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Gil seems faintly embarrassed at the state of the house: the 'intact' walls are riddled with sledgehammer-sized holes, and everything else is in varying states of torn-down. You can't see any real pattern to the damage, except that he seems to have picked a few areas to really focus on: the wall he leads you to is surrounded by plaster chunks and open sky.
You nod approvingly. "Pretty good. Can I knock anything down? Or do you have it all—"
"Um... I-I wanted to finish this one, first, but... maybe? Can you lift this?"
"Gil, it's not a real sledgehammer."
"Oh yeah." He lifts it a little. "Feels pretty heavy to me, but— I-I don't know. I-I-I can give you a go in a little bit, I guess, if you want to... sit down, or stand over there, or..."
You sit down on a big slab of wall and prop your chin on your hands. "Gil," you say at an elevated volume (he's begun whacking the wall.) "I've been thinking about something. About getting you a real body."
He pauses midswing. "A girl one?"
"Not a— not a girl one. Unless you wanted that?" (He screws up his face.) "Okay, not a girl one. Actually, I was thinking it could look exactly like you. Pre-beetles."
The swing resumes. "How the hell do you plan that? I-I-I don't have any twins, Lottie. Unless you plan to <span class="mu-i">magic</span> me up a—"
"Okay, that was uncalled for," you say. "And no. I mean, I met maybe-Madrigal— did I tell you the end to that? She's not really Madrigal, and she used to work for Namway, so I'm gonna use her help to go find the real Madrigal, you might come along— anyhow, her face was made of goo. And she looked <span class="mu-i">exactly</span> like Madrigal, only a little drippy because the Court took a torch to her. <span class="mu-i">Exactly</span> like her. And Pat looked totally different when she was disguised. I think it could look like you, easy."
"...You want to make me a <span class="mu-i">goo</span> body?"
"Uh... yes. It'd look like you," you say hastily. "It'd be basically like having your real body all over again, only... squishier. And I think your clothes might be a part of you. But the alternative is us scooping up some fresh corpse from the Pillar, and that'd be some dead guy who wouldn't look like you at all, so—"
"Yeah, I-I-I-I... i-it's goddamn goo, though. I-I don't know if I can..." He pounds the butt of the sledgehammer against the floor. "I-I-I'll think about it. Maybe I-I can get used to the idea ahead of time..."
"Great!" (To tell the truth, you weren't super enthused about the prospect of corpse-hunting.) "You can keep sledgehammering. That's all."
(3/4)
