Become Your Fursona

Stephanie glared menacingly at the blue screen, though despite her best efforts it refused to retreat and go back to the online encyclopedia she’d been looking at mere seconds before. Rolling her eyes at the all-too-familiar problem, she jammed the restart button just a bit harder than necessary. The blue screen faded to black, then to a colorful splash page with a load bar crawling its way towards completion. And then blue again.

Knowing fully well it was futile, she looked inside the computer case and was met with a confusing mass of crystals and wires and goodness-knew-what else. Her eye twitched. “Come on…” Restart. Black. Blue. Curse. Kick desk. Fist-to-keyboard contact.

“What did you break this time?” Her brother, Alex, was poking his head in through the door she thought she’d locked, a smirk playing across his face.

“I didn’t break it.” Her voice was defensive in spite of herself. “It’s just…” She struggled to come up with a technical-sounding term, before deciding simply on “…blue-screening.”

“Right.” Alex hovered over her shoulder. She forced back the urge to punch him in the jaw. “Should be easy enough to fix.”

There was a long pause, punctuated by Stephanie drumming her fingers against the edge of the desk. “Well…?” She finally asked. “Are you going to do anything?”

“What’s in it for me?” He fired back. “Reagents are expensive, you know. I can’t be using them on just anything.”

Stephanie knew quite well this was a blatant lie, considering that he’d run off with her other brother and a group of their friends to test out spells that involved explosions, ones which she heard from half a mile away. She also knew quite well it was not going to do her much good to argue with him and it certainly wouldn’t do her computer any good to make him angry. “I’ll clean up the living room for this week.”

“Deal.” Given the size of her room, it took him about three steps to get out the door and out of sight.

A few moments later and he returned, dragging his backpack behind him and holding a stick of charcoal in his hand. “Move.”

She obliged, sitting on the bed and inadvertently waking up Bonnie, who opened her one good eye and yawned, before relocating to Stephanie’s lap. Stephanie smiled down fondly at the kitten and stroked her fur. Bonnie purred loudly enough to nearly drown out her brother’s incantations.

There was a sound much like someone slamming an eraser against a chalkboard, followed by shrill electronic beeping. The beeps decreased in volume and pitch, then simply stopped altogether.

“And that should be it.” He dusted the charcoal off his hands. “Have fun.” And he disappeared out the door again, leaving an unsightly ring of black dust on the carpet.

“Great. Thanks.” She muttered, half-sincerely. She carefully ushered Bonnie off her lap and with a spare shirt attempted to clean the charcoal off the ground without success. She sighed. Too late to get the vacuum now with her mother in bed, it’d have to wait until tomorrow.

The computer was indeed working now, at least. So she re-opened her browser, and went back to reading about mages and thinking about how wonderful it’d be if she were normal.

Sure, she knew what other anaetherian activists would say. She’d lurked on the message boards, even posted once or twice, and written about anaetherian rights in the privacy of her own blog which nobody ever read. “People without the Gift are just as capable as mages, because lacking the Gift does nothing to hurt our mental capacities. It’s society that restricts us. We don’t need a cure, mages need to stop gearing everything towards magic-users blah blah inclusiveness blah…”

It was true on some level, she was very aware it was right. Still, it seemed so much easier to just change one person than change all of society. So, just maybe…

She skimmed through the “Anaetherian rights controversy” page, listing false cure after false cure, fraud after fraud. Or maybe not. A false hope was better than none, but there didn’t seem to be much insight.

“Oh well.” She closed the tab. “No use dwelling on what can’t be.” So she spent the rest of the night skimming through pictures of baby animals, reading news feeds, and talking to people hundreds of miles away she’d probably never meet. Time slipped past her, and once she finally decided to check her clock, it was five in the morning.

She sighed. Though she wasn’t tired, Mom would be up any time now, and the last thing she wanted was to get caught up this late again. She issued a few quick goodbyes to the few people still up, and half-fell into her bed, with Bonnie curling up beside her.

* * *

The mechanical droning of an alarm clock woke her up, and the sunlight streaming in through her window conspired to ensure she stayed awake. Despite the fog enshrouding her mind, she had just enough in her to slam the snooze button and take a bleary glance at the clock. Two o’clock. She groaned and slammed her head on the pillow.

“At least Alex is in school now.” She reluctantly kicked the blankets off. “Nobody can yell at me for sleeping in so late anymore.” She made it into the kitchen before realizing something odd. She hadn’t kicked off a kitten along with her covers. She was put at ease for a moment when she considered that Bonnie obviously had gotten up before her.

But there was something else wrong. All the while telling herself she was being too paranoid for her own good, she took a look back at her room.

Bonnie’s food bowl was empty, except for a few crumbs she was sure were left over from last night. And Stephanie was sure Bonnie would have woken her up well before two. A hungry cat was a nigh-unstoppable force, as she’d found out.

“Bonnie?” No response, not even the clicking of claws across the hardwood floors of the hall. She poured a bit of cat food into the bowl, rattling it as loudly as possible. Still nothing.

With deepening dread, she stepped out onto the porch, “Bonnie?”

She heard a high-pitched and familiar mewing, and her paranoia dissipated. She knelt over, and her kitten ran straight into her arms. “Don’t do that again, alright?” She sighed. “You scared me.”

She then found another reason entirely to be afraid when she turned around– a very tall man dressed in the robes of a high mage. She jumped backwards, almost dropping Bonnie.

“Don’t be afraid.” Stephanie figured his tone was supposed to be soothing, but it wasn’t doing much to banish her contemplations on where her mother had left the guns. “I’m here to help you.”

She was certain she’d seen a scene just like this in a movie, right before the female lead was kidnapped and almost murdered. So she took a few careful steps backwards towards the house, hoping he wouldn’t notice. “Who are you?”

“We’ve met before.”

She reached for the handle of the door.

“You’re a member of several Anaetherian Rights forums. So am I.”

Her mind spun, trying to remember what kind of information she’d disclosed that would help him find out where she lived.

His eyes flicked to her hand on the door. “I’m only here to help. I promise.”

“Why should I trust you? You…” She tried to come up with a creative way to tell him off, like her brothers always could. Nothing worth saying came to mind.

“You don’t trust me.” He paused, looking thoughtfully to the sky. “What if I told you that you wouldn’t be the first person I cure?”

A million questions buzzed in her mind. If he really had a miracle cure, why wasn’t he telling anyone? Why wasn’t it all over the news by this point in time? How could he have succeeded where scientists had failed? Who was he in the first place? Unfortunately, she couldn’t manage to come up with anything more articulate than “Prove it.”

“As you wish.” He bowed his head slightly and flickered out of view.

The closet, that’s where the guns were! She rushed inside, almost tripping over the rug. It was right about when she threw open the door she remembered the gun rack was locked. And not without reason, they’d been expensive, not to mention hard to find in the first place. After weeks of scouring mainstream stores, her mother had finally given up and had them special-ordered.

Her mother had also been exceptionally paranoid and reinforced the locks on the rack with magic, reasoning it was the only way to deter potential thieves. In retrospect, it was ironic– the one equalizer she had she couldn’t even use without other mages around.

There was a strangely polite rap at the door. She cautiously peered out from behind the door. It was the mage, a familiar woman beside him.

“Rose?” Her jaw dropped. How long had it been– several months? All the things she’d been warned about, how a mage could easily create an illusion of someone she knew or trusted, and she’d have no way of knowing, dropped out of her mind. She stepped outside to meet her.

Rose smiled shyly at her, the same smile she remembered from pictures and webcam conversations. “Sorry if I worried you.”

“It’s fine.” It wasn’t, she’d been at the back of Stephanie’s mind ever since she disappeared from the boards. “What happened?”

“I was cured.” She held out her hand. It contained a tiny flame of raw aether. “It’s real, see? I can use magic now.”

Stephanie’s eyes widened. Her hand shaking slightly, she reached out to touch the flame. It wavered and flickered as she drew nearer.

Rose snuffed out the flame before Stephanie could. “I’m…” Her voice sounded shaky. “I’m really sorry I left without telling anyone. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, you know how most of them are. They wouldn’t believe me, or if they did they’d say I was a terrible person for wanting to be cured. They didn’t understand what it was like to be that bad.”

“I know.” She sniffled and forced back tears.

“Things have changed now, though.” She brushed at her eyes. “His cure really works. I can already use elementary-level magic. This could turn my life around. It’s already changed so much.” Her voice cracked. She took a deep breath. “And it could change everything for you too.”

“It’s alright if you can’t decide now.” The mage stepped in. “I will give you time to decide.”

“Okay.” Was all she managed to get out through the growing fog in her mind. This was all too much.

“I will be back tomorrow.”

“W-wait.” She protested, her hand subconsciously reaching out for the mage. “Could you–” Could she stay? That would require some extremely awkward explanations. After all, she’d kept her online life secret from her mother, and her mother had never taken kindly to the possibility she could be talking to forty-year-old men pretending to be teenage girls or weirdos who write poems about killing themselves, or everyone at their school or both, the only people she seemed to think existed on the Internet.

“What is it?” Rose asked.

Stephanie heard the sputter of the school bus’s engine drawing close. “It’s nothing.”

And then the two of them disappeared from sight.

She trudged back inside, collapsing on her bed just in time for her brothers to go barging in the hall, arguing about something-or-another. She’d long since learned to shut them out, and paying attention to their arguments wasn’t going to help her figure all this out. She just needed to calm down and clear her mind.

Easier said than done. The conversation she had kept going through her mind over and over again, and all she could think of was what she should have said, what she should have asked, what she should have done.

She grabbed her laptop and brought it out of sleep mode. Maybe a little distraction would help. And as soon as she logged in an IM window popped up, from someone named Maranatha. ‘Hey there. How’re things going?’ It took her a moment to recognize the username– it was one of the members of the Anaetherian Rights message board.

‘Hey. ^_^’ She rested her chin in her hand. Now there was something that was going to be difficult to give a straight answer to. ‘I could be better. Lots of things going on.’ There. Honest, yet not direct.

The reply was almost instantaneous. ‘Aww. :/ What’s going on?’

She tapped her hands on the trackpad, trying to figure out how to dodge the question. ‘It’s a long story.’ Cliché, but effective.

‘Ah, alright…’ The person typed back.

There was a long pause, and no indicator Maranatha was typing a message. She bit her lip. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to at least bring up Rose. But she still had to close her eyes while typing the message. ‘Do you remember anyone named Damask from the forums?’

Maranatha took a few moments to respond. ‘I think so, yeah. She hasn’t posted in a while though.’ Another pause. ‘Did something happen to her?’

“Yeah, something happened to her, alright.” She muttered. ‘She’s doing fine. I just met her today. She just needed to take a break from the forums, I guess.’

‘Yeah. I can’t really blame her. After that whole flame war over the cure issue.’

Stephanie winced. She remembered one (or several) flame wars erupting on the site, but only had the vaguest understanding of them– she’d always made it a point to stay out of the controversial topics. They’d always gotten extremely heated, and it usually took no more than a few posts before someone got called an idiot (or some more colorful iteration thereof.) ‘I know she was pro-cure…’

‘Well, her and a bunch of overzealous parents. Versus a bunch of overzealous people with a lot of pent-up anger. Nobody came out looking good.’

‘And then she just stopped posting…’ No wonder she’d seemed so worked up about accepting a cure.

‘Yep. :/ That topic was the last I saw of her. Is she thinking about coming back…?’

‘No.’ And with good reason, she thought. ‘She’s had some other things come up.’

There was an awkward break in messages. ‘Are you anti-cure?’ The question came out before Stephanie even had time to think about how stupid it was to ask something so controversial. That was always the advantage of a forum. You had time to think about what you were saying, and you could always just take it back by deleting your post. Then again, if you did put it out there and couldn’t do anything in time, everyone saw it.

Maranatha didn’t reply for a while, which left Stephanie to pace around her room, trying to figure out how she could defuse what would most likely be an explosive argument. And then her computer pinged. ‘In a sense, yes. I think saying that we need to be cured is saying we’re inferior people. And we aren’t. I’ve always agreed that we’re only disadvantaged because of how almost everything in society is so dependent on magic. Yet things don’t have to be like that.’

Once Stephanie could have believed that. Now she wasn’t so sure. ‘But if there was a cure, no strings attached, and you could choose to have it…would that be better?’

‘I don’t believe in no strings attached.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘If there was. Just hypothetically.’

‘Then all anaetherians would be pressured into getting it. We’d lose the insight we get from having to go through life without magic. Think of all the anaetherian inventions and scientific discoveries and progress we’ve made, gone. And those who they can’t pressure into taking their cure would be even more marginalized.’

‘It’s easier than having to change the world.’

‘But is it really better?’ Maranatha replied without missing a beat.

Stephanie could feel a headache coming on and she wasn’t sure if it was from stress or the fact she’d barely eaten or had anything to drink the entire day. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Just think about it, alright? Just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile.’

‘Yeah.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘And I’ll BRB. Time for dinner.’ She left without checking to see if Maranatha bid her farewell.

Dinner, however, turned more into a thirty-minute hunt for decent food and ingredients, followed by another thirty minutes of trying to cook it, followed by another bout of picking at it, then trying to hide from her mom arguing with her brothers, then playing with Bonnie to calm down, followed by a massive video game binge into the early hours of the morning. She finally crashed at three in the morning into a deep sleep.

* * *

The doorbell dragged her into consciousness. Her clock indicated it was twelve, but she felt like she’d barely slept at all. She trudged to the door. Her heart skipped a beat when she opened the door to find what she thought was a complete stranger until she realized it was the mage. Rose was nowhere in sight.

