Saki Chapter 11 - A Sneaky Study

I've decided I'm gonna start posting them publicly here too, but the latest Saki chapter is now ready to go! :>

I hope you guys enjoy, and thanks a million as always to cones for writing this gold! <3

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In the middle of July, with fond memories of the cherry blossom festivals and beach weeks far behind them, Osakan residents could usually only count on a couple types of weather: hot and humid, or staring down the year’s typhoon season with a week of rain and thunder on the horizon. Today was the former; and the beating sun through the windows of the Hanabira office may have well cut the already small break room in half. Rather than risk the rest of the day being drenched in sweat, all the tables had been shoved to the shady side of the room, with all the employees sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with painfully lukewarm cans of soda from the run-down vending machine as they ate their lunch.

Making all of these things worse was a lack of working air conditioning, and no news of a timeline on their repair. Windows had started the day open and fans deployed to let some of the stuffy air out, but once one important document flew off a desk and onto the streets below management ordered them all shut to the response of copious complaining from the staff; not that there wasn’t much they weren’t already complaining about.

“I don’t know why they would even make these windows with latches if we aren’t allowed to open them.”

“I mean, if they had bothered going digital for half of this pointless paperwork we wouldn’t have even HAD that problem- I’ve been trying to get the cubicle block organized for weeks now and shit keeps piling up. It was only a matter of time until something got lost.”

“Totally. Once this pay period ends I'm putting in my notice.”

Izumi rolled her eyes discreetly at the comment made by the woman sitting next to her. She had said he would quit last week, and if Izumi was recalling correctly, the week before as well, despite not putting in a single word with HR. Forcing herself to stay quiet, she tried eating her lunch as quickly as possible before the combination of complaining and heat turned her stomach. She knew work sucked at the moment- that was hardly a question, but dragging what should have been a break from the annoyance into just more misery and griping made no sense to her.

Irritated, she checked her watch. Only a few minutes left until the end of her break. Then she could bear a few more hours in front of her computer and leave, simple as that- she had more important things to be worrying about anyways once the workday was over. Even if she did at some level share the sentiment of wanting to head for greener pastures, Hanabira had made some major changes in her life, and still had some answers she felt she was owed.

Hearing the door to the room open behind her, the clack of high heels made themselves known as they moved from the carpeted hallway to vinyl.

“Oh, hi, Ms. Takamaru.”

Izumi whipped around, not expecting her girlfriend to be the one addressed by her coworkers, yet there Saki was nonetheless, a stuffed folder wedged underarm in the shoulder of her crisply pressed jacket.

“Hey, Ch--...h-ey…ahem…good a-afternoon, Saki.”

Saki returned a warm grin to the table, seemingly immune to the negative aura that hung over it.

“Hello! Hope you are all enjoying your day. I was wondering if I could borrow Izumi for a bit; I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

Izumi couldn't have downed the last of her soda and packed her unfinished lunch any faster.

“Noooo, I’m not doing anything important here at the moment; was just about to leave anyways, heh!”

Ever patient, Saki responded with an “Oh! Well this’ll just take a second if you want to finish your--”, but Izumi had already gotten out of her chair and made her way past her towards the exit. Saki cut off her sentence and followed suit, catching up to her girlfriend as best as her shorter legs could. Once out of earshot of the breakroom, Izumi leaned on the nearest wall with a sigh of relief.

“Thank God, that place was turning into a goddamn funeral. What’s up?”

“Ahh, they’re all griping again? Could tell something was up when I didn’t hear your voice over everyone else’s. Anyways, it was about the…” Saki looked down the hallway to check if it was empty before turning back with a quieter voice “…the plan. I was just thinking about it this morning and--”

Already seeing the disappointment flash over Izumi’s face, Saki started trying to elaborate, but was quickly drowned out.

“Saki…come on, you know we have to do this. You agreed to it last week. We can’t let something like what happened to you at the ocean happen again, and if anybody can tell us anything, it's the science people right here. If we’re lucky, they won’t even trace it back to you.”

“If you’d let me finish; I wasn’t trying to get out of it.”

“…Oh. Shit, sorry.”

