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This Cubefall holiday is awesome.

Yugo's scanning his options in the bar. There's a ginger kitten, a woman who looks a lot like his sister (that's just weird), some guy with ridiculous hair and a bright red arm, a sapient cup of coffee (a vanilla-caramel latte, apparently), and a robotic squid type thing.

Man, the squid looks awesome. It's gotta be, like, regular squid-sized, right? Scuttling around on tables or something. Yugo presses it.

"ERROR: This reconfiguration choice is only valid outside."

- Well, that's harsh. Still, Yugo cheerfully goes outside and presses it again and ...

Look, you know skyscrapers? Vast, break-world-records skyscrapers?

The creature, a kind of cephalopod robot made of black metal with four blue lights as eyes, now floating sedately over the lake area is large enough to use those as toothpicks. There's a gold disk with a blue jewel (now the size of a lake) on one of the tentacle-claw-things.

"Dude."

This is a voice well-suited to a mechanical eldritch abomination.

"I was not expecting this."

[OOC: And Then Yugo Was A Reaper.

Regarding indoctrination: It's on, and he can't switch it off, but luckily the effects of indoctrination are very, very slow - slow enough that it's not going to be brainwashing or particularly influencing anything. Still, if you feel so inclined and if your pup is liable to be affected more than normal, feel free to have characters find themselves oddly inclined to agree with him. Alternately, feel free to have them noticing a persistent whisper building in their heads. Once he realises what's going on, he'll dial it back as much as possible.

Unlike with a regular Reaper, any effects will fade once people stop talking to him.]

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"Oh, that is the best thing I've seen all week!" a girl shrieks cheerfully from behind the giant, metal hippie-squid.

She zips around him in the air, making appreciative comments until she comes around to what she thinks his face is. If his eyesight is any good, he'll see a relatively tiny girl with a pair of silver wings strapped to a harness with blue ribbons. Adding to her fashion palette, she has a pair of glittery blue snakeskin boots and matching gloves.

"Oh, good heavens, is this a Cubefall thing or are you a new arrival?" a cheery girl says. "Because if it's the latter, you have to let me take a look at your armor!"

... Well, this is terrifying.

Yugo is all shy now. Those tentacles may be gathering a little defensively in front of him.

"Duuuude, it's - it's a Cubefall thing," he says, looking down at her. "Er. Who are you?"

"Er, I'm sorry I frightened you," she says sheepishly, and backs three steps away, in the air. Autor never does know how much 'girl' behavior to throw at people. Much less monstrous armored creatures. "Squids are my favorite animal."

Which makes it so much better.

"So I wanted to come see who would choose that."

And also check it out, but that's been established.

Oh no, someone from one of those terrible hentai manga came in, didn't they.

This is the worst time to be a giant tentacled robot ever.

"I thought it was smaller when I picked it."

Autor would fall to her death if she were a telepath. Thankfully, she's not.

She nods politely ignoring the steady flap of her wings. "I can see how that would be an issue. But why a squid in general?" she asks, cupping her chin in her hand. "Wait, do you have to eat anything? I can't imagine, given your being robotic... hm."

"Dude, it looked cool, that's all. I wasn't really thinking much about it."

Beat.

"Are you usually a girl?" The dimming of some of those lights on its - not-really-a-face might be a squint.

Huh, Autor thinks, blinking at the squid. He's always been impressed with Yugo's ability to ask not just questions, but narrowing ones. Whereas most people have asked, "Is this your first Cubefall," or "what options did you choose," Yugo picked one not-so-easily deflected.

"No more than you're a squid, Yugo," she says, and turns around in a circle. Her cocky grin and the way she places her hand on her hip is surely enough of a hint.

Reapers don't breathe, so Yugo doesn't breathe a sigh of relief, but he does relax visibly.

"Oh thank god, I thought you were going to ask me to penetrate you hard with my tentacles."

Beat.

"That would've been awful, man."

At first, the girl's reaction is rather curious. She tilts her head at him, squinting. "What?"

And then--voila!--sudden understanding! There's a moment of incoherent sputtering and gasping and the fierce blushing of a maiden who can't quite wrap her thoughts around this new font of knowledge, but knows just enough.

Something goes click! in his brain, with such force that it knocks her clean out. Head tipped back, she spirals straight towards the lake at a fast clip, weighed down by all the gear she's wearing.

Better think fast, Yugo.