“Have you decided?” He asked.

“Yes.” Her voice was shaking, and she couldn’t manage to spit out her answer.

He arched his eyebrow. “And it is?”

“I…” She prayed she wouldn’t regret what she was about to say. “I want to be cured.”

“As you wish.” He nodded. “Please follow me.”

She didn’t quite understand why they had to use the woods behind her house for this. The mage had rambled on about leylines and some other things she vaguely remembered from her brother’s textbooks. Then he traced out a circle around her and started sprinkling powders, scrawling runes in the earth and muttering incantations. All-in-all it was nearly an hour before he finally said things were ready (and considering it was starting to glow faintly, it was fairly obvious things were.)

He told her he had to leave now, but all she had to do was just sit in the circle until it was done. Easy enough. It was so quiet and peaceful out here, dead silent except for the wind and the faint sound of bird wings flapping overhead. She couldn’t resist closing her eyes, and couldn’t resist letting her mind drift away.

* * *

Something jabbed Stephanie in her knee. She lifted her head up, her eyes snapping open, and immediately regretted doing so. It was painfully bright, despite it being sundown. Everything was like there had been a dimmer on the sun that had been on low, and now someone had turned it all the way up. Furthermore, it seemed like everything she could make out without going half-blind had a green-blue ambient glow around it. The circle she was sitting in was especially bright.

She covered her watering-up eyes with her hand and felt something strange. Something soft and downy, something that definitely wasn’t human skin. With a sense of growing dread, she let her hand travel to the center of her face. She had what felt like a delicately curved beak. Her blood ran completely cold. “Where is the mage?”

She tried to stand up, but stumbled, nearly falling forward onto the ground. There was a weight on her back, something that felt like it was jutting out of the very bone of her shoulder blades. She reached her hand behind her back and tugged at it. It moved, and she could feel muscles and tendons stretching as if it were another limb, along with a covering of the same downy substance on her face. Feathers.

“I have wings.” She realized with a sense of awe and horror and shock all mixed together. “And I’m some kind of mutant bird-thing.”

The next few moments were a whirl of disjointed and panicked thoughts. She closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. “Okay. Okay, it’s going to be alright. Transmogrification is a normal magic discipline, it’s reversible. I’ll just have to get the mage somehow.” She tried to speak, but her words came out as harsh screeching.

She clamped her hands (talons?) over her beak, and took a few deep breaths. And then she tried again. The screeching was quieter this time, but still nothing remotely human.

She hobbled around, trying to pace to help herself calm down and think straight, but movement was far harder than it should have been. So she settled for her mounting frustration by kicking around some leaves. And then within the circle the mage had created, she unearthed what was most likely the source of her problem– a single owl feather. She’d heard of minor contaminants and mistakes causing catastrophic results. Just her luck.

With an irritated sigh, she collapsed on the ground. “What am I going to do now? And what am I going to tell everyone?” There was always the off chance it was just a temporary issue. Or maybe she was a shapeshifter, like they always talked about in fairy tales. Owl-creature by night, human by day.

“Or it’s just punishment for wanting something I never should have wanted.” She thought bitterly. That seemed to be the way things always went, after all. Or maybe Maranatha was right– there’s no such thing as no strings attached. And now she had to deal with them– it was just a matter of how.

She began pacing anew, her steps slowly becoming more and more natural, though she still had to hunch over. Still, it was proving hard to think through her headache, and therein one course of action revealed itself. Go back home and get some asprin.

“And try not to get attacked by my family. They’d probably think I’m some mad mage’s latest transmogrification experiment.” And the irony of it was that it was half-true. She collapsed underneath the biggest, shadiest tree she could find. Best to wait until nightfall. Maybe then they’d just think she was a very malnourished bear and not a monster.

She tried to start speaking again in an attempt to pass the time, but even something as simple as going through the alphabet was hard. Vowels proved to be much easier to enunciate than consonants. “At least speaking Japanese won’t be a problem.” Then she remembered how long it’d been since she picked up the books and DVDs she’d gotten to help her learn it in the first place, and cringed.

The sun was getting lower and lower now, and her surroundings got a deeper and deeper tint of red to them. It had to have been a beautiful sunset, and she couldn’t even look at it. The upside was that it was almost dark enough she didn’t need to shield her eyes anymore. The leylines were still bright, but at least they were nowhere near as bad. And the world was coming more and more into focus. If anything, now she could see even better than she used to.

“Guess I should get started now.” She hoisted herself off the ground and began the walk back, taking in the sights of the forest as she went. Everything was as clear as, well, day, and despite it having been months since she’d gone for a walk in the forest. Of course, the fact her house lights were still on helped.

She winced at the flourescent lighting, and tried to take a look inside. She couldn’t see anyone in the main rooms, which meant her brothers were probably playing video games, and her mom was in bed, a stroke of minor luck after several major misfortunes. And she was finally getting to the point where she could form actual words, something that made her happier than it should have considering her situation.

She couldn’t resist taking a quick look in the window glass to assess the damage done to her. A bipedal barn owl stared back at her with wide, pitch-dark eyes, its tawny feathers stirring slightly in the wind. She traced a talon around its…no, her heart-shaped face, trying to force her mind to register that the creature in the glass was her. And when that proved to be a depressing prospect, she tried to force herself to remember it didn’t have to be permanent.

She broke eye contact with her reflection. “The sooner I get this over with, the better.” Steeling her nerves, she carefully opened the window and attempted to slip inside. Though she might have been able to do this as a human, she failed to take into account she now had wings. The result was an audible thump much like the kind one would hear if a bird flew into a windowpane.

She didn’t even bother to check and see if anyone was coming. She ran the best she could, ducked behind a tree, and huddled there until she stopped feeling like she was about to die of cardiac arrest. When she recovered, she opted instead to go through the back door, and the sudden change in light made her flinch.

Inside, she could hear the faint sound of the TV in the basement. She breathed a sigh of relief– they probably had their game up too loud to hear much of anything. She poured herself a glass of water and after a struggle with the bottlecap, finally managed to fish out a pair of asprin. She then raised the glass to her mouth, and tapped the edge against her beak, splashing a bit of water on the ground.

“Aaaawh, come on…” She muttered. She glanced at the basement door. The game’s sound effects were still audible even with it closed, but that did nothing to quell her uneasiness. “Don’t have time for this.” She took the asprin dry, tried to ignore the horrible aftertaste, headed back for the door, and almost tripped over her kitten.

She stopped dead in her tracks, and almost fell over on her face. Bonnie was staring at her with wide eyes. The kitten fluffed out her fur and hissed, backing away from Stephanie. Stephanie felt her heart sink, and fresh tears came to her eyes. She stepped over Bonnie, and opened the door. Then she felt a cold nose poking at her heels, followed by purring. Bonnie rubbed up against her leg and mewed– her usual call for attention.

“Good girl.” She stroked Bonnie’s fur as gently as she could. A lump was rising in her throat, and she was reasonably sure it wasn’t because of the asprin. “I gotta go now, okay? I’ll see you again soon.” She sincerely hoped she wasn’t lying, and slipped out the door before Bonnie could react.

“At least someone recognizes me.” She thought dourly. She tried (and failed) to formulate any other upsides to her current situation when a glint of light caught her eyes. There was a ladder leaning against their shed, and thus an idea formed in her mind…

* * *

She carefully ascended the ladder onto the roof and looked below her. It looked a lot higher up than she thought it would have, and she felt her hands shake a bit at the thought of having to jump.

It was about this point in time she remembered that owls were hollow-boned, and that a fall would not bode well for her skeletal structure. She sighed and sat down, her feet dangling over the side of the roof.

She looked up again at the sky. She could see bats darting erratically about chasing after moths, and even another owl.

More than anything, she wanted to join them. To be free, and get away from the dismal situation she was in.

So she sat for a few more minutes, staring enviously at the owl and the smoothness of his (for she was almost certain it was a male, though she wasn’t able to place a reason why other than simple intuition) flight. So she closed her eyes, let her instincts take over, and jumped.

And after a few seconds in, after she was certain she hadn’t broken anything or otherwise hurt herself, she opened her eyes. She could see the world below with so much more clarity than she had as a human, right down to the crickets leaping from grass blade to grass blade and mice scurrying about. Part of her thought that the mice would make a nice midnight snack, but it was drowned out by sheer exhilaration.

Half-delirious with joy, she pumped her wings faster. The world below grew smaller, her house farther away, the crisscrossing leylines began to blend together, and the blasted, lonely, middle-of-nowhere town that’d felt like a prison for as long as she’d been there started to fade, and even if just for a moment, everything she’d been through was worth it. Even her bizarre new body.

* * *

She flew until she felt as if her wings were about to fall off, and made a somewhat rough attempt at a landing. After plucking some twigs from beneath her feathers, she trudged back to her house, daydreams of a nice warm shower dancing in her mind.

And she was preoccupied enough with those daydreams she didn’t notice a few irregularities inside. Firstly, the lights were still on even in the middle of the night, when her early bird mom and not-quite-as-night-owlish-no-pun-intended brothers would have been long since asleep. Secondly, there were some aether leylines planted in the ground that hadn’t been there before– not that she would have noticed, given she’d never looked at her house with the Sight before.

Not being entirely disconnected from reality, she realized the two unfamiliar shadows skulking about did not bode well. With her heart rising into her throat, she slowly, carefully, and as stealthily as she could crept up to the window.

The lights inside were far too bright for her tastes, but she could make out who was inside. The mage and Rose. Her feathers fluffed out in irritation. “So now he decides to show up.”

Instincts were telling her there was something very wrong with this situation, and reason was quickly filling in the blanks as to why. She knew for a fact that her mother wasn’t a light sleeper, that the doors were supposed to be magically locked at night, and the mage’s body language was far too casual for someone who’d just broken into another person’s house.

And most importantly of all… “What’s he done to them?” He couldn’t have just waltzed in there without anyone noticing. Horrible ideas of what he could have done to ensure nobody saw his entrance ran through her head.

“You can come in, you know.” She stifled a screech of shock– how could the mage have heard her? “I know you’re out there.”

“He’s bluffing. I hope.” Not to mention being in a room with just him was the last thing she wanted right now.

He sighed. “Please be reasonable. I just needed to see you.”

“Reasonable!” She said in a low hiss.

“Yes, reasonable.” She saw him nodding from her vantage point near the window. “And before you say anything, yes, I can hear you too. Please, come inside. I don’t feel like talking this loudly.”

“Tell me what you’ve done to my family first. Or…” She trailed off. What could she threaten him with?

“Oh, them. Don’t worry, they’re fast asleep. Very fast asleep as a matter of fact.”

The thought of punching him entered her mind before she remembered how much frailer her bone structure was now. “What’s that supposed to mean? What have you done with them?”

“It was just a simple sleeping draught, now will you calm down? You’re being very unreasonable.”

“You drugged them? Why? Why are you even here?”

“I just needed to get your attention, seeing as you’ve been avoiding me. And I’m sure you don’t want your family to see you in the state you’re in. Now will you please come inside? It’ll be a lot easier on both of us.”

“Stephanie, please.” She could just barely make out Rose’s voice. “We just want to solve this problem, and we can’t do it while you’re out there.”

“Fine.” She’d hoped what she was saying sounded defiant. The self-conscious side of her told her she just sounded petulant. And to ease a little bit of her frustration, she gave the door a jab with her clawed foot to make it look like she was kicking it open.

“Thank you.” Despite her new appearance, he was staring at her impassively.

Rose, on the other hand, was not. She let out a tiny gasp of shock and jumped back slightly. “What happened to you?”

“Something must have contaminated the spell circle.” The mage answered for Stephanie. “This could be difficult to fix.”

“Really.” Stephanie tried to make her displeasure as readily apparent as possible.

“Really.” He intoned back. “It wouldn’t be as much of an issue if you’d just turned yourself into this after you’d become a mage, but now being a whatever-you-are and a mage are…intertwined, so to speak.” He paused thoughtfully. “Incidentally, did the rest of the spell work?”

If Stephanie had lips, she would have been scowling at him. “You’re worried about that?”

“Well, did it?”

She threw up her hands. “Yes, it did! I can see leylines, I tried to tap into one, but that’s the least of my problems now!”

The mage was stroking his chin, oblivious to her distress. “Well, that much is good. Shame illusionism is such a complex matter, otherwise I could at least make you look human.”

“So you’re saying there’s no way I can be human again.” She wondered how long it would take her to get to the phone and call the police. Probably too long. But maybe if she could just get him to keep rambling on…

“Oh, there certainly is.” He nodded. “Actually, I’d rather prefer that solution, it will be easier on everyone.”

There was a pause, most likely engineered by the mage for dramatic tension. For the most part, it was just wearing down on Stephanie’s already frayed nerves. “And it is?”

“Reverse transmogrification. Basically, I could try to turn you back.”

She tapped her claws on the dining room table. “This sounds too good to be true.”

The mage clenched his jaw ever-so-slightly. “It can be a slow and painful process. For whatever reason, your transformation was unusually fast, but now I’ll have to work much more deliberately to make sure I don’t take away your new gifts, or anything else.”

“Have you ever done this before?” The tapping was quickly turning into a drumbeat from her favorite metal ballad.

“It’s an experimental procedure.”

“And I’m supposed to trust you won’t mess up again?” She tried to glare at him, but couldn’t quite manage to meet him in the eye.

“It wasn’t my fault!” And that was the loudest she’d ever heard the mage get. “It was just an unforseen error. Trust me, nothing like that will happen again.”

