Outsider

[Laowai]

Laowai woke early the next morning - Zarita lay beside him, still asleep and breathing gently. He smiled and kissed her forehead lightly. Raising himself gently off the cot he dressed and gathered his things, he wanted to get an early start, get out and gather some wood, water and perhaps some more food if he could find it. He recorded her a message on a data pad and headed out.

Zarita awoke sometime later. She yawned and stretched - She knew Ben had gone out a while before, even without listening to the data pad message, she'd been aware of his movements somehow while she slept. She sat up, moved across the room and opened the cooler - taking out some of the meat from the night before she nibbled on some and played back Ben's message on the data pad. He was expecting to come back around lunchtime and so she still had a few hours to kill.

Right she thought, if this is what i am, then by the ancestors im going to be the master of it, it is NOT going to be the master of me.

She held up her hand and stared at it intently, an image began to form in her mind and yet she maintained her stare, beneath her skin, she saw feint lines begin to form, much like the ones she had seen whilst flying the Titan. This time however, she didn't give in to her instinctive fear, she maintained her stare, emptying her mind of anything save the image she had, an image of what she had seen last night when her arm had morphed from a wing back to her human shape... a clear, blue shapeless shape, liquid and yet solid, changing and yet stable, moving and yet......

Trance like she almost didn't see it, and yet, it happened, slowly her fingers began to move, coalesce, join, almost melt into each other, the lines under her skin seemed to widen and the pigment of her hand began to fade, began to shift, began to wash over itself with a clear, pure almost liquid... blue.....

With a start, she snapped back to the here and now, and her hand whipped out and took clear shape once more, fingers where they should be, pigment lines gone and her flesh the same olive complexion it had always been. She stared at her hand and the realization dawned on her.....

She leapt up off the chair "Yes!!!!" she cried out to no one. She could control her fear, and if she could... if she could keep some form of control, then it appeared that......
She could change shape.

Whipping around with a laugh she pointed at the door and shouted "BOOM!!!", as she did so, the door suddenly snapped off its hinges and flew violently outwards away from the cabin, a cloud of dust and splintered timber in its wake.... "oh... crap...." she muttered......

She walked outside, the door lay meters away, sitting squarely in the dust, if it could express emotion she felt sure it would be one of irritation.. she giggled... "What did I ever do to you?... Mr Door says....."
She sat on the steps and looked at it - She didn't know what her body was, or what it was really capable of... and yet at this point, certain things had manifested themselves - as she pondered this she began to feel that it was in the moments when she was least "conscious" that its abilities seemed to come to the fore.
She considered that, for how does a person... think, without thinking?

She tried once more, imagining the door lifting from the ground and moving towards the now open lintel... and yet, she didn't look at it, her eyes stared at nothing in particular, the dust, the birds moving through the trees, the clouds drifting across the sky.
She turned and sure enough, the door was hanging inches away from her, hovering in front of its old position. As she became conscious of it, it dropped with a loud clatter and fell once more, this time onto the balcony.

Cocking her head to one side she looked it it... It really shouldn't be there.... she thought, it was heavy, and really, laying flat on the balcony it was useless as a door, it wasn't even really a door anymore, more like a joined collection of flat timbers, because surely a door should actually lead somewhere in order to be able to rightly call itself a door, and after that, what was Ben going to say when he came home and found the door to his cabin laying completely un-door-like on the balcony, he surely wast going to.....

The Door raised up from the balcony as if being lifted by many pairs of hands, effortlessly it moved until it stood, squarely in the lintel where it had been, it leaned slightly against one side and then its weight shifted away from its invisible hands and back onto the ground.

"There" Zarita said with a small smile of satisfaction "A couple of hinges and you can call yourself a door again"......

---

http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/3289/...047770.png