(WARNING! The following text contains elements of Transformation/Mad Science. If you do not care for any of the aforementioned topics, just leave.)
(This takes place after Why Not? - Classified 1, if you give half a damn about continuity. It probably doesn't really matter.)


"Good morning. How was last night?" Art asked as I entered the door. I had just gotten to the Artificer's lab that morning, after a night of vigorous… experimentation.

"W-what do you mean?" I blushed nervously.

"The portalization serum. Does it work well? Oh, and did you happen to find out how long it lasts?"

"Oh… right. It works very… very well." My face must have been lit up bright red, thinking about what I had done last night. "And sorry, I didn't get the time… I did wake up in one piece this morning though, and couldn't pull myself apart anymore."

"Ah, that's a damn shame. Oh well! I guess you'll just have to try it out again to find the duration."

"Um… sure." Oh my god, I can't even imagine how red my face must have been. I was secretly looking forward to it. "Right… now?"

"No, no. Some other time." Disappointment took hold. Art looked up from his work on the desk. I looked at the stuff cluttering his desk for the first time that morning. It seemed to be mostly a lot of papers, sketches and drawings, with notes scribbled hastily all over them. Untidy and completely disorganized. I chuckled to myself. "Although, I guess if you wanted to, you could. I don't have anything for testing today, so feel free to mess around with whatever you find." He made a sweeping motion across the lab.

"…uh. Okay." I looked around, feeling a little lost, and picked up a cylinder-looking device, off the shelf. It looked a bit like a double-ended flashlight, with two switches. "So it's safe to just try out anything?"

"Sure, sure! I don't think I have anything lying around that's dangerous… well, except for… oh and maybe… hm. Anyway, it should be safe. For the most part." Art grinned.

That didn't exactly fill me with confidence, but I felt that I could trust him to take care of whatever happened. I flipped one of the switches on the flashlight-thing, and a blueish light came out of one end. It extended a faint 6 inches before dying off. It didn't seem to do anything else, however. I waved it over my free hand. As my hand came in contact with the light… well, it didn't. Because my hand was gone. I pulled back my arm sharply. "Ahh! What… My hand!"

My hand was gone up to the wrist. Simply gone, there was nothing left. I couldn't feel it or anything. "Um… Art? This light, what does it…"

"Hm? Oh, that's a Vanishing Beam. It was my first idea for easy transportation, before I made the portalization rings. And then the serum, but that's not really for transportation." Art said, looking up from his work. "It absorbs any and all 'life' and can reconstitute what it absorbs. With the other end, that is. Everything on that shelf is old work on the transportation stuff that didn't quite pan out."

"Oh." I wrestled with the device for a moment (I only had one hand) to flip it over and flicked on the other side. The light was green this time. I waved it over my wrist stump, and heaved a sigh of relief as my hand returned to existence. Flipping the beam over again, I switched it back to blue and curiosity took ahold of me as I passed the beam over my head.

Suddenly, everything went pitch black. I couldn't see or hear (or smell, or taste) anything. I lost all sensation of my head. Checking to confirm, I waved my free hand over where my head would be, and it passed straight through. Yup. I was headless. I ran my hand across my shoulders, shuddering at the strange touch on my neck. Oh, there was skin over it again. Weird. It was kind of relaxing, in a way, not having to deal with four of my five senses. How was I still thinking, if my brain didn't exist? Then again, how was I still alive? A quick check noted that I wasn't breathing anymore. I guess I didn't need to.

I restored my head, shocked by the sudden rush of having my senses restored. I just stood there for a moment, soaking in the sensations. I don't think I had ever been so glad to be able to see or hear. Then again… it was pretty relaxing being headless, too. I put the Vanishing Beam back up on its' shelf and picked up another cylindrical device from right next to it. It looked almost identical to the Vanishing Beam, except that the lights were red and yellow, this time.

Cautiously, I flipped the yellow switch, and as expected, there was the yellow light. I passed it over my hand… and nothing happened. Must be the restoring side, I decided, and flipped on the red side instead. I poked my hand in. The light felt warm to my skin, the kind of comforting, relaxing warmth you might get from a sauna.