“Trust you!” She snapped. “This is the second– no, third– time you’ve randomly shown up at my house! And this time you’ve broken in! And you drugged my family! And you’re acting like this isn’t even an issue! What is wrong with you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me!” He turned away from her. “I can see you’re not going to listen to me. Shame some people just don’t know what’s good for them.” He took a small cloth from somewhere within the folds of his robe.

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”

He upturned a small vial, dabbing the cloth with a pungent, clear liquid. “Oh…and don’t bother trying to run.” He returned the vial to his robes and with his free hand snapped his fingers. Stephanie felt as if someone had kicked her in the stomach and knocked the breath out of her. “I’ve just activated an anti-magic forcefield. As long as its up, you’ll be unable to use any kind of magic or leave here.” He continued. “Last chance. Will you undergo the procedure or will I have to force you to do so?”

“Stephanie, please.” Rose said softly. “I didn’t get my powers the first time around, just do what he says. He’ll be able to fix this.”

“No.” Her voice might have been shaking, but she was sure in her convictions. “This was a mistake. All this was a mistake. I never should have…” She stopped herself before her voice started to crack too much. “If anyone’s going to fix this, it’ll be me.”

“I see.” He advanced towards her, an impassive look on his face. “If you insist.”

She flattened herself out on the counter, her talons splaying across the cold surface, the very tips of her claws scraping against a frying pan. And without taking any time to even consider the potential consequences, she grabbed the frying pan and slammed it into the mage’s head as hard as she could.

The impact jarred even her, but needless to say the mage had it much worse. He crumpled bonelessly to the ground without a sound.

* * *

Stephanie bundled her covers around her, trying to lull herself into sleeping. Being questioned by the police had been exhausting, yet unnervingly enough she couldn’t get it out of her head long enough to rest. Then again, ever since she’d changed she’d been quite literally sleeping all day. It hadn’t taken much to get to that point given her previous sleep schedule, but that didn’t stop her mother from griping about it.

Still, if that was what she chose to gripe about, Stephanie was fine with that. It was already something she was quite used to hearing, and she’d take any semblance of normalcy she could. She was sure her family was horrified by her change, seeing as how they were avoiding her even more than usual, but at least they weren’t talking about it, and more importantly they weren’t asking her questions about what had happened. They just avoided her. So had Rose, for that matter– she’d only heard from her once in the past few days. She seemed to be coping, but barely. She’d overheard in the police station that there was some residue of magical tampering with her mind and memories, and it’d take a while to recover from it.

At least Bonnie was taking things well– she had a near-infinite supply of feathers to play with now. And things were easier that way, being left to her own devices with the one being in the world she knew could care less about her appearance. Still, she couldn’t say the past few days had been easy at all. The police station had been particularly bad. At least her mother had teleported them straight to the station, but Stephanie still had to insist on wearing a very heavy raincoat, the baggiest pair of sweatpants she could find, a hooded sweatshirt underneath that, and a wide-brimmed hat to hide as much of herself as she could. It was hot as blazes, but it worked.

Then once they were done interviewing her, they had to do a physical exam of her. The horrified look on the nurse’s face the moment she took off her coat and hat was burned into her mind and would be for a very long time, though the actual exam was a blur. And the second it was over, she hid in the bathroom and cried. Her mother took her straight home afterwards, but the damage had already been done. She was certain her mother at least felt bad for what happened, because once she woke up from a fitful sleep, she found a cheeseburger from her favorite restaurant with her name literally on the styrofoam box in the fridge.

If she didn’t find something to do, she’d just get more depressed. As of lately, escapism had been proving to do her a lot of good. There were even times, however brief, that she could forget about what had happened, usually when she let herself get lost in a story.

That was something she fully intended to do right now. It wasn’t hard to find her computer, all she had to do was follow the glowing leylines. As she was skimming past the numerous sites on transmogrification reversals on her bookmark list, someone IM’d her. “Who’d be on at this hour?” She squinted at the font on the screen– Maranatha was, apparently, greeting her with the usual ‘Hey there! ’

‘Hey.’ She might as well be civil, even if she didn’t especially feel like talking now. Besides, it’d give her a chance to practice typing with claws again.

‘How are things going?’

She sighed. Not this again. ‘Kind of rough. Not sure if I want to talk about it.’

‘Ahh, alright. Well, I remembered the talk we had about the cure, and I was just wondering if you’d seen this…’ A link to a topic on the Anaetherian Rights forum followed. Out of morbid curiosity, she clicked on it. Her blood ran cold in her veins when she recognized the title– it was a headline from their local newspaper. Someone had posted an article about the mage’s arrest.

‘They haven’t said much about the reason why,’ Maranatha continued, ‘they just cited reckless endangerment and unsanctioned magical experiments. But the rumor is he was trying to find a cure.’

She stared blankly at the screen. How could word have spread so quickly? And more importantly, how could they have found out?

‘Anyway, it was in your area…I was just wondering if you’d heard more about it.’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’ She replied, and subsequentially realized she was probably just leading on Maranatha.

And surely enough, his response came back within mere seconds. ‘Try me.’

It might be nice to talk to someone who wasn’t a police officer about everything that had happened. If she’d had more sleep, she might’ve had the sense to decide against doing that. But she’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours and her mind was frazzled from stress. ‘Yeah, he was doing experiments. They had side effects, that’s probably why they’re not giving out details.’

‘That’s not so unbelievable. I mean, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think those kind of experiments happen more often than we like to think. The side effects must have been pretty severe, though.’

‘Oh, they were.’ She sighed and looked at her hands. Now she was almost getting used to seeing them there.

‘Do you know if the people he experimented on are alright…? :/’

‘Yeah, we’re alright.’ Something registered about that sentence as being wrong, but it took her a few moments (after she pressed Enter, unfortunately) to work out what. “We’re.” Just the wrong pronoun to use, even if it was true. She felt her skin heat up beneath her feathers. Maybe she could just claim it was a typo?

‘Wait, we?’ And Maranatha noticed. Just her luck.

She took in a shaky breath, and after a great deal of struggling for the proper words, came up with ‘I really don’t want to talk about it.’

There was a break in messages. She was almost to the best part of the chapter when the message alert started flashing. ‘Can I tell you something?’

She scratched the side of her head. “Okay…?” ‘Yeah, I guess.’

There was another long pause without so much as an alert that a message was being typed. And then, finally, ‘It might be easier to show you.’

She received a webcam invite. Her curiosity piqued, she accepted it.

Her breath caught in her throat. Looking at the webcam, a weak smile on his face, was a huge, humanoid bobcat. “H-hey.” His voice was barely audible, and on top of that it was scratchy and sounded barely-human. It almost reminded her of hearing a parrot talk.

Fortunately, the webcam conversation wasn’t two-way or he would have caught her gaping at him.

“Um, I know this must seem really weird to you. I can explain…I think.” He cleared his throat. It inexplicably brought to mind Bonnie when she was trying to cough up a hairball. “I guess you can tell I had some, uh, side effects too.”

Her hands quavered as she typed. ‘Did someone do that to you?’

“You could say that.” His tufted ears twitched. “So,” he laughed, or tried to do something that sounded like it, “how’s this for side effects?”

“It can’t be.” Then again, it probably could. Who knew how many other people the mage had gone after? She desperately wanted to ask how and who and why, but couldn’t quite work up the courage to do so.

“I’ve gotten used to it, though.” He went on, his voice growing more confident. “And there are other people like me out there. It’s a bigger community than people think. And there’s a lot of support for people who live with magic-related disorders other than anaetherianism.” He cast his gaze askance. “I guess I just wanted you to know you’re not alone.”

She brushed tears away from her eyes, self-consciously straightened out a few stray feathers, and sent a webcam invite of her own before she was able to process what she’d done enough to regret it.

She knew the moment he accepted, because his jaw dropped open. “I…did…” He took a deep breath. And then another, just for good measure. “Did you ask for someone to do that to you?”

She stared blankly at him. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know.” There was a desperate look about him. He gestured furtively to his tail and ears. “Right?”

She shook her head.

He sighed. “I guess it really was an accident for you.”

Stephanie found herself gaining a new hatred for people with an aversion to straightforwardness. “What are you talking about?”

“Shapeshifters. Or anthros– I mean, anthropomorphic animals. Some people like…um, like me, we turn ourselves into them with transmogrification. Or try to.”

Stephanie had a vague recollection about seeing a news segment on them. For the most part, it had played up how insane they had to be to undergo the difficult rituals needed to become one, and other alleged deviant aspects of their lifestyles. The report had seemed thrown-together and sensationalistic, like most news reports. “You wanted to be that?”

“No! I mean, I wanted to be like this sometimes. I was just going for shapeshifter, but something went wrong and I couldn’t change back. So,” he pointed to his muzzle, flexing out the claw on his index finger, “I’m stuck as an anthro. And I didn’t want to be. I mean, I really didn’t want to be. You’d be amazed at how hard it is to get used to not being human. Everything’s made for human mages.”

“Tell me about it.” There was a smile in her eyes– faint and bitter, but there.

“Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to. I don’t get to talk to other anthros much.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You probably think I’m a hypocrite. All that talk about resisting a cure and being yourself, and look at what I did to myself.”

She shrugged. “No. You’ve just got more personal experience than most anti-cure advocates do.”

“I guess that’s one way of looking at it.” He returned the smile. “Um, if you’re interested, there are some forums and places I could show to you.” His voice grew quieter and quieter as he went on, making the last few words difficult to make out. “Everyone’s really nice, and they won’t care you didn’t change on purpose. And they can help you deal with it. They really helped me out.”

The bitterness in her smile started to fade away. “I’d like that.”

His ears perked up. “Really? Um, hang on a second, let me send you the links.”

She sorted through them, the other part of her mind on the outside. Dawn was breaking outside, and she could feel exhaustion creeping in, the edge at last taken off her anxiety. After everything that had changed, the sky hadn’t fallen, and the world was still there. She could fly again any time she wanted.

For the first time she could remember, she finally felt free.

A light rain misted onto Carol’s glasses, as she removed her helmet and put down the motorcycle’s kickstand. What she could see of the sky was gray, and all around her was the sound of water showering on thick forest leaves.

Gravel crunched under her feet, as she walked around the ranger’s jeep and past the sign that said “WILDLIFE RESCUE.” She took a moment to steel her nerves, before walking up to the front porch and knocking on the old metal screen door.

Footsteps, from inside the building. Then the ranger came up to the door. She didn’t look much older than Carol, but she was a lot taller, and her khaki uniform made her seem much more professional.

Her voice sounded like it had on the telephone. “You’re Leslie, right?”

Carol nodded, a little too quickly, and looked away.

“Well, c’mon in!” The screen door pushed open with a creak, and Carol held it open before stepping in. It was not much warmer inside.

“Let’s see about getting you set up.” The ranger went deeper into the building. Carol adjusted her glasses and looked around. It was an old building, dusty but with lots of natural light, and it smelled like zoo animals …

Oh. That was why. The imported Egyptian Fruit Bat hung silently inside its floor-to-ceiling cage, which took up about a third of the room. Toys dotted the floor, covered in newspaper clippings, and pieces of oranges and shards of rind hung on a string made the room smell faintly like air freshener.

Carol’s gaze, though, was fixed on the bat itself. All she could see was its softly-furred backside, and its brown wings wrapped tightly around it. It was only about half a foot long, and there was a metal mesh cage in the way. But Carol thought it was beautiful.

Footsteps came up from behind her, and stopped. “You like the Rousette, huh?”

Carol blinked and turned around, broken out of her reverie. “Huh?”

“The Egyptian Rousette. The bat.” The ranger was carrying an armful of medical paraphenalia, including a syringe.

“Oh. Um, yeah … ” Carol was looking at what she was carrying.

“You know they’re the only large bats that use echolocation.” The ranger tore open a package, and affixed a needle to the syringe.

“Yes.” Carol couldn’t help but watch.

“You like bats?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I think they’re cute.”

Carol just nodded, and swallowed.

The ranger finished what she was doing, and started wrapping a long elastic cord around Carol’s arm to cut off the blood flow. “Okay, Leslie, now hold still. This is going to sting a little, so we only want to have to do this once.”

Carol felt the pressure build up uncomfortably, and watched as the ranger got the needle ready. She closed her eyes and clenched one fist as it pierced her arm; then it got pulled out, and immediately a cloth bandage was pressed over it. “Hold that while I get you a Band-Aid.”

Carol held it in place, and let out her breath. While the ranger’s back was turned, she pulled the gauze away and stole a glance at her arm. A drop of blood had soaked into the gauze, but her arm had already healed.

She hurriedly replaced it as the ranger came back, and put an adhesive bandage over the gauze. Then the ranger untied the cord holding back her blood flow, and put it back in the first aid kit before holding up the syringe, partway full with Carol’s blood.

“It’ll take us a day or two to get the test results back,” she said, squinting at it. “You can start volunteering before then, though, so no worries about that.”

The ranger went back down the hallway carrying the first aid kit and syringe, and Carol followed, stealing a glance over her shoulder back towards the bat as she went. A little ways down the hall was an infirmary, and the ranger put up her gear there, and set the vial of Carol’s blood inside a rack next to empty vials. Carol took note of that.

“So … what will I be doing, here?” she asked, struggling to find the words.

“Oh, it depends. See-”

The phone rang.

“Hold on one sec.” The ranger left the infirmary, and went down the hall into another room.

Carol’s eyes fell on the vials, and on the first aid gear right beside them.

* * *

Carol unlocked the bat cage, with the key that she’d found in the ranger’s desk, before quietly stepping inside. The ranger had a loud voice, and it carried all the way out here and drowned out what she was doing. It sounded like she was on the phone with a friend … or a relative. Or an ex-boyfriend, judging from her tone of voice.

