Julia really wanted to stay and talk to Ajax more. After she’d finally worked up the hutzpah to actually approach his room, the possibility she’d had swirling in her mind for the last weeks, she’d found herself almost desperate to continue to the conversation.

She couldn’t though, and after only about two hours of talking about almost anything, getting comfortable with the endlessly welcoming and understanding man, she’d had to hastily make an exit. It wasn’t graceful by any means, not even close, but she didn’t have time to care about how it’d seemed.

She’d raced towards the elevators as fast as she could in her slowly diminishing form, pressing the button to go to the second level of accommodation. As soon as the elevator doors closed, the urge became so much worse, almost painful in comparison to the ebbing control she’d been experiencing before.

When the doors opened once again she bounced down the hallway like a runaway rubber ball, an uncomfortable mode of movement for her, but quicker than it’d be to roll like usual. As she reached the door to her team’s dorm room, she pulled the keycard from an internal pocket, unlocking it and bouncing through the room and into her own tiny personal room, locking the door behind her automatically.

As soon as she was in the privacy of her room, she let the urge overcome her as her roughly spherical form lost all its structure and fell into a puddle of purple liquid on the linoleum floors, along with the embarrassing addition of a pungent smell rising from the released gas within her.

If Julia could speak in this form, she’d sigh with grand relief, what amounted to a tingling sensation coursing across her strange biology as it always did.

There was a sharp nock at her door, a worried voice travelling through the surprisingly thick wood door, especially considering their accommodation’s relative squalor in comparison to what Ajax’s apartment had been on the eighth floor, the single most expensive floor of the training centre.

“Jules?” The voice called, worry permeating the woman’s voice. “Are you okay? Do you need to talk?” With a little effort, Julia created a small nodule on the surface of her puddle and spoke in a small voice.

“I’m fine!” She called quickly, “I just needed to, uh, you know.” The explanation that Julia offered seemed to mollify the woman on the other side of the door, a relieved sigh coming through loud and clear.

“Is it okay if I come in?” The woman asked, and Julia had to think about it for a second before squeaking out a yes, then unlocking the door from the inside of the door and retreating underneath a blanket to hide her form.

A moment later, the woman slipped into the room and closed the door behind her as well. She took a breath in to begin the conversation, but immediately choked on something. A flush of pure shame rushed over Julia as she realised that she hadn’t turned on the room’s fan to get rid of the pungent smell. In a flash of movement, she sneaked out from underneath the blanket, able to see grimacing woman’s face before Julia turned on the fan and hid herself once again.

The fan turned on, quickly removing the smell with a loud whir and a light sucking sensation as the room’s air was removed and replaced in less than half a minute, then turning off and leaving the room in a dead silence.

“Wow, I really didn’t believe you when you said that the smell was intense.” The other woman’s voice rang out in the silent room, only adding to Julia’s mortification.

“Oh my God, Jamie. I am so sorry I–” Julia’s tiny voice cracked with emotion, the shame converting into an uncontrollable sadness.

“Hey, hey!” Jamie said consolingly, which was odd on the girl who was just as much of a nervous wreck as Julia, “I said it was intense, not that it smelt bad. It was actually kinda nice.” She finished her words with mock contemplation, striking Julia with a sudden horror.

“Jamie!” But the other girl just giggled.

“What? It’s nice! If you could dilute it down, then you could probably sell it as a perfume you know.” Even though Julia couldn’t wear an expression anymore, Jamie could almost sense the woman’s mortified expression.

“Ew, that’s so gross!” Julia said, though she couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity, “That’d be like you diluting your pee and selling it.” Julia peeked out a little tendril from under the blanket, creating another little nodule to use as an eye.

Jamie was a small woman, probably only just making it to five feet tall. Her fashion sense didn’t help with the perception of a quiet and reserved character, the long frizzy brown hair with mousey features with large circular lenses perched on her nose. The extremely oversized hoodies, blouses and basically every other piece of clothing being a baggy mess that hung off her frame. Usually, she had some sort of bandana or a high collar that’d cover over the bottom of her face, but amongst friends she was comfortable revealing the scale-like keratin that completely covered the skin on her face underneath her nose and down her neck.

Currently, her expression was perfect, her button nose screwed up into an expression of humorous disgust. Though, before long she realised that Julia was looking at her with the little nodule, and she grinned mischievously.

