That thing between Nadia and Jade.

[Anzu Minea]

Nadia wasn't responding to his touch in the same exciteable way once he took her hands and helped her onto the table. She was keeping herself calm, pain looming on the horizon and the prospect able to weaken her enthusiasm. She wasn't going to say no, however. This was exactly what she'd come to the Bioship for...

"I'm ready, Jade." Had he noticed that she liked to say his name? Nadia forced a smile as she spoke to him, tied down to the table that quickly was syncing it's pulse with hers. "Even if it hurts, I trust you."

After she spoke, Nadia tried summoning her powers. She wasn't aiming to curse herself again, and certainly not do anything like that to Jade- counter productive, hm?- but Nadia's shadow seemed to lengthen and darken under her despite the lights around her. She didn't have a familiar- something she'd like to change eventually- but that didn't mean she couldn't manipulate things far away from her. Maybe she was reaching through her Mark to try and see how Jade was able to multitask so much across distance...

Either way, the effect of her shadow was short-lived, and her attention returned to him and what was happening to her.  

[Torment]

The feeling of his hands splitting to spread over her breasts was accompanied by the second skin he had given her pulling off to the sides. His flesh began to gather along her ribs as he lowered himself towards her with his eyes closed as if in concentration. His body began to increase in temperature as thousands of pinpricks ran up her sides from his flesh beginning to invade her body. The warmth would begin to pulse through her chest with an intense heat starting along her ribs. The sensation of hot glass grinding into her wounds would be absent this time but the shifting of her flesh from the lack of crystal supporting it would quickly begin causing bleeding in her soft tissues. The parts of Jade that entered her would be quickly attempting to stop the bleeding, even by creating temporary blood vessels and capillaries if necessary.  

[Anzu Minea]

There was pain again, but even as she flinched against it and showed her displeasure clear across her face, it wasn't nearly as bad as what had come before. Nadia turned her face away from him where she was attached to the table, eyes closed tightly before she forced herself to relax. He was holding her, but moving too much on her own would only cause problems for them both.

Instead, as he began to work away at her, part of Nadia's mind drifted off. Not... pleasureably... but she sent it away, like an out of body experience, something that walled off the pain and left her magic still accessable, increasing it's range. Nadia's body would grow a little cold once this was complete, and she'd begin to move and respond a lot less, but everything else about her was still in nearly-perfect working order.  

[Torment]

He continued to lower over her until she was half submerged within his chest with the odd sensation of something quite literally flowing through her chest, not that she'd really feel it. Two tendrils from above extended down and inserted themselves into Jade's back to feed him raw organic compounds to use in the regeneration sequence. All the while a diagram of Nadia began to grow out from her ribs on the screen Jade had summoned along the wall.

Nadia Machi, The Weaver. A woman crushed by man. Gentlemen, we can rebuild her. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic woman. Nadia Machi will be that woman. Better than she was before. Better, stronger, faster.

Fade Out

 

[Anzu Minea]

Fade In?

Josie was on board, and for Nadia it would have been a bit too awkward to get up out of the Medical Facility and wander the halls aimlessly for Jade. He was injured, and that worried her- not that he wouldn't recover, just the fact that he was injured.

She was too weak to move around to find him though. Leaving might've also left Josie to fall into the same panic Nadia had succumbed to during her first hours on the ship. And if she somehow stumbled into Jade's Keeper along the way she'd likely die of fright and that would be the end of things.

It wasn't as systematic a search as anything even an exhausted Jade might've come up with, in fact it wasn't systematic at all. Nadia was drawing on Amalgamation's reserves of energy since her own had been depleted already, and at random throughout the Bioship the shadows along the walls or cieling or whatnot would suddenly become very cold. October might not've appreciated this, but at least it was only temporary. Nadia was proding through the shadows with her mind, looking for Jade and making sure that until she found him she was only looking, and keeping away from anything even remotely sensative. Unless the room where he was keeping himself was completely bathed in unbroken light, or with a temperature just too high for her to look into (and didn't Jade hate heat anyways?) she'd find him eventually. Or so she hoped.  

[Torment]

It was not that finding Jade was difficult, seeing as the ship only had a few rooms, but getting to him might be the hard part. His room had been permanently sealed from the rest of the ship with the obvious exception of the air handling systems. His room was mostly bare aside from a raised area with a steep bowl in the center in which a sickly green fluid was currently resting. A glowing screen covered one wall of the mere five by five foot room with his handguns sitting upon the wall, still streaming prismatic light from the damage they had sustained. Several small green objects littered what looked to be shelves along the walls but were difficult to make out in the sickly light of the room.

The fluid was not Jade, not by itself anyway. The bowl was normally filled with a thick orange protein soup of sorts and the contrast of Jade's green coloration and the orange was creating a nauseating hue. The most striking thing about the bowl were the claws that extended from the side that had the glowing wall. From the bottom of the bowl all the way to the top the bowl was broken into many sections which seemed to measure his displacement within the protein soup.

