The ambassadors study was cosy. Books, a discreet liquor cabinet and nice furnishings; polished walnut and aged leather.
But at the edge of view, there was security. Arlene was on edge and so she picked up things she would've normally ignored. The ambassador's chair faced the door, and the windows behind it were covered with curtains that hung heavy on the rails. Steel wires secured them in place where they brushed against the floor. When she touched the edge of the open door as she entered the room, it had the cool feeling of painted metal; an inch thick steel plate sandwiched between wood.
"Now, sit down, and we'll have a chat."
The ambassador sat and then, deftly he removed a headband hidden well amongst his grey hair- on which his rabbit ears stood erect, and placed it carefully on a stone bust.
He caught Arlene staring at them and coughed.
"Paravel isn't actually my homeland- My wife was born there and I'm sure had I remained there long enough I would have exhibited symptoms as well. However I have not, and it's rather expected of one in my position to fly the home flag. Politics, you know."
Arlene nodded wordlessly.
"So. To business. What can you do for me?" He steepled his fingers before continuing, "I am willing to provide a secure escort out of the country and put both of you in protective custody, however, you must comply to my terms, the first of which being, an immediate demonstration of why I should take you in."
"Dragon's stone."
"The watch still have it and I doubt they'll listen to you right now should you ask for it back."
"I'm willing to offer two stones, under the condition that you get both of us to safety."
Dawson's aged face split into a buisinesslike grin.
"That puts a rather different complexion on things. Two stones will buy you an exit and six months of protective custody."
Arlene scowled. "That's stingy, six months! What happens after that-"
"Is up to you. I'm an ambassador, not a hotel manager. Why, I don't even know why these mysterious rocks are so valuable- perhaps if you could provide a hint, I might find the budget for a longer protection period."
There was a twinkle in the older mans eye. He was enjoying this- but Arlene wasn't a negotiator, and had been very stressed in the last few days. She knew she should be bargaining harder, but, right at this moment, she just couldn't muster the strength to care.
"It's a catalyst for steam. Reduces vaporisation threshold by about 70% at least. I haven't had the opportunity to test it much."
Ambassador Dawson's soul seemed to partially leave his body.
"How long does two rocks buy me?"
"You'll be out of the country immediately. Excuse me." Dawson rose and started jotting notes, which he slid into message tubes laid into his desk- presumably so he could communicate with his secretaries on the floors below.
Harper was helped upstairs by a guard. He explained that if it wasn't urgent, she'd have been given more time to recover. As it was, she was still woozy from the tranq. When the door to the ambassadors office swung open, she saw Arlene and the Ambassador standing with what looked like a teapot. Before she could speak, Arlene had dropped what looked like a piece of gravel into the spout.
With her incredible visual acuity, Harper saw the first burst of steam expel itself from the spout, milliseconds before spider-webbing cracks ran over the china of the pot, and the entire thing shattered in a cloud of vapour and spray.
"That was more violent than I expected." Arlene commented, "Sorry. I think that the stone ricocheted inside the pot whenever it touched water, as the burst of the water going to steam pushed it away."
Dawson leaned down and searched through the wreckage, finding the Dragons Stone chip.
"Absolutely incredible. that was only forty degrees...."
The guard behind Harper blanched, and the Ambassador noticed him for the first time since they entered the room.
Harper briefly wondered if the guard would die to keep today's secret.
"Agent Lang. Get Mary ready on the roof. Signal pickup team Charlie one and arrange for a hot pass."
The guard hurried away, and Harper was pushed aside as two men entered the room, with a roll of white fabric and a large cutting edge mechanical camera. The auto exposure kind. As the cameramen setup, another man and woman entered the room holding heavy black rectangular box-shaped cases. Harper and Arlene were guided to sit down by the latest arrivals, and the cases were opened to reveal their true identities as works of art. Dozens of small shelves fanned out as the lid was pulled open. It was to a makeup kit, what a set of screwdrivers is to a machine shop. There were trays of skin-tones, sheets of wax paper with fake moles, freckles and scars stuck on them and more exotic items whose use could only be imagined.
The artists looked to Dawson for instructions.
"Male, Engineers, Brothers, mid twenties. Use wigs. Tonemask too, I want this done quickly."
The disguise artists nodded. The man held up bottle of dark coppery tone, the woman shook her head and selected one shade lighter.
The selected tone was then mixed with what seemed to be a sort of clear syrup- which thickened quickly into a waxy cream. The result was spread over both Harper and Arlene's faces and necks and then hot air was blown over it.
"We'll supply you with tonemask regularly while you're under protection. You'll need to peel off the old layer and reapply each week."
