Everything was happening too fast. [i][color=82ca9d]This is what it's like to see a dream from the outside[/color][/i], Tristan, thought. [i][color=82ca9d]to be separated from the transitions, absent the instincts that hold it together.[/color][/i]

Which wasn't true. Time flowed normally, moment to moment, as steady and sure as ever. Keahi's gun - [color=82ca9d][i]is mine back home? Fuck, I wish I had a gun[/i][/color] - gleamed in the light as the others spoke, laughed, confessed...the scene was surreal but perfectly linear, drawn from an extant history. He was the thing unbound. The earth felt soft beneath his feet and as he scuffed one the scent of the grass rose up from where he'd broken stalks, and breathing it in, something so solid and certain, made him feel like the beginning of a second disappearing act.

[color=82ca9d][i]The truth is invariable.[/i]

"I am a variable."

[i]Fuck. Was that out loud? Where did that -[/i][/color]

The mask gleamed in his hand. Like a gun. He felt like he'd been standing still for a long time, but his breathing was getting faster, heavier. It wasn't that nothing was making sense. It was that sense was what he was afraid of. The weight of destiny. [color=82ca9d][i]There's even a quest.[/i][/color] The kid was dashing off, and then the kid was an angel. The killer was smiling in the sunlight. The Ghost Girl was still herself, measured, collected, even and attuned. Everything was right. Everything was wrong.

He needed an anchor, something that didn't stink of faith and fate. Something - someone - to trust. Tabitha, the harlequin? Laughing and crying with more emotion than he'd dreamed her capable of, watching from the shadows of their little band? He wanted to trust her, but [i]wanting[/i] wasn't enough. The cop? For reasons that didn't make sense here. The killer? He didn't want to trust [i]him[/i], but maybe that, too, was based in reasoning that no longer applied. There was a girl shouting at both of them. Outside their dynamic. Stormy, too, and the vomiting man. Were outsiders safe?

What was safe? He felt a scream start to bubble up in the back of his throat, could almost hear it...

...but it wasn't entirely his scream. He could feel his Semblance against his fingers, almost but not quite trembling, somehow communicating this imperceptible perception through his fingertips. [i][color=82ca9d]You were afraid, too.[/color][/i] Had he really thought he'd go insane if he heard that scream? What had the Ghost Girl said? That they were alike, but she didn't scare so easy? [color=82ca9d][i]But that wasn't true, was it? You were afraid all the time. No one to trust. But you found a way,
 to move, to make things...[/i][/color]

He gasped suddenly, a ragged sound like the tatters of a clothesline in a storm. Fingers scrabbling as his eyes darted, trying to keep the others all in view, stepping backwards, tripping, scrambling, the mask in his hands, the metal pressed against his face, breathing in sweat and oil, fumes and fear, breathing, shaking, screaming-

[color=82ca9d][i]...safe.[/i][/color]

His heart tore out of his torso, impaled on a spined tendril of carbon and silver. He stared up - he'd come to rest on his back, hands fisted in the grass - at the excised organ, uncomprehending. Then the tendril opened, [i]blossomed[/i] as if in imitation of one of the field's many flowers, shredding and shedding its gorey bulb.
 [color=82ca9d]"N-"[/color] His new appendage reversed its path, slammed home into his chest, driving the breath from him. [color=82ca9d]"T-"[/color]

A dozen more tendrils split his skin, discarding the detritus that defines a human being. Gears boiled up beneath muscles and churned them to ruin, their relentless rotations drawing out armor plates and sliding them into position, pistons priming and separating the chaff of his flesh wherever it interfered with their novel operations. Sprays of thick black ferrofluid warped and then retracted in midair, hardening into angular segments. Limbs, vitals, skeleton, musculature, the wailing indigenous vanishing beneath the conquest of clockwork and chrome. Soft circuitry, too, wormed its way through his mind, shocking him with its unbidden architecture even as the immediacy of his terror expanded - spreading out into its own subclusters, dedicated threat-calculating mechanisms that need not interfere with efficient action. A clockwork screaming, moment to moment, steady and sure as time.

Holograms of soft green light flared around him as he climbed to his feet, cycling through possibilities. Tristan dismissed them with an instinctive wave of his hand. A single tendril separated out from the back of his chassis, sunk into the soil to discharge a potentiality there. An emerald shard that set to shivering at a hungry frequency, wave-patterns like roots spreading across the ground to draw iron from his blood, calcium from his bones, pulses burrowing into the earth in search of richer veins than Tristan's former. After a moment the flow of materials coalesced and the shard unfurled into a delicate filigree flower, another set of holograms forming around it like petals, displaying future plans. At its heart a single offering gleamed, and with the hiss of steam lifted up into the air to meet Tristan's reaching hand. 

Though it corresponded to no human design, there was nevertheless something immediately interpretable about the function of the device he held. A weapon. A gun.

Tristan examined it with too many eyes of molten gold as he stepped forward on mechanical legs, tilting his head briefly as the horns grew, four branching lengths of sharpened silver. He came to rest a few paces from where Tabitha sat laughing, but his unsettling golden gaze was fixated on their half-dead host.

[color=82ca9d]"This isn't just...power. Is it?"[/color] One eye each flicked to Tabitha, Koda, Ascot, and for some reason Stormy, but the central orb stayed its course. [color=82ca9d]"This was [i]someone's.[/i] What was...she?"[/color]

He paused.

[color=82ca9d]"And what are we?"[/color]