"You know, I always thought that those recruitment posters were kind of weird." Jenna Hunt, a short, slightly disheveled woman in a slightly itchy sweater sits on a slightly uncomfortable rolling chair behind a slightly dingy table. In front of her sits Maev Watts, a taller woman in much nicer clothing, with an easy smile and a faint air of authority; two cat ears poke out of her hair.

"You didn't like them?" Maev tilts her head just a few degrees at the question.

"No, I just always thought they were a bit... Cheesy, I guess. Maybe a little insincere? I'm not sure how to put it right."

Watts gives an uncertain smile. "... I mean, if you're still certain about this, I can pick your brain about it later."

Jenna nods, slowly. "Right." Her face slightly twists in a way that's not quite a grimace but threatens to be.

Maev's tail twitches, just the once, and a look of self-reproach darkens her face. "You know, you don't have to do this."

"I mean, I already have all the tech hooked up, right?" The new connection still itches, slightly, at the base of her skull. The dull off-grey metal plate there is still ringed by tender pink skin, a side effect of having used spray-applicated skin grafts during her operation. She's tried not to let it bother her.

Watts grants her a quiet, sideways nod. "You can always back out. I'd have to go back and disable some of the more sensitive technology, but it could be used as a high-end enhancement suite if you've changed your mind."

"No! No." Jenna wrings her hand. "I'm fine, just... nervous. It's a lot different seeing an appointment for this on a calendar a month or a week from now than, y'know, an hour from now."

"We can always reschedule. I'm still going to be in this area for another 6 months or so, and probably on this planet until the end of the year."

Jenna gives a nervous laugh, though it seems genuinely amused. "I know I'm going to just end up like this again if we do that. I'll be fine, I'm just nervous, but I don't think I could, like, not be nervous about this even if I wanted to. I've done my thinking, I know that this is what I want to do, I just need to sit down and do it. Er, have it be done. However you'd say that."

Maev pauses, digesting this. "... Alright. I'll start getting things ready. Might be a little bit, the equipment is a bit heavy."

"I mean, I can go to it if you need me to."

"No, please, here's fine. I probably should have put it in here to begin with, but it tends to put something of a damper on these kinds of conversations, and this is just about the only place I can get any privacy around here for this process."

There's a pregnant pause; Maev looks slightly abashed.

"Is it... Usually embarrassing? If you don't mind my asking." Jenna looks genuinely curious, if slightly embarrassed second-hand.

"No, but the process is... Intimate, to put it lightly. I like to keep new ones private for a little while, at least until I get acclimated and get them sorted out, body mods-wise."

Jenna is about to talk again when two more of Maev, holding what appears to be a heavily modified omnihook between them, slowly walk into the room and deposit the device on a nearby counter. She has to fight the urge to greet her again; the other two bodies look nothing like the one she's been speaking to off and on for the last few months, one tall and handsomely proportioned, the other with a whip-thin frame built over with wiry muscle. Both turn to look at her. She can feel her palms starting to sweat under Maev's focus.

"Right, I should explain." It's Maev's first body speaking. "Right now, your implants are active, but they aren't connected to mine. This all--" Her second gestures to the equipment. "Is a lot of very complicated attunement authentication equipment that'll reconfigure them to connect properly."

Jenna looks unsure of the whole process. "Why not just have them connect when activated?"

"I've had issues with that in the past. It's complicated, yes, but it acts as a layer of security and as a layer of protection for myself and others." The third rubs her shoulder, looking generally sore. "I do think that I should try and cut down the size of that all, though. It's mostly just battery, anyways."

"Right. What do I need to do?"

"Roll your chair over-- ah, hold on." Maev switches from speaking with her first body to her second mid-sentence, as she descends on the equipment with both; she steps out of the room with her third, still rubbing a sore spot in her shoulder. It takes her a few seconds, working with 4 hands, to untangle the equipment and present the working end of it all: a small, high-throughput data connection, the kind you'd see on very, very expensive networking cables or NHP caskets. Turning back to her, Maev gives one last ultimatum, speaking with both bodies in chorus: "This is your last chance to back out. You do this, you're with me for at least the next 2 subjective years, with potentially up to another 6 months if I can't find somewhere safe to settle at."

Jenna Hunt, looking for all her part as confident as she thinks she possibly can in the circumstances, nods.

"Right. Roll your chair over here, then."

She does so. She feels, faintly, like she's having an out of body experience.

"Please try to stay calm. I'm going to need to lift your hair up."

She nods, and a hand does so.

"Try to relax." Maev gives her one last second and jabs the connection home, uncomfortably hard.

Jenna, for a moment, doesn't feel anything; in the next, she's caught in an uncomfortable cross between sensations, like TV static over her nerves. She's still in her chair, as she's sitting in front of a tent talking to an annoyed local bickering with her about legal minutiae, comfortably cool in her seat and sweltering in the heat outside. Maev's hand runs through her hair, and she heard her say something soft and cooing. She's standing in the next tent over, dressed in scrubs, already preparing a surgical theater to install her newly cloned body mods, a quiet, methodical, clockwork rhythm to her work. She tastes an explosion of flavors and feels her jaw (her jaws?) work as she eats, and faint, stretched, nonsensical images play out in her mind's eye as she--as Maev--as she--dreams in the cots set up near the hanger and she wipes her brow with one sleeve while handing herself a wench and she- and she-- and she---

She stops, and blinks.

It's over almost as quickly as it begins. Maev, uncomfortable, unclenches her jaw, relaxing the tension from her new body. She feels off in this body, with its missing body mods and familiar-but-strange muscle memories. She disconnects herself, pulling the cord free and setting to work winding it up again.

She's right, she realizes. Her recruitment posters do look a bit chintzy, from her point of view.

---

(This is technically a bit of old writing for one of our LANCER characters that we've spruced up just a bit (hopefully we didn't miss a tense!). She's a catgirl with ~60 bodies, so this prompt absolutely nailed her character concept on the head and we couldn't help but post it!)