sticking out of it, then starts pulling herself inside, letting her awareness of the structure blossom around her as she fills the empty spaces in between. She can do it faster but she's a little petty and a show-off so she makes a whole thing of wriggling all of her into the hull. Only then does she really turn her attention tot he seemingly endless expanse of flat metal around her and she starts pulling herself along it towards the back of the ship where she can feel the vibrations of the engines increase.

[Narrator]

Ryan watched Robin as she wriggled her way into the hull, perhaps a moment longer than she necessarily needed to.

The ship was large, and imposing. It's a different thing to inhabit something small; something she could take over entirely. Something this large, with thousands upon thousands of interconnected parts, made it more of a collaboration than anything else; figuring out what she could grab and how to make it work with the other parts of the ship. Her father, who anthropomorphized this far more than she did, phrased this as a negotiation process, anthropomorphizing the various parts of the object in that strange worldview that he had.

The ship, being just a hunk of metal and machinery, offered Robin no more than the standard token resistance as she pulled herself along through it; following the vibrations towards the engine; the room inhabited only by one sleep and board looking mook.

[Robin Stanton]

Her Dad's point of view on these things had always been kind of a point of conflict or at least disagreement. As a kid she'd made her toys move as if on their own accord and play pretend. Though at the time she would have balked at the 'pretend' part of it. But sooner or later she'd run into the fact that being able to take control of inanimate things and knowing them to have some level of anthropomorphized feelings attached were two incompatible stances. It didn't matter that Dad had suggested what she's doing is asking permission, the process itself felt too intrusive once she'd become more aware of it. Without a certain amount of imposed will, her power failed to work at best and left her stuck inside things at worst and that she'd had to learn from her Mum.

Still, with something this big humming around her, composed of so many moving parts she could vaguely feel in the distance it's hard not to see there being more than the sum of it's parts. A kind of 'boat-ness' the reach of which was exceeding her grasp. The whole of it is too much to reconcile for her into one thing she's part of when she's so firmly inside a hull panel. Even the adjacent panels could be seen as separate and within them rivets and bands of metal and inside them... If she had a head she'd shake it to clear and refocus her thoughts. She's the hull, that's a simple if physically large concept, no different than a scooter or a car. Arbitrary lines her Mum would say while Dad would probably not understand why that same sense of a whole 'thing' doesn't include a whole dang freighter.

Leaving confusing thoughts of what constitutes one single unit of a thing behind she crawls along the hull until she reaches the source of the rattling noise. She reaches out and within a split-second she's yanked from the cozy confines of the metal into the spinning world of the propeller shaft and engine where everything is moving. Where she is moving and she lets the motion carry her throughout until she feels the churning heart of the engine and the two extending 'arms' of the propulsion on each side of the ship. She flexes one and feels the rotation in it slow, the ship slowly turning as one propeller outpaces the other and pivoting it through the water.

[Narrator]

Robin slides into the engine like slipping into a comfortable pair of old jeans; the familiar sensation of integrating herself with the moving parts bringing with the familiar adrenaline rush of power and movement and energy rippling through her form.

Moving a ship of this size is...slow, to say the least. It moves at near glacial speed, just ever-so-gradually tilting as Robin forces the propellers to obey her. And for a minute or two, she's able to turn the ship without any pushback. she's in control.

After a short while, however, the ship starts pulling back. Whoever's at the rudder on the bridge is turning the wheel, ordering the propellers back into alignment, ordering Robin to get with the program.

[Robin Stanton]

That's what she'd been concerned about. The pushback. There's only so much physical leeway her power imparts on the object she inhabits and if she warps the transmission shafts too much the ship's going to tear itself apart. She clamps down hard on one of the shafts, forcing it to nearly a complete stop. She can feel the tension that's almost certainly producing smoke somewhere as she tries to find a way for the engine to shift most of it's power to the other shaft naturally rather than forcing one to be wedged still. The rudders she can't do anything about but she trusts the giant propeller that is her to overpower the tugging of water at little flaps of metal. One 'leg' churning, the other wedged against a metaphorical corner and slowly running hot. On the upside, at this rate sabotaging the engine to strand the ship will take care of itself, though that'll probably hurt like a motherfucker if she can't get out fast enough.

