almost too young and pretty to live

"Wait...which one of these is my face? Is that-? No, the eyes are too big. This one the mouth is too thin. This one the eyes aren't big enough, but I think-- No, my hair isn't there. Let's try this one, also with the wrong shape eyes..."

Closing their eyes as if something sinister will happen to the body they're currently standing in (or are they? they can't see much lower down than a floating cursor of a hand, cut off at the wrist), Seren picks the female mim's fifth base option.

Brown hair. Bangs. Okay... Height, minimum, obviously. Skin, the machine seems to offer minimally helpful coordinate tags, so they try R9C1. The most possible freckles, no planing on the cheeks, no scars, the most amount of moles, and now they come to hair.

Good. Phew. There's their reliable blue bob at the end of the top line, except that it's still brown. Ahoge? On, definitely.

If Seren could peer out of the chamber (or maybe it's more like a capsule?) to check for L's reassurance, they so would. But instead, they just have to puff out their cheeks and cycle through endless options of hair colors. It helps a little bit to be able to choose the all-over color first, then customize the roots and tips. R55C1 seems right, and they go one shade darker for the roots, one shade lighter for the tips.

Phew. Hair done. It nearly gleams at them in the reflection, though they could be imagining that.

Pupils... Seren tries to imagine actually having stared at themself in a mirror - how many little points of light and corneal flickers, retinal whosywhatsits, rods and cones and tutti-frutti ice cream had they had swimming around in there?

All the ones on the first line are too simple. They choose the first option on the second line and pray. Now comes maybe the most pivotal part of all: recalling their own eye color.

Blue, of course. Bright, if not electric, and definitely not leering. The outer color ends up being more of a baby blue (R6C1), while the inner is properly piercing (R7C6).

Eyeshadow - Seren had honestly completely forgotten that the flush on their lids was called this, having only had it pointed out by others post-moments of tension - is option R7C1. Lips are pretty natural, just a little pop of healthy color, from option R2C1.

The fact that their vitiligo is categorized under "face paint" is more than a little scary, but Seren scrolls to the bottom of the menu and picks the mask in the middle, scattering their cheeks with a soothing layer of stardust.

Okay! Okay. All that just to put them back to how they'd been to begin with. Could they have just left the customization capsule without "saving changes" and been just as fine? Probably yes, but even the most easygoing of Serens got fearful about stuff like that.

Yardley's sunglasses - at night, of course - covered any elicited reaction in their eyes, when the pressure release finished sighing. They turned, arms still crossed, and looked Seren up and down.

He's clearly not impressed by the extended session that resulted in...what? "Did you change your voice?"

Honestly, they'd forgotten all about that, and just hastily double-tapped on the confirmation dialog. None of their usual jokes; Seren replied, "I sure hope not." Okay, good. Still themselves.

Speaking of jokes - "Where's L?!"

Yardley sighed. "Ci had to go lie down. Getting too nervous."

"B-but-- But I needed cim to write down all my choices! So we could know!"

There was no real danger, of course, given that Seren had - they thought - effectively recreated their true-mim appearance as seen since the opening of the Lifepod. But it was annoying, still to have wasted all that time and have nothing whatsoever to show for it.

Now they were starting to sound like Vivanne...

"Our dear friend! Why, you look wonderful!"

Relief shuts Seren's eyes before they can blink, and they feel L's hands on their shoulders, whether from in front of or behind them, keeping them as upright as they'll need to be.

"They look the same," Yardley retorts. "Did you even do anything?"

As if he should care. "I was gonna," replies Seren as their eyes flash open, "but I wasn't able to actually modify my mim as it exists right now. I had to start over! Don't you think, y'know, your million-dollar machine should do a little better than that?"

(Past conversations with Feru about the revolutions and the revulsions of gender-change technology and its development filter faintly through their head. Of course, as laissez-faire as Yardley appears to be, they haven't appeared in a female body yet, so...so there's that.)

"You sure about that?" Yardley asks, cocking his head. The golf-course-green buzzcut catches the harsh light of the MS-MT's work area, but doesn't shine. "There're two options: gender selection, and body customization. The former'll put you back to the very beginning. The latter works from what you've already got on."