“What I wanted to say is that I did some cleaning last night, and found…”

Rummaging through her overstuffed folder, she pulled out a small plastic zip bag and held it up to Izumi’s face. It seemed empty at first, but looking closer she could just barely make out a long white strand curled up tightly inside.

“…this.”

“And that is?”

Saki pointed to the top of her head.

“Remember like two weeks ago? Where I did the, um, ‘Rapunzel’, and tied y--”

Izumi’s cheeks burned bright red.

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, it turns out that we actually pulled a single strand so far that it couldn’t stretch any further and it just…fell out, like, well, normal hair. I found it while vacuuming; nearly gummed the whole thing up. ”

“But that’s not even close to pink. How do you figure that’s supposed to be a piece of your hair?”

“Yeah, I thought the same thing, but I couldn’t think of anything else it could be. So then I went and took some scissors, pulled another strand as far as I could and tried trimming it- still really tough to cut through, but once I finally got it, same thing happened. For whatever reason, the colour completely fades as soon as it’s off my head. So, that got me thinking- did some research, and I think this may work even better than me just spitting on a petri dish or whatever our first idea was.”

“I’m listening.”

“So we were nervous about them turning whatever sample into the police and tracing it back to me, right? Turns out it’s waaaaaay harder to do that with hair as long as the root isn’t attached, and since it’s no longer pink I doubt I’d even be a suspect when it came to direct questioning.”

“And you know that because…”

“Crime dramas, incognito mode, and a really good memory for useless trivia. I mean, we are KINDA still breaking the law doing this. Can’t avoid looking a little suspicious. All I’ll need to do now is slip this in the lab with the rest of the samples the science team looks at- they’re super backlogged on analyses this week so it’ll just get lost right in the pile without anyone noticing a thing.”

“How’d you go about figuring THAT out?”

Saki looked confused.

“I just…asked. Sat down with Manabu in Research and picked up some gossip. Nothing unusual and he was happy to talk.”

“Really? -I mean great! Sorry, I’m just trying to keep up here. You did way more digging around than I expected.”

Saki shrugged.

“Just really curious, you know? You know me, when my mind is set I always end up putting in my all to get it as perfect as possible. Once it’s in there we’ll just act normal until rumours about weird stretchy hair pop up and we get the answers you’re looking for.”

By then, the rest of the staff had begrudgingly started leaving the break room behind them and into the hallways. Saki gave a reassuring grin.

“Trust me, this’ll go great.”

And with that, she stood on her tiptoes and gave Izumi a quick kiss on the cheek before heading off to her own workstation across the floor, an action done many times before, but never before in the eyeshot of their workplace.

Izumi stumbled from her leaning position against the wall, heart high in the rush of emotion she always got from such intimate gestures, yet pounding twice as hard as she heard the subdued double takes from behind her. In spite of the weather she had stayed cool through most of the day, but as she heard one of her coworkers walk up closer to where she stood, she could feel a chill line of sweat begin trickling down her back.

“Are you two...dating?”

Izumi turned and laughed weakly.

“Um, yeah. It’s a long story…”

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Miraculously, the rest of the day was relatively painless. Just before closing, the sun slid behind the neighboring office building, snuffing out the horrible heat rays from the windows and giving the staff the glimmer of hope needed to tough the last hour or so out. Shutting her laptop, Izumi kicked out from her desk, swiveling her chair around and bursting free of her cubicle prison, but not before grabbing a wheeled, overnight suitcase that had been sitting in the corner of her station the entire day, untouched. Clacking out its handle and deftly wheeling it in front of her, she briskly put Hanabira’s corner of their shared office building behind her as fast as she could.

Heading to the elevator bay, Izumi tried to make as little eye contact as she could manage with her peers. While she felt she had managed to tell a stretch-free version of how she and Saki had fallen head over heels in love as confidently as possible, it was still a massive disruption to the status quo to drop and even now she could practically feel people trying to envision the two of them passionately embracing as she walked past. The woman in question herself stood just off to the side as Izumi proceeded to the lobby, waiting for her.

“You all set?”

“Yeah. Listen…Izumi, I’m sorry I jumped right into that. You know, that thing after lunch. I don’t think I really thought that all through. Did…did anyone give you a hard time about it?”

“No, though my office babe hotness ranking has probably jumped up a few notches for the wrong reasons. I’m more concerned about you getting unwanted attention. I mean, what’s gotten into you? You’d probably pass out if I even SUGGESTED doing that a few months ago.”