The bat stayed sleeping and motionless as Carol tore open the wrapper in her mouth, and got out one of the long needles. Affixing it to an empty syringe, she approached the bat and held still for a second, conflicting thoughts in her head.

It’s so cute, all huddled and sleeping like that …

I wonder where I ought to stick it at.

Just a tiny bundle of fur and wings …

How much should I draw? Will I hurt the thing?

I want to pet it, right now.

I need to do this. But how?

Taking a deep breath, she stepped forward and took hold of the bat in one hand, then stuck the needle in it with the other and drew out a tiny amount of blood. It turned to look at her, eyes wide with shock, and she sweated as she withdrew the syringe and unclipped the needle from it.

Carol had almost gotten to the door when it started chirping at her, loud. Now she was really sweating. She tried to get the lock back in place-

“You can’t turn your back for one second these days, can you?”

Carol froze.

Heavy, booted footsteps came up the hall behind her. One hand grabbed her shoulder and turned her around, hard. “Alright,” the ranger said. “Let’s see it.”

Carol’s heart was beating so hard it felt like it would give out. Slowly, carefully, she reached into her pocket and withdrew a vial of blood, then handed it to the ranger.

The ranger snatched it up without looking. “I don’t know why I give people the benefit of the doubt anymore. I was just telling my friend the other day that we shouldn’t judge people like you. Now I’m not so sure.”

There was a long moment of silence. The ranger did not speak again until Carol looked up, and saw her hard, stern face.

“Get out.”

* * *

Carol hopped down the wet, wooden steps and out into the rain, filled with adrenaline and trying to keep from showing it. She was scared, and she didn’t think she would stop being scared until she’d gotten ten miles away. Her guilt barely registered, she was so scared.

But she was also excited, because she’d gotten what she came for.

After getting back on her motorcycle and pushing the kickstand back up, she checked in her pocket to make sure. The tiny vial of bat blood was still there. And the vial of her blood was not, anymore.

The screen door pushed open, and Carol hastily threw on her helmet. A second after she’d gotten it in place, a rodent-like snout pushed out the front beneath the visor.

“Hey! What do you think you-”

Carol took off, kicking gravel up from her tires, and sped back towards the main road, a whiplike tail trailing out behind her.

* * *

Carol knew she couldn’t go out the main gate, so she took a barely-marked dirt trail out through the west side. After making sure she was not being pursued, she unwrapped another needle and injected herself with the bat’s blood, wrapping the needle and syringe up afterwards and pocketing them to throw away later.

She forced herself into human form and got back on her motorcycle, at the edge of the park where the dirt trail just met the road. No cars were coming, and there were no traffic noises for as far as she could hear. Just water dripping off leaves.

Carol grinned to herself, inside her helmet, and noted the time on her watch. It’d been fewer than three hours since she’d set out. At this rate, she’d be home by dinner.

The drive to the wildlife rescue had taken two hours. The drive back took six.

She didn’t take the main roads, for fear of being spotted. But in under an hour Carol started to feel lethargic, as though she’d been running all day. At first she dismissed it as being the effects of stress, and tried to settle into her ride and enjoy herself. But after not too long, she realized that she could barely keep her eyes open. It was the middle of the day, and she was starting to fall asleep.

Carol pulled off the road at a fast food restaurant, somewhere on the edge of a town in the hills, and almost let her motorcycle fall over she was so tired. There wasn’t a line at this time of day, so she walked up and ordered something small just so she could sit down. While getting a straw she noticed they had a free newspaper sitting on one of the counters, so she grabbed it on the way to her seat.

She only managed a few bites of her snack before realizing that she was about to faceplant on top of it. Stretching out in her seat, she took off her rainjacket and used that as a pillow. Then she covered her face with the newspaper, half-sitting and half-laying down.

Carol only meant to rest for a few minutes. She was used to feeling drowsy in the middle of the day, and laying down for a half-hour or so and feeling much better afterwards. Besides, it wasn’t like it would be easy to fall asleep on a hard bench like this …

* * *

She tries to wrestle the gun away from him, but he is too strong. He slams her against the wall, scraping her knuckles across the brick. Then he kicks her away when she lets go, smacking her into the concrete.

She looks up through the haze and the ringing in her ears, up into the barrel, and he-

* * *

“Ma’am?”

Carol gasped for breath, her dream cut short.

There were sounds all around her. Sounds of sizzling, and beeping, and people talking and eating and walking around. And deeply interesting smells, of grease and dead things that were good to eat. Where was she, again?

“Ma’am.”

Something shook her shoulder and she recoiled, jumping to her feet up on the hard plastic seat and putting her hands against the windowblinds. The newspaper fell away, as she stared in fear … down at the middle-aged woman, with a restaurant uniform on and a cleaning rag in one hand.

If the woman was startled, she gave no sign of it. “Ma’am, we’ve let you sleep there for hours. People are coming in now, and you’re making noise and it’s scaring them.”

Carol’s heart was still beating fast. She could barely remember why she was there. The gunbarrel seemed more real, and she felt like it was still pointed at her.

“You need to order something if you’re going to stay here longer. And if you’re going to sleep, you need to get yourself home or to a motel. Okay?”

The words were starting to make sense. She realized that people were looking at her, and it would’ve scared her if she hadn’t just been afraid for her life.

“Okay?”

” … okay.”

Carol slid back down into her seat, as the cleaning lady went on and washed the next table. She took a deep breath to center herself, still ignoring the people looking at her. Then she looked down, and her eyes fell on the meal that she’d barely touched.

Putting her rainjacket over one arm with shaking hands, she got up and wadded up her trash and tossed it into the bin. Then she went into the ladies’ room to clean up, her face turning red as she tried to ignore the stares on her back.

There was no one in there. Which was good, because when Carol saw her reflection she jumped up and gasped, and dropped her coat on the floor. Her face was a hybrid of bat and opossum features, darkly furred with radar dish ears and a pink nose on a long snout. Her arms were covered with fur, and her tail was whipping against the wall in her panic.

She fought to control her breathing, as the reality of what had just happened struck her. They saw me! They all saw me! I must have scared them to death — I must have seemed crazy to them — they probably saw me flailing my arms and things and … and …

She took a deep, shuddering breath, and made herself hold it for a few seconds before letting it out. I’m going to be alright. Everyone knows that people like me exist. No one’s going to try to hurt me or anything … not here, not out in public. I’ll be okay … I’ll be okay.

Even so, she locked herself in there, until she was satisfied that everyone who’d been in the restaurant just then had left.

* * *

Carol didn’t eat anything else there. By the time she got home, she was famished.

She walked her motorcycle up to the driveway, after cutting the engine a couple of streets down. The streetlights were on outside, over the suburban lawns. A couple of dogs barked at her from inside their fences, but dogs were always barking at something.

The gravel driveway was empty, just like it had been since her parents had left on their cruise. Carol went around back and leaned her cycle against the outside wall, then unlocked the side door before stepping in. The house was dark, even though the moon shone in through curtained windows.

Now that she was inside, Carol let the changes come, and found it a lot easier to see afterwards. She tried clicking her tongue to echolocate, but nothing happened as far as she could tell.

She shut the door quietly and went into the kitchen, without turning any lights on. The refrigerator was whirring, and the noise made her ears flatten. She opened it, squinting inside, but the scent of old grease and leftovers no longer smelled as good as it once had.

Looking over at the table, her eyes fell on the fruit basket. She shut the refrigerator door and ate three bananas, before realizing that they were brown. Oh well, she thought. I would’ve just made banana bread with them anyway.

Washing an apple in the sink, she looked out the window at tree silhouettes. Things were moving between them, little flying things, and Carol knew what they were.

She turned off the water and opened the window a crack, listening through the screen, and her ears perked at the sounds of clicking and chirping. She could hear more of the bats’ calls now, the higher-pitched parts that human ears couldn’t detect. Her heart leaped at the sound, and she held her breath in, listening and waiting for an epiphany. An understanding of what their calls meant.

After a minute or two of holding still and breathing quietly, she finally stopped and sighed and went to go get a knife for the apple. Something about their chirping did call to her. But she wasn’t sure if it was because of her nature, or just because of her bat ears. She felt like they were talking too fast and speaking a foreign language, one that sounded like one she knew but was too different for her to interpret. Maybe if I lived in Egypt, she thought.

Carol had a long dinner, plowing through most of the fruit basket (peels and all) and half of a jar of peanut butter. She finished with a tall glass of milk, not questioning her cravings but taking the time to satisfy them. She knew what was happening to her, and that it would take awhile to finish … awhile for her wings to grow in.

As it turned out, “awhile” was “about a week.”

It was slow and painful at times, and she was lethargic and sleepy for most of it. She slept for almost the whole time that the sun was up, and if she couldn’t get back to sleep around noon she read one of her manga until her eyes were too heavy again. The nights she spent eating and drinking almost constantly, gulping down gallons of milk and bringing a snack to eat on the way to the store. After a little while, she didn’t even try to hide the bony protrusions sticking out of her back, or to hold her animal features in. She just smiled at the cashier, and hoped that it didn’t look like she was snarling.

She took two multivitamin pills daily. Her shopping basket was filled with dense, nutrient-rich foods; avocados, a couple of pomegranates, and lots of citrus fruit. Meat was too expensive, so she stacked tubs of cold, wet tofu into her cart, and ate peanut butter and bananas while marinating it at home. It wasn’t half bad, although after a couple of tries she found that she liked it better when mixed into fruit-and-milk drinks than when fried up with soy sauce.

The few hours she didn’t spend eating, cooking and shopping, she spent surfing the ‘net on her laptop, with the lights off and brightness turned all the way down. (And the window open to listen for bats.) Mostly she looked for videos by other ‘morphs, and blogs with tutorials on how to deal with a changing body. Links to recipes started to fill up her favorites list.

Every now and then she browsed for news stories, about First Federal or her disappearance. They hadn’t talked about it for a while, in the town that she had been working in. And apparently, no one had caught the killer.

Carol did not like to think about that. She spent one day in a haze of half-awakeness just because her dreams were so terrible. The whole time she was asleep she spent trying to run, or to fight him off. And all she could think about while she was awake that day was the feel of the cold gunmetal, or the way her hands clawed at his until they were slammed into the wall.

She had been shot only once, but she’d relived it six times now, each one just as horrifying.

For all that, she found that revenge didn’t drive her. She tried to think about her death as little as possible, because all that she felt about it was fear. Likewise, her plan was not an obsession. It was just something that had to be done.

She wanted it to be over soon. Preferably before her family came back. Then she could reveal herself, to them and her friends online and her boyfriend. She missed every one of them, even the annoying ones. But she dared not call them, or pick up the phone, or log in to sites with her old accounts. She didn’t even surf the web without using a proxy server.

Soon this will be over, she thought, doing pushups while stretching her wings to their lengths and trying to feel their tips. And soon I’ll be able to fly.

* * *

Despite exercising whenever she could, Carol still put on a bit of weight, and it wasn’t just in her wings. She used a flashlight to look down at the scale, frowning to herself and being glad that she was sewing her stealth outfit with some give to it.

And that she was going to be getting a lot more exercise, soon enough.

That night was the first time she tried flying, as her wingspan was already greater than her height. There was a creek beside her house, behind the suburban neighborhood, and there was an open area in the trees behind it. After wading the creek, she ran as fast as she could into the clearing, then started flapping her wings wildly. But it only drove her to crash in a tumbling heap.

She rubbed her bruised elbow, the color not fading even as the pain did. Then she got up, took a deep breath and tried again. I don’t care how many times I’ve got to do this, she thought. Being shot didn’t stop me. This isn’t going to either.

Carol tried five more times to get up the speed to fly, and to hold her leathery wings at the right angle to produce lift. On her last try she almost did, and her heart leapt as she felt her wings carry her feet off the ground. But then they clipped a tree, and she rolled to a stop, instinctively curling her wings around her.

She looked up at the tree in dismay. Then she started climbing it.

It took her ten long, agonizing minutes to get up to the branch that she wanted. Her wings kept getting caught on things, and trying to get them out without being able to see behind herself brought her close to tears in frustration. But she closed her eyes and took a handful of deep breaths, then continued and finally freed herself.

Crouching on the thickest branch, twenty feet off the ground, she looked out at the creek and the clearing and at her house’s distant roof. Then she closed her eyes, and jumped.

Her wings caught the air, and she soared.

It was just like the first time she’d managed to ski. The same feel of gliding, over ground that she’d once had to tread. And the same feel of silent exhilaration, the only sound in her ears that of wind rushing past. It was hard to hold her wings out rigid, but she barely noticed she was so excited.

After a couple of seconds, she realized that she was dropping slowly and tried flapping her wings to compensate. But she underestimated how much force she would need to apply against the stiff cushion of air beneath her, and her wings folded up and she dropped like a rock, falling into the creek with a splash.

This is what she was thinking right afterwards.

Aghpttb-

I flew! I was flying! I …

AGH, there are rocks stuck in my knee and it stings!

I still remember what it felt like. I want to do it again …

Cold! Wet! Pain! Cold!

That was the awesomest thing EVER!

She finally stood up off of the slippery rocks, and finished brushing the pebbles off of her skinned knees, her hands moist with blood and water. Then she looked back up at the tree she’d jumped down from, and thrust her fist into the air, before shivering.

Hugging herself with both arms and wings, she managed a grin in spite of chattering teeth.

That was so worth it.

Carol wanted to try it again right away, but decided she’d better not. That turned out to be the right choice. She spent the rest of that night shivering and sniffling, and drinking a warm mug of lemon tea.

