A heavy sigh escaped Makhus’ lungs as he grabbed the nearest mess tin in reach - the one Zelsys had used - and stood up to get himself a portion of soup.

There it was. The Tablet. Her ticket to a new identity. Just sitting there on the bunk, next to a puddle of that asshat’s drool. She’d given up on trying to help him directly long ago, with how eager he seemed to close himself off and play the good soldier.

It made her entire forearm buzz with pins and needles when she picked it up, just like the attribute scanners back in the barracks. A word appeared in the middle.

SCANNING

She never did find the sensation painful, regardless of how much the others complained about the monthly attribute checkups during training. The device took some time before the first stage of its work was finished, after which another projection manifested above its surface. One sentence in white, two in blue.

RECORD FORMAT NOT RECOGNIZED REGISTER NEW FORMAT OVERWRITE RECORD

As the brief argument outside unfolded she climbed into the lower right bunk. It wasn’t hers, but she didn’t want to risk falling out of hers as a result of whatever reaction she might have to the Tablet’s overwrite process.

The pain wasn’t a concern. Her pain threshold was higher than most men’s, and even then she knew how to deal with what little pain truly affected her. It was the unconsciousness, in particular the possibility of her other eye opening for that bizarre projector-like side effect.

While she sat there staring at the Tablet and trying to mentally talk herself into just doing it, the nearly-empty bottle of “Liquid Vigor” next to Makhus’s bunk caught her eye. “Addict,” she thought as she leaned down to grab it, downing the rest of the liquid in one gulp. Much to her surprise it smelled and tasted different from what she was used to, though that wasn’t the surprising part - the evershifting, undefinable olfactory qualities of Viriditas were almost as well-known as the theory that no matter what, it would always be to a person’s liking.

Through the aggressively minty notes of this batch, there pierced an undertone that smelled both different and familiar. Something new, but something she had smelled before, rather recently. It smelled like… “The foreigner?”

Her mind raced with a dozen different thoughts as she furrowed her brow, looking the bottle over in a futile attempt to discern whether the tan giantess had drunk from it. The smell hit her nostrils again, and she realized that it wasn’t the Viriditas - it was just the foreigner’s smell lingering in the bunk from when she had used it to change clothes. Somewhat eased by this realization, Spliteye took a deep breath and laid down in the bunk, then pressed “Overwrite” on the Tablet, doing her best to keep her left eyelid closed.

The buzzing sensation grew and eventually became painful, the brief urge to open her other eye fading a moment before her consciousness slipped.