“I…don’t know. Really. Maybe I’m just worried about tonight. Maybe I’m feeling cocky that this kind of plan even CAN happen. Maybe I thought it was time they knew- though, if that was the case I probably chose the worst way possible to break the news…”

“Well whatever it is, it’s fine. It’s in the past now. By the next time someone says something stupid on Izakaya night after too many beers I’m sure it’ll already be old news. Let’s just get this over with.”

Breathing deeply, Saki closed her eyes and rolled her neck. From the corner of her vision she could see the building’s metal detector at the front doors, the security desk sitting right beside it with feeds streaming onto monitors from the cameras surrounding the lobby. If all went as expected, none of those things would be of any concern.

“Yeah. Totally. I’m ready.”

With their employee IDs, the two women scanned themselves out, wishing the security guard at the station a wonderful evening. Having scanned their cards in the morning as well, the computers noted their exit, logging them out of its databanks and removing them from the need of any further scrutiny.

Two women in, two women out. Business as usual.

The guard yawned. Only a few people remained left in the lobby, some waiting for rides or making last minute evening plans, but over the next fifteen minutes even they trickled out through the front doors. Thinking the most social part of his job over, the guard subtly leaned over to one of the desk drawers, brushing aside walkie-talkies and folders to grab the stack of unfinished manga to be caught up on laying at the bottom. Nothing left to do but kick back, crank up his desk fan, and read some--

“Sorry, just gotta run back into the Hanabira suite. Just realized I’ll just be needing this suitcase there tomorrow morning so…no point lugging it all around, you know?”

The guard slammed the book back into the drawer from the startlingly sudden voice, worried that a superior had caught him slacking. Looking up, he instead saw Izumi standing there, a sheepish look on her face and straining to lift up the item in question so he could see it.

“Uh...yes, just sign yourself in and you should be able to drop it off.”

“You sure? I’ll only be five minutes, max.”

“Building policy, ma’am.”

“Alright, alright. No problem.”

Izumi scanned her card as was told, took the empty elevator up to Hanabira’s floor of the office building, and dropped off the suitcase back in her cubicle. True to her word, she was back in the lobby in just under four minutes, and signed herself out once again.

One woman in, one woman out. Business as usual.

Izumi left through the front doors, and the guard watched her carry on down the street until she had vanished into the nightlife crowd. Office workers could be a strange bunch.

Eventually, once he was ABSOLUTELY certain there would be no more surprise visitors, the guard found the page of his manga he had hastily left off on and carried on reading, ready for an uneventful night. To his relief, it was, and Izumi’s interruption was the only one he saw all shift. Until dawn came up the following morning and the nocturnal worker was swapped out for his daytime counterpart, not a single person passed through those front doors.

However, just as Izumi left, something began to stir, six floors above him.

Alright, probably waited long enough for Izumi to get out again.

As if pushed by an unusually strong breeze from the building’s non-existent air conditioning, the suitcase in Izumi’s cubicle tipped over onto its side, its just-recently unclasped latches jangling softly. The leather creaked, having been heavily pressed together, but now allowed to start letting its compressed cargo expand. Slowly but surely, a twitching began to rock the lid open further, until the seal cracked and it finally flung wide for a limp, crumpled, rubbery limb flopped to the floor.

Saki panted for breath, her face flat as a sheet from where her arms had been layered atop it. Below the impression of her face was the rest of her, torso atop waist atop legs, all folded up not unlike a towel and packed down tightly by the firm, but loving hands of her girlfriend in a nearby convenience store bathroom.

I seriously can’t believe this worked.

Saki had held reservations about the plan ever since Izumi had laid out the groundwork a week ago in her apartment. The offices of Hanabira were hardly a top-secret facility, and the only real concern the two of them foresaw when it came to sneaking some kind of bodily sample into the lab after hours was the entrance itself and its security, ran by the building Hanabira was renting its office space out of. A part of her still held suspicions that the suitcase idea was initially just a joke from Izumi, meant to be phased out once a better plan came along, but after a bit of playful, experimental folding, they realized that her bizarre, malleable physiology could very well be compressed down to such a scale. Just as practice and time had continually increased the lengths her body was able to reach, the same seemed to hold true in the opposite direction. Pushed far past the amount necessary to squeeze through an air vent or adjust her cup size as she had done before, Saki found herself impressed by how much excess volume Izumi seemed to be able to wring out of her until the short, but still adult proportioned woman was able to fit into a container less than a quarter her size.