The next day (or next night, given her sleeping schedule) her back and her wings ached all over. She could barely even move her arms, which made sewing her stealth outfit hard. She had to rest that day, and the next, stretching her stiff wings when she could and making a couple of feeble attempts at doing stitches. It had only been a few seconds of flight, but she felt like she’d tried to lift a car.

The day of her parents’ return was approaching, and she still wasn’t ready. It looked like there was only one thing for it: She spent the whole last day packing and cleaning up, then got on her motorcycle and drove back to the city she’d worked at.

It was a long drive, especially with a sore back and wings, and she had to share the road with humans who couldn’t see as well as she could at night. Worse, the prices at the downtown hotel were sky-high. But as she flopped down onto the big, cushy bed in her room, she thought it’d been worth it for two reasons:

One, the generous fruit basket on the table.

And two, the lights of First Federal, right outside of her window.

* * *

Midnight. Still not as dark as she would’ve liked. The lights of the city shone red on the clouds behind her, as though sunset had never ended.

Carol finished hauling her bag up to the rooftop next to her, and looked out at the bank building as she got her things out. There weren’t too many lights on in it, and there weren’t any other large buildings nearby. The office that she was headed for was on the other side of the building, so she couldn’t see in it, but she’d made sure to check when she’d driven back with snack food and energy drinks. An hour ago, the light had been on.

Her fingers were unsteady as she strapped the gun to her hip. She wondered if it’d been a good idea to drink so much liquid sugar, or if she was just nervous. For a second, she thought of just climbing back inside. Then she shook her head and dismissed it, and finished strapping her gloves and her gear to her night-black stealth outfit.

There wasn’t a lot of gear to strap on, because she had to pack light to be able to fly. Stepping up to the edge of the roof, she looked out across the street at the lower ledge of the bank building … a flat platform with air vents and boxy things on top, to the side of the main part of the building.

Carol swallowed as she looked across at it. It seemed so far away now. And the lights of the streetlights seemed brighter, and the noise of distant traffic seemed louder. Every now and then a car drove past below, and she felt silly and conspicuous, like everybody could see her.

She clenched her fists, and told herself that if she did this right, nobody would.

Carol went to the center of the roof, walking lightly on bare paws, the noise of the central air conditioning getting louder in her ears. She stretched her arms, legs and wings, and did a basic warm-up routine. Then she looked out at the bank building and took a deep breath, before running towards it and leaping over the edge of the roof.

It was like doing a pullup while wearing a full-sized backpack. The first time she’d barely noticed, because the feeling of flight was so novel and she didn’t have any place she was flying to. But this time she immediately panicked, her breaths fast with fear and exertion, and as she looked up into the rushing air she realized that she was not going to make it.

Do I flap?

She couldn’t bring herself to, because she knew she would certainly plummet. So instead, as the roof of the building approached she put out her arms and

SMACK

One second she was flying, the next she was grappling with the ledge. She felt it beneath her arms, then her forearms, then only her hands were holding onto it as her footpaw-pads slipped on squeaking glass.

Heart racing, breaths rapid, brain telling her I am going to die, she fought to clamber on top. Her foot gained traction on scratchy concrete, and she just about tore its pad off getting the other one off the glass and pushing with all her might. One elbow got above the ledge, then the next, then she flung herself over the side and landed on top of the building.

Carol’s heartbeat was so rapid she thought she would die just from it, and trying to catch her breath felt like fighting to keep from drowning. Her tail and her wings were squashed underneath her, but she didn’t care. She could barely feel them.

She wasn’t there long before her ears perked. There was a squeak, of skin on the glass of the window she’d been kicking. Like someone had pressed his hands or his face up against it.

Carol jumped back to her feet, blood rushing to her head and making her stagger, as pins and needles crept into her wings and her tail. Then she shook her head, trying to clear it, and looked around for an entry point.

She had to rest up against the side of the door for a second, before taking out her glass cutter and carving a square through the inset window.

* * *

Carol crept through the dark hallway, towards the light spilling out from the open door.

A woman’s voice, laughing. “Are you kidding me? Those mortgage bonds are backed by the country’s top three lending institutions! Of course your money’s safe. It’s safer than it’d be in our vault.”

She got out her phone from its belt case, softly closing the magnetic cover before switching it on and turning on the Voice Memo feature. Carol pointed its microphone towards the door as she crept closer, quietly, holding her gun at the ready.

“Well, okay, maybe not that safe … ” Carol’s pointed ears heard a trace of the other voice on the phone. “But you know me, Ron. I’ve never let you down before, have I?”

She stopped outside the door, recording for a second.

More laughter. “And you’ll never let me forget that, will you?”

Carol let them finish their conversation, and waited for the phone to hang up. But a second later she heard it being lifted off the receiver again, and a number dialed into it. This time a man’s voice spoke, a deep one that sounded like plaid shirts and facial hair. “Hey, Mark. Remember those subprime mortgage bonds that I told you about?”

Carol’s ears perked.

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” A chuckle. “Yeah, those’re the ones. Anyway, I think they’re going downhill.”

She holstered her gun, and crouched down low to hold a knife out around the corner. In its mirrored surface she saw feet under a rainforest wood desk, along with an energy bar wrapper on the floor next to a wastebasket. The feet moved, kicking the wrapper out of the way, as the chair swiveled to face away from the door.

“Heh, I know. Sorry for getting you into that mess. And First Federal has spent a ton on them, haven’t they? Listen, maybe we should … ”

Carol’s pounding heart drowned out the man’s words as she stepped into his office, the scent of central heating and pretzels and peanut butter and wheat-oat bars all assaulting her nostrils. His desk was messy, his suit jacket was tossed over the guest chairs next to the plant, and there was a screensaver going on his PC as he twirled the phone cord in his finger.

She stepped closer, crouch-walking, holding her wings pressed to her sides. She crept around the side of his desk, closer and closer to his high-backed leather chair. Finally she stood up, between the chair and his desk, and put her gun to his head. “Don’t move!”

Carol had tried to make it sound forceful. Then she realized the person on the other end of the line must have heard. There was silence for a long moment, and then her heartbeat drowned out a question on the phone.

“I’m going to have to call you back,” the deep male voice said, cracking. He hung up the phone, slowly and carefully, without turning his head.

Carol waited another long, painful moment, sweat running down her sides, before he spoke. This time it was silky and young. “The voice sounds familiar, but I’m afraid I can’t place it. Can I at least look to see who is pointing a gun at me?”

“G-go ahead.” Agh, she thought, I stuttered!

She stepped aside a pace or two, holding both arms straight out to aim at him, trying to keep them from trembling. The white-shirted young man in the chair spun it slowly to turn and face her. When he saw her, he looked confused. “Carol?”

She nodded, too quickly.

An incredulous look, for a second. Then he burst out laughing, and she really began to sweat. “Carol, you- this-” He was laughing so hard he couldn’t talk.

She said nothing, and couldn’t help but wonder just how dumb she looked.

He reached for a tissue, and wiped at his face. “Well, Carol, congrats on your rebirth! Welcome to the club.”

“I know what you are.” All of a sudden she wanted to cry, and she knew it came through in her voice.

“Yes, I know.” The man regained his composure and looked up at her. “And you’re lucky that you weren’t dumped in a creek. Did you know that?”

She said nothing, and he went on. “And now that you’ve got your life back, you’ve decided to … to dress up in a costume and come up here and kill me. For revenge, I guess. Is that it?”

She shook her head, unable to speak.

“What is it, then?”

“You’re going to tell everyone what you are.” She shook the cameraphone in her hand. “I’m going to take a video of you changing. Then you’re going to say how you cheated everyone. And killed me.” Carol tried her best to keep her voice level.

“You’re wasting your time,” he said.

“Y-you’re not going to talk?”

“No, I mean this is a waste of your time.” He gestured at her. “Just look at yourself. You risked your life getting in here, and for what? To put some small-time corporate con artist away?”

“Murderer.” She growled at him.

“Yes, well, there was a reason for that. And as you can see, you’re not dead, now are you?” He clasped his hands underneath his chin, leaning his elbows on the arms of his chair, and smiled at her.

“I didn’t come here just to put you in jail,” she snarled, anger taking over where fear left off. “I want you behind bars so that I can go back to living my life, without having to worry about you killing me again.”

He shook his head, sadly. “Rule number one of rebirthing. You don’t get to have your old life back.”

“I will if you’re out of the way!”

“No, you won’t,” he said. “Think about it. What are you going to tell your family? Your life with them will never go back to normal.”

“They know I’m a ‘morph. They just don’t know what all that entails yet. And they already think I’m weird.”

“Do you really think you’ll get your old job back?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Do you really think I want it?”

He leaned back in his chair, and put his hands behind his head. “You have all the answers, don’t you?”

“And now, I want answers from you.” Carefully, without taking her eyes off of him, she thumbed the controls on her phone and set it to record video.

“Ask me how I survived the last person who tried to kill me,” he said, smiling.

“H-” She coughed. “How did you survive?”

“I didn’t,” he said, and spun his chair around slowly.

“Don’t move!” she said, and waved her gun helplessly at the back of his chair.

When he came back around, he had the face of a cat, with glossy black fur and emerald green eyes. His hands pressed together beneath his chin, and sharp claws came out from them and tapped each other. “I didn’t survive,” he repeated. “But I have nine lives.”

“Wh-”

He screamed as he sprang at her.

* * *

Carol had seen her cats get into fights before. They were so fast she couldn’t even tell who was winning until one broke off and ran. There was just an explosion of fur, and then two cats would run out of it, one of them chasing the other.

Those cats meant business. So did this one. One second she had a gun trained on him, the next it went off and she was rolling around on the floor, crashing into furniture, trying to get this whirlwind of blades off of her. It was like being attacked by a million pairs of scissors, and it was all she could do to keep them from cutting her open. Fur went everywhere, and so did pieces of fabric and upholstery. After only a few seconds, the room was a cloud of flying debris.

If someone had watched it in slow motion, they might have seen her grabbing his arms, and then him pulling his hind claws up to her stomach, and then her pulling away while still holding onto him and the both of them crashing into the plant. But Carol couldn’t watch in slow motion, and so she could barely tell what was going on. Except that everything in the room was being destroyed, and she wanted to keep this from happening to her.

Hadn’t she been holding a gun at one point? There it was, on the floor. She grabbed it in one hand, and he grabbed her arm, and she swung the gun into the side of his head and it went off as she did so. Plaster and insulation clouded the room from the new hole in the ceiling, followed by potting soil as she grabbed a handful of it off the floor and flung it in his face.

Clutching his face, blinking dust out of his eyes, he dropped to one hand and swung his legs in a clawed spin-kick. Carol dove towards the door, but he caught her tail and it stung and threw her off-balance.

There was a pause of about one second as she stood there leaning against the doorway in pain, looking into the clouded room and then down the hallway, as two men in security outfits rounded the corner. Then he pounced her again, and they were in the hall tumbling and kicking holes in the wall. And people were shouting at them, but she couldn’t hear, because he was screaming. (Or was she?)

Then a gun went off again, and she didn’t know if it was hers or someone else’s, but blood sprayed across her as he recoiled and let go. She didn’t stop to think but took off, down the hall, stumbling and staggering but running as fast as she could. There was another gunshot as she rounded the corner, and she couldn’t feel anything but didn’t know if it was because they had missed or because she was so high on adrenalin.

All Carol knew was that she had to get away, right now. And that running footsteps were chasing her.

* * *

He approaches the man from behind, unable to see his face in this light. Or his tail.

“Sir! Are you alright?”

The man just stands there clutching his chest, taking deep shuddering breaths and coughing. It looks like he’s bleeding.

“Sir!”

He comes up next to the man, and something taps his leg. He looks down, and it’s a swishing tail. He looks up just as something hits him in the side of his face, and he loses consciousness.

A cat in a tattered, stained shirt leans against the wall and grits his teeth for a second, before something tiny and metallic PLINKs from his chest to the floor. He wipes at his muzzle with the back of his hand, then lurches forward, unsteady at first but soon settling into a run.

* * *

Carol turned sideways to slam into the crossbar on the door, going through without losing momentum, then stopped at the head of the winding staircase. Stairs! was all she could think.

Running footsteps, rounding the corner behind her. For a second, she had a vision of herself jumping over the railing and floating down dramatically, wings outstretched. Then she had another vision, of herself smacking into the concrete. She winced.

Carol jumped, as a shot bounced off the door, and took off running again.

It occurred to her, in between smacking into the wall at each landing and scrambling to take off down the next flight, that this had been a long night and she really wanted to go home. Hey, maybe I’ll get to go home now! she thought. Having to be with her family seemed downright happy compared to that cat fight.

She grabbed the rail of the last flight, trying to round it without smacking into the wall, when a gunshot from above bounced off of it right next to her hand. She fell backwards, landing on her wings and tail in a heap and so filled with adrenalin that all she could do was flail and kick her legs, not sure which way was up.

While she was doing that, a cat was knocking a person out several stories above her. Then she got back on her feet, just as a dark-colored blur dropped down between all the stairs. It rolled to a stop as she ran down the last flight, then came up at the end of it while she was about halfway down. A shaft of light from the window behind her shone on his fur, and his glowing eyes.

And on the gun in her hands.

Oh right, I’m still carrying this! She held it pointed at him, the stairwell silent except for their echoing breaths.

Carol remembered their last standoff, and how badly it’d ended for her. But whatever had happened between then and now, it looked like he’d gotten the worst of it. She felt exhausted, but he looked even moreso. And as she watched, he dropped to one knee, gasping for breath and not even looking at her.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” she ventured, “haven’t you?”

He just nodded.

