Going to the Store

I casually waved to Mal as I wandered off to the marketplace; given his inclinations he was going to go track down news of what was going on. Fine by me, really... there were a few things that I wanted to try to find. For instance, I heard that Red Steel was neat, and I wanted to get a Wii. Oh, and processors for biological stuff. I could probably tinker something together, but it wasn't really my area of expertise and I'd much prefer to work on stuff that was more fun.

Of course, before that I snagged another beer, as wandering around without a drink in hand at this point in the con would almost be against protocol. The various stalls setup were featuring all sorts of wares, both mundane and not. Which was all well and good, and would provide hours of browsing entertainment later, but right now I wanted to get my Wii. While I'd made reservation arrangements while we were enroute, there was probably going to be enough of a demand for the things that it might get sold out from under me.

"Hey Dee," I muttered, apparently to thin air. A 3" tall holographic girl popped into existence at shoulder height, a bit off to the side of my field of vision. She was looking more or less like Cortana this week.

"Yeah boss?" she replied.

"There any maps around? Looking for Stan's."

"Hang on a sec... yeah, second row, couple back."

"Domo." Best PDA ever, really. Nevermind that I was trying for something completely different at the time, it all worked out fine. Mostly. I sipped the bottle of Guinness as I walked that way. Really, I suppose I didn't actually have to ask how to find Stan.

"Welcome, welcome to Stan's Kwalitee Danegoods!" he shouted from his stall. "The finest new and used goods from..." Dee had hid at the first sign I was getting close. Smart girl

"Just, please, stop talking," I muttered, wincing. Stan was a fixture, and had been picked because, among other things, he was the most likely to be able to hang onto the merchandise. But his voice gave me a headache... and that suit...

"What can I do for you, sir? There's a wide selection of current fashions, but today I'm selling them below cost to pass on the savings!"

"What's wrong with what I'm wearing?" I asked, with a bit of an edge. He looked me up and down, taking in the Hawaiian shirt, the camoflage fatigue pants, the combat boots and the pair of swords crossed at my left hip.

"Nothing at all, sir," he answered smoothly. "Perhaps you'd be interested in..."

"No, stop... I'm KJ, I arranged shipment of a Wii, it's prepaid, could you get it so I can be on my way?" I interrupted, rattling off the statement all at once before he could start talking.

"Right away sir," he said, disappearing behind the booth. "And if you'd be interested in anything else, feel free to browse and... here we go!" He produced the boxed Wii, which I hurriedly crammed into my duffle bag. Before he could start talking again, I had fled the scene.

"Like hell I'm going to buy clothes from someone in lime green pants, a blue shirt, red tie, sombrero, and a purple and green checkerboard jacket," I muttered to myself, as I put my head down and proceeded away from the scene. Which is why I didn't notice when I ran into another congoer.

"Oh, geez, I'm sorry," I said as I helped him up, then paused and noted my shirt was soaked, my voice was higher and... oh yeah, I had breasts now. Great. "Uh... do you know where the nearest restroom is?" I asked, crossing my arms over my chest and mentally cursing the effects of cumulative handwavium exposure. He gestured to a corner of the room and I hurried off.

Really, I don't know why that happened. Okay, so I end up using handwavium a lot to make machine tools to make other things, and breaking them down afterwards sends some of the stuff in dust form around the section of the Ptichka's cargo bay that I sectioned off for the shop. But a pseudo-Jusenkyo curse? Personally, I vaguely blamed Dee, though I didn't hold it against her or bring it up. What's done is, and hell it vastly increased the number of characters I could cosplay as.

"Hey," she spoke up, appearing in the side of my vision again. "Ptichka sent out a message saying Mal wants to see us back at the ship."

"Just as well, only dry shirt I've got in here is too tight on me in girlform," I replied as I pulled on the Zim t-shirt in question and headed back.

In this crowd, I suppose an irate 6' tall redhead with daisho at her waist wouldn't draw much attention, even if they did know that I'd gone towards the market area with brown hair and a different gender. The other inhabitants of Ptichka were even more used to this sort of thing happening every so often. Well, Elena seemed about to ask some question or other, but paused and reconsidered as she saw the irritated look on my face.

"Tell Mal I'll be right back," I grumbled as I stormed into the section of Ptichka that I'd more or less claimed for my own. The workshop was one of the things I'd talked Mal into as a necessity, and I was glad of it. I calmed down as I watched some finishing operations going on one of the automated machining centers. Not that I disliked the handwavium, but I was trained as an engineer, and highly advanced technology that I could understand was reassuring. Mundane technology, perhaps, but only in the sense that it was made to human blueprints. I'd fairly quickly realized that despite everything handwavium could do, there would always be a place for stuff that worked in comprehensible ways, without random... features. Conservative reaction, perhaps, but I made a decent income making bits for other people who realized how little we actually knew about the stuff and were a bit iffy on trusting their lives to it completely.

Okay, to be honest, I was cheating a bit. There wasn't room for a full assortment of machine tools, so I had to break them down and reassemble them into other things using handwavium. Fortunately, the quirks from this mostly manifested in the form of very strange units; the milling machine was taking a cut out of a piece of alloy that it measured in tiny little fractions of a light year, and none of the placards on it were in any langauge I recognized. Part of the reason I made Dee though.

I sighed and stretched, rummaging through a drawer and extracting a dry Hawaiian shirt and a bra. Truth to tell, the quasi-curse didn't bother me that much, except for two things. Of course, it seemed to follow Murphy's law; when I was in a hurry and didn't have the proper stuff to change into, I'd be more likely to walk into someone or slip into a puddle, or run out into a rainstorm, or whatever. That wouldn't have been much of an issue if it didn't hurt so much to change more than once a day.

"Oh well, whatever," I muttered to myself as I tied my hair back and adjusted the swords. "Sorry about the delay," I said as I wandered back into the common area.

"These things happen," Mal casually replied, and I couldn't help but break into a grin at the fact that we lived in a universe where that was true.