The trip back to campus was mostly uneventful. We stopped at the food court to get takeout for lunch, caught the bus back down the hill, and made it to the back entrance of the women's dorm with nothing worse than a few stares. We were almost back to Tammy's room when I felt a sensation that was immediately familiar, despite being pretty new to me. I was running down.

I didn't know if it was from all the walking and carting piles of clothes around, or if it was "normal" for this body to need winding multiple times per day, but I recognized the symptoms from earlier. My movements were slower and jerkier, my sense of time was getting a little whacked, and I could hear my internal tempo dropping. "U-um, guys?" I said. "I thiiink I'm..." I trailed off; it wasn't hard to think, not yet, but I was losing coordination as parts of me took too long to respond to my brain.

"Oh, geez," Emma said, glancing back at me. "Again? Um..." She fumbled around for a moment trying to free herself from her burdens; she had our bags (a couple of mine, plus several of hers) slung from her elbows so that she could carry her head with both hands. "Uh, Tammy, could you hold these for a minute...?"

Tammy shook her head. "C'mon, we're trying to lay low here. You're gonna kill five minutes putting that stuff down just to pick it back up again. Stu, turn around, okay?" She wheeled around and rolled up to me; I turned my back to her and made to crouch down, but she stopped me. "I can reach just fine, thanks," she said. "Be more trouble for me if you're hunched forward like that."

Scooching up so that her tail slid past me, brushing the side of my leg, she took my key in her hands and started turning it clockwise. Her grip was firm, but gentler than Emma's had been; there was less of a lurch in my perception with every turn, even though the strokes were quicker, and the motion was smoother. I was surprised at her upper-body strength, but her arms had been getting exercised for years.

But she had more than that to work with now, and as the tension in my mainspring made winding harder, she planted her tail against our makeshift footrest for a better foothold ("tailhold?") A pectoral fin brushed against my thigh; she was probably moving it reflexively as if it were still a leg. I heard the popcorn tin flex under her weight, but it didn't buckle. She wound the key about as tight as it would go, then smoothly let it reverse as the spring began to unwind.

I actually felt more energetic than I had that morning; Emma must not have wound me completely. "U-um, th-thanks," I stuttered, various parts of me still getting up to speed and back into sync. How was she so...together? So much more than myself - she was helping me here, despite everything she had to deal with that I didn't...or hadn't had to, until now. Sure, she was no longer paralyzed, but even before this, she'd given off the same feeling of decisive reliability...

"Don't mention it," she said, interrupting my musings. "But seriously, c'mon. I don't want to get waylaid out here; the food'll get cold. Well, Emma's will."

We went inside; her roommates were still gone. Tammy and Emma tucked into their meals immediately; I went into the bathroom, extricated myself from the tight jeans, shucked off the panties that I'd ended up in last night, and dressed in the alternatives we'd picked up. These jeans definitely felt more comfortable, and having more familiar underwear helped things feel at least slightly more normal.

...Slightly.

While they ate, I slipped out to the men's dorm. Gil wouldn't be back until later; he spent his Saturdays scoping out the recycle center downtown or working in the CS lab on a project he always talked to me about - restoring some even older computer to working order. I worried about being seen, but I made it to our room, grabbed some T-shirts and my laptop and headphones, and got back out without encountering a soul; some combination of last night's weather, the threat of today's, and people being gone for the weekend spared me any awkward encounters.

Being spared from the weather was another matter. In the time I was inside the men's dorm, it turned from ominously cloudy to actively raining. Fortunately, I'd gotten a new umbrella at the mall, and I had the leftover shopping bags to carry my things in. I passed a few other students on the way back, but nobody wanted to do more than stare at me if it meant getting wet.

When I got back, Tammy was modifying one of her skirts, while Emma idly browsed on her phone. She'd cut slits in the sides almost up to the waistband, and was stitching up little flaps of fabric she'd folded over into hems on the new edges. I watched curiously; she really seemed to know what she was doing. "I, uh, didn't know you did this kind of stuff," I said, after a minute.

She shrugged. "A little. My sister is the one who's really into it, but she always gets me to help her when she needs a spare pair of hands." She motioned to a couple little packets of metal bits. "Hey, can you open those? I'm nearly done with the needlework here."

I took one and tore it open, with some difficulty - I no longer had fingernails. The pieces inside, as far as I could tell, made the ring side of a snap-fastener when pressed together. I'd never really thought about how those worked before, but it was a clever little design. The other packet had the pieces for the corresponding side.

When Tammy finished her sewing, she took the packets from me and got out a pair of pieces. She thought for a moment, and reached down to measure the base of a pectoral fin with her fingers. Turning back to the skirt, she guesstimated a slightly larger distance from the top of her cut down the side, and pressed the pieces together through the fabric; then she positioned the pieces for the other half on the opposite hem.

Honestly, I was a little...jealous? Intimidated? Embarrassed? I couldn't have done this without at least an afternoon of research and prep, but here was my (formerly?) handicapped classmate just improvising useful clothing alterations on the spot like it wasn't even a thing. I felt kind of useless by comparison.

Okay, I did remember what Emma had said last night, but...that wasn't the same, was it? Carrying around a head full of trivia that just happened to come in handy in these unusual circumstances wasn't the same as having broadly useful life skills you could whip out at the drop of a hat - on top of apparently being a musician as well. Why was everybody I knew more together than me...?

Tammy added another snap further down, then did the other side up to match. Evidently she didn't mind a bit of a slit in the side, but not all the way up what used to be her thigh. "Okay," she said, "that'll work for now. You brought over some of your T-shirts?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, still a bit distracted. I fished one out - a faded logo tee from a favorite band - and handed it to her. She looked it over and nodded. "Okay, yeah, this isn't too thin to work with. Shouldn't be too tight, either. Here, come over here for a sec."

She grabbed a measuring tape; it was a bit too far from the neckline to the top of my key-shaft to span with her fingers. Nodding to herself, she took a hefty pair of scissors and cut her way up the back of the shirt, then did the new edges up as she'd done with the skirt. When she finished there was an opening most of the way up and neatly-spaced snaps all the way back down. "Okay," she said, "go see how that fits. Hey, take the grey cami with you."

I went into the bathroom, doffed the borrowed shirt, and tossed it in the hamper with the unreasonably tight jeans. I could still smell the perfume on myself. I slipped the camisole over my head, tugged it down into place, and pulled the shirt on. It felt comfortingly familiar, even with the slit up the back. I buttoned it up and looked into the mirror; it was still bizarre to see this clockwork-automaton creature looking back, but having her dressed the way I did made it a bit less creepy and weird to think of her as being me.

Tammy looked me over when came out and nodded. "Good, that'll work," she said. "Now, gonna be honest here, Stu, it's a little obvious that the cami is bunching up over your key, and a bra-strap wouldn't do that - but that's your call. And we'll cut up the full-length ones, after the shirts - not like we've got much else planned for the weekend."

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