“Dammit!” Eli cursed, twisting away from a stream of bright orange liquid as it sprayed through the air, drenching the spot of floor where he had been standing just moments before. The liquid emanated from a tangle of pipes, spurting forth five or so feet in a long arc before hitting the ground.
The irritated employee didn’t need this right now. He had work to do and a quota to fill, and the last thing he needed was a broken valve spewing out chemicals that could permanently alter his physiology standing between him and his work station. His tail twitched anxiously as he considered just running through the compound to get back to the terminal on the far end of the stream. With luck, the standard issue coveralls that all of Amalgatech’s floor staff wore would protect him, but there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t eat through the suit in seconds and then rob him of his skeleton.
The employee sighed, pressing a small button on the side of his helmet and activating the radio in his mask. “Hello Ethan? This is Eli. I’ve got a spill by the primary furnace output. Yeah, a broken gasket or something, I dunno. Better send Walter”
Five minutes of anxiously tapping his foot later, Eli’s impatience was finally rewarded by an odd squelching sound that grew louder, until finally, Walter rounded one of the large processing vats on the factory floor and slithered up to the co-worker that had summoned him. The repairman was not in any way human anymore. After being exposed to a sample of unstable caulking, his entire body had taken on the properties of the goop, rendering him an inert sphere of sticky foam. Fortunately, Amalgatech rarely let something as inconvenient as loss of humanity stand in the way of getting the best out of their employees and after a week or so of chemical baths and a few experimental solvents, Walter was back in the game as a large wad of adhesive putty, fully functional but resembling something out of The Blob.

“Afternoon Walt” Eli nodded to the amorphous mass as it slid past him. A thin strand of Walter’s body stretched away from the central mass, making a gesture that could only be interpreted as a cheerful wave as he crept towards the leaking pipe. Walter’s sticky body pressed itself against the pipe, sealing the leak while several other tentacles formed themselves, going through a large toolkit that he had produced from within himself. He ignored the orange, noxious fluid that dripped down his form. After all that Walt’s body been through, he could probably take a bath in trichloric acid and still come out unscathed. A hiss signaled that he had found and shut off the back-up valve, at which point he brought a large welding torch to bear on the surface of the pipe. Sparks bounced harmlessly off of his rubbery hide as he meticulously cut away the damaged section of pipe in order to make way for a new one.

Walter had managed to maintain a fairly Zen-like approach to all of this. Granted, it had been a jarring transition between being a 6’2 Caucasian and a being a greyish wad of muck, but even his current state felt like a relief after a week of being that massive sphere of immobile goo. Every time he looked in the mirror, he panicked a little less, got a little more accustomed to what he was looking at. He couldn’t even think of himself as ugly anymore, he was so divorced from anything remotely resembling human. He was just…different.  He might have had a harder time adjusting if he had been working anywhere else, but the folks at Amalgatech barely even batted an eye at their amorphous co-worker. They ate, joked and worked alongside him, never treating him like anything less than a man. Once or twice he could even swear catching a few others stealing glances at him, as if entranced by his bizarre form. Ethan and Maggie had been especially good friends during all of this.

It wasn’t what he had signed on to this company for, but so long as he had his work, he could live with what he was, and one day, maybe even appreciate it. And he had a feeling he’d be working for a very long time.