What she didn’t expect, however, was how constraining holding that scale would be. Her breaths in that bag had felt shallow, her mouth tapering off into a flat neck and chest that significantly limited the amount of airflow she could get. They had done a short test run of sorts earlier to make sure she COULD breathe, so she knew she wouldn’t suffocate in such a space, but regardless, it had been unnerving as she sat crumpled in the dark, barely hearing anything from the outside world beyond the thud of every sidewalk crack the bag rolled over as she was lugged around. The moment the lid flipped open though, those breaths had much more room to travel, and she could feel herself expanding and inflating from the neck down.

She had more room vertically now, but the same horizontally, and she could feel her decompressing body begin to strain the leather walls of the bag to their limits. Not wanting to make Izumi explain why there was an exploded suitcase in her cubicle the following morning, she would have to get out quickly.

Unfolding stiffly at first, her malleable skin quickly smoothed over all of the creases that had been left in it, her entire body swelling and slinking across the carpet in an unravelling motion. As each fold undid itself, she felt the tingle of sensation rush back into the part that had been cramped up. At first it merely felt like pins and needles down her arms and neck for the initial few segments, but the more of herself that was unpacked, the stronger that feeling grew. Saki shuddered as her knees buckled out of their folds and into soft arcs that lay strewn across the floor. None of her body parts were remotely the right length or contained any amount of joints, and as she finished pulling her feet out of the case with wobbly, snaking arms, her upper body lay back on the floor, chest heaving with breath.

…that…wasn’t…as easy…as I thought it would be…

Laying in an elongated heap, Saki shivered, her office attire having been replaced with a t-shirt and the shortest pair of shorts she could find in her closet in the hopes of minimizing volume. Her skin buzzed angrily, numbness giving way to discomfort as her sense of touch returned. However her nerves worked, if she still had them, they didn’t seem to approve of how her body had been treated.

“Oww…”

Saki quietly grunted. She didn’t feel hurt, her body just as unimaginably resilient to physical damage as it had ever been since she had gotten her powers, but whereas most times laying in a heap was a source of relaxation, now it was simply uncomfortable. Her mind likened it to a cramp, the same way one can sit crunched up at a desk all day but not notice its damaging effects until the moment they stand up.

I really hope Izumi didn’t think flattening me was hot, because I am NOT doing this again.

This was only stage one of the plan, however, but fortunately the only one that required such a squeeze. Security in Hanabira’s own suite was considerably less intense, with only a few very noticeable cameras inconspicuously scattered throughout the hallways, easy to avoid line of sight of if one knew the floorplan well enough. Given that the building had such thorough checkpoints at the ground floor, these precautions on the upper floors were mostly meant to simply keep employees from doing things they weren’t supposed to. Or at least, that’s how it was in theory.

Clearly, they weren’t expecting me.

With her ability to move herself in ways no other human should, nothing from here on out should have proved an obstacle- provided she was able to stretch as freely as she was accustomed to. This, however, was becoming clear not to be the case. Willing her legs to retract first, the moment they lost even an inch they made their complaints known with a spraining sting of discomfort that zipped all around her elongated limbs for a solid second. Her body had just spent a hellish half hour not being allowed to stretch and now it was being made to retract? Fat chance. Saki sucked some air through gritted teeth, reflexively slipping the leg back out back to its prior length and then some. Only then did her nerves settle down.

For a moment, Saki was concerned that she had just discovered another snag in her mutation, some sort of superhero-like weakness that would leave her stuck elongated for as long as she had spent bed-riddenly softened not too long ago. Forcing herself to calm down, her more rational side took over and was confident this was not the case.

No, this has happened before…whenever I try and compress, it just makes my urges to stretch more intense. This is just…WAY more than I’ve ever tried to push it before. It should subside…eventually.