The results of such a simple application were staggering. It didn't just change the colour of the skin, it looked like skin by itself. And with the base-coat down, the artists got to work, adding details to the blank, perfect 'skin'. The crowning touch was a pair of black messy wigs with feline ears sewn into them.
"You can read your background papers on the way in. You'll be second generation members from an outlying region. That said, you will likely spend more than three months in Paravel so the chance you'll display genuine symptoms during your stay isn't zero."
Harper coughed, "So what're the chances of us growing fur, changing shape, and all that nonsense."
"Zero. The capital is where the most severe effects are felt and total transformation is, even there, limited to sixth generation members of the population. Ears and tails are usually the first manifestation, and the average time to EAT is a year at the epicentre. That is an average, it's highly variable, but never shorter than three months."
Arlene fingered the fake ears and tried to imagine herself after a few years in Paravel.
The disguises done, the photo's were taken in short order and the camera hauled off to the film could be developed immediately.
The female disguise artist left her colleague to pack up her tools and came over to where Harper and Arlene were standing, in the corner of the room.
"You can feel the development of symptoms several days before they're visible. However, chances are, they'll look different to the generics we've fitted you with, so before they manifest, make contact so you can have your ID's remade. Also, anyone who touches them or looks long enough will know they're fake. Bear it in mind. My name is Nikita. I'll be giving you a crash course on acting like a local.
How much do you both know about Paravel?"
Arlene shrugged, "As much as anyone. It's a big circle, you go in, symptoms happen."
Harper added, "There's a crater that turns people into animal people."
"The crater at Claire Paravel is now a theatre, dedicated to telling our history. First things first.
Paravel was settled in the wake of the empire's breakup. We've had several invasions occur on racial grounds, so we're a tad sensitive to that. We're also proud. Nobody's succeeded in a campaign against us. Care to guess why?"
"Everyone who invades is also affected and loses their original reason to fight?" Arlene hazarded a guess.
"Exactly. Although it's different these days, after the first few times, no army was willing to mount a campaign against us."
Harper raised her hand.
"Can really nothing be done?"
Nikita shook her head.
"No. I stayed in Claire Paravell as a child, and then passed through on a carriage ten years later. I got a headache and these sprouted." she reached up and fingered the short, rounded ears protruding from her head.
Harper leaned forward for a better look.
"Does anything else change?"
"Well..." Nikita hesitated, "I really, REALLY like honey now. I didn't mind it before, but now, I just can't get enough."
"Is that a problem?"
"It's expensive, I end up buying it instead of other things I'd like." Nikita hesitated and then whispered in Harper's ear.
"Actually my partner tried to liven things up with some during our last anniversary... I... ended up paying more attention to eating it than to them."
"Seriously? That bad?"
"Seriously. It was so embarrassing."
"Is it always like that?"
"No. Take James, who the person with me just now. He used to love drinking- but now he so much as smells alcohol, he gets in a bad mood. It's what we call an Earful. The little quirks that come with physical changes. Though it's also slang for picking up a hobby or habit from someone."
The chat with Nikita went on for more than an hour, before they were presented with their freshly minted Paravel citizen passes.
Thanks to the efforts of Nikita and James, they looked like a pair of student engineers, handsomely tanned and with almost no resemblance to a pair of wanted fugitives.
"Well, I guess we're related now?" Harper inspected her ID, "And, I'm the older brother? Victor."
Arlene snickered, "You don't look like a Victor."
"Well 'little bro' what's your name?"
"This 'little bro' is Vorn Vance..."
"Victor and Vorn Vance. So how do we be brothers?"
"I dunno? Fight I guess. Stare at girls. Argue."
Nikita interrupted with a smile, "You wont need to go that far right now. We'll take you to a safe house where you can adjust to things. I'll be coming with you, along with a few others, to act as your handler until you're adjusted to your temporary identities."
Nikita hadn't been idle. She'd taken their measurements during their talk, and then sent them off to have new clothes prepared. They were taken into a fitting room, where a bespectacled woman, who was a fifth or sixth generation Paravellian fawned over them.
Or more accurately purred.
"Lovvvvvely! The innocence, The harrrrrd working feeling! The come hitherrrr appeal of a pair of brrrrothers focused on the job with cool exteriors, but are really just a pair of rival hearrrrrts just waiting to be capturrrred. And then- Traappppsss!"
She didn't 'meow', but her vocals had a certain feline sense to them. She'd roll her R's into a purring avalanche before launching frantically at the rest of the sentence, as if it'd run away if she left it unsaid too long.
"Arlene, Harper, meet Camo."