People always assumed Robin never shared in the near universal experience of childhood injuries and it's true that she's never broken something that, in a pinch, becomes optional. But something that breaks under her control has a tendency to leave her with echoes of fractures and cracks in her protoplasm. Doesn't matter how many times she's told it's psychological, that never helped her Dad and it certainly doesn't mean an injury isn't real, as far as Robin is concerned.

[Narrator]

Fortunately for Robin, she and whoever was controlling the ship did have a common goal in mind -- neither of them wanted to break the dang thing. Boats are expensive, even for drug cartels! So as Robin strained herself, she felt the bridge crew reacting.

Robin can feel the power to the rotors being cut from the bridge as they tried to bring the ship to a full-stop. She could hear the crackle of the radio, trying to get the attention of the guy in the engine room to see what was up.

She could feel the grip of the commands on the engine from the bridge slackening just so... giving her the wiggle-room she needed to overpower things.

[Robin Stanton]

Braking, in itself, is a command, though it always seems easier to make an engine that's build to move and churn and rattle to do something rather than not. Especially one that's as big as this and thus has a lot of inertia. As as the controls begin to slow it down she gives it a moment of slack to let people think everything's working and then grips hard onto the moving parts, keeping their momentum going and spinning them back up. Buttons, knobs and levers on the engine itself twist and flip 'on their own' against the outside signaling of 'simmer down'. Full speed ahead, maties!

[Narrator]

Normally, the engine firing on it's own would trigger an alarm of some sort -- operating outside of normal specs, as it were. But because Robin was manipulating the knobs and levers herself, it meant technically speaking, everything was under control. Just...under the control of the engine rather than the people on the bridge. That's still control, right?

The ship whirred back into motion (well, technically it had never stopped, because momentum is a thing, but you know what I mean), curving hard to the port and out to sea as Robin spun the propellers round and round.

In the engine room, the mook there watching things flung open a panel and slammed the emergency stop button.

[Robin Stanton]

One moment Robin is running, sprinting. The next she's clotheslined by something that slammed the engines to a stop and her own momentum makes the engine buck and shudder and groan. Here and there where engine oil and grease is supposed to smooth pistons pink protoplasm seeps out as Robin tries to recover from the ringing in her head. Slooooowly the pink goo runs down and gathers in a puddle on the floor and tries to lift itself up, swaying as a not even humanoid mass. A hole near the top forms and grows to separate out a noodly 'arm' holding the blobs 'head' as the whole mass shudders with a groan.

"Oww..."

[Narrator]

"<The fuck is that!?"> the man said, but in Italian, which Robin didn't speak, and so she would have to go from intonation and context clues. In fact, let's lean into that.

"Exclamation of surprise and anger!" the mook said, leaning over to poke the blob with the barrel of his gun.

[Robin Stanton]

The blob in turn grabs hold of the gun and yanks the mook forward to try and punch his oncoming face with a not-so-swiftly forming arm. Hands and fingers optional, she focuses on solidifying first.

[Narrator]

"Curse of pain!" the man shouted, as Robin's stump collided with jaw.

The man staggered backwards, woozy but not quite down yet, though how he was planning on fighting a puddle of protoplasm while completely unarmed was, at the moment, unclear.

"Another curse, this time backed by a threat not necessarily supported by the evidence," he growled, backing his way towards the door.

[Robin Stanton]

The blob let's out another groan as it pulls the gun into itself and deposits it on the ground behind it as it shambles forward. And then topples straight onto the guy. Her solidity is still a little unreliable and she feels like she doesn't have time to properly pull herself together before this guy figures out he should bolt and pull some kind of alarm. It's sloppy but she can probably sleeper-hold his head by way of engulfment.

[Narrator]

"Slimy and frightening!" the man yelled, trying to fight against the ever-encroaching blob of pink protoplasm. But Robin was relentless, shambling forwards and engulfing the man's head. She could feel him yelling inside of her, the sound waves vibrating through her, being muffled from the outside world, as he slowly lost consciousness.

