Xaviers!

Because of her duties as Tree -- and her subsequent missing time between then and New Years -- Will hadn't had a chance to actually see what gifts people had gotten her.

Having spent so much time in her own room since she arrived -- and, frankly, from not having as many connections as she did back Home -- her haul was less than what she had given out, which was fine -- that was the spirit of Christmas, after all. But one of the thing she had received was Tosh's crazy high-tech tub thing, which was appropriately mad-sciency enough to be enjoyable.

Which is why anyone coming into her dorm would find her upper torso resting on the edge of the tub, while her lower torso and legs were being mashed into an amorphous mass, being turned, mixed and folded over upon itself.

((open))

Shari, back from her trip to Nat's parents walks into the room and throws her bag on her bed before doing a double-take at Will hanging out in some kind of high-tech thingie set up in their room.

"Uh... got some new furniture, huh?"

"Mmm? Oh, hey Shari -- yeah, this was one from Tosh and the tech crew down in the labs. Christmas gift," she said, propping herself up to look up at Shari. "It's absolutely freaking amazing."

"It's also absolutely freaking huge. It's taking up a good quarter of the room!" she says as she walks over to peer at what the hell is going on inside the tub. The fact that Will might be indecent doesn't really occur to her.

Will certainly wasn't wearing pants -- just a sports bra -- but whether or not that could be counted as "indecent" is in the eye of the beholder, as there was nothing defined below about midtorso. Will's clay was being churned and twisted by specially-designed paddles and mechanical arms, folding over and over on itself and oozing back out to fill the tub. It was not entirely unlike an industrial dough mixer, only on a more residential scale.

"Well, you can talk to Tosh about that. He built it for my base size, which is, to be fair, more relaxing than shifting into a smaller form. Prioritizing comfort over utility, I suppose. You're more than welcome to use it from time to time if you want to let a load off."

"I think I'll pass on that. I'm not so great with amorphous shapes." she says, kind of anticipating the obvious derision from Will. "So you're just gonna keep it in here taking up room?"

"Mmm. I'll work something out with someone at some point, but ASHLIE doesn't exactly prioritize returning my calls. Not since I smashed her in the eye. For now, we'll just have to deal a little bit. Unless you have a better suggestion?" she said, twisting unnaturally 360 degrees so she was resting on her back rather than her front, looking up at the Skrull.

The expected derision didn't come, except maybe a little bit in the 'mmm'. Maybe.

"Fine. I guess you didn't ask the Santa for a giant machine."

"You don't like it," Will said.

It wasn't a question.

"Well it's big and a little noisy and it seems like it mostly... mangles people who aren't you. Why would I like it?"

"It's a fairly impressive piece of tech from us Earthlings, I'd say. Got a whole bank of controls down here with different timers and settings, it's got glowing blue sci-fi lights. It's a fairly impressive thing, I thought. Plus, it's shifter-focused tech, which again, coming from a planet of shifters...

...But to each their own, I suppose."

"You know, I'm kind of sick of you holding yourself up to be the benchmark by which all shifters get measured." she says, turning around to rummage through her backpack. "Here, why don't we make it a hot tub." she says, turning to face Will again and holding a bag of extra-spicy beef jerky. "Ah damnit, I shoulda gone with the jerk one... Oh well." she realizes a much better quip, shrugs and underhand tosses the bag into the churning tub.

"Woah, hey, no, what are you doing!" Will cried, trying to swat away the bag. She's too slow, however, and with a 'plop', the bag burst open in the clay, quickly sinking into the mass as Tosh's mixers kept, well, mixing.

The effects were pretty quick and apparent. The clay began to change color, going from a dull, lifeless gray to a deeper brownish red, with flakes of pepper and chili poking through. Interestingly, it wasn't just in the clay mass -- the color began to go up Will's torso as well, as the jerky continued to be smashed in. All in all, a lot more of an effect than one might expect; it wasn't like she had dumped in 150 pounds of jerky or something.

Will reached and fumbled for the controls. Not having used it before, however, she had not yet managed to turn it off -- with multiple settings and speeds and a timer function, it wasn't quite as simple as pressing the 'off' button, especially when she was flustered.

"Hahahaha, I changed my mind, this thing is hilarious." Shari laughs as she watches Will.

Will's fumbling...didn't work. The next thing she managed to do was actually to speed up the paddles, the motors whining as they were pushed to their maximum speed. It created a little bit of a suction as well, as more and more of Will's torso and chest started sinking into the spicy clay mass, grabbed by the manipulators and twisted into the churning clay.

"Shariiiii!" Will said, stretching her arms to try to reach the controls one last time...

