The water was running when the hesitating knock came.

Good thing i finished rinsing the blood out of my hands thought Riley Davis, before drying her fingers on the towel next to the washbasin. Her work for the day was done, her workshop had been tidied up, it's tools put into their place, both the inorganic and the living ones. Motorized forceps and scalpels lay silent in their drawers, creatures softly purred in their cocoons.

The project she had been working on was sewed and cauterized, laying silent on the operation table. Tubes feeding it and taking in the waste. She could let it sit for the night and go back to do the final touches tomorrow. That is where the real artistry came to light. The main brushstrokes, the discerning dump of paint in the canvas, that was all foundational and could be grasped with a couple weeks of practisce. But the final rendering where you hid the seams and polished the product, that had to be cultivated for years.

a second set of knocks at her door, weaker than the last. She sighed. it wasnt that she minded being visited but the people who came, the few who braved coming to her for her services, tended to loose their nerves and run away before she got to the door, which forced her to hurry every time to open it if she wanted to have costumers at all.

She walked out of the workshop, which took about four fifths of her apartment space and into the little room that worked as reception. The wall separating both added just a few weeks ago. It turned out it didnt cause a good impression if the first thing newcomers saw was her work displayed open.

When opening the door she saw her potential client. He stood on the hallway, about ten paces away from the door. Hands being wrung, knees slightly bent inwards, pupils dilated, sweat accumulating, pulse racing, hormones pumping, adipose tissue being burnt, blood oxidizing, sking folicules turning towards... she blinked a few times. Her attention tended to get caught in those details when meeting someone new. The client did the thing everyone always did. He turn his head downward to look at her. she had to get around to changing her body into that of an adult. or buy a stool, whatever was cheaper.

She decided to start the conversation, knowing that the other person wouldnt be able to.

"good afternoon" wait, it was evening, she had lost her sense of time in her work yet again, nevermind, keep going "are you here to make an appointment?"

the other person kept on saying nothing, aparently trying to find some saliva to swallow. The eyes where moving all over her, probably scanning for weapons. Riley thought that she ought to do the same. So far she hadn't come across any civilian with a vendetta in mind or some deranged cape trying to make a name for themselves in this brave new world but it was bound to happen. Still, trust. That had been the foundational principle of Eden, the name they had finally decided to put on the reconstructed megalopolis.

The mayor had had her sense of humor, if nothing else, when pushing for that.

"Sh-should i have called beforehand?" finally asked the young man.

"It's perfectly fine, i dont have any work to do right now, would you like to come in?" she step back a little bit giving the costumer a wide berth.

Finally his sublingual gland managed to generate enough liquid to push down his throat, clearing it and, by some obscure placebo mechanism, giving him enough resolve to walk into her den. They both sat in comfortable armchairs, beaten down and with a few patches on them considering they had been salvaged twice after going through two apocalipses.

"So, let's start with your name" said Riley as she awkwardly lay her hands on her lap. She never knew what to do with them whenever they were not buried in flesh "then let's move on to what... services you need"

"yes" one final clearing of the throat and the client started "uh, hi, my name is um john and i... um... well i guess i just wanted to know your... uh, your prices?"

"it is generally custom tailored for each job, depending on how extensive, how invasive and how permanent the results, to give you a gauge, cosmetic changes tend to be cheaper starting at about a hundred new dollars, things like quote unquote incurable tumors are in the midrange of about four hundred and, well..." she never knew what to call it, what words could she use that wouldn't sucitate bad associations "...for, shall we say, radical alterations i can charge up to a thousand new dollars, with the understanding that it will come with mainteinance down the line"

"radical alterations" was the new term she was going for lately, at most it seemed to cause some slight whitening of the knuckles, way better than to say "flesh carving" or "body sculpting" like she used to.

"is this for you or for someone else?"

"uh, w-well... it would, um, it's...uh..."

"it's for you, good to know, what are you looking for?"

This was another thing that was inevitably bound to happen. So far all her clients asked for the most basic, most boring interventions. Dental care, asthmas and reumas, severe fractures, congenital diseases, limb replacement. The most exciting thing that had happened lately had been a woman in a wheelchair who wanted to ble able to walk again, and even that had been child's play. Usually the bigger projects, such as the one resting back at her workshop, were comissioned by the wardens, or by earth shin.

