Jillian_Guzman
“Jillian Guzman,” she tells the wide-hipped barista. It had taken Jillian one day to learn to speak, one week to learn English, and just over five months to “find her voice,” as it were. Humans were a rather sensitive and picky bunch when it came to the sound waves they used for communication, vibrate the cords of slime she used to simulate their speech too quickly and they don’t hear anything at all, animals that are already uneasy around Jillian completely freak out, or they put their hands to their ears as if they’re in intense pain, vibrate them too slowly and they either still don’t hear her or seem incredibly uncomfortable. Erring a bit on the side of caution to avoid inflicting pain by vibrating her simulated vocal cords too quickly, she had found a comfortable area on the slightly lower side of the spectrum, giving her a deep yet still distinctly feminine voice that had a confident and almost dominating quality that still seemed to suit her form, or at least that was what she’d been told. The confidence was intentional, the dominating aspect was an unintended but not undesirable side effect. The reason Jillian went to so much trouble for something most people took for granted was obvious, she was not human, but a mass of living, sentient green slime, and she had been for the entirety of her very, very long existence. For centuries she had dwelled in the depths of the Earth, feeding, growing, learning, and eventually becoming bored, and thus did the formless mass of slime attempt to take on a form and become a part of human society, which had some inherent obstacles that had to be sorted out, but Jillian felt she was making admirable progress.
“I know your name, Jillian, and you really don’t need to use your full name, just your first name is fine, we just need a name to call out when your order is ready,” the barista, who Jillian knew as Tabitha_Cooke (partially thanks to the nametag on her uniform, partially because they were already acquainted), sighed as she finished putting the order in. Jillian simply had the puppet body shrug and smile sheepishly, “I just know that there’s a proper order to do things here and giving one’s name after placing the order is the way of it.” “Well, you’re not wrong, I suppose,” Tabitha smiled herself, seeming placated by the gesture. Jillian moved herself aside so the next customer in line could place her order, directing the puppet to turn naturally and walk to where she would wait until her order was ready, making sure the feet touched the ground with each step and making an adequate footstep so as not to unsettle anyone. Humans were picky about appearances too. It had taken Jillian an hour to shape herself into a “body,” it had taken a month to understand why humans were terrified over her, it took 2 months for her to find a form humans were comfortable around, it took 8 additional months to “find her face,” as it were. Forming the bulk of her mass into a human shape was an exhausting exercise, and Jillian had, with uncomfortable frequency, found herself slipping, dripping, drooping, in unnatural and terrifying ways. Eventually, she realized that all that work was ultimately unnecessary, humans didn’t need to interact with the bulk of her, they needed to interact with something pleasing to their eye. She left the bulk of her mass comfortably on the floor in a mostly-formless mass that she could still move and control at will and with as much care as necessary, since humans very rarely looked at the floor, especially if sufficiently distracted elsewhere. She stretched a bit of herself upward in a smooth column that resembled long, straight human hair, and hung a “puppet” with a pleasant appearance for them to interact with. There was only enough of herself in the puppet to look good, it was a rather unimportant extension and she could easily make at least a dozen.
The first step was choosing a form that humans were comfortable interacting with, and she found the most widely pleasing form was the thin feminine frame she displayed now. She had started with a male form, out of convenience more than anything else as she had no gender and mostly identified as female now due to her puppet’s current form, but with some tricks she could make herself more pleasing to certain humans, which made interaction easier and more enriching. Being sexy made humans nicer to her, and it was easier to be sexy if her facade was female, male sexiness tended to vary wildly. She wasn't trying to be particularly sexy right now, of course, she was just getting coffee for some coworkers. The steps to being sexier were simple: wider hips, thicker thighs, bigger breasts, more cleavage, poutier lips, bigger eyes. It also helped if her "hair" was a little less tidy. People could look past the green translucence of her body if she followed that formula, but that was if she wanted to manipulate them or elicit a desired response.
The face, that was tricky, she was still fine-tuning it to this day. She had started with emulation, mirroring the person she was speaking to, which had mixed results, which were not what she wanted, she wanted consistent results. Next was mixing features from various people she'd seen, but this seemed to give consistently bad results, everyone seemed uneasy when speaking with her. "Depth" in eyes, this was important she came to realize, and the fact that she hadn't put special care into the eyes, something she hadn't guessed would be so important at first, gave her a rather terrifying uncannyness. Next, she tried emulating cartoons, this seemed to get much more positive results, with a few outliers, and at least no one was put off by her appearance. Since then, she had slowly been altering her face over the course of her time among humans, learning as she went, adjusting the density of her slime in certain areas to create the appearance of different colors, of depth, of things that made them more comfortable to be conversing with what was clearly not human. The trick was to be close to human, but distant enough so they didn't get uneasy, perhaps they were afraid a slime could be MORE human than they were, ridiculous as that sounded. Jillian had settled on her current look 5 weeks ago, which was her record, and she was quite happy with her face, it seemed to be the most widely accepted and respected. She was treated like a human rather than a monster now, so long as she made her facade behave like a natural human and didn't bring attention to the blob at the bottom of her "hair" that was the majority of herself.