Saki didn’t have time for eventually though. Every second spent in this building was a second things could stop going to plan, and Saki didn’t even want to consider what she would have to go through if she was found out. While a bit one note at the moment, she did still have superpowers, and they alone were responsible for getting her this far. A bit more sneaking should be child’s play, even with the handicap.

If she wasn’t able to get any shorter, she would have to just keep getting longer. Rolling her spindly body around, she rooted her four limbs on the ground, getting as oriented as her skewed proportions would allow. Then, arm over arm, she began to crawl forwards, out of Izumi’s cubicle. It could be debated that she wasn’t actually going anywhere though; as her upper body pulling brought her out into the wider expanse of the office suite, her feet remained planted where they had started, with the long stomach connecting the two pairs of limbs beginning to stretch out longer and longer as they parted. Progress was slow, and the carpet annoyingly itchy on her bare arms and increasingly bare abdomen, but she managed to make it out of one room into the connecting hallway within only a few minutes.

Eventually, the burden of stretching was distributed on her arms, legs, and neck as well, with the realization that it would be wise not to let any part of her near its limit. This is one of the few occasions she wasn’t stretching to get herself off, and she didn’t want to risk changing that fact, especially when stealth was her main priority. Saki couldn’t deny how good the stretch felt though, owing itself partially to the contrast of her earlier squishing, as well as the straightforwardness of it. In her apartment, there was only so far she could be pulled in any one direction before the limited space of the rooms forced her to double back, bending or folding in one way or another, with her desire to reach the limits of her powers leading her to end coiled up on herself in piles and piles of loops and curves. Here, however, she had already extended herself no less than fifty meters, but only needed to make a single, right angle bend in one of the hallways. Saki found it weirdly satisfying in a way, taking up that much space while her senses took in so much more of the surrounding area than her pre-powered body could have ever understood.

There has to be some way I can try stretching like this other places. I wonder…

Saki forced herself to stop wondering. The labs were only a few hallways from her and between them sat several intersections, and Hanabira’s modest security efforts. Big, bulky cameras, hardly discrete and likely several years obsolete, whirred from left to right and back again as they scanned over the point where the hallways met. Having a few convenient “water breaks” in that hallway, Saki had made note of where their mechanical eyes fell, and for their cheapness, they had been placed reasonably well. It was unlikely she could have slipped past in any blind spot among the floor, and now that she was leaving a long rubbery trail of herself behind her, doing so was even less of an option than before.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to go along the floor. Saki did a quick twirl, yanking out another meter or so of torso to work with and coiling at the side of the hallway just out of camera view. This served as a weight, giving herself a new center of balance for her upper body to continue on its journey, only now going straight upwards. Another two or so meters then had her head bumping up along the ceiling, and, more importantly, right next to one of the hanging, darkened light fixtures evenly spaced along it.

How convenient it was that they were placed there- Saki was certain she couldn’t have traveled along the ceiling without them for support. Back at high school she could barely pass the pull-up test and now that those same untrained abs were distributed along significantly more body, her core strength left much to be desired. However, as she threaded herself between the light and the ceiling, the fixture managed to support her weight and she began reaching out with an extended arm towards the next one, slithering high above the carpet below and completely out of sight of the downwards-facing cameras even while right beside them.

She would like to have thinked she looked like a monkey, swinging gracefully through the workplace canopy, but in all likelihood her movement was far more slothlike as she slowly gripped herself along with long, slinky armholds from one support to the next. Still, it was nonetheless effective, and soon she had doubled her distance traveled, the hallway to the lab now looking like it had been decorated with the world's most rubbery party streamers.

Saki turned another monitored intersection completely unseen, which was shortly followed by the final camera to pass by near the vending machine, recently installed after there had been suspicion about employees tampering with it for free soda, something Saki absolutely assured Izumi she had nothing to do with, probably. At the end of that hallway, a frosted glass door separated the labs from the offices, and once she lowered herself to the floor safely out of sight, Saki simply pushed it open and passed right through.

Shivering as her stomach slid off of warm carpet and onto cold linoleum, Saki took in the darkened room, lit only by the smallest of lights as they hung over a nursery of the company's genetically altered sprouts. Despite being the birthplace where Hanabira’s sole products were developed, it was hardly any larger than the room of cubicles she had started her journey in; only after a strain with commercial use was created was production scaled up, but that part of the process was handled in a separate facility out of town, large enough to handle the increased volumes required. That was probably where the exact vial of LC-99 that birthed the powers she was using at that very moment was actually created, but irregardless, the concept was born right here, its creators still unaware of the effect it was having on the woman currently stretching well over a hundred meters of her body through the building.

