[center][img]https://see.fontimg.com/api/renderfont4/RRdW/eyJyIjoiZnMiLCJoIjo4NywidyI6MTUwMCwiZnMiOjU4LCJmZ2MiOiIjOTI5NEZGIiwiYmdjIjoiIzM2MjM2QiIsInQiOjF9/UGV0cmE/grime.png[/img][h3]??? — Dilapidated Shack[/h3][@Zeroth][@ERode][@PKMNB0Y][hr][/center]It took Petra a bit to figure out the art of locomotion. Her first attempt had been to form herself into a ball and to rotate her ‘innards’ in such a way as to roll around, but actually forming – and more importantly, maintaining – a shape that refined had proven quite challenging, and she’d ended up giving up once it became clear that even if she could manage it her body simply didn’t have the rigidity to prevent itself from deforming under its own weight. 

Her next attempt was to simply shift her mass along the ground, which worked, but it was slow enough to give Petra the impression that she'd make snails look like Olympic sprinters if she tried it. Actually taking a cue from snails worked a little better, rolling her ‘foot’ in a wave motion, so as to propel herself forwards, though coordinating the whole program such that it wouldn’t simply spin her in circles was a nightmare and in the end it was still agonisingly slow. Whatever, it’d have to do for now. 

Extracting herself from whatever it was she’d been under, Petra didn’t have time to get her bearings – not that she was quite sure how to go about doing so in the first place – before she felt the ground beneath her shake – a rather unusual sensation considering she only had that strange sense of proprioception with which to feel out the way the vibrations caused her body to subtly deform. 

Petra wasn't able to modify her mental programming in time to carry her back under her shelter before the approaching thing grabbed her, lifting her mass into the air. By some miracle, the programming Petra had created continued to pull her mass inwards as she was lifted, because without it, she was pretty sure she’d have literally fallen apart. Whatever it was that picked her up, it was clean – far cleaner than her environment at least – but it ‘tasted’ distinctly organic. 

Was it a person? Did they know she was a person? Were they going to kill her? 

Before she could do anything, Petra’s train of thought was cut short. A vibration, transferred both through the arms that had picked her up and the air surrounding her body hit her. The vibration really shouldn’t have made any sense to her – even if it happened to be in English, her current senses were simply too far removed from actual hearing for her to even have the slightest chance at understanding – and yet somehow the meaning behind the words was seamlessly imprinted upon Petra’s mind.

[b]“You.”[/b]

Just as she’d been able to perceive and modify her anatomy, Petra was met with yet another seemingly supernatural effect. This time in her apparent ability to translate what really should have been gibberish. Was it magic of some kind? She didn’t feel any noticeable difference in the drain compared to her other two seemingly supernatural feats, so was this somehow different from those?

[b]“Were you human too? Give a proper sign.”[/b]

Oh, right. The catastrophe at hand. They wanted to know if she'd been human. That was probably a good sign! Or maybe a really, really bad one, but nonetheless it seemed as though it was her best option given the circumstances. Just one problem; how exactly was she meant to give a proper sign?

Petra briefly considered morse code as an option, until she remembered that she knew exactly two letters of that. Binary was another option, but that seemed like it’d take a while and would require her captor to be able to translate it… what about the translation function then? Did it work both ways?

Testing her idea, Petra started forming a new program to extrude a new pseudopod and repetedly slap it against her body. Somehow she only fucked up twice in this endeavour and neither failure resulted in any loss of mass – she was truly getting better at that, her burgeoning mastery of her own body surely a good first step towards mastery of the entire globe. 

The wet sounding slaps really shouldn’t have had any meaning to them beyond their constant pattern, but what was language if not patterns people had prescribed special meaning to? Assuming she could translate her own sounds in the same way she had the other person’s – which was admittedly a pretty big assumption – there really shouldn’t be a reason she couldn’t just make up the meanings to words as she went…

[color=9294FF]“̴H̵̶̶̦͉̓̌u̵m̴̶̴̠̦̊̽á̶̶̴̳͇͠n̷… ̷y̵ę̵̶̶̝̿̀s̶… ̷m̷ȩ̴̵̷̥̐̕… ̷W̶a̴s̷– ̷h̶u̵m̵a̴n̵… I wa̴s hum̴a̴n, yes̷.”[/color]