She wanted to lean up against the wall herself, but she was afraid to show weakness. They stood there for a couple of moments, long enough for Carol to feel dizzy as the adrenalin started to wear off.

“Bet you can’t … ” The cat gasped for breath. ” … finish me.”

“Huh?” Carol blinked.

“Got to do what it takes … ” He took several breaths. ” … to stop me. From going after you.”

“Y-you’re going to go after me?”

“Didn’t you?” He glared at her.

As she watched, he rose to his feet, a murderous look in his eyes. And then he began to climb the stairs towards her.

“Stop,” she said.

He went on.

“I mean it!”

The next few seconds would have ended badly for Carol, no matter what she had decided to do. But just then, she heard cars screeching and pulling up outside. Sirens wailed, and colored lights shone in through the windows.

The cat turned to look, and his ears flattened.

Carol looked between him and the door, her brain frozen. Then somebody pulled the door open, and without thinking she turned around and shot out the window on the landing above her.

“Don’t move!” someone shouted. But she wasn’t listening.

Pounding footsteps, gunshots, screams and noises of fighting echoed off of the walls behind her … as Carol ran through the window, jumped off the ledge, and flew.

* * *

The next day, the phone rang at her parents’ house. On the other end was a voice that sounded like their daughter’s, or like hers would if she were in massive pain. It wanted them to come get her, at a certain motel in a town in the next state, and to get her motorcycle at another motel in the same town.

They got there around noon. Carol had been up the entire day, unable to fall asleep because of muscle pains in her arms, legs, back, side, wings … pretty much everywhere. And she hadn’t taken anything for it, because she didn’t have anything to take.

She was still part-bat and part-possum, and was still wearing her torn stealth outfit. At least the color helps hide the bloodstains, she thought, gritting her teeth against the pain as they helped her into the car. A couple of tablets of painkiller and a pillow bought from the motel helped her fall asleep on the drive back, and the last thing she thought was I hope it isn’t too hard on them when the police catch up with me.

As it turned out, she needn’t have worried.

Carol woke up that evening when her mom walked into the living room and turned on the TV, after letting her crash the entire day. The lights were off and the volume was low, but it was loud enough for her to hear.

She winced, still wrapped up in blankets, and tried to shut her ears to it. But then she heard something about First Federal … and slowly, trying not to move her neck too much, she looked back over at the TV set.

She expected to see footage of the place where they’d fought. Of the torn-up office, and the stairwell where she’d flown off. But instead they were interviewing people, about how the bank had gone belly-up. Apparently they’d bought too many worthless loans from other banks, all so a ‘morph with ties to the others could profit from it. The police had him in custody now, on charges of fraud and assaulting a police officer, and the bank was closing down.

Carol’s heart sank as she watched, because she remembered that she’d left her phone there. It had everything on it … but was it even still working? Were her fingerprints recognizable? She didn’t know. And over the next few days as she recovered, nobody called them or showed up asking about her. Eventually, she forgot. And to all appearances, so did her parents. They never asked her any questions, and she never told them anything.

* * *

Halloween was that weekend. Carol spend the late afternoon giving out candy at the door, and the evening talking with her boyfriend and friends online. She didn’t have any proof of what she’d just been through, and it seemed almost like a dream. But somehow, it was one that she kept reliving.

It had been scary at times, but it had also been exhilarating. And she kept coming back to the fact that she’d done it, that she’d made her plan and carried it out and kept from being killed again or captured. She’d never known that she had it in her. And it made her wonder if maybe she shouldn’t be looking for a new line of work.

The next weekend, she heard how another ‘morph somewhere in New York had brought down the gang that had “killed” him and his family. And when she looked, she read similar stories from all over the world, of ‘morphs and people with other abilities. Everyone was suspicious of them, but they were doing things that no one else could.

People like her were making a difference.

The next evening she said goodbye to her parents, and rode off into the night. Somewhere, somebody needed her help, and she wanted to be there for him or her.

And maybe get a pet dog …

Virmir was having a great week.

That wasn’t the name he’d been born with, of course. It was the name that he’d chosen, to represent himself online. His “real” name had hardly anything to do with who he was, but Virmir was an Urocyon cinereoargenteus; a gray fox, that walked on its hind legs and talked and grinned and wore clothes (when it felt like it). A cartoon drawing, a personal brand and an identity that felt more real than the human one he’d been born with. Or at the very least, more fun.

Some days he felt kind of silly about that. Like his first few days on the job. Maybe it’d been the gray cubicles, without so much as a potted plant. Maybe it’d been his manager’s clean haircut and firm handshake, and the way he’d gone on about “fostering world-class infrastructure” and “meeting customer-centered goals.” Or maybe it’d just been the fluorescent lighting. Either way, his first few days working there had taken a lot out of him. He’d gone home and flopped on the couch, and had barely felt like a human being, let alone Kendo Virmir the fox mage.

After he’d been there awhile, though, he’d noticed something, and it hadn’t just been that the meeting room donuts were always stale. Maybe it’d been the view out the window that’d clued him into it … the row upon row of identical offices that he saw in the skyscraper across the street. Or maybe it’d been after a few minutes of hearing his boss and his boss’ boss chatting with each other, and then turning his swivel chair to look and realizing he couldn’t tell them apart.

Here’s what the-person-who-was-Virmir realized: The people he worked for talked, groomed, and dressed that way not because they were actually like that, but because the people they worked for were like that! And so on, for as far as he could see.

Somewhere at the top, Virmir imagined, was a happy, fulfilled man, who used “infrastructure” and “customer-centered” in his daily conversation. And he had a whole lot of people working for him who were trying their best to be him, even if they didn’t have a clue what those words they kept using meant.

In other words, they were all creating their own identities too. They just weren’t being very original, and they weren’t having nearly as much fun with it as Virmir was.

He felt a lot better about imagining himself as a cartoon fox after that.

Anyway, Virmir was having a great week, and it wasn’t because the PHP web app that his team had been building was almost complete. No, it was because last night he’d put the finishing touches on his latest art project, live on streaming video. On top of that, he was expecting the commission he’d ordered to come in the mail any day now.

On days like these, he wasn’t a “team member,” or a “human resource,” or a white shirt and a tie. He was Virmir, just as much as he was when he was at home in his den. And it was not just a sense of confidence, or an amused smirk at things that would have annoyed him. It was an entire way of seeing the world.

He coded faster, because server-side scripting was simple compared to runic equations and magic. He spoke up more often in meetings, because the silly humans kept digging themselves into messes and it was up to him to help them get out. And when he looked out the windows at the end of the day, at the city of concrete and windowlight, he didn’t see a vast and impersonal maze. He saw a wondrous landscape, as fantastic as any that he had imagined. And it was a bit grittier, perhaps, but it was still just as magical.

Anything can happen here, he thought, as he turned off his monitors and put on his coat.

He had no idea how right he was.

* * *

On the fourth day of this great week, something unusual happened. You see, instead of just imagining himself as the self that he drew, Virmir actually became a cartoon gray fox.

That’s not the unusual thing, though, as surprising as it seemed to Virmir. After all, anything could — and did — happen in this magical world that he lived in, including transformations. Every day, caterpillars curled up to sleep, not knowing they’d wake up as butterflies. And people became cartoons all the time, too. How else could they ever get made?

What was unusual was that he didn’t notice. He was just going about his workday as usual, a confident anthro gray fox mage, his cape and his tail tucked behind him as he typed away on the keyboard. His legs kicked the air underneath him, and his brow furrowed as he looked up at the dual monitors, trying to make sense of his coworkers’ code. It was another day in the life of Virmir, and after these last few days he’d become so used to feeling this way that he didn’t even realize he was a couple of feet shorter, until his neck finally got a cramp in it.

“Blast,” he muttered. He reached around to massage the kinks out of his neck, wincing. Then he looked up at the screens on top of his desk in dismay, and hopped down from his chair to get something to sit on.

Reaching up towards the telephone book at the edge of his desk, he saw his fox hand and thought That’s some nice shading. Then he froze.

Two hundred lines of PHP code poured right out of Virmir’s brain.

“Hey,” his coworker said, from past the partition behind Virmir’s monitor.

I love those dynamic lighting effects, said the part of Virmir’s brain that was still working right. And look at the texturing!

“Hey,” his coworker said again, and knocked on the partition. “In line 248, what did you mean by blah blah mumble subroutine blah?”

That wasn’t what he actually said, of course, but Virmir’s brain still wasn’t working. In fact, he was more in shock than he would’ve been if he’d just walked away from a train wreck. The social part of his brain said that he needed to reply, though, and so he tried. Only to find that he’d forgotten how to make words come out. “Uhhhm … ”

Silence.

Slowly, Virmir ran his long tongue across his vulpine chops, and tried to talk naturally like he’d done just a minute ago. “I … don’t … know, uh … ” He blinked, shook his head, and unfroze from the position he’d been in when he was reaching up to the telephone book. “What was that, again?”

” … are you okay?”

“Oh! Uh, yes, uh … ” Virmir’s cape flared out and his tail swished as he looked about himself quickly, trying to find a hiding place and a clear escape route to the stairs. Had anyone already seen him? What about in the building across from his cubicle? He had to somehow-

“No, I’m serious.” His coworker’s freckled face came up over the edge of the partition, and looked down at him.

“AGH!” Virmir fell on his tail, and backed away several feet on his hands and legs before getting caught in his cape. He stared up at his coworker, and a drop of sweat the size of a golf ball formed on the side of his head.
His coworker gave him a bewildered look. “Dude, you look wired.”

Virmir misheard him. “Weird … in what way?”

“No, wired. You look like you stayed up all night and hit Starbuck’s before coming here.” He pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “Chill, okay? Go take a walk or something. I’ll figure it out on my own.”

He ducked back down behind the partition, and Virmir just sat there, unable to move, his heart pounding so hard it drowned out the printer down the hall. Someone walked past behind him, and while his ears automatically pivoted he could not turn his head to look. He could only sit there, and catch his breath.

What on earth just happened?

Slowly, the sweatdrop vanished and Virmir’s breathing steadied. He climbed back up to his seat, turned off the dual screens and looked into them. They weren’t glossy, so the reflection was imperfect, but even with the light from the windows in the corner of his eye he could tell. He looked just like the gray fox from his drawings. A three-dimensional, cel-shaded, hundred frames-per-second rendered gray fox, but a cartoon gray fox nonetheless. He wasn’t even wearing anything besides his cape.

Then where did … Acting on instinct, Virmir reached around behind himself and pulled out his wallet and Palm Pilot, and looked to make sure they were okay before putting them back. Then he turned around in his seat and looked. They were nowhere to be seen.

How … ?

Phones rang in the distance, and the sounds of typing and clicking and shuffling paperwork reached Virmir’s fox ears. The absurdity of his situation was not lost on him.

Now what?

After a minute’s thought, he hopped back down from his seat and walked around the side of the cubicle farm. Another sweatdrop started to form on the side of his face, as he realized he was out in public walking past people and banks of windows like this. But if he was right, then …

“Tom?” Virmir looked in at his coworker, the one who’d just talked to him. He was munching cheese puffs out of a bag while glowering at his own monitors, but he turned to look as Virmir addressed him.

“Do I, uh … ” Virmir spent a moment thinking about how to phrase himself. “Do you notice anything different about me?”

Tom squinted at him for a moment, before a look of recognition lit up his face, and he nodded. “Nice haircut,” he said.

“Totally doesn’t look like you slept on it the wrong way.” He then turned back to his monitors, and wiped his hands off on a napkin before typing something in.

Virmir’s tail stopped in mid-swish, and his face turned red. “Thanks,” he said, before ducking back out, and standing there for a moment next to the Dilbert cartoons Tom had taped to the side of his wall.

Okay, he thought. So I’m myself. I mean, Virmir, I mean … blast, this is so frustrating! How did this even happen? And is it just me, or am I really …

His thoughts trailed off as he looked behind him, at a sudden, unusual sensation. His tail had been swishing with agitation, and he could feel it thump into the cubicle wall next to him.

Maybe this is a dream? Virmir pinched his arm, and it hurt. Not only that, he could feel how furry is was, past the claws on the ends of his fingertips. And if he looked closely, he could see each individual cel-shaded hair, despite the black borders at the edges of his arms. His fur rippled as he breathed out while looking at it.

Maybe splashing my face with cold water will help …

* * *

Virmir knelt on the edge of the sink in the men’s room, the one that had been up to his neck while he’d been standing next to it, and turned the cold water tap all the way to the right. Then he scooped up a good double-handful of it, and smacked it into his face.

“Aghptbb-” He fell over on his back, on the wet sink, and sputtered and slipped as he tried to get up. His cape and his back fur got soaked through, and his foot got stuck in the sink for second before he finally slipped off and landed on the floor on his arms and knees, wincing.

A couple minutes under the blow dryer helped, although they didn’t do anything about his smarting elbows and knees. He looked over at the mirror as the warm air rustled his cape, and gave his fox face a disgusted look. “If you’re a hallucination, you’re a very persistent one.”

Someone else came in just then, and Virmir quickly walked out and got his tail out of the way before the door shut behind him. He dried off his hands the rest of the way on his fur, and looked out the full-length windows, arms folded. His foxy reflection looked back at him, stern and upset on the other side of the glass.

I don’t take anything weird, he thought. So if this is my mind playing tricks on me, either I’m going crazy or somebody drugged my cereal.

Someone walked past behind him, and brushed his tail without noticing.

But my mind playing tricks on me wouldn’t account for my having a tail. Or needing a telephone book to sit on while I’m coding. Maybe I really did change, and I’m just the only one who noticed?