[Robin Stanton]

A literal speech bubble of exhaled air glides through her and pops near her 'head', leaving behind a small crater that slowly turns into the ear on a sideways tilted head, followed by hand and finger on her arm to twist into the newly-formed ear. "Oh why was that so loud?" she complains as she lets herself slide backwards along the wall and into a sitting position while shoring up the rest of her human appearance. It takes her a second to notice the lack of rattling and vibrating in the wall of the ship.

"Ah crud, we stopped." she says and pushes herself up along the wall and turns her head towards the stalled engine and the spot where the two drive shafts disappear through a bulkhead to connect to the propellers. They're wider than she is at the shoulders and without the engine's drive they look very, very heavy. "I can't turn those by myself. Fuck." She turns her eyes to the engine to try and find anything wrong. Something physically must have slammed into place somewhere to shut it off. Like a brake or something. She climbs down from the walkway to start poking her head into the various nooks and crannies, suddenly regretting not listening better when her Dad rambled about being an engine. It wouldn't have made her a mechanic but having some intrinsic understanding of how it should move would sure help her find the part that's stopping it from doing so.

And so she clambers around the engine, twisting and elongating herself as needed to fit through areas not meant to be accessed by people, occasionally tugging on bits that look like they could be brackets clamped down on something or a bolt that's been slammed into place. When they don't budge she puts her flat hand on them and pushes it inside, to see if she can make it jiggle loose. This almost certainly is slowly loosening parts that should absolutely not be loosened but she doesn't need it to run for a long time, just a good time? No, that's a terrible quip. But she does need it to run again. If Ryan hasn't managed to keep them from sending a distress call the ship has gots to move from the spot they send it at.

[Narrator]

There's a lot of jiggling and poking Robin does, as she begins to explore the bowels of the engine. Not being an expert on naval mechanics, this was a process more of trial and error than anything else. Loosening a bracket here, unscrewing a screw there -- nothing too fancy. And equally speaking, nothing too successful.

That is, until she gets to the fuel pumps. A countershaft seems to have moved into place, cutting off the fuel supply to the engine. With no diesel getting through, the engine wasn't doing a dang thing. It was a mechanical stop, too; the opening was physically closed by the conduit, rather than just a shutter not opening or something of that nature.

There's your problem.

[Robin Stanton]

Robin pulls on the shaft on principle, not really expecting it to budge until she pushes into it and tries to make it wriggle it's way back up like a squirming worm.

[Narrator]

Indeed, pulling on the shaft didn't seem to do much. It was locked tight -- which, in retrospect, was probably good. If you blocked the fuel supply off for a reason, you surely don't want it to be easy for the diesel to flood the engine!

[Robin Stanton]

"Damnit, what is it with failsafes being all safe and stuff!" she asks the empty engine room and gives the fuel-pipe a frustrated kick. "Fine, where's that stupid crankshaft thingie..."

She looks down from the engine down to the space underneath it where the large metal shaft turns the pumping of pistons into rotation. If she can get it turning just a little she might be able to keep it going but she's up against tons of resting metal and how knows how much water resistance on the ship propellers. How do a bunch of pistons exert this much force anyway? Her eyes wander to the giant engine and the rows and rows of pistons. Levers and gears and shit. Turn one thing a whole lot to turn a larger thing a little. Basic machine stuff. She puts her hand on one of the pistons and lets herself sink into it, pushing through the metal until she pops out into a flat cavity reeking of oil and diesel fuel. She has no nose but the stench somehow permeates through her protoplasm.

She gathers as much of herself as she can into the space, compacts herself down as dense as she can and then she expands, pushes all the tension in the densely packed goo out as if she was leg-pressing a gigantic weight. Which, in a roundabout way she is, but instead of muscles it's building pressure by shifting from dense metal to water over and over again, each time claiming the fraction of an inch of more room and moving the piston in one chamber, then sliding over to the other and repeating the process. First it's barely anything, then it's a millimeter of rocking them back and forth, then a centimeter, back and forth, back and forth. Finally one push sends the piston to it's apex and back down, making it just a little easier to push the other one and keep the movement going more and more.