But as people, slowly, torturously, got used to her they would start to get a bit more bold in their requests, which was good, something else to keep the interdimentional alien artist in her head happy.

"i...i just... it's..." boy, it was like pulling teeth, except that removing teeth was actually a piece of cake for her. It was like doing a live brain transplant on a patient, while the patient remains awake. "i want to be a girl"

And there it was. She had to supress a smile. Plans and schematics where jumping wildly in her mind. so many ideas, so many possibilities. Ok, fine, she was going to allow herself a very slight quirk at the corners of her mouth. Nothing too disquieting, just a little mirth, as a treat.

"So..." Riley started.

"that came out wrong, i uh, is not like... i am trans you see"

"sure"

The client visibly relaxed at this. Wow it was that easy? suddenly cartilage was a lot looser, which made it more pliable, which could be then extended into a criss cross shape to... nope. mind was wandering again.

"and, well, i was transitioning" continued the... the girl "but... it's just, hormones are a lot harder to get after the titans, and they were already pretty hard to come before, and most hospitals are crowded and there are no more people who really specialize on this and, i... i just... i got so desperate...i" the voice broke. Which was just a turn of phrase. For a voice to break you needed very specific damage to the larinx. What was actually going on was just a rush of blood towards the neck which made it harder to speak.

"desperate enough to come to me, i see" there was no offense to her voice, just a bit of dry irony. She chuckled before clasping her hands "so! what girl?"

"what?"

"what girl do you want to look like? do you have a photo of her?"

"oh, uh, not like anyone in particular, just... me but more femenine? i guess?"

Golly that was even better. Where was the fun in just tracing an already existing piece? but to reinterpret what was there, to deconstruct it and then reconstruct it into something wholly original. She allowed herself to smile just a tiny bit more, the client was already relaxed anyway.

"that's great!" look at that, now the client was smiling as well, this was unprecedented. Usually the weariness didnt go away until after the operation had been made and they could triple and cuadruple check that everything had gone as expected "now let me see" she leaned forwards getting closer to the customer, the aqueous humors crystalizng into a sharper lens than that of any other human, picking apart tiny details. Her nose picked up on the smallest of feromone shifts and the other senses she had added to herself were informing her of total mass, metabolism rates and other minutae. A few more minutes of observation and she would have a complete phisiological map of the person in front of her.

"i see, you have budding breasts, that's good, more to work with, you might need a slight shaving of the orbital bone, nothing major, you could stand to loose a couple of inches unless you dig the amazonian look, and oh look at this!" her hand went instinctively to the shoulders of the person in front of her who cringed away, pressing themselves against the back of the armchair.

Woops, getting caught up, time to back down. She sat a bit straighter on her own chair.

"...all of which would be up to you, of course" she said in a more measured voice.

"right..." said the client, slowly letting down her arms, raised in protective gesture.

"anyway, we should also talk about the vector of intervention, it can be done through the traditional method of invasive surgery but it can also be ingestion of the right supplements, or full body transfer via cocoon, or perhaps dna splicing by way of a custom pathogen, though i'm not sure that last on will give you a working uterus, whereas the others would garantee it and-"

"wait, hold on, uterus? you can...you can do that?"

Now that was a silly question, of course she could. Hell, if it was a matter of doing it right here right now it would at most take an hour.

"Anything you need, i can make it so it functions and yet you dont have to deal with periods or anything annoying like that"

Ok, now those were tears in her eyes. That was a first. Well, it was a first the fact that the tears were of joy.

Finally she allowed herself to smile fully, teeth showing, eyes squinting. John... Joan, now she realized she had misheard, hugged her.

"thank you... thank you so much"

one hundred and thirty seven pounds of flesh and bone were bearing on her shoulders. About 98 degrees farenheit of heat radiating on her skin. Close to 237 mil of water being exhaled near her ear. She could feel the dopamin running through her body caused by the aforementioned stimuli. And yet that was just the name that her power was giving to what was happening right now. There was another name for it. Happiness.

Riley Davies loved her job.