CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO SOMETHING, ALRIGHT.

You’re still not used to a shower this fancy. Back on earth you had a slightly-too-small bathtub that you could barely sit in, but this is a wholeass standing shower. The water pressure is nice, but you’re still a bit perturbed by the lack of curtain. Yeah, the glass steams up with the hot water, but it still feels weird to have your bare ass be hypothetically visible, though that doesn’t seem to be much of an issue in this world… you think. Is it? You feel the backs of your eyes start to ache as your thought slips down the drain. What were you thinking about? Never mind.

You turn around, letting the water run down your back as you relax your shoulders. It’s far from the first time you’ve showered at Chrome and Tabitha’s, but you’ve been soaking this one in today. Maybe it’s the weird tension there’s been between you and Chrome recently. You guys haven’t talked in a hot minute and it’s made the whole house feel tense.

The water is nice, at least. You grab a cylindrical bottle from the shelf. It’s this special body wash made for furless people, so it’s the closest thing you could get to human body wash. It’s labeled as a nonspecific “tropical” scent, you can’t recognize anything particularly tropical about it other than a drawing of a palm tree on the front, and the back just has a list of random chemicals you wouldn’t even try to pronounce. It smells nice though.

You squeeze a small palmful of the soap out of the tube, it’s a bright cyan colour, with these weird little specks in it. You’re not sure what they are? They’re like these little white clear-ish balls in the gel, you guess they might be to help exfoliate or something? Or maybe it’s just big glitter. You rub the soap between your hands and start applying it to your skin. The blue gel spread over your skin gives it a weird sickly colour. Your near-colourless white skin combined with this electric blue raspberry slime leaves it as an almost blueish-off white, as if you had blue blood under there.

When you’re finished with your arms and shoulders, you move on to below your neck. You look down at yourself, huh, guess you were right when you thought something was changing. Your breasts sit half-formed on your chest, and further down your - let’s say inguen - rests at the midpoint as well. You were wondering if you were imagining it, it was going so slowly, but it’s nice to know that your body can still change passively without magic. It’s a small comfort at least, knowing that your cambion genetics still work, though it’s probably best to not try and force it, in case something breaks.

It’s strange being a cambion in a place like this. It’s not one of your tentpole “weird” elements, along with being a triplet, having albinism and the poetry stuff. Here you’re just… an alien. Everything weird about you is just wrapped up into a single package. You guess that’s the same for Markus too, all their quirks are superseded by being a weird mutant or whatever they are. You wonder if albinism is a thing in this world too. You’d wager it would be since you know animals on Earth can have it, so presumably these guys also have melanin.

You coat your chest and lower half in the tropical topical before running your hands under the water to get the last of it off.

Chrome and Tabitha also bought you shampoo as well, though it’s just a normal fur shampoo. It smells of almonds, though you’re not acquainted enough with sniffing almonds to register the scent as anything but a generic “clean” smell. You squirt a dollop out of the bottle and run it through your hair, vigorously rubbing it at the back  to make sure you don’t get that annoying patch of matted hair you got last time.

You tilt your head back below the showerhead, letting the conical spray of the water just barely hit your forehead. You close your eyes and run your hands through your bright pink hair.

This is nice, you think to yourself. You’ve never been one for ‘self care’ like Avi always was, but now you get why they always took hour-long showers. You think. Maybe they just wanted to leave you and Ari with cold water as some sort of cruel joke. You stretch your arms over your head and hear an audible pop from your back. Jesus, how much tension did you have built up there? That can’t be healthy.

With your eyes closed, you stand still under the water for a while longer. It’s a nice escape from everything that’s been stressing you out lately. As far as you care right now, there’s nothing outside this shower that can—

“Ali?” A quick knock and Tabitha’s voice comes through muffled, behind the bathroom door and the running water, snapping you from your steam-induced trance
“You have been in there for quite a while. Is everything alright?”

You blink your eyes open and move out from under the showerhead.

“I’ll be out in a second.” You give yourself one last rinse to make sure you get all of the body wash and shampoo off of you and turn the shower off. A cold draft breezes by you as you open the shower door to towel off.

You dry yourself off in front of the sink and go to reach for the hairdryer, letting the hot blast of air blow your hair in every direction. You notice a not-insignificant amount of white mixed in with the pink. You grab the hand towel off the hook and wipe the condensation off of the mirror. Your bright white roots are creeping their way further down your hair, you guess the dye you got must not stay for long. Well hey at least that means you won’t have to completely rebleach it for—

Wait. What month is it.

You grab your phone off the counter and check the date.

Fuck.