“Right,
okay.” Dill turned, his naked, doughy body rippling with the
movement and his legs twisting rather than lifting and turning. Dill
looked down. “Oh. I'll have to be careful about that, won't I? The
steel body didn't twist like that.”
“I think
you'll find there are advantages and disadvantages to both forms. I
doubt this one is anywhere near as strong as the steel one.”
“No, I
don't suppose it is.” Dill tried to lift Harold's antique oak desk
and discovered it stayed exactly where it was although his arm became
longer and thinner. “When we're done with your demon hunting I'd
like to spend some time trying to develop a compromise. You mentioned
latex earlier, didn't you?”
The image of
Dill dressed in a latex one-piece flashed into Harold's mind and he
tried to think of something else to dispel the thought. “Yes, but
what about a steel core with the dough moulded around it. That would
give you tensile strength. If you used nine-core wire you could
separate strands of it to allow the... er... tentacles or other
shapes. You'd be Mr. Fantastic, the plastic elastic man.”
“A
superhero, eh?” Dill concentrated in lifting a motherboard to the
light and inspecting it. “Sounds good, though right now I'm more
interested in reassembling Orias. I can't see any damage here, but
Sam was always the hardware man.”
A lump grew
from his shoulder and expanded rapidly to almost the size of his
head. Compensating for the bulk, Dill's chest became thinner until
Harold began to worry about his dough-bones poking through. The lump
developed a nose and mouth, the activity in the area of the eyes
reminiscent of a ball of maggots inside a corpse. The eyes opened,
one almost normal but the other merely a yellow ball with a pinhole
in the middle. The new head opened its mouth to reveal dozens of
brown teeth. “Did someone call for me?”
Dill
grinned. “All right, Sam?”
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