Efaen tears her gaze away from the process to regard Corliss briefly. She does not answer him immediately, but as soon as Ossanlin breaks contact with Terenia she wordlessly begins stripping, shedding the black leotard without any semblence of shame. She tosses the wadded up lump of fabric at Corliss' feet and, still silent, pushes past those crowding the doorway, eager to be free of the claustrophic room and far from the creature that was Terenia.
As soon as she is back in the main cabin Efaen begins to demorph, returning to her natural form with no intention of ever using her human morph again, if she can help it.
When Terenia begins to feel the distant changes to her body she almost stops the morph in shock. Keep going, she scolds herself, refocusing her energy. With the agonizing slowness of someone who has not morphed in years her Yeerk body swells, growing larger and larger, until it is much too large for the container Corliss provided for her. She can feel the pressure building around her and she shifts her body, rocking it until the container tips, spilling pool liquid across the table and dumping her twisting, mutating form unceremoniously onto the cold metal surface.
The largely featureless slug that was her Yeerk self continues to grow, the tail end splitting and forming legs, her 'fins' becoming arms. Her palps disappear altogether, sucked into her head to be replaced by a sprig of blonde hair that grows longer and thicker as she herself inches closer to human sized. Small, as of yet unseeing, eyes appear in the section of her body that will become her head.
In addition to the physical changes, Terenia is acutely aware of something far more miraculous. The clamoring Yeerk and Andalite instincts, born from nothlitism after nothlitism has stilled, no longer competing with her natural human volitions. The voices that have been slowly driving her mad for years are gone. The silence is almost more overwhelming than the reappearance of her lost humanity.
Finally, after long minutes of slow changes, the process completes itself. The final change is the appearance of her mouth, a horizontal gash that opens with a gasp. She is on her hands and knees on the tabletop, naked as Corliss had predicted, but seems not to notice. Breathing heavily, fighting against morphing fatigue, she stares down at her hands, splayed wide in a quarter inch of discarded pool water. Her expression betrays utter wonder and confusion as she examines human hands that she has seen many times before, but has not been able to call her own for many, many years.
"Oh..." the quiet exclamation escapes her lips almost silently. She appears unable to say anything else.