Those tentacle-claws can move surprisingly quickly when they need to, and one swings neatly underneath her, close enough that the fall isn't all that bad, even taking into account that she's landing on metal.

"Dude?"

She bounces once, and it takes her a minute or two to rouse. "Oww," she says, rubbing her neck. "What happened?"

Ignoring any response he might have, she unstraps her wings and pokes around at the considerable damage. "Augh," she says. "I'll have to fix these at the bar."

Then she crawls over to the edge of his claw and pokes her head over it. "Nice catch. Pretty sure I would have broken my neck when I hit the lake... Yes, a fall from half a mile? Definitely."

She looks like a bizarre mix between happy and mention tentacles again and I will gut you.

"Dude, did you - did you swoon?"

Because that's the only explanation Yugo can think of.

"Apparently," Autor says petulantly, tossing a Lego piece into the lake to watch it plop down where she would have. "I wouldn't have if someone--augh. No, never mind."

She rolls over and into a stand. "Hm!" she says. "I'm envious, you know. If I had known I could have been a monster squid and terrorized the bar, I absolutely would have chosen that instead."

Edited 2013-06-06 03:07 (UTC)

"Dude, I'm not terrorising the bar," Yugo says patiently. "That'd just be mean."

Beat.

"Hey, on the bright side, you make a pretty girl." One eye goes dark for a moment in a simulation of a wink.

Autor's jaw drops, and she immediately looks over him again for weak spots. Curses, he thinks. I can't find any.

"I do not," she says, fussing with her wings again. "You have odd tastes. Besides, I'm not concerned with being pretty, I'm concerned with... how other people treat me. When I'm like this."

She furrows her brow and pouts viciously. Whether or not that looks more ridiculous in his natural form is up to personal opinion.

"I may not have thought this through."

"How people treat you when you're a girl, or how people treat you when they don't know you're you?" Yugo asks.

Beat.

Fondly: "Dude, not thinking things through and thinking things through too much are totally your specialities. I'd be worried if you found a middle ground."

"Both," Autor murmurs, staring at her glittery, snakeskin-booted feet. He already knows to some extent how people treat him when he's not around--being relatively invisible helps with that--but this is up close and personal. So to speak.

At the fond words, however, Autor's glower reads very much the same regardless of sex: gee, thanks.

The girl shrugs. "I also don't know anything about women. As I've been told. Frequently," she says, fidgeting as she clears her throat. "So why not be one for a day or three?"

"Dude, you make it sound like people don't like you here. They totally like you here."

Beat.

"The magical girl get-up may confuse them, though.""

As a boy, Autor is fairly expressive, though he tries his best to control that. As a girl, all bets are off.

She sort of... blinks at him, in a very clear, I know not of what you speak and am wondering what my reaction should be, but I suspect you're trying to tell me something slightly terrifying?, gesture. Right before she shakes her head.

"I didn't choose the look of the outfit," she says, shrugging. "But I can punch through a brick wall, so it's an even trade-off."

And really, is confusing people such a bad thing?

"How many people have guessed that you're you?"

"Dude, pretty much everybody. No idea why."

The rasping mechanical voice makes it difficult to tell if he's being sarcastic or deadly serious.

Yugo's sense of humor is dry anyway, so Autor smirks and places a hand on her hip. "Hm! Really. No idea."

Then she smiles again. "What are you going to do for the rest of your time as a giant metal squid, anyway?"

"Stay above the treeline, mostly," Yugo remarks. "Don't want to accidentally, er, damage everything. But hey, there's plenty of space to fly around in."

Beat.

"I do feel an overwhelming urge to inform people that they are like dust in a stellar wind."

Autor tilts her head, and narrows her eyes just a bit. "That isn't Phoenix, is it?"

He hadn't even thought about how a Cubefall transformation would affect the Phantom shut up in Yugo's head. He bets the florist hadn't either.

"Not really his style, dude."

Beat.

"But hey, I still have my disk!" He waves one tentacle. The gold disk on it is now the size of several houses, but it's recognisably the same.

"I'm glad it's not him, but where is he?" she says. Then she blinks, and presses her knuckles to his mouth. "You could transform with that, can't you? Goodness. Armor on armor."

Then Autor does almost every time he's been marginally horrified by an idea in the past: her eyes widen and she cracks up. "Well, it's good that you have it. We'd have a giant metal Phoenix on our hands, otherwise."