Nothing seemed to change, but my hand felt a little tingly. I wasn't sure how to describe it, but my hand felt… looser? The feeling seemed to intensify the longer I held it under the light. I looked up at the shelf to see if there was any instruction manual or something. There wasn't. As expected. As I was looking, I heard a dripping noise, and felt something poke my pinky. I looked down at my hand. My melting hand.

My eyes widened in fear as I quickly pulled the light away from my hand. It didn't help. My hand was literally melting away, dripping onto the floor and collecting in a neat little puddle of flesh. I then realized I could still sort of feel my hand. I felt the floor, in a bunch of different scattered parts throughout my hand, but I also felt… the rest of my hand. It was like touching myself in a bunch of different places all at once, like every small bit of my hand could feel the rest of my hand.

It also felt kind of nice, and comforting. It was like my hand was being hugged. By itself. The last of my hand dripped away into the puddle. I poked my stump with my other hand. It was soft, sort of pliable, like it was also half-melted already. I turned the yellow beam onto the puddle of my hand, and in a few short seconds, my hand was lying there on the ground, detached again. I picked it up and pushed it against my wrist. Instead of the fusing like from when I was detachable, however, the two surfaces began to melt again, only to rejoin quickly, with an intense tingling sensation. I put the um… Melting Beam, I guess… back on the shelf, with a mental note to try it out more later. For now though, I wanted to see some other stuff. I decided to move to a different shelf.

I picked up a phone-looking device from another shelf. It looked like a standard smart phone, touch-screen interface, with a camera and everything. In fact, that's what it was. There was a label over where the brand name would be that said "Recombiner". I guess he got lazy thinking up clever interfaces. I found the power button and turned it on, to be greeted by a nondescript screen that simply had the words "Scan New Subject". Figuring it meant scan with the camera, I decided to "scan" myself, and put the device down, camera facing forward, and stepped back, letting myself get in full view of it. After a few moments, I checked it again, to see myself fully rendered on the display… nude. I looked around quickly to make sure Art wasn't watching me. He was still at his desk, muttering to himself with random exclamations. I turned back to the screen.

There were lots of menus and buttons all over the device, and several of my body parts were highlighted with options. I selected my left leg, and a drop-down menu appeared. "Nothing, LA, RA, LL, RL, HD…" the list went on and on. I shrugged and hit one at random, RA. A few seconds later, I suddenly lost my balance, but quickly caught myself with my arm… but I was still standing up straight. I looked down, and found that my left leg was an arm, instead. A right arm. Oh, that's what RA stands for, right arm. I shifted my balance to my left leg and moved my new arm around. It was just as usable as my normal arms, and I had full control over it. "Cool."

I shifted my balance onto my new arm so that I was standing on it, and swapped my remaining leg for another arm. A lefty, this time, to balance it out. Standing was a bit tiring though, I wasn't exactly the most fit of people. I passed the Recombiner to my lower-arms, and swapped my normal arms for legs.

I noticed that my shoulders got broader to compensate for the fact that my legs were larger than my arms, and I could stand on them perfectly fine. I was a good deal shorter, though. I walked around in this new form for a bit, but got bored of it quickly. I traded my legs for arms again, and walked around on all fours, like a gorilla of some sort. It was really easy and sort of fun to swing myself around like that.

Noticing that I could also change my head, I hit the drop-down menu. The same sort of options appeared. Could I really swap my head for another arm? I decided to give it a try. Turns out yes, I could. Instead of my head, I had an arm sticking out where my neck should be. I could still see and hear, sort of. I could kind of tell where everything was, and it felt like I was sensing that from the hand of my new arm. I tried to laugh, but found that I couldn't. I didn't have a mouth, after all.