“Well, you know that Miss Terra started to sell–”

“NO!” Julia yelled, doing the equivalent of covering her ears and yelling until Jamie stopped talking about the infamous Linked woman and what sexually explicit madness she was up to. Before long they were both laughing uproariously, and if Julia couldn’t breathe through her pseudo-skin, she’d be wheezing without any breath to push for laughter.

“She’d so gross, right?” Jamie managed to say between giggles and Julia did her best to glare at the woman while she was also hysterically laughing.

“I still don’t trust any websites you send me after the last one! I never wanted to see her change into an animal and…” Julia made a retching sound for effect, making the other girl laugh even harder.

“Oh, don’t you worry! She got a copyright thing going and used a tech Linked to remove those videos from the internet for a wild amount of money.” Jamie barked with laughter again, cutting off her own sentence, “Apparently she got it replaced with an ad to her own site. Only a grand for access to videos of her turning into a sexy animal! What a steal!”

They continued the hysterics for a few minutes longer, Jamie constantly reinvigorating the laughter with offhand comments about Miss Terra’s pornographic exploits and the animal rights shitstorm she’d managed to start with an errant media post.

Soon enough, the giggling died down and they ended with up with a warm and companionable silence, something Julia had felt blessed that her teammates had established early on in their training somewhere in the first month or so.

“So,” Jamie began, trying to fight down a smile, “how’d meeting prince charming go?” Julia stifled a squawk of outrage before speaking, trying not to give the notorious jokester any ammo.

“Good.” She said flatly, the room falling into a moment of brief respite before Jamie let out a great guffaw, slapping her knee a few times as the tears of hilarity started to flow from her amused eyes.

“Oh my God, Jules! You’re crushing soooo hard!”

“I am not!” Julia screeched petulantly, though she knew that it was only weakening her case. Underneath the blanket, her purple colour slowly brightened into a lighter pink-purple.

“Maybe you should try singing?” Jamie said, doing her best suave deep voice. She was imitating the words that Ajax had said before he’d left after saving her from Baxter and his crew.

“He does not sound like that.” Julia corrected, only adding to Jamie’s hilarity,

“Ah, I swoon.” Jamie did in a much better imitation of Julia’s voice, minus the sound of tinkling crystals that was so distinctive to Julia’s unique tone.

“I didn’t say that, either!” The pink-purple was now almost entirely purple as she desperately combatted Jamie’s giggling rendition of soap-opera Ajax.

“Oh come on Julia! You’ve been practically melting for this guy for god-damned weeks.” Jamie threw her hands wide, letting her clawed fingers show from underneath her long and baggy sleeves, “I’m glad you finally went after him though, even if you had to do it right after he had his shit kicked in by Jeremy Baxter for helping you out. Staying classy.” Julia just about squawked out a retort but managed to stop herself last moment, hesitantly considering her next question.

“W– was it really that bad?” She asked, and Jamie instantly began nodding as she crossed her arms over her deceptively buxom chest.

“Oh yeah, I mean we’d catch you salivating over the thought of him in the morning. At a few points Ren was worried that you’d awakened a killer instinct and wanted to go actually eat him, rather than the other kind of eating him.” Jamie winked with gratuitous innuendo, and Julia just sighed heavily, not having the energy to argue with her. Yet, little did she know that Jamie had one last bombshell to drop.

“You know we can hear you writing and singing your own songs at night, right?” Julia really did squawk at the gleefully grinning girl but wasn’t able to get a word in before serious Jamie returned.

“I don’t know, Jules.” She shrugged lackadaisically, “It probably wasn’t the best-est and most romantic-est move anyone has ever made, but that doesn’t mean shit if it went well anyway.” Jamie gave the little nodule peaking from the blanket a long look with a half-smile, an expression that Julia secretly loved. That half-smile was something that Julia honestly believed was the heart of Jamie’s character, underneath the joking and legendary ribbings she could dish out and take like no-one else. The gentle little smile, kind and caring, was genuine above all else.

“So how did it go?” Jamie said, the half-smile cracking into a wider and grander affair. Julia sighed heavily in response, trying to tally the day’s events up in her head.