Once she had ultimately settled on a female form, however, it wasn't terribly difficult to "find her name." People like puns, whether they admit it or not, people like things to make sense, to have names that evoke feelings to which they can relate, Jillian was practically given her name, since her slime body was not unlike Jello, it was a good name to go by for people to remember her. A last name took only a brief thought, "Guzman" (pronounced goos-man) sounded both professional and had another nod to her gooey body. When she introduced herself as such, no one batted an eye, and so that was the name by which she was addressed, the name she'd registered for Social Security with, the name on her resume. "Jillian Guzman," Tabitha called out playfully, even though she had earlier said only the first name would suffice, "Here's your four coffees, be careful with them, ok?"
"Of course, thank you," Jillian vibrated the cords of slime in the back of the puppet's mouth, nodding the facade's head and making the face smile gratefully at the barista as she firmed up the arms and hands so that it would be able to support the weight of the drink holder of coffee. Only someone who was WAY too close and looking WAY too carefully would've seen the slime transfer up the column of "hair" and down the head into the arms. "See you later, Tabitha," Jillian called out, transferring a lot of the extra slime to one arm to support all of the drinks as she lifted the other arm to wave goodbye. She balanced the arms out again and made her way to the door, having the facade walk naturally in front of her while she flowed naturally behind it, using a tendril from her main body to open the door since her hands were full. She didn't "cheat" often, and she was trying to have her facade do more and more, so that people would be as comfortable as possible around her, but sometimes it was simply easier to perform a task the easy way, especially when no one was really paying attention.
She had only been employed for a month, after settling on her current body and face, she knew the next step to integrate into human society would be to get a job and work like them. It was... actually shockingly simple, she interacted with a human interviewing her in the ways that she'd learned to interact with humans, she behaved professionally and had settled on not trying to "sexualize" herself to get an unfair advantage. She'd gone in how she was now, her facade dressed in nice, professional attire, wearing clothes for the first time actually made her wonder why she'd never dressed up the puppet before, it made maintaining its shape that much easier because she could simply fill up the appropriate areas and only worry about properly forming her legs, which were showing between the skirt and socks, her hands, and her face. As much work as she'd put into the face, she wasn't about to cheat by wearing a mask at this point, though it had certainly been tempting. At the conclusion of the interview, the woman speaking with her extended her hand to shake, and Jillian very sensibly put on a surgical glove that she'd brought and vibrated the slime in her facade's hand to create enough friction to heat it to a close approximation of human skin temperature, then shook her new boss's hand with a firm and warm handshake, explaining politely that the glove was so that she wouldn't accidentally get slime on her.
Jillian didn't have to look back to see behind herself, because the facade's "eyes" were purely for show, she could see in all directions simultaneously in a way that made her wonder how humans could possibly operate limited to only one direction at a time, even with two eyes! She couldn't fathom why they couldn't even use each eye to look in a different direction, but it had been explained to her that it just wasn't possible, humans could only look in one direction at a time, limited by their eyes range of movement. Still, it made it easy to know precisely where a human was looking from that, and from that information, a lot of other conclusions could often be drawn. Back to the matter at hand, Jillian couldn't help but be a little ashamed at what she saw behind herself. Try as she might, she had never mastered leaving absolutely no residue behind. There were plenty of ways she could avoid doing so by preventing her slime from touching surfaces in one way or another, but they would either look strange enough to draw unwanted attention or they required more effort than Jillian thought that she could keep up for longer than a few seconds without compromising the integrity of her facade, which could potentially terrify people. Therefore, if she had to touch something with her slime that other people wouldn't want slime on, she wore gloves, and she apologized to cleaning staff profusely for her "trail." Most seemed sympathetic outwardly and were fairly obviously inwardly resentful. Jillian went out of her way to make things as easy as possible by following a trail she'd already left whenever possible and occasionally do nice things for them.
This coffee run was not such a favor for the cleaning crew, however. Rather, many of her coworkers had a bit of an addiction to the stuff, addiction was another concept that had been initially hard to grasp, and when she learned the coffee machine in the office was broken down, she had volunteered in order to improve office morale and hopefully ingratiate herself with some of her coworkers that were... less accepting of the non-human in their midst. A living slime was an unusual enough sight, a living slime that chose to live as a person was unprecedented, and a human concept that Jillian had become all too familiar with was a fear and distrust of the abnormal. Two of Jillian's coworkers seemed to hate her, though it was more likely their fear simply manifests as such. She knew they were suspicious of her, and with good reason, a slime her size COULD consume a human being, and Jillian had before, more times than she could count, not that this was information she would divulge to them. They saw her as a wolf in sheep's clothing, playing nice until it was time to eat... Jillian had given up on THEM, they could get their own coffee... The others were slowly warming up to her, hopefully this gesture would improve things that much more.
Humans were strange, silly creatures, but the past year of her life had been such an interesting learning experience, she had never imagined so much could happen in a mere year, it had felt like such a short amount of time to her before, now it felt like most of her life was packed into that timeframe. Jillian put a warm smile on her facade, ready to face another undoubtedly-eventful human day.
Just another one of the many Silhouette_Alts