With any luck, it’ll stay that way.

The tiny plastic bag containing her hair had earlier been tucked into the strap of Saki’s bra, and the constant strain her features always put on said article made certain it didn’t slip during her escapades. Stopping her forward momentum for a second, and resting one hand down to balance herself, the other reached into the collar of her shirt and retrieved the bag while her neck meanwhile glided through the room in search of the perfect location to put it. In the far corner, beside a desk littered with instruments, she managed to find a cooler. Bringing her arm from by her torso to by her head, she opened it, was greeted by a heap of other bags, each containing some small shred of plant matter and only labeled in the loosest sense by the numbers scribbled on them with permanent marker.

Nice to see that they’re doing just as good a job keeping organized as the rest of the office is…my sample should fit right in.

She took a closer look at the bags. They were a different size than hers, but a stack of empty ones sat not too far away. It was an easy enough fix to simply place the hair in one of those, write a random number on its side with a nearby pen, and toss it in with the rest. Blinking in the dim room, she almost instantly lost track of the strand of hair among the rest of the stem samples.

Wow, they really do look nearly identical…I mean, I did get my powers from these kinds of things…No. That’d be ridiculous.

Quietly closing the lid of the cooler, Saki’s mission was complete. A nearby clock showed the time as well after 8; her body’s uncooperativeness had led the simple ordeal of crossing the office to take well over an hour. Her stomach rumbled. With the nerves of getting to the lab over with, the anxiety they carried with them gave way to other feelings. Rarely had she ever been this long for such a large period of time, and as a result had left her feeling both very hungry and not an insignificant bit aroused- both issues which could likely be solved by meeting back up with Izumi at the food court she should be waiting at.

Experimentally, she tried to return one arm to its normal length, and to her relief, it did. It would seem slowly being pulled hundreds of times its length over the course of ninety sensual minutes was finally enough to satiate her needy body. Saki began to squeeze back the way she came, taking the time to appreciate what had just happened. Nobody else could have done what she just did. If she hadn’t been of a similar mind in wanting to find out more about her body, there was no way Izumi could have found the information they were about to get by herself. Saki had always been good at achieving the goals she had set for herself, and now that she could physically do more than she ever could have before her life changing accident?

Who knows what she could accomplish.

The return trip proved itself far easier, as she grew more stable with every meter subtracted from her impressive total. Once she had pulled a safe distance away from all the cameras, she began walking her legs back to her upper body in tandem with her retraction, meeting somewhere in the middle as she finally snapped back to her normal proportions for the first time in quite a while. Saki shook out her arms, her entire body abuzz from the intense workout she had just put it through. Another buzz caught her attention, however, bringing her arms down to her hips. Her phone lay in her pockets, quietly vibrating from the silent mode she had put it on before getting in the suitcase. She had gotten a text message, and upon looking at the screen, had been getting them for a while as the first one was stamped over an hour ago. It must have been vibrating this whole time, but simply got lost in the sheer amount of other sensory input she had felt while stretching.

As she somewhat expected, they were all from Izumi.

IK: Is everything alright?????

IK: PLZ respond

IK: It’s been an hour! Are you OK???

Saki ran her fingers through the messages. From that point on they were all quite similar. They had predicted that the entire ordeal would have been over in 30 minutes, and as Saki’s stretching mishaps went past that time, the texts had gotten more and more frantic. Feeling a little sorry for keeping her in the dark, Saki quickly tapped back her own message.

ST: I’m fine, just had to get very long~~ ;D

The response was instantaneous.

IK: Oh thank god you had me worried sick. You coming back?

Huh. Thought that ‘long’ comment would have gotten more of her attention. Guess I’ll just tell her about what happened in person.

ST: Yeah I’ll be over in just a second, see you sooooon! ^3^

IK: Alright, just be careful. Love you!

