Riffsational!(IC)

[Cubist]

"Jubatus. That's it, right?"

Xavier nodded. "Got it in one. From the official species nomenclature, Acinonyx jubatus. Or if you'd rather, go ahead and call me Jay, because that is my name. And before you ask, no, I don't bother with a secret identity."

"I fought a man who threw water and another one in a top hat who cheats. Now I'm talking to a girl who isn't here. Weird seems to be the order of the day, yes."

The feline smiled (without letting his fangs show). "Oh, she's here, alright. Just in a slightly nonstandard physical configuration, that being 'coherent acoustic standing wave'. One more piece of the local weirdness, is all." Weird, yes, but not that freaky, so why's she bothering to mention it? Hmm… if Blue Jay's one of those people who just can't cope with Extreme Weird, she should get out of the game now. Here, the feline's smile evaporated, leaving a serious expression: "If you don't know how to deal with weirdness, you really ought to consider moving to a place with a lower background level of the stuff than Freedom City—and giving up on the superhero thing might not be a bad idea, either. I mean, I've been on a bus that got hijacked to a different dimensional plane, and getting back home involved assistance from some ancient Hittite deities, okay? You stick around, odds are that you will run into freaky crap like Nazi robots and divine drilling-equipment salesmen and transdimensional nanotech-enhanced baristas."

Xavier paused to gauge the young woman's reaction to his words—until he heard someone else's words:

"Do you think that maybe you could turn some of these into a transformer? The one that altered me… it resonated kind of like these do. Jinx, what about it, think that could work?

"'Scuse me, Blue Jay." And Xavier looked at nothing in particular, aiming his eyes in the direction his ears told him Constance's voice was coming from: "Could work, sure, why not? But it's almost certainly different in some way from the mechanism that originally zapped you, so Echo only knows whether or not a thing I rig up here-and-now can fully restore you to your normal self. If I was in your position, the first thing I'd try is running the original energy-converter in reverse, before I tried any other possible cure. That said… I'm not in your position. And I did say that whatever you chose to do, I'd back you up on it. So… yes, I'll jury-rig these amps into a bank of sonic transducers for you. And while I'm doing that, I strongly recommend that you think about all the ways this plan could backfire on you. And if, after you think about it, you're still willing to give it a shot, you can do so with my blessing."

Xavier upshifted; this was going to be a delicate task, and the more of his time he took doing it, the lower the likelihood of his screwing it up in some horrific way. He wracked his brains (and his internet-connected tablet computer) for every scrap of information he could recall, or retrieve, about the energy-converting mechanism that had originally transmuted Constance into her current state, and he tried his level best to duplicate that mechanism with the parts and tools available to him here and now.

Okay. Amps and mics. They're both sonic transducers, with amps specialized to convert electricity to sound, and mics specialized in the opposite direction—and we got plenty of both to play with. Also an Imperial crapton of semiconductor-based gadgets, so there's another exploitable source of energy-converting components… He also considered secondary issues: Say it works—she's returned to a solid body. Will her clothes will come with? Have the space-blanket at hand, just in case… Sound-dampening earplugs, just in case her hearing ends up over-amped…

And in a relatively small number of clock-minutes, the deed was done: The stack of amps Xavier had commandeered, was now festooned with a variety of exposed wires and cannibalized components. Xavier downshifted to the common tempo of 1. "Okay, Constance: It's as good as I can get it. Are you willing to take a chance on my handiwork?"