[Social] Inspired

[Will Stanton]

"By 'mushy', I assume you mean as clay, and no. I find that makes it difficult to walk around if I'm sagging all over the place," Will said, raising an eyebrow.

[Shari]

"Things other than clay are mushy!" Shari informs him and puts her hands on Will's cheeks and smooshes them together.

[Will Stanton]

"Yesh," Will says through squished cheeks, "but but flesh doeshent shtay put when mushed."

[Shari]

"Can you make it stay mushed? Or do you gotta clay it up and then go back to flesh?"

[Will Stanton]

"I mean, with proper shifting, I could probably get it to stick.

What do you have in mind," she asked, raising an eyebrow.

[Shari]

"I dunno! Just lemme mess around and see how it turns out!"

[Will Stanton]

"Well, I mean...

OK. Just for a bit, mind you."

[Shari]

"You can just pop back to normal after!"

[Will Stanton]

"Well, that's kind of what I mean 'for a bit'. I'm gathering 'fleshcraft' will be a, shall we say, transient art form."

[Shari]

"Makes sense to me. Just let me know when you're ready, I don't want to start smooshing if you're still full of bones."

[Will Stanton]

"Waitwaitwait, you want to manipulate a bag of meat and skin?" Will said, turning her nose up slightly. "I thought you were just going to, like, pose me or something."

[Shari]

"What? No. Just... move stuff around. Maybe it'd work better if you're all grey goop and when I got a good shape you can turn it into flesh and bones."

[Will Stanton]

"Yeah, let's go with that," Will agreed, losing color and definition. "Much less room for problems if we're doing that, I'd say."

[Shari]

"Hmm..." Shari hums at the gray humanoid shape in front of her. Then she reaches for Will's head and pushes it flat until there's just a torso with arms and legs. "Something... new. That doesn't exist yet." she muses and grabs both of Will's arms and pulls them to the top of the torso before mushing them together into one appendage. Looking at it she bends it in a couple directions at the elbow, then shakes her head and smoothes out the whole arm until it's just a uniform tentacle with a crude hand at the end. Then she pokes her finger into the torso twice and draws a curved line underneath to indicate a face. Kind of.

"Is this anything? I don't feel like this is anything yet..." she grumbles.

[Will Stanton]

"Not quite yet," the mouth said, sounding rough and gravelly as it tried to speak. "If it doesn't feel like something, it probably isn't."

[Shari]

"Yeah... It's just rearranged. But all the unique stuff I can think of is all alien critters! That wouldn't be new, just new to you." she says as she starts shoving all the appendages into the main body until Will's just a big ol' lump of clay with a badly drawn smilie-face on it.

[Will Stanton]

"Well, maybe you can combine them in different and new ways? Or don't think Animalia; you don't need to just copy something from nature."

[Shari]

"This is harrrrd!" she complains as she stares at the blob of clay. Then she starts just kind of randomly deforming the top of the block, trying to find a shape she likes. What she ends up with is a five-sided pyramid she then tries to twist counterclockwise to make a kind of spiral, followed by making the same kind of pyramid, just inverted and un-spiraled underneath with the tip disappearing into the rest of clay-blob.

[Will Stanton]

"OK, now that feels kinda weird", Will slurred, a rip opening up in the bottom of Shari's smooth pyramid to let him speak. "Weird angles..."

[Shari]

"Hey, you're breaking it. Put that mouth somewhere else!" she says, trying to smooth out the inverted pyramid again by wiping across the rip.

[Will Stanton]

"Hey, what are yoummmmmph?" Will asked, as Shari wiped out her mouth, the better to fit her artistic vision.

[Shari]

"Here, you can use this one while I figure out the rest of it." she says and draws a straight line into the part of the clay that sits underneath the twisty-pyramid-polyhedron. "Maybe something more... roundish."

[Will Stanton]

"Well," Will said, her voice sounding odd and distorted from the crudely-drawn mouth. "Paht of aht is the iterahtive prahcess. Ahspecially with clay. Keep on wahking and rewahking until it meets whats inside ya head."

[Shari]

"Yeah!" she says and starts flattening out the bottom chunk to try and make it into a flat disc that the twisted-polyhedron would seem to be emerging from.

[Will Stanton]

"But wait, befoommmmph," Will tried to butt in, before Shari flattened out her base yet again.

The clay was easier to work with than 'regular' clay; normally, you'd have to find some sort of tradeoff between malleability and firmness to prevent collapse. But, as Shari knew well, for as good as Will was at shapeshifting, she was terrible at fending off outside imposition. Perfect for your novice alien sculptor.

[Shari]

"Hrm. I feel like I've gotten away from biology here."

[Will Stanton]

Indeed, it was difficult to imagine how the form in front of her would exist, biologically speaking; all twisted and angled. Surely, nature wouldn't have created anything like this; too many potential problems.

[Shari]

"Can you turn this into something living?" she wonders idly. "I mean you're already alive but also not right now?"

[Will Stanton]

Another half-formed mouth appeared. "Nnnttt sure how that would work," she guttered out. "Nt like life I've seen..."

Of course, Will didn't have the experience with interstellar life that Shari had; stuck in a very earth-centric mindscape. You know, like a moron.

[Shari]

"I dunno, there's all kinds of stuff that could take this shape, I guess. Mollusks or snails or plants and such. Or just... one weird mammal. Or a crystal."

[Will Stanton]

After a moment, Shari's sculpture did begin to shift, the clay dissolving into..well, flesh, twisted and squashed and bent at strange angles. What looked natural in clay looked like nothing of this earth when made of meat.

[Shari]

"Well that certainly looks like nothing I've ever seen! Which means it's a rousing success!" she exclaims over the strange meat sculpture.

[Will Stanton]

The blob just quivered somewhat, as it was lacking any sort of obvious way to communicate -- or really deal with the outside world in any capacity. Witness the freak of evolution!

[Shari]

"Uhm... What do you do with art once it's done?" she scratches her head.

[Will Stanton]

There were a few projects in various states of completion around the artroom, but Meat Arts was apparently not a popular major on campus, so there was little Shari could use as a direct comparison.

[Shari]

"Display it? Display it." she nods to herself and goes about hefting the Will sculpture up to carry it out of the room.

[Narrator]

Unnervingly warm? Check! Quivering slightly when touched? Sure thing! Bony and lumpy? You better believe it!

Shari was an excellent sculptrex.