Re: Ark City, North District - University
Freya Brandt, mild mannered grad student in the Ark City University's vaunted biology department, forgets her many woes by throwing herself into her work. She sits in her preferred environment - a laboratory with microscopes and fridge after fridge of petri dishes to examine under them. She dresses in loose, comfortable clothing, track pants, an ACU grey and blue sweater, a white lab coat, and goggles strapped to her blonde haired, blue eyed face. Beside her is a paper cup of coffee - proper coffee from Italy, not what Americans call coffee. And, as always, beneath her clothes, is her second skin - the Slath symbiote that had become one with her.
It didn't have a name. Slathi, being usually linked to one hive mind, have no need for names. This one is an anomaly: independent and extremely powerful compared to its average kin - and for this reason it is being hunted. But Freya Brandt is a part of the alien now as much as it is a part of her, and though it doesn't have a name for itself, by merging with her, it had created an identity.
Toxsyn.
In truth, the Danish-American woman who had been Freya Brandt is irrevocably gone. She had succumbed somewhere in the Arctic tundra. Now, the knowledge, the habits, the idiosyncracies of her human life are her cover story. She goes through the motions because they are what she and the symbiote knew will help them survive, help them stay a part of the Earth's ecosystem. But she knows, deep down, that her true self is the hybrid. She is Toxsyn now.
And Toxsyn enjoys Italian coffee. It also has conceded that ice cream is an acceptable excuse for why a human might forgo training her body into an exemplar of athletic prowess, and so it has adjusted Freya's metabolism accordingly. Before merging with the alien, the old Freya had been overweight, but comfortable in her own skin. The new Freya is much the opposite - the body of a sculpted amazonian goddess, the looks of a femme fatale right out of a steamy Bond film, and very much self-conscious about people looking at her 'skin.'
She can move her midnight-blue (with a touch of neon yellow) alien skin around her body, but she cannot detach it from herself any more than she can pull off her human arms and legs. And though she can twist it into various clothing styles, it is not the sort of material that could be mistaken for anything made on earth.
So as pretty as she now looked, it is impossible to take advantage of it without outing herself as something different - something not entirely human. It's an odd head space to be in.
Freya sips her coffee, finds that it's mostly drunk, and so tips her head back and drains the rest of the cup. Maybe she could use a walk? These slides could wait a while.
Taking her cup, she walks out of the lab, stepping outside the brick building and tossing her cup into a nearby trash bin. The frigid air doesn't bother her in the slightest. Toxsyn thrived in low temperatures.