“What happened to your hips?” Greg asked.
“I got some nips and tucks all over the place,” he said, twisting to the side for a better view as Kerrie swirled her finger in the air.
“Just take it all off,” Kara urged.
“Fine,” Paul said, realizing that was best, though as he did so and the air hit his body, his skin went from slightly blue to streaks of hazy yellow.
“Yellow means you’re turned on?” Sara guessed.
Paul frowned. “No. I’m not sure what this is. Maybe vulnerable.”
“I can see the organ on your spine,” Wilson commented as a slight bump along either side was visible. “Plus your entire skeleton looks to be configured for more agility and less brute lifting.”
“All that running, probably,” Jason added. “No Saroto’kanse’vam?”
“Nope,” Paul confirmed as he half turned again.
“And you’re sure you’re finished transforming?” Morgan asked.
“Quite sure.”
“Where are your nipples?” Kara asked.
“Lost them with my bioplasma and body hair. I don’t have any more hair follicles except on my head and in my nose. Has something to do with the skin alteration as much as them being deactivated, or so I assume.”
Morgan stood up in the 4th row and raised one of her arms at Paul. “Mind a little test?”
“You might black out,” Wilson warned her.
“I’ll risk it if he will,” she said, looking at Paul.
“Go ahead,” he said, taking up a slight defensive stance as she threw a not so small Jumat blast at him. He took it on his body without any shielding, and it pushed him back a step…and as it did so a splash of brown shot out across his body around the impact site, but it didn’t make it to his extremities before the blue quickly reasserted itself.
“Ooo, my turn next,” Kara said excitedly, though she remained seated.
Morgan slumped back into her seat, though she remained awake. “Interesting. What does it feel like?”
“A little prickly, but otherwise all the colors feel normal.”
“Riley can change his on command, and they stay put,” Jason added. “So I’m guessing it’s not the same thing.”
“He went chameleon?” Paul asked.
“Sort of, yeah. Takes a few hours to process.”
“Hopefully there will be a lot more individual abilities popping up,” he said as he picked up his clothes and held them up as if asking if he could put them back on…only to have Kerrie telekinetically snatch them out of the air and pull them over to her where she wrapped her arms around them firmly.
“You’re fine as is,” she said with a smirk. “Except you do look a little clumsy.”
“I feel clumsy. The fitness I had before got washed away and I’m starting from scratch unfortunately…but it seems this new body was designed off my original fitness, so its base level is higher in most cases than my max before, so I’m sort of ok with it. Don’t know if I could take a second gen Saiyan right now or not. My timing is all off.”
“Not that much,” Cal-com said from the back where everyone had forgotten he was. “But his potential for growth is massive. What he has lost is a little speed due to his new mass.”
“Probably right,” Paul said, remembering something. “And you guys need to start overeating now, not later. I made that mistake and it made things…well, let’s say more ouchy than they had to be. I hit a point where I needed a lot of food for the size upgrade, and you need to take in more than you think, because it’s going to happen super fast. Almost Kich’a’kat fast. So be ready to pig out.”
“Not an option,” Ivan warned. “I can’t keep much down as it is.”
“That should pass…I think. Might be we’re all going to process this differently…”
3
“I still don’t see this massive empire transition you’re inferring,” Jason said three hours later into the discussion, with now 14 of the trailblazers unconscious in their chairs, including Kerrie, whom Paul had stolen his clothes back from as soon as she’d blacked out. “Some tweaks here and there, sure. Maybe it’s just my fragged mind, but I don’t see it.”
“I don’t have a master plan to lay out,” Paul said, understandingly. “It’s more a sense of potential. Put it this way…one of the reasons the V’kit’no’sat used the Zen’zat so much was because of their versatility. Bipeds are simply better multi-taskers than quadrupeds, at least the bigger ones. They have their niche, but the quadrupeds are so bulky there is a lot they can’t do. And our Esquires serve the same role for the Knight races. It’s those Knight races that are our greatest strength, but they’re also limited. If we can shift the center of the empire’s capabilities to a race that has the strength, flexibility, and intelligence to surpass the others, then the quadrupeds’ skills can really shine as they can become specialists. That’s the primary shift I see, but I can feel the potential for a lot more yet to be developed or discovered.”
“You’re still talking a bunch of newbs here. And we have no idea how this will shake out.”
“Diversity is not our strength,” Paul emphasized. “The weaker races contribute where they can, but in a lot of cases they have to be protected more than they can help, and when they help it’s more in non-combat roles. If we get hit everyone at once, when we can’t move our elite combat units around to shield the weaker planets, how many and how well are they going to stand on their own?”
“The Band-Aid problem,” Greg said, blinking heavily as he was trying to stave off his own blackout. This conversation was too important to put off until later, and they all