Saki smiled grimly to herself. ‘Careful’…as if Izumi didn’t know what she was about to do. Returning to the cubicles, Saki made sure the suitcase she had been stuffed in was closed and paced back as inconspicuously as possible in the corner by Izumi’s desk, making sure not to let anything left behind seem a hair out of the ordinary. Satisfied with making the cubicle look like there was nothing worth looking at, she quietly tiptoed to the nearby window which had been such a point of contention earlier that day. Saki cracked it open, and sighed as the cool evening breeze filled the stuffy office space.

Alright, you can do this.

The window was the most direct way out. Saki had protested against it more than the suitcase idea, but they hadn’t been able to figure any better way around it. Without a second person to cover, the entrance was no longer an option, and while sneaking office to office through the vents for quick chats served its purpose, the larger air circulation system around the building was too much of an unknown for them to reliably make it part of their plan. They had thought about entering through the same means as well, but the windows only opened from the inside, and besides that, the time it would take Saki to stretch upwards from the alley below would have taken far too long to avoid notice.

The way down, however, was much faster.

Two seconds. That’s all it’ll take. This LITERALLY can’t hurt me. I know it can’t.

Saki peered down into the quiet alleyway below, devoid of anything save a few dumpsters. The only ones to travel through it were the occasional garbageman, and they should be nowhere to be seen for at least another couple hours. She simply needed to drop down onto that pavement twenty meters below her, and walk back into the streets like nothing had ever happened. Only she would know anything out of the ordinary had even taken place.

Slowly, she put one foot upon the windowsill, followed by the other until her entire body was perched on its edge, protruding partially out of the building itself. Her stomach lurched in her chest. Saki pursed her lips, biting quite literally through her tongue and squishing it flat to prevent any involuntary attention-grabbing screams.

Three…two…one…one half…

Her legs, shaking from the tension, slipped out from under her, giving her the push she quite clearly needed. She had wanted to land feet-first, as gracefully and silently as possible, but as her face tipped forwards and the sight of the earth below rushed towards her eye, all she could do was flail her limbs like a dancing car lot balloon.

Oh God oh God oh God oh Go--

Though painless, the impact still managed to shock her. Her chest, first to feel the pavement, had its prestigious volume widened as each breast flattened, cushioning the blow, but only slightly. Her joints instantly gelled as she felt herself spread across the ground by the sheer force of gravity, but only for a moment. Dizzily, she opened her eyes which had shut on reflex, and as the world eventually stopped spinning around her, her mind was able to accept the fact that she truly had been unaffected by the fall. Trying to put the embarrassment of how very un-graceful she had been behind her, she took a breath, and began picking herself up before she risked anyone finding her mangled-up self.

Her skin creaked as she pulled herself together, quickly firming back into place anywhere it had been flattened as she puffed into form. Sharp pebbles dug into her skin, yet were completely unable to puncture it in the slightest, and fell back to the ground as her body regained its supernatural smoothness. Standing herself up on wobbly knees, only the dust on her shirt remained of what should have been a fatal drop for anyone else. But brushing the dirt away, she merely sighed, the night's ordeals finally behind her.

Incredible…just…incredible…

Exiting the alleyway, Saki calmly walked onto the Osakan streets, ready for a well-deserved meal.

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The science team ended up being among the first to report in the following day, knowing full well that nothing but a flawless operation on their workload would leave them working unpaid overtime way into the evening hours. Running 99% on caffeine, they got to work, running nearly two dozen varieties of analyses each on roughly three times that amount of samples. A vast majority of them returned textbook results, but with the company in dire straits, they pressed on, eager to find anything that could be the basis of a future product.

Around ten, one researcher started running scans on a thin white sample. Watching the screen with curiosity, he began rubbing his eyes, wondering if his exhaustion was responsible for the readings he was seeing. Finding nothing wrong with his vision, he waved over a colleague.

“Check this out- weird, huh?”

“Is that hair?”

“Oh good, you think so too. Thought I was going nuts. But nah, just another stem sample from the lab; judging by the structure, it seems like a new strain of that LC-99 flower.”

“Why’d they give that to us? Thought that project was closed down.”

“Dunno, but it’s certainly interesting. Might be worth asking the guys at the top to give it another look. This thing’s like nothing I’ve ever seen- supple, elastic, durable as hell. That plant may have been a lousy skincare product, but it sure could still have its uses…”