Camo recovered from her earlier semi trance and held out a hand. Paw. It was something somewhere between the two.
Harper, ever the less tactful and more curious of the girls, asked the pertinent question first.
"How do you sew with those?"
Camo was coy, she flicked her finger and a needle flew from the table to hover above it.
The breath caught in Harper and Arlene's throats.
Craftspeople were strong. They had strange abilities that let them mould hard metal like clay and more.
Wizards were wizards. They existed, but knowing that and meeting one was very different.
A Craftsperson could bend a steel bar, but a Wizard could tell the bar to bend itself.
Outfits floated from the racks at the side of the room and rushed to hang in front of them.
"Paravel is steeeeped in the Arrrcane. It causes the change. It's the magic rrrrubbing off. Like washing whites with rrreds, the pink sheets'll never be the same again. You'll trrry some of these for Camo, won't you? Just a couple. Yes."
"Uh why are you, a wizard working-"
"For dishes like you two delightful saucers. And they need me, yes they do- and I love it so. So I do. Now let's just try a few things on to starrrrt."
Nikita intervened.
"Camo. They're due out."
"Just a little-"
"Camo!"
"You'rrre spoiling my fun."
Her mood spoiled, Camo's face turned dark. With a wave of her hand, a pair of elasticated tank-tops rose into the air and approached the two of them.
Camo flicked her frizzy, curly grey hair forward and ran her fingers through it while sighing softly. As they watched her hair straightened turning silky, and when she raised her head, her face was different. It was human and icily beautiful.
"I tell you dears." Her voice had changed too, to a bored aristocratic lilt- "Never work for the government. They promise the moon but never let you have a spot of fun. It's just, bullet proof this, and make invisible that. Nikki here won't even model without the right motivation. Arms up."
Arlene and Harper both started to raise their hands, only to have their arms jerked upwards and held there by an unseen force.
In an instant, their clothes undid themselves, slid away and folded themselves neatly.
The new tops slid on, and a pair of engineers jumpsuits pulled themselves onto the rack to follow.
Arlene felt a little confused and looked down. Although it wasn't something she boasted about, she normally felt that she sported reasonably impressive assets in the chest department. Now?
Flat. As anything.
She would've said something, anything- but, at that point both her and Harper were lifted into the air, undressed and redressed in brown engineers jumpsuits.
"Mirror. Oh. You can come down now dears. Sorry about my little tiff just now.... but you have turned out looking nice...."
The floor rippled in reverse and a mirror slid upwards. Camo stalked behind it- only to appear in the reflection behind Arlene.
"On the surface at least. But the two of you are worn out. You look like you both could need just a touch of... Magic."
Arlene felt hot breath on her ear, but when she turned, there was no-one.
"Darlings, why not stay a while with me. I can get you where you need to be, safe as kittens. You don't want to go with them. Trust me. I can be trusted, can't I Nikki?"
Nikita looked, conflicted to say the least.
"Yes. I'd trust you with my life. But, not with my body."
"Such a tease. Look, dears, if you go with them, you'll be stuffed into a big haversack, fired from the embassy woods to some waiting team. Flown in a bag to the border to be picked up who knows where by who knows who... Just stay a while with me. Have some tea. Try on a dress or two."
Camo as she spoke had stepped out of the mirror, and and held out an empty hand before sweeping her other arm down to conjure a sequined red dress.
"Nikki." Arlene chose her words carefully, "If Camo can move us with her wizardry so much faster and safer, why not do that from the beginning?"
Nikita was bitter, "If we ask Camo to do something like that, she refuses. Arguments happen and then people get turned into newts. I'm obligated to warn you, while travelling with her is safe, staying with her is dangerous in other ways."
She'd barely finished speaking when she suddenly slid across the floor into Camo's waiting embra.
"Dear little Nikki. You're so earnest! Feeling all responsible for these two adults... Oh you don't need to worry about a thing, I'm not forceful. Not unless someone wants me to be~" She ran a finger along Nikita's chin.
"Not now, please. So. Harper, Arlene. She's offering you a shortcut. If you decide to go with her I'll tell them to cancel the extraction arrangements from the country and we'll skip straight to the Greene Safehouse, where I was going to link up with you both. "
Harper looked unconvinced, but Arlene nodded.
"I've had enough real danger and adventure. Let's take the easy route." "Arlene, are you sure-"
"Harper. If she really didn't want us to leave, I don't think we could. So, I think we'll be fine. Plus, I'd rather be here, than stuffed into an extra-dimensional bag and flung outside the city limits and then pursued by the Watch."
Harper shrugged.
"When you say it like that, how bad can a couple of hours of lounging around be?"