Her Dad probably could have turned himself into real fuel or gas to make this so much easier but she has to fight for every stroke of the giant piston, each of which turns is focused down and down and down to move the propellers just a bit. Basic physics slowly overwhelming water pressure.

[Narrator]

It's a lot of effort, for sure. This massive object is supposed to be moved by explosions, not sheer physical force, and so Robin has to strain every bit of her to try to replicate the energies required to get the pistons moving. It does not help that, technically, the only thing stopping the pistons from working is the intake valve being physically shut by the emergency stop. That prevents fuel and air being sucked into her spot in the cylinder, but it means the other stages of the engine work just fine. The weight of the pistons, pushing down against her and trying to compress her flat. The exhaust valve opening, trying to have leftover fuel and air pushed out when the pistons were at the bottom. And, perhaps most worrisome for a protoplasmic Stanton shifter, the spark plugs at the top, attempting to ignite the fuel at the top of the combustion cycle...

[Robin Stanton]

Had Robin considered spark plugs? Of course not, that would require a better understanding of machines than she has. The only saving grace is that at the point they spark she's as densely packed as she can get and the uncontrolled spasm of shifting that rips through her almost does what she's trying to do better than she could by herself. It does make it significantly more uncomfortable, like a full-body cramp that just so happens to do what she needs done she then has to knowingly lean into again and again. But at least it's for a good cause of keeping drugs from wreaking havoc on people with much less resilient bodies.

After who knows how many rounds of letting herself get crushed against a cattleprod she doesn't clench herself tight and simply lets the pressure of the descending piston force her out through the impossibly narrow gap of oiled tolerances between piston and engine block. The resulting squirt of Pink-Flavored Stanton splatters against the wall of the engine room and slowly dribbles down into a quivering puddle. Hopefully nobody would come to try and investigate the mysteriously running engine for at least a little bit because right now the notion of pulling herself up to even just a couple feet of height, much less any kind of even vaguely humanoid shape, seems borderline impossible.

[Narrator]

Now, unfortunately for Robin, 'engines mysteriously starting' and 'non-responsive engine room' are, in fact, reasons for people to investigate.

Perhaps more fortunately for Robin, 'a strange pink puddle of goo' is not top priority, especially to a bunch of mafiosos who may not understand how engines work. And so, when two guys came running down with pistols, they didn't stop to check on Robin on their way to the engine. One of them actually ended up stepping right through the puddle of quivering Stanton on his way to the control panel.

[Robin Stanton]

Robin lets out a pained squelch at being stepped on but fortunately it sounds exactly like the sound one would expect from a puddle on the floor. Those two can marvel at the engine going all they want, Robin's job is unfortunately not entirely done yet. She lets herself slide down underneath the engine to find the transmission shaft. She lifts a couple of pseudopod tendrils to latch onto the slowly turning metal and lets herself get pulled up by being spun around it like a coil. She lets herself get spun around for a little bit before letting her protoplasm bulge with a kind of deep breath and she plunges herself into the metal, becoming the thing that is slowly turning the propellers in the water. She's heavy and lumbering but she is moving and she makes sure to keep it that way, flexing in a kind of undulating pattern to keep things going round and round and the ship pushing further off course.

[Narrator]

And it's working! The ship turned as Robin flexed and twisted as the propeller shaft. Without a button to shut down the engine (which was already shut down, as far as the control panel was concerned), Robin could move the ship as long as she held out.

[Robin Stanton]

It's hard to tell time when you're a metal shaft spinning in mostly darkness, much less extrapolate how far that moves the ship, so she just keeps going until she's too tired to go any further and she slops once more onto the floor of the engine room. She feels grimy, oil and grease smeared throughout her protoplasm, giving her a dirty but vaguely iridescent sheen. She just hopes the armed goons aren't still prowling around so she can get out of here swiftly.

[Ryan Foley]

"Yo, Pink, you OK in here?"