I noticed that I didn't have to change out my entire limb, I could just change parts of it. I selected one of my hands (my normal right hand, if you care), and picked the HD option. My hand turned into my head. "Whoah." I waved my head around, giggling to myself. I must have looked absurd. I noticed that my head-hand wasn't picking up senses anymore. Guess my normal head overwrote that. "I wonder…"

I selected my normal left hand and swapped it for another head. "Whoah." "Whoah." My two heads said at once, staring at each other. "…Hi." "Hi, Amy, I'm Amy!" my other head quipped. We… well, I, both laughed. I was in full control of both heads, and pretended to have a conversation with myself, and when I got bored of that, I swapped both heads back for hands, and traded the hand from my neck for a head. Having an arm for a neck made moving my head around really fun, but my head was a bit heavy, making it tiring. I decided to turn my neck back to normal.

Looking over the other options for my limbs, I found that I could basically just put new things anywhere, or remove things at will. I gave myself two new arms, right below my normal arms. When they appeared, they ripped two holes in my shirt on the sides. Oops. I hadn't really thought that through. I deleted the new arms, sighing about the holes. I opened up the menus again, looking for things I hadn't tried out yet.

I found a menu for modifying my face. I giggled, and began messing around with it. I deleted my nose, and replaced it with another mouth, right above my normal mouth. Reaching out with my tongues, I found that I could touch them together. I laughed, then wondered. I pulled up the menus for my hands, and found that I could place mouths on them, too. Soon, I was holding my hands together, kissing myself.  Not a bad way to practice. I laughed, with my other mouths, and darted my tongues in and out. I decided to stop before I degenerated to making out with myself. I replaced the mouths with eyes, and dizzied myself with triple vision. I got rid of them quickly. Oops, deleted both of my hands entirely instead. I shrugged, and just grabbed the device with my lower arms for use. I went back to the face menu, giving myself multiple eyes, noses, mouths and ears all over my face. It got complicated, and the sensory input was pretty jarring, so I wiped it all off.

Including my original face, apparently. I slapped myself in the… well, I didn't have a face anymore, I guess. It was perfectly smooth, just like when I had detached my face. Instead of remaking my face, I rolled up my shirt so that my belly was exposed, and re-created my face there. I poked it. "Ow!" It still felt like my face. Not sure what I was expecting to be different.

After a bit more tinkering around, I restored myself completely. There wasn't an option for default restoration, so I had to swap everything back one by one.  I was just putting the Recombiner back where I found it when suddenly I heard a loud explosion from behind me. Startled, I dropped it, spinning around to see what happened. There was a large cloud of smoke around the desk. And that's all I remember before I was plunged into darkness.

I couldn't see, hear, move… anything. There was just nothingness. I started to panic, but there was nothing I could do about it. The Recombiner must have broken when I dropped it… and modified me somehow, but I couldn't feel anything different. Actually, I couldn't feel anything. I had no body. The Recombiner must have deleted me entirely! I felt even more worried now, the Artificer said he could restore me from whatever, but what if there was nothing left of me? And who knows what happened to him, whatever that explosion was.

So there I was, just… my thoughts, my mind. Nothing else. I had no body. I had calmed down a bit, there was no real use fighting it. It was actually kind of relaxing, like the best meditation ever. I had done some yoga and meditation classes for awhile, but they had never been anything to this measure, of course.

After what seemed like an eternity, a rush of sensation returned to me. I could see again! Hear! Smell, Touch, Taste! I felt my body, electric and alive compared to the nothingness I was just in.

"Amy, are you okay?" Art was standing over me. Apparently I was lying on the floor. I got up, a bit shakily, as if I weren't used to my body. "When you dropped the Recombiner it accidentally hit Erase on everything, so your body just vanished. You should be okay though, right? How many fingers am I holding up?" He waved his hand in front of me.

"I'm fine, Art. And three." I said. "What about you, are you okay? That explo-"

"Oh, that. Pish posh, that's nothing. I should've warned you earlier about that though, things tend to get a little noisy when I start doing things. I was working on a new idea, now that I've gotten teleportation ironed out. Sort of. You want to try it out?" He grinned.

"But the… you… I… Oh, sure." I grinned back at him, and he grabbed my arm and whisked me further back into the lab.