“I think it went okay? It was super weird though.” Jamie quirked a thin, styled eyebrow from beneath the rim of her glasses, prompting her onwards.

“I mean, he was super nice! And almost exactly like I’d imagined he’d be.” Julia shifted underneath the blanket, making it rustle a little, “He was even taking care of his teammate while we were talking. The one that was crushed by, uh, Terry?” Jamie grimaced; the image of the poor kid being thrown over the Arena like a ragdoll ingrained in her mind. The entire point of what Jeremy Baxter had undoubtedly set the matches up for in the first place.

“His other teammate was in his room at the start too. Mirah, the girl who just stood still in her match. She was… weird. Skittish.”

“Like you?” Jamie interjected immediately, which would have made Julia grin if she still had a mouth to grin with. Or, more accurately, could make a mouth on her form that didn’t make her look like demon spawn.

“That’s what I said, and that’s maybe why he asked me to befriend her when she got really uncomfortable and left.” Jamie screwed up her face at that, a look of dubiousness written clearly across her expression.

“What is he, her dad?” Julia giggled at that, though she didn’t share the same dubiousness as her friend.

“I mean, no.” She began quietly, but continued before Jamie could interject further, “But I don’t think he was being weird about it. You saw the scar on her face, right?” Jamie thought about it for a moment, before nodding slightly, her expression telling Julia that she wasn’t entirely sure what she was getting at.

“Yeah so? Tonnes of Linked had all sorts of gnarly scars, even I have a few.” Jamie patted a specific place on her stomach where a wound had once been, an accident in training gone potentially mortally dangerous.

“But facial scars on girls?” Julia implied heavily, knowing that the other girl had grown up in a ‘sheltered’ life, until her Awakening and the events preceding of course. It took Jamie another second before realisation dawned and her face dipped into darker territory, grimacing heavily at her own misunderstanding.

“Oh. Yeah, that’d do it.” Julia giggled, despite the implied subject matter. The sound, almost reminiscent of a windchime in some ways, pulled Jamie from the moment of embarrassing misunderstanding.

“Well, I mean, more friends can’t hurt right? And if you spend time with prince charming because of her, then it’s a win-win!” Jamie said, changing tacts with a wry grin.

“Yeah. I don’t really know much about her though, just that Ajax is having a really hard time putting together his team.” Jamie shrugged flippantly.

“Hey, you came in late, so you didn’t get the angst-fest that was our first few weeks of training. The next month after that was cake in comparison. God, angsty Juney, can you imagine?” Jamie and Julia laughed at the memory and concept of their sweet and excitable teammate being angsty—so unlike the personality that had begun to show through after Julia had entered the fold as the team’s fourth.

“Plus,” Julia continued the sentiment, “we had the power of ‘J’ names to bond us. I think they only have two ‘A’ names, so they aren’t as powerful!” Jamie cackled with laughter but stopped suddenly with a shocked expression.

“Wait, what about Ren?”

The two girls sat in stunned silence for a moment, a moment of dawning horror before Jamie yelled out with a surprisingly powerful voice.

“Ren!” There was a moment of pause before they could hear a door slam open from one of the other four in the main area, then the door of Julia’s bedroom bursting open to reveal a frazzled looking Asian man, with an athletic frame clad in skin-tight exercise clothing. He looked from the two inhabitants worriedly, his ‘naturally’ green hair swishing from side to side with the sound of grass in the wind.

“What? What’s wrong?” He said in a slightly accented tone, looking towards his summoner. Jamie stood from her spot on the ground and walking over to the considerably taller man and reaching up to his shoulders, standing on her tippy-toes to manage the feat. With a deadly serious gaze Jamie began to speak.

“Ren Ikari, We of the order of ‘J’ invite you to receive an honorary ‘J’ name and be inducted into our ranks. Do you accept?” Ren’s face warped wildly as he spontaneously developed an aneurysm.

“Wait, what?” He asked, but Jamie only nodded as if he’d accepted.

“You have made the right choice. We grant you the name of ‘Jen’!” Julia couldn’t stop herself anymore, the loudest laugh she’d ever produced bellowing out of the small little nodule she’d formed, quickly breaking Jamie’s almost ironclad composure, leaving the newly dubbed Jen with a look of total bewilderment.

“What?” He said, totally lost, only making the two girls laugh harder.