And despite the fact that they were in space, the Keeper was no where on board.  

[Anzu Minea]

She passed the room with the giant bowl once, and then came back to it, accessing the Marks once she finally remembered that Jade's natural form wasn't human in appearance. Duh.

The temperature in Jade's chamber dropped a few degrees, something she couldn't help as Nadia stitched together another Sending. This one was completely reliant on energy from Amalgamation to do so and just hoping no one decided to be a**l about the drain. Back to the matter at hand however...

A hand of shadow would gently graze along the length of his damaged weapons where they hung, Nadia's responses becoming drawn out and sluggish with Josie as she'd found him and began looking through the Sending instead of her own eyes. She was immediately concerned when she saw Mind and Blaze: normally when weapons took a beating their masters did too. Crossing the room towards the basin, the shadow clearly had Nadia's outline and profile to it, making it recognizable as if her aura weren't solidy at the core of it. Carefully, she'd reach out to touch his mind.

'...I don't like explosions anymore.'  

[Torment]

The pool of fluids rippled slightly as her mind touched upon his and spoke through the link they shared. For several long moments the pool lay still until a single ripple crossed the surface, though no message was returned to her. It would take several moments more before light flickered within her field of vision. The response came not in the form of a string of letters but a simple animation of a bomb exploding with a NO sign over it. Once it faded the HUD flickered once more before another message appeared, heart ? The message remained only for a brief moment before the HUD flickered and it disappeared from view to be replaced by a count-down timer in the upper right reaches of her vision.  

[Anzu Minea]

In the other compartment, Nadia watched the bomb animation with a sad look in her eyes, but when the heart appeared her expression became unreadable. The count-down brought fear.

A rush of cold, black energy quickly overcame her where she'd been reclining and speaking sluggishly with Josie, a swap taking place as a moment later Nadia stumbled with both hands against the outside of the tub he was resting inside of. They'd switched places, and the strain of it was clear on her face as she was also standing now instead of reclining. And she wasn't even standing straight- she was over five feet tall and the room was not.

"Jade..." She said his name tenderly, leaning against the basin as she sunk down to the floor, Nadia would cast her shadows again. A webbing of shadows being the intention as they formed just over the basin's opening.

An orb of Jade's green crystal would sink into the tub, clung to by several threads of darkness. The orb was a to-scale image of the world, and it wouldn't matter what sort of current Jade kicked up inside, Nadia wasn't going to let go of it. The threads would be just long enough to dandle the orb about mid-height where he was resting, and as it bobbed up and down a bit the threads would curl and knot themselves, each one forming several small shadow-woven heart s.  

[Torment]

It was still some time until Jade would be able to waken from his own breed of slumber and though he was recording what Nadia was doing he was not truly awake. Any other cycle he might leave portions of himself active in case of emergency procedures but in this instance he had been drained almost entirely. It was not Jade that responded to Nadia, but his room itself. The ambient level of light rose slightly and caused the two walls heavily adorned with small green shapes to glimmer in the darkness. The ship groaned slightly but the walls and ceiling expanded to better allow Nadia to explore Jade's quarters.  

[Anzu Minea]

Jade didn't respond. Nadia could put that down to his exhaustion, the running around he'd had to do not to mention all of the medical procedures with her and Josie. Nevermind what they'd done earlier and all the information he'd likely taken in with little time to process. She could think of all of that, and tell herself it would be wise now to return to the Medical Facility where Josie was and where she'd left the immobile Sending.

She could tell herself that, and think all of that, but the only thing she could see were the numbers in the corner of her vision. It was that count-down that had appeared after the heart and hadn't responded, paused, or stopped since. The worry she'd felt when it'd appeared- not understanding what it meant exactly- had only been growing worse. Wrapping one arm down across her torso and the other up to hold onto the opposite shoulder, Naida laid herself down on her side. She would close her eyes tightly against the HUD, her eyes burning and she clenched her teeth against the urge to let the fear bring tears.

She wasn't leaving. And even if she needed to sleep, she wasn't leaving.  

[Torment]

Every so often the countdown would flicker out of sight but would return and would do so at regular intervals. These intervals could indeed be tracked but they did not seem to follow any Earth notions of time, which is probably to be expected as he mentioned his regeneration cycle would last for seven hours and forty two minutes. In the whole of that time he did not move more than those few ripples as he struggled to reactivate the numerous Units in Nadia's body. He didn't even ripple when she submerged the sphere inside his body.

Even in the last few moments he seemed to be a dead slab of sickly green jell-o he remained entirely motionless. However, the moment the countdown hit zero the room shook and a fully formed Jade slammed against the part of the basin farthest from Nadia, gasping for air. His body had reverted to the red and pink hues Mindblaze had been fond of and his facial features were quite similar. His hand gripped at his chest where the strands of shadow entered his form, the small hearts and the replica in jade deep inside his body.