So maybe Seren had been a little bit too cursory about their exploration. "Okay...but I picked gender selection, and it reverted to some randos - the default set. Isn't there a way to just change the gender of my" - they gesture most emphatically, L's grasp moving with them - "mim?"

Yardley scratches their head (maybe the grass is getting itchy from that white-hot LED heat). "No? That hairstyle isn't available on the male mims. The clothing looks different. It's a different costume, yanno? C'mon, live a little - get into it! Remember, no guilt. We're all gonna get our real bodies back eventually, so-"

Seren cuts him off by making a sharp ninety-degree rotation and stepping back into the machine. Yeah, yeah, real bodies, they know. But not for them.

They don't need any further instruction from Yardley to inspect the menus much more carefully this time, and find the option to save the currently-loaded mim (here referred to as "avatar" - makes enough sense) for later reference. Before selecting that, though, they select the cancel feature. Everything fades to black, yet they're still wide awake.

Alright then. Seren moves to the save-data dialog and sees one slot already occupied. With...yep. With their current, canonical appearance. So yet another way in which their first attempt was a waste of time. But it's okay! They're confident this time. Their appearance can be reselected, and they do vaguely remember all the choices they made just a few minutes ago.

So now it's back to the gender selection screen, for a male-model mimeosome this time. Their usually so-carefully-coordinated hoodie and leg armor clash, since guys' fashion gear apparently just universally sucks (except for L's outfit, which they've never been able to wear).

The first base's face is stark, blank, dully red-haired. Seren skips past it to the third, with the softest affect of all the available options. The majority of these seem to be for older men, staunchly set as soldiers, and the mature options definitely don't reflect the same antiblackness as the female lineup, so that's...nice? Makes sucky-looking outfits a reasonable price to pay.

Right away, Seren scales the unit's height to the minimum possible, again - this is a 1, for reference. No thought given to an actual understandable scale. The skin color at the same coordinate position seems to have a much stronger yellow undertone than they remember, but that'll have something to do with the huge white patch missing over the bridge of their nose and top third of their cheeks.

Now on to facial features - freckles and moles to the max, scars and cheeks at large plain as can be. The default hairstyle for this base actually seems to get the closest to their trusty bob, and even if there's a better option...Seren just doesn't feel like braving the base selection again, and again, and again, to find it. This one has messy fringe in the front and a what seems to be a shaven nape in the back. Maybe better equipment to take to Cauldros, if mims did need to sweet.

For further hair inflections: ahoge, which here means slightly messier bangs, and that same forever-scroll to get to the proper hues and tints. They tick past the beard toggle...and then they keep going past it. There are limits to this agender thing of theirs, after all.

Eye color is probably the most uncanny screen of all. Really staring into your own soul, here. Seren scrabbles to find the correct colors - the only selection not coming from the first column - and skedaddles out of there.

Okay, and which voice? Joker, right? Whichever one is the most...annoying. Seren will admit that, in the sanctity of the MS-MT machine.

When they go to save these edits, they notice that now the second slot is also already filled out. So, they choose the third. They do attempt, for a moment, to puzzle out the heuristic of the save-and-load scheme, and failsafes and backups and all, but since they have no plan to chew Yardley out again (it's shocking that they even did it the once), they decided to leave well enough alone.

Save. Confirm. Exit.

Their steps are heavier, as they make their way back onto the administrative district's basement floor. Instead of clicking, the platform almost thunks with weight. This sensation is well matched to the way their shorts have turned into joggers, their warm orange hoodie - a rare choice, but cute with Reginal variant legs - into a PVC monstrosity in baby blue, for real this time.

After all that work, what have they got to show for it, then? They're not as cute, honestly. L may fawn with the utmost love and care, but...the male mim just isn't cute. Not with this hair, anyway. Seer does it better (Seer does the female mim better, too). Maybe Graham does, too, but Seren has yet to truly meet him and find out.

Seren sighs. L also sighs, but with a different emotion. They'll try on some supercivilization duds, maybe see how Sakuraba BLADE Combat wear looks on pectoral muscles without the far-too-obvious bra outline, shoot a few of the more menacing Turba, and then go right back to how they were. For now, though...

"I gotta change."