It seemed so obvious, and yet it was hard for Virmir to accept, just because it was so unexpected. Even if he was remarkably good-looking this way, he thought, striking a pose to see his reflection.

Hm, maybe if I downloaded Blender I could do something like this. I’d have to learn it, of course …

He stuck out his tongue, and then tried a couple of other faces.

What if I just uploaded a video, and then didn’t tell anyone how I did it? It’d have to use real-life backgrounds, of course, but still. It’d be a hit!

He struck another pose, tossing his cape out dramatically behind him.

Hmm … but would anyone be able to see me? Would whatever is keeping other people from seeing me like this work online?

Virmir furrowed his brow and put a hand to his chin, lost in thought. Maybe that can be my first experiment, then. To find out if it’s just me, or if I really did change and no one else can see it. I could do things like take pictures of myself standing under things I’d be too tall for normally, and trying to reach for things that my human self wouldn’t need a ladder for. Then I can show them to other people, and ask them to tell me what they see.

Virmir sideyed another coworker as he walked past, and it occurred to him that he was taking this pretty well. He felt a little light-headed, but on the whole he felt comfortable as his fox self, even out here in public. It helped that he’d gotten in practice, he thought … a lot of practice. Maybe that’s what caused this?

He shook his head. Nah.

Virmir’s tail swished happily as he returned to his cubicle, and stacked a couple of manuals on top of his seat before climbing back on. Then he stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles and got back to work.

* * *

That would be a convenient end for this story. Fortunately, life is rarely convenient.

What happened next started a couple of hours later. Virmir had been coding for awhile, and his throat was feeling dry. His fox ears could hear Tom munching on salty snacks in the cubicle past his, buttered popcorn and puffs with dry cheese powder on them, and the sounds and the smells were the last straw.

He hopped down and went over to the water cooler, only to find that he wasn’t tall enough to reach the disposable cups stacked on top. If Virmir had been the kind of mage who could levitate objects by casting a spell on them, he might’ve tried it; the instincts that let you do things like that are the same kind that made him become his fox self in the first place. But Virmir’s fox-self was a fire mage, and the only thing his spells could have done to the cups was make them set off the smoke alarm.

Which is why he came back a minute later, pushing his swivel chair in front of him and muttering under his breath. It got stuck on a corner, so he turned around and carefully pulled it the rest of the way …

… only to bump into a man who was standing there already, wearing a striking black suitcoat and tie and filling a huge plastic Big Gulp cup from the water cooler.

The man smiled down at him, a plastic sort of smile, his hands not leaving the controls. “Hello, Mister Robinson.”

Virmir squinted up at the man, immediately distrusting him. Maybe it was the fact that he knew Virmir’s name, when Virmir had never seen him before. Maybe it was the fact that he’d never known anyone who wore an Italian suitcoat to shop at the 7/11. Or maybe it was the black sunglasses the man was wearing … and the fact that Virmir saw in them not his cartoon self’s reflection, but the one that he’d seen in the mirror that morning.

“Having fun imagining yourself as a fox, are you?” The sound of water pouring into his cup almost drowned out the man’s words.

Virmir gave the man an amused smirk. “Yep. You should try it sometime.”

“I don’t think you understand, Mister Robinson.” That plastic smile had not left the man’s face. “You don’t understand just how dangerous it is, to imagine something that’s not wanted.”

“Oh, I totally agree.” Virmir leaned up against his chair, and winked.

The man went on like he hadn’t heard him. “Millions of people, all imagining themselves living happy, normal, productive lives … and one maladjusted person, who tries to imagine himself as a cartoon. That sort of imagination is like a disease … a cancer, in our society. And we … ” He took a long swig from his Big Gulp, and licked at his face afterwards. ” … are the cure.”

As he was talking, two more nearly identical-looking men in black suitcoats stepped into view, one behind him and one behind Virmir. Virmir was feeling quite threatened now, so he did what a fox fire mage does when he feels threatened: He fluffed out his fur, threw out his cape, and ignited a huge fireball in his hand. “I’d like to see you try!” he snarled.

The man doused him with the rest of the water from his cup. Virmir gasped and spluttered, dripping wet, and tried to ignite another fireball in his hand. A wisp of smoke came up through his fingers. ” … blast,” he said.

The three men stepped towards him.

Virmir tensed, and got ready to spring as they advanced. Then he turned and bolted, diving around the man behind him and running past banks of windows, trying to put as much distance between him and them as possible.

Without a word, the men in black suitcoats took off after him. Virmir ducked into a hallway, sprinting towards the door to the stairwell at the far end. He looked over his shoulder, past his flapping cape, and saw the three men chasing him. But when he looked back where he was heading, all he could see was a long row of doors, and a hazy mirage at the end that receded into the distance.

Virmir blinked, looked away for a second and looked back up, but he still couldn’t make his eyes focus. “What the heck?” he snarled. There was no way that this was-

Oh. Oh. Now he knew what was going on. He’d seen this a million times in cartoons, whenever they did chase scenes indoors! Only one thing to do, then. Virmir jumped at a door shoulder-first and ran through someone’s office, ignoring the startled shouts and taking the next door he saw.

He opened it and saw another hallway … or was it the same one? He could see the men in black suitcoats pausing and fanning out to check doorways. With only a moment’s thought, Virmir dashed for the next open door that he saw, ignoring the footsteps that he heard behind him. It was like an indoor obstacle course … dodge past the furniture, run through any open door and wait for an opportunity to escape.

Which came when Virmir reached the end of the hallway. Except that there was no more door to the stairwell, unless it was cleverly hidden. There was only a windowsill.

Virmir reached up and clawed at the window, trying to pry it open, as the men saw where he was and ran towards him. Then he stopped, breathing hard with exertion, and ignited a fireball in his now-dry hands and hurled it up at the window. It shattered, the air shimmering around the empty frame in a heat distortion, and Virmir hauled himself up to the sill and scrambled through just as the men caught up and lunged at him.

The sounds of traffic and of wind rushing through skyscrapers reached Virmir’s fox ears, and the breeze rustled his fur as he edged sideways along the outside of the building. One of the men stuck his head through the window and looked out at Virmir, the light glinting off of his sunglasses. “Come back, Mister Robinson,” he said. “We want to help you.”

“Interesting way … ” Virmir gasped for breath. ” … you’ve got of showing it!” His muscles were all trying to tighten up, after the way that he’d run full-tilt, and he did not need that now when he was ten stories off the ground. He tried to control his breathing, and to move steadily towards the next window.

“Mister Robinson,” the man said, “look down.”

“Why? What’s … ” Virmir’s voice trailed off, as he looked down at his feet. There was nothing below them but thin air.
The man grinned.

Virmir flailed wildly for a second, claws scraping the outside of the building, then fell like a rock. “Blaaaaast … ”
He smacked into something, and the world went dark.

* * *

Smells crept into Virmir’s nose, of rotting fruit and decaying garbage. Car horns and engines, the sounds of city traffic, came at him from the side. Virmir cocked one fox ear towards them, and felt something on his face. He reached up and removed it. It was a banana peel.

The three men were standing around him.

“Gah!” Virmir scrambled to his feet and tried to back up, but slipped and fell. He was sitting on his tail on top of a heap of garbage bags piled up next to a dumpster, and the one behind him had split open where he’d landed on it. His left hand was deep in a pile of unpleasant things, and he removed it and brushed it off on his fur before looking up at the men in black suitcoats. They were still just standing there, watching him.

“What do you want?” Virmir asked.

“What do you want, Mister Robinson?” It was the one in the middle who spoke.

“Do you want to go your whole life looking and acting like this?” The one on the left.

“A cartoon fox, in a world designed for human beings?” The one on Virmir’s right.

“You can’t go on like this forever.” All three of them spoke at once, now.

“I’ve done a good job of it so far … ” Virmir tried to stand, and had to lean up against the dumpster for a second and wince. He had a headache so bad that it made him dizzy, and on top of that he felt exhausted.

“Because nobody else sees you as a fox,” the one in the middle said.

“Exactly,” Virmir said, rubbing his forehead, then looked up and squinted at him. “Are you saying that some people can?”

“It’s a rare person who sees himself for who he is,” the one in the middle went on, as a skeptical young human’s face reflected back at Virmir from his sunglasses. “It’s an even rarer person who sees others for who they are … Mister Robinson.”

“Instead they see … discrepancies,” the one on his left said. “Things that don’t add up. Things that contradict the person they ‘know’ that you are. Things that contradict the way that their world works. They won’t see you any differently, but they’ll know that you live in a different world than they do.”

“People don’t like their world to be threatened,” the one on Virmir’s right said, as though he knew right where the other would leave off. “They don’t like it when someone else doesn’t play by the same rules they have to. They’ll react. Violently, if necessary.”

Trying to look back and forth between them was making Virmir notice his neck ached as well. He clutched at his forehead and winced, closing his eyes and trying to put as much weight on the dumpster as possible. “So some people will notice me and attack, or something?”

“‘Attack’ is such a harsh word, Mister Robinson … ” The voice from in front of him. “More like ‘deny privileges to.’”

“Privileges like friendship.” The voice to his left.

“Money.” The voice on his right.

“A home.”

“A job.”

“A life.”

“A mate.”

Virmir’s ears pricked back and forth, trying to follow which one was speaking. When they were silent for a second, he looked up. The man in the middle was smiling that plastic smile again, and holding out one of his hands to Virmir. In his palm was a large blue pill.

Virmir took it with his clean(er) hand, and gave it a weird look. The man to his left handed him a full paper cup from the water cooler, and he took it without thinking about it. “So wait. You want me to just take something that’ll make me forget about all this?”

“Oh, no, Mister Robinson.”

The one to his left spoke up. “We have other ways to make people forget things they need not see, and places they need not be.”

Virmir gave them a droll look. “Then what’s this?”

“A choice, Mister Robinson.” The man grinned. “To have things return to the way they were-”

Virmir shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“-when you want them to be that way.”

Virmir gave the man a bewildered look. He went on. “You don’t even know what’s happened, do you? You just know that things are different now. And different is not safe.”

“This will allow you to be different when you want to … ” the man to his left said.

” … in the comfort of your own den,” the man to his right finished.

“And then to be the person that others expect, when it would be dangerous not to do so.” The man in front of him smiled.

“And that’s all it will do?” Virmir asked.

“Of course.”

Virmir had half a mind to just tell the man what he could do with that pill. But something made him hesitate. Maybe it was the fact that he really did not know what had happened, not on an intellectual level, and his instinct was hazy right now. Maybe it was the splitting headache he had, that was keeping him from thinking clearly. Or maybe it was the way the third man had said “den” … as though he were acknowledging that Virmir really was a gray fox.

Virmir saw, in the polished shoe of the man in front of him, a warped, fishbowl view of his cartoon self. And behind him, his human self in shirt and tie, waiting with arms folded to get back to work. The self that his coworkers saw … that’d he’d tried to be, every day, before he’d remembered to be his real self.

That’s when Virmir knew what he had to do.

First, he drank all the water, and tossed the cup away. Then, smiling, he placed the blue pill on the street in front of him. The men around him raised their eyebrows, and frowned. “What are you-”

WHAM.

From the same place that Virmir was storing his wallet and Palm Pilot, he produced an enormous mallet and brought it down on the pill, smashing it. Then he stood the mallet upright and leaned on the handle, and grinned. “Thanks for the help,” he said. “I feel a lot better now.”

The three men sideyed each other.

“Anything else you need?” Virmir asked.

The one in the middle coughed, and straightened his tie. “Mister Robinson,” he said. “If you’ll recall, we mentioned that some people might react … ”

“Violently?”

The men nodded.

Virmir ignited a flame in one hand, and smiled up at them. “Bring it.”

* * *

“YAAAH!”

A fireball flew past as three men in suitcoats piled unto the back seat of an unmarked black sedan, their sunglasses crooked and smashed and their faces black with soot. The last one in hastily doffed his burning jacket and slammed the door shut, just in time for a mallet-shaped indentation to appear in it.

Tires squealed and exhaust spewed as the car took off. Virmir smashed one of the taillights with his hammer before coughing, and moving out of the way of the gray cloud left behind. “Fun times,” he said, smiling weakly and coughing again. “Fun times.”

His ears perked towards the sounds of horns honking and more tires screeching in the distance. Then they faded into the background of city traffic, and Virmir was alone in the alley.

He looked up at the side of the skyscraper he worked in, leaning on his mallet and trying to catch his breath. Then, finally, he put the mallet away and walked down the alley, heading back toward the building’s front entrance.

The guard raised an eyebrow at him, as he slid his card. Inside, people waited to take the next elevator rather than share one with someone who smelled like garbage. Alone in the elevator, Virmir examined his cape and sniffed at himself, and his nose wrinkled.

The sun was beginning to set past the buildings outside the window as Virmir walked back to his workstation, in the now-empty cubicle farm. Without sitting back down, he reached up and woke his computer from sleep mode, then saved the project he was working on and logged out. One eye fell on the books stacked up on top of his chair, as he did so, and he looked at them for a long moment. Then he walked out.

The train ride home seemed to take forever. People refused to sit next to him, which was just as well since he needed someplace for his tail to go now. But they also kept glancing in his direction. A child pointed at him and whispered to her mother, and her mother whispered something back, but she continued to stare at him afterwards.

Virmir didn’t know if the attention he was getting was because he looked beat up and smelled bad, or if it was because they could tell something was different about him. Either way, after a couple of minutes he felt awkward and uncomfortable, and wished that he could just blend into the background and wait for his aches to subside.