Someone had been busy while Robin had been twirling, twirling into the future. The two goons who had been in here were down, bleeding from the head, and Ryan had half of her frame sticking out from the wall. "Oh, geez, just goo. Like, uh, burble or something if you're still with me."

[Robin Stanton]

Oh thank god. She visualizes a thumbs-up but manages to only raise a couple quivering bumps to briefly form before collapsing again. So tired. Instead she puts her efforts into pushing herself up and forward, shifting her mass to one edge until it collapses forward and lets her slowly inch her way towards the sound of the voice. Bones (or any other semi-rigid approximation of solidity) seem like too much effort right now, easier to just be rather than exert any effort on holding a shape. Too tired to stand might mean sitting down for most people, for Robin it means no legs. Or any other recognizable body-parts.

[Ryan Foley]

"Shit. Alright. Right. OK," Ryan said, repeating to herself a couple times and looking around frantically.

She found an old water bottle lying on the deck of the ship, and quickly dumped out the contents. "OK, Pink, I'm gonna...gonna kind of...smoosh you in here. Because we gotta go, and you don't look up to running," she said, carefully approaching Robin with the empty bottle. She hesitantly reached out towards Robin to try to sort of, kind of, shove her in, looking reluctant to actually touch her.

[Robin Stanton]

Fortunately for Ryan, Robin gets what she's trying to do and jams herself into the bottle, some of her bunching up around the opening in the process and hanging down the outside of the bottle. Once she's more or less situated one of the bits hanging out of the bottle gently bops the hand holding the bottle affirmatively.

[Ryan Foley]

Ryan, only partially understanding Robin's Stantonglyphics, shook the bottle a little to try to get Robin to fall all the way inside, fumbling for the cap as she started speeding out of the room, running through walls to avoid the sounds of angry footsteps headed her way. She tucked the bottle into the waistband of her pants to leave her hands free as she hurried.

[Robin Stanton]

Robin blurbles at being shook and just to keep the world from bouncing she digs deep for some reserves and compact herself down enough to fit in the bottle. Though once Ryan's attention is elsewhere she squishes herself up against the cap and twists it out of the way to let some of her spill out around the opening. It's still a pretty secure ride and she's not liquid enough to lose parts of herself to the run. Being pulled along through walls is interesting, unlike when she enters something it's like it's barely there, even if she wanted to latch on to it in passing she's not sure she even could. Like trying to grab smoke. Or maybe she's the smoke?

As Ryan is running, her loosely secured ride bouncing, she snakes herself around Ryan waist in a loop so when the bottle inevitably gets jostled free she's still hanging on without too much effort.

[Ryan Foley]

If Ryan noticed Robin wrapping around her, she didn't say anything.

It's also possible Ryan didn't notice Robin opening the bottle up, because as soon as she reached the outer hull of the ship, she jumped off and dove straight into the sea, which would mean water would flood into Robin's bottle, too!

[Robin Stanton]

Robin did not anticipate this. One the plus side, she doesn't need to breathe so that's fine. One the other hand, salt water dehydrates when you drink it. Or when it surrounds your entirely protoplasmic body. The good thing is, she soon fits into the bottle just fine. For bad news, she loses her grip on Ryan and is soon bobbing in the ocean inside her little plastic bottle. At least it slowly floats towards the surface as the waves knock her about.

[Ryan Foley]

"Shit!" Ryan cursed again, closing the distance between her and the bottle in a few strokes. Tucking it into her top, she turned and swam back for the fishing boat, cutting through the water fairly easily. She hauled herself up onto the deck, gasping from exertion, and quickly started the engine. Step one, get out of there. Step two, check on her saltwater taffy friend.

[Robin Stanton]

Even dehydrated as she is, Robin still has the wherewithal to be mildly embarrassed by the vista on either side of her bottle, though there's not much an already pink bundle of protoplasm can do to blush. She does finally manage to absorb the actual water that's in the bottle with her, salty as it is, trying hard not to let herself get squeezed out of her ride by Ryan clambering onto the ship, having to actively pull herself together each time she overflows and slops against Ryan's collarbone.