"What's this?" she says, putting one hand behind her ear as if she had trouble hearing Will. "You need some help from a shitty shapeshifter like me? Why don't you just shift your way out of this one?" she says, chuckling.

Will made one last lunge with a stretching arm, but that was it -- her head finally was drawn in to the machine, quickly vanishing into the churning mass, followed quickly by her arm, leaving nothing hanging outside the tub.

Turns out, there are disadvantages to not always being roughly biological! Advantage: Skrulls.

The machine kept whirring, lifting, kneading and folding the spicy clay repeatedly. The room was slowly filling with the smell of spicy jerky -- an interesting potpourri, if you liked meat. Occasionally, a pillar or protuberance raised it's way out of the clay, only to get caught by one of the paddles and stirred back in.

After a couple minutes of watching Will get thoroughly mixed and churned Shari starts pushing buttons on the control panel to try and turn the thing off.

"Just pushing buttons" got her to set and unset a timer, as well as cycle through a couple options the thing had (apparently, it was self-cleaning!) before she decided to try the big red "off" button, which turned the thing off.

The paddles and mixers whirred to a stop, rising out of the clay with a *splorp*. The spicy clay mixture slowly came to a halt and was still, as Will regathered herself.

Two hands appeared, grabbing on to the side of the vat, as Will pulled herself out, gradually reforming into a humanoid shape as fine details took a while to come in. Gradually, over time, Will would appear more and more 'normal' if left to her own devices.

Normal, that is, except for her darker brown skin color, with pepper flakes embedded all over the place. Almost like freckles, they coated her from head to toe -- it was the extra-spicy jerky Shari had thrown in, anyway, and that means Will was well-seasoned.

"What. Was THAT all about?" she asked, slowly making her way over to Shari, her eyes glinting as she maneuvered her body to be between Shari and the door.

"I'unno." she shrugs. "I wanted to see what would happen."

"And what if I had gone kerplooie or something!" she said, waving her hands about in a more frantic motion than normal. "Or if I had jammed up the machinery?"

"I would have found you a nice bucket and scraped you off the walls. You survived being eaten by a Skrull, pretty sure you can take an ambitious... cement mixer?" she grasps for a comparison. Sometimes the things she's familiar with can be a little bit random.

"It's not that" she said, melodramatically, leaning up against a wall. "I can handle that."

"I'm just rather...susceptible when I'm like that. Mixing in strange things can have all sorts of strange consequences."

There was something...odd about her speech patterns. Like something out of a soap opera or something; very much a heightened sense of drama.

"Yeah, I think I can tell." Shari snickers. "And it's kind of hilarious!"

"What's so funny about this?" said the jerky girl, arms akimbo.

"Aside from your new color scheme? How... flamboyant it made you."

"Well, yes," she said, blowing the hair out of her eyes. "It's called rolling with the metaphor, and it's how I sort of work."

She pivoted on one heel and strode across the room, dramatically lying down on her bed. "I have to adapt to changing circumstances in order to survive, you understand."

"Oh, I think I dooo." Shari snickers. "This is fucking amazing. You're so... extra!"

"...I'm also, like, a million years old, so I don't know what you mean in this context," she asked, scrunching her face up. "You kids today with your slang," she sighed. "Life was simpler in my day."

"Hahahaha, oh my god, it got better! Does this work with all food-stuff? Oh! Oh! Does it work with non-food things!?"

"Once, back in my own universe, where I was respected, I was mixed with lavender body wash and was bright purple for two weeks.

It is the tragedy of being clay. While I will eventually absorb everything and minimize it's effects on me thanks to the strengths of my own personality, mixing anything in can have strange and unexpected effects. It has happened to me in other contexts, as well -- often when I was electronic and someone messed around with me there, but I am at my most vulnerable in my default state."

"So.... what? This'll fade after a while? Cause I'm not really seeing the downside. Miss Respected-In-My-Own-World."

"Well...when you put it that way, yes, it will fade. It's just the indignity of it all. To walk through life as a smoked meat snack. It's galling, is what it is."

"So what you're saying is I should toss in something more agreeable next time."

"Do you have clay in your ears or something? Who knows what would happen if you started messing around!"

"I dunno. Probably something hilarious, going by this precedence."

"How cruel. An alien invader taking advantage of a poor, defenseless woman," she sighed, resting one hand on her forehead.

"Oh my god, you are ridiculous right now!" Shari laughs. "Would you say you got bested by a lowly Skrull?" she gloats a little bit, head slightly cocked to one side.

"...Is that what this is about?" she asked, flipping herself up off the bed and walking over towards Shari. "Jealousy?"

"More like payback for you being such a butt."