Oh. Oh. She saw the difference now, she thought. That'd do it. She felt a sudden rush of sympathy, and not just sympathy but empathy. Thinking suddenly of when she'd first woken up. Of Ben Reilly telling her -- pretending at sympathy but having neither that nor empathy, full only of his own self-satisfaction at what he and all his fellow empty lab coats had done -- that she must be very confused, but that it would all be okay because someone was coming to strip out her mind and replace it with something else. With someone else.

It hadn't been a fun day.

That hadn't happened, obviously. She'd kept everything, her whole... her. And if she hadn't, she'd be someone else, someone who couldn't empathize with what Nuriko was dealing with. So sometimes things worked out, in their own crazy strange way.

"I can see how that would be," she said, placing a careful, reassuring hand on Nuriko's back. "You've got a lifetime of sense memory, of experience that doesn't match up with what you're feeling now. Everything's put together slightly differently. Simple things-- it's different when you walk. Heck, when you breathe. Even your skin feels different. And even though you know that this body is yours you start-- you think, it feels wrong and then you can't stop thinking about it. What if it always does? And there's nowhere to go to get away from the feeling, because you can't crawl out of yourself."

She broke off, suddenly, realizing that had just kind of flooded out of her, less a studied statement and more a recited remembrance, and maybe not immediately helpful besides. She'd find something more helpful to say, she knew she had it, she just needed to collect heself. Try to be a little less revealing about it.

Yeah, great job so far.