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My dad poked his head through the door, frowning at me. “Crystal, come see this.” I got up to follow him. Instinctively I pulled my wings in tight. I did that when I felt scared or cautious. Like humans wincing or gulping, my wings reacted to emotion much like facial expressions. 

            He led my to the TV room, and that’s when I remembered a snapping sound during my experiment. In an instant, my over-enhanced brain did the math, calculating my speed into time, and into how fast a reception goes, and to how quickly it can get onto a TV.

            Someone fed pictures of me to the media.

            Long story short, my parents weren’t thrilled. Well, moreover my mom wasn’t thrilled. My dad only suggested that I change my appearance.

            “But that’s not the point!” explained my exasperated mom. “She exposed herself in front of a mass amount of people.”

            “And besides, we all know how I feel about changing my appearance,” I reminded my dad. For someone with octopus in their genetic gene code, I hated to change my look. I only did it if I was being stalked by some crazy person. It felt weird to look like someone else, gauging the texture of their skin, flushing out my pigment for theirs.

            “What do you propose then, Kim?” my dad asked. My mother sighed.

            “Moving, or changing appearance,” she relented.

            “Or do your science thing and declare everyone had sun stroke at the same time,” I added sarcastically. My dad actually smirked, but my mom sighed again.

            In the end, we began to pack.

            A surge of energy shot through me and I whipped open my flashing green-blue eyes. I threw two quick punches to my left, one sharp one to the right, and snapped a kick upward at a steep slope. Then, with a quick flap of my wings, I flipped over my opponent, bending my knees to the momentum as I landed. I gave a round-house kick, and with another flap, perched on top of the punching bag.

            My dad stopped his stopwatch and smiled.

            “32.56 seconds,” he boasted. He twirled, facing the committee. “As you can see, after years of training, E-3 has developed powerful gross motor skills with the application of her extra limbs.” I shifted my wings appropriately.

            “How high can she fly in relativity to the atmosphere?” someone asked.

            “As high as the highest plane,” my dad replied. “Now we shall demonstrate another one of E-3’s abilities.” I obediently did my performance, doing another flip and lithely made my way to the screen we had set up prior. One half of the screen whirred to life, displaying an image of a blue haired girl around her teens.

            I studied the image, deciding how to go about the things I couldn’t tell, like her skin and hair texture. After a while, I closed my eyes and willed the data of the girl into the part of the brain that allowed me to change my appearance. I could feel my skin briefly ripple in an eye’s blink to match her skin tone, my eyes swirling with a new color for me (purple), and my hair fading to the shade of blue the image showed.

            The committee made a noise of approval. I was to their standards. The head of the committee stood and handed my dad a license of science. He had proven his worth.

            When we were out of there and on our way to the motel we had crashed at, he let out a sigh of relief.

            “That was painless,” he joked. I smiled. I’ve seen these kind of meetings come and go, knowing my science name, E-3, like it was my own. My human name for social events was Crystal.