A look of surprise washed across his features as his eyes were shot with black and the irises and pupils turned a thick green. He stopped gasping but his hands remained upon the threads as he stared at Nadia, his voice not yet active. From his eyes the changes rippled out over his body to replace pink hair with a dirty blond with auburn highlights. His red blouse (for it truly was modeled after the female garment Mindblaze had worn) was replaced by a broad chest covered in scars. His tight black jeans grew wider into a pair of purplish back slacks as his body shortened to accommodate his overall changes in width. His eyes flicked closed and her HUD came back into full view with a message at the bottom, What are you doing in here?!?  

[Anzu Minea]

After having been asleep for so long, most of the threads holding the orb had faded, leaving only one real strand able to keep a fixed hold on the model as Jade came to life and burst out from the side of the tub. She was woken up by the feel of it moving around with him, but it wasn't until he pushed and stumbled his way out that she actually pushed herself up and looked around behind her, startled.

"..?" The count-down was gone, and she finally clued in on what it had meant. It'd been a count-down to let them know when he'd finished regenerating. For a moment she couldn't even figure out where the other crazy thoughts she'd been plagued by had come from, but they'd come, and there wasn't much she could do about it.

She felt a stab of embarassment, seeing him come out with his hair and clothes all strange. And then she wasn't even sure if he knew the feeling well enough or not to be even more humiliated at having her there to see it in the first place!

"You were injured, I was worried-" Was his hair pink? That top looked- "She didn't know anything when I asked what'd happened to you. I started looking and when you sent those messages, I..." She touched one hand up to her eye, where the HUD images had appeared, the bomb and then the heart. She finally seemed to take in her surroundings aside from the mass of the tub that'd held her attention for the most part. She'd seen the guns hung on the wall, but now noticed the multitude of crystals everywhere, her sight undiminished in the dark and able to show her to small figures scattered about. Was that one of Krausse?

"I'm sorry, it was rude of me." He'd come out wearing a bright pink woman's top, Nadia was suddenly either extremely curious or completely not about who or what was still inside that basin.  

[Torment]

He slowly leaned forward and lowered his hands so that he could receive the sphere as it tumbled out of his body. He turned slightly and extended one hand towards her with it gripped as though his hand were a claw over the top. His body rippled as he held the replica out to her, shifts in color dancing along his frame as he attempted to solidify his command over the appearance of his body into something she knew well. His hair, however, refused to shift from its dirty blond with auburn highlights and seemed adamant in its requirement to stay much shorter than he liked.

His first words came not as anything intelligible but as a mere growl as he tugged on strands of his hair. He shook his head and his voice came with two echoes following in the background, one soft and the other gruff and lightly accented, "I- I am sorry I did not give you an update on my status once I returned. My base programming was in effect as I was beginning to process new input from Uri Baluyev. You have no reason to apologize for entering my regeneration chamber. You were concerned. Worried. You wanted or needed to ensure I was still functional."

His eyes then flicked open, the emerald pupil lined with a ring of brown to distinguish between what was intended to be two separate part of his eyes, though he generally filled the pupil in with black. He looked to her for a moment before his eyes flicked shut and her HUD received another message, Nadia, what does heart mean? It..... bounces.  

[Anzu Minea]

"Y-yes, I..." There wasn't much she could add on to his statement about her searching for him. Wanted and needed, that was the only slight detail- and needed, not or.

The HUD message made her blush though, now there was no excuse for her fear at all. He'd sent it asking what the image meant, not about a blending of emotions. Maybe in his damaged state he'd started going through his library of symbols and just casually plucked one up to ask her about. It could've just as easily been $ or @...

"It... does bounce. I think it's cute though, but I expected something green from you." Actually, a Green Heart always symbolized envy, so it made sense if the one on the HUD was pink since they'd already established that he didn't feel that or jealousy. But now she was overcomplicating her own thoughts. "It's a symbol which represents a strong human emotion. A bond different and in many ways stronger than just normal friendship."

His voice was strange to her now, not unpleasant and still easily recognizable, but she could hear the accent and the gruffer tone invading his normal monotone. She also smiled and hid a bit of a giggle behind her hand as he growled and tugged at his hair. She'd already helped close the distance so she could accept back her orb, rolling it in her hand against her stomach for a moment before a cloud of darkness enveloped and whisked it away safely. She reached up then and twisted a few of his the shortened locks around her fingers tenderly.

"I'm sure your hair will grow out in time, once you've adjusted. I like the new colour though..." Nadia said it with a smile, but her hand drifted down a bit, gently touching the tips of her fingers against the portions of his face where she'd seen the crystal grafted across him when he'd returned to the ship. He looked fine now though...