Virmir reached around behind himself, and spend a few seconds pawing at the folds of his cape before coming back with his Palm Pilot. He turned it on and tapped on the book reader app with his claw, but then he couldn’t make himself read anything. Instead he could only look at his hand and his claws, tapping them against each other and drumming them on his leg.

Virmir fumbled with the stylus for a moment, trying to pull it out of its slot, before finally just pressing the “Home” key and then tapping the picture viewer with his claw. A list of thumbnails came up, and he tapped on one of the drawings he’d done of his cartoon self not too long ago. He looked between it and his reflection, comparing the two with an artist’s eye and not sure which one he was checking for discrepancies.

Then it hit him. His coloring had become flat, as though he’d been colored in a vector graphics program. The drawing he’d done had better shading than he himself did.

Virmir ran one hand along his arm and could feel individual furs, but he couldn’t see them anymore. He turned off his Palm Pilot and looked between himself and his reflection, scared all of a sudden and wondering if he was just going to fade away. Then he slumped back in his seat, worn out and disgusted and not even caring that he was squishing his tail. He just wanted this day to end.

* * *

It was cold and quiet outside Virmir’s house. Dried leaves crunched under his feet, and puffs of white came from his vulpine snout. His long ears heard the songs of crickets chirping, but also that blasted dog that kept coming by and barking at Terra, his German Shepherd. His ears flattened, as he spent a whole minute listening to it louder than ever before, and fumbling with the folds of his cape and the fur on his back trying to pick out his house key.

He finally got it out and walked up the driveway to the front door. The outside light came on as the motion detector “saw” him, and in it he saw that there was a package leaning against the doorstep.

Virmir’s ears perked.

He hurried up to the front door and started using the jagged edge of his house key to cut the boxing tape. Then he looked at his hands, and just tore it open with his claws. His ears were starting to freeze by the time he pulled it out of the box: His commission, just like he’d asked for, of his gray fox character looking confident and adventurous. And it was drawn even better than he could’ve done it himself.

His tail started to swish happily as he looked at it, running his thumb over the cardstock and feeling the actual materials used. His cartoon fur fluffed out and became visible again, and his cape straightened out and became shiny. By the time he got to the note that said “Keep being awesome!” his dynamic lighting effects had returned, and he noted them with approval, looking down at himself and at his reflection in the glass on the screen door. He grinned, and his eyes and fangs shone.

An hour later he was cleaned up and wrapped up in warm, fluffy towels, his tail beside him on the couch. He set his plate with the scraps on it on the floor, and patted Terra on the head as she scarfed them. Then he stretched, and woke the notebook computer on the tray in front of him from sleep mode by tapping the external keyboard.

In a chat room attached to Virmir’s website, his online self posed dramatically, spotlights shining on him as he entered.

“Hey!” someone said. “How was your day?”

“Great,” Virmir said, and winked.

My parents weren’t there to see me off. There hadn’t been any time after the test had been done. I’d only had a few minutes to grab my belongings, and no one else had been in the house. Besides that, it was a military train station, not a light rail depot. My parents probably didn’t have clearance. No one else’s families seemed to be there, either.

Guards stood around us as we boarded, wearing thick ceramic plates and carrying the kind of rifles that shot your soul, not your body. Between them and the steel-armored maglev, huge and intimidating up close like a dinosaur’s flank, I nearly had a panic attack just getting on the train. It felt like stepping into a cage … or being shoved in, as the case may be.

Still, once I was inside I felt safer. It was cold with air conditioning, and echoey with the metal clanks of walking, but it reminded me of a subway car without any advertisements. Even better, it looked like the kind of train where you got your own compartment. An unarmored soldier showed me to mine, and I sat down on the thin cushion fidgeting nervously.

Now that I knew it was there, I could feel the animal inside my heart, frightened and begging for someplace to hide. I knew it was alien — it was the problem — but for now I didn’t protest. I let it be scared, and I drew my knees up to my chin and hugged them, closing my eyes and blocking the world out. And when the door shut, and left me alone in there, I let out a sigh of relief.

I looked out the bulletproof glass at the concrete side of the station, and thought of what lay beyond … what lay outside the city. But if this was a cage, it was keeping me safe inside it. And from now on, whatever happened to me was out of my hands.

Somehow, I found that prospect both relieving and frustrating. It meant that I was just a passive observer. No guilt, no reason for people to claim that this whole deal was my fault. I didn’t ask to be tainted with an animal spirit, it just happened. I didn’t ask for treatment, I just needed it. And I didn’t want to go outside, but that was the only place I could be treated.

I wouldn’t have minded actually having some power over all this. But I didn’t. That seemed to be how things went in my life — always being dragged around by something or another. I was getting used to it, just like how I was starting to get used to the constant nagging fear that came with having an animal eating away at your human soul.

Well, at least one of those things would be going away.

I tried to turn my thoughts towards more pleasant matters by looking around at the scenery. But military trains are not the most visually stimulating places around, unless you really like looking at shades of gunmetal grey. On to plan B then — a nap, or as close as I could come to getting one.

Of course, the moment I closed my eyes, the door slid open. I opened my eyes and tilted my head towards the door, fully expecting a soldier. What I saw was a young man about my age (I wasn’t sure; I was never a good judge of these things) in civilian clothing. He smiled a forced sort of smile, and waved at me.

I bit my lip and looked out the window again. “Please don’t let him sit next to me. Please don’t … ”

He sat next to me. Of course. My heart lodged itself somewhere in my throat, and I did my best to ignore him lest it fall right out of my mouth. I might not have been keen on the idea of going on living at the time, but that seemed like an awful way to die.

“Um. Hi,” he said. His voice was quiet and subdued, like it was for most people with eidolic toxicosis. Spirit poisoning. “M-my name’s Leander. Everyone just calls me Lee though.”

Cue awkward but inevitable pause between the two of us, while my animal side screamed at me that he was extremely dangerous and I needed to run and hide. Just like it did for every other person I met. It was worse than usual now, maybe because I was cornered. After all, he was between me and the door, I didn’t think the guards would take well to me fleeing through the hallways in a blind terror anyway.

“So … what’s yours?” I heard him shifting in his seat.

I sighed and looked in his general direction, more at the fabric patterns on the seat than his face. Maybe if I played along for a little while he’d leave me alone, and I could go back to pretending he wasn’t there. “It’s Corrine.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you.” He didn’t sound like he meant it. I couldn’t blame him; it’s not like these were great circumstances to be meeting anyone. “So, do you live here?”

It was a ridiculous question, and he realized it if his frantic backpedaling was any sign. “Um, I mean, it’s just I haven’t seen you around. Did you, uh, move here recently or something?”

“No. Lived here all my life.” And good riddance.

“What school do you go to?” Ugh, small talk. He sounded about as excited about it as I did, more like he was reading lines off a page than putting anything into a conversation.

“I don’t.”

He stared at me, confused. I saw his face contort and twitch for a moment.

“Long story,” I offered, in the way of explanation. It was the most anyone would ever get out of me.

“I didn’t do too well in school either. Not with grades, but … you know.” His voice dropped into the near-inaudible range. “It’s why they, ah, had me tested. And now I’m here.”

I winced. Was I really that obvious? “Yeah. They never got me tested at school, though.”

“Then how … ?”

“Work. It’s required by law now.”

“Oh.” He looked down again, his gaze flitting back and forth like he couldn’t bear to look up at me for more than a second. “Sorry.”

Huh. ‘Sorry.’ Well, what else could you say to someone who had a spiritual tumor growing in them? “We’re all in the same boat here,” I said, the terror inside me quieting as I willed myself to believe it. “Er, train, sorry. Anyway, they’ll find a cure soon.” I was being hopelessly optimistic, if not outright lying. It wasn’t going to be soon, if the military was overseeing this like they seemed to be. They tended to be busy with other things, like the skinchangers. As long as we weren’t p-shifting and ripping their throats out, we weren’t high priority. Which meant we were probably getting shoved off to the outer world where they could forget about us.

“Right.” Sincere voice, suspicious body language. He could probably see right through me, even if I could read people I never was a complicated read. “So…have they told you where we’re going?”

“Outside.”

“I know that.” He crossed his arms. “But didn’t anyone tell you where?”

“I know about as much as you do.” I shrugged. “Which isn’t much. It’s the military, what were you expecting?”

He flinched again. “Could you keep it down? They can probably hear us.”

In retrospect, implying the guys with guns were anything short of open, heroic, and competent was probably a bad idea. “Sorry.” I mumbled and did a double-take towards the door. Still closed, and they weren’t beating the door in. So far, so good. Maybe I’d even get through the ride there alive, if the train ever left the station.

It wasn’t long before I was drumming my fingers against the armrest and scowling, quite against my own will.

“Nervous?” And here I was almost willing him out of existence. Drat.

“Yeah.” My rhythmic cadence had turned into a rapid-fire solo from one of my favorite metal songs. Blast beats for the win. “I just don’t like enclosed spaces.”

He laughed nervously. “Me neither.” He stood up, reaching into a shelf above us for his luggage. “Here, I’ve got something that can help…”

Naturally at this movement, the maglev lurched into movement, and he fell to the floor along with his bag. I’ll be honest, I laughed, but more of a reflex than out of it being any kind of funny. I much more carefully got to my feet, and picked his bag up from on top of him. “You alright?”

“I’m fine.” He said far too quickly. “Sorry, I’m not that coordinated.” He braced himself against the windowsill and placed himself back into his seat.

“No need to apologize.” His bag was a bloody mess. I could see notebook papers poking out the sides of it with illegible scribblings just about everywhere, including the margins. But then again, I wasn’t one to criticize organizational skills. But I wasn’t this bad…was I?

He stared at his bag. “Could you…”

My brain took a few moments to process through what he could possibly be asking for. And then the proverbial lightbulb went off. “Oh.” I dropped the bag in front of him.

He gave me a bewildered look in exchange, and picked it up. “I always carry around at least a few of these with me.” I heard papers rustling around, and from the debris he produced a stuffed animal of some kind of dog.

“It’s cute.” I said, not really sure what else he was expecting.

“She’s a jackal. Only one I’ve ever seen.” He smiled fondly at the stuffed animal. “She can keep you company. If you want, I mean.”

“Sure.” Why not? Maybe this would get him to leave me alone. And at least it seemed to brighten his day, his face sure did light up. He did an underhand toss and the jackal landed right in my lap.

“I’ve got a lot of these. I collect them. I even have a virus plushie, want to see?”

“No.” I did have a nagging curiosity about how that was even possible (what with viruses being a microscopic entity and all) but I was sure the results couldn’t be pretty. Assuming they were visible to the naked eye.

As I tucked her under my arms, I had to admit, she was soft, and fuzzy, and strangely comforting. I leaned up against the seat and stared out the window, the pine forests obscured by a shimmering eidolic hedge. Still, it at least seemed less claustrophobic. Maybe now I could get my nap. The animal in me seemed to be somewhat satisfied, at least.

Everything turned very dark– we were heading into a tunnel. Perfect for my nap. I stretched out as far as I could without kicking Leander. And then the train lurched to a stop again.

He blinked, looking out the window along with me. “That can’t good…”

In my personal experience, a situation is never so bad that it can’t somehow get worse. And I was proven right once again when the eidolic hedge powered down. Any feeling of security I had withered away and died. What was going to protect us now from all the skinchangers and raiders and Lord-only-knows-what-else lurking outside?

Safety lights flickered on in the hallways and the intercom crackled to life. “Attention passengers. There has been a mechanical malfunction on the maglev. Please remain seated until the problem is resolved.”

This was less than reassuring, but the howls coming closer and closer were a greater concern of mine. It meant one of two things– wild animals or skinchangers. I was praying for animals.

Leander didn’t seem to be doing much better. All the color drained from his face. “Did you hear that?”

I was finding it impossible to speak or make a sound, and merely nodded in response.

Outside I could hear feet shuffling around and eidolic bullets loading into gun chambers, the soldiers otherwise eerily silent. Their movements stopped. I could hear a dull click, click, click, like metal against metal. Then, the shattering of glass and screams. Some might have been my own, I wasn’t even sure at this point. My mind had placed itself somewhere far away and safe, where there wasn’t shouting and gunfire and more screaming.

I had only the vaguest perception of someone grabbing my arm. A few moments and I realized it was Leander, and he was yelling at me too and I wasn’t sure what he was saying. Somewhere in all the haze I realized he was pulling me towards the door and trying to open it. I guess it wasn’t working, because we weren’t going much of anywhere.

But it didn’t really matter now, because there wasn’t a door to speak of. The soldiers were literally up in arms and screaming. They were also being flung across the hallways as if of their own will. Then I thought I heard one saying “Protect the civilians!” but it was hard to hear over the gunfire. And I was so far away already.

Something– I wasn’t sure what, because I couldn’t see anything except a strange shimmer in the air like heat off the pavement in summer– caused Leander to lift straight off the floor. His hand was yanked from my grip, and I stumbled onto the ground. I got off better than Leander did. He was thrown against a wall, and stopped moving.

I felt another something brush up against my collarbone. And then a flash of light, and a yowl of pain, and the something became very clear. It towered over me, and had to hunch over to fit in the compartment. Its golden fur contrasted starkly against the grey of everything else around it, and its feline face had a savage look in its eyes. It was unmistakably a lion skinchanger. And I should have been terrified of it, but I wasn’t. The animal in me was silent for once. And something about it was morbidly fascinating, like how a flame must be beautiful to a moth.

Of course this thing probably wouldn’t burn me to death. I’d just get my head knocked off. It’d at least be faster.

The thing backhanded the last soldier standing, and turned back to me. One of my aunts had a cat before they became illegal, and that animal was an unrepentant mouser before everyone went into a mass panic and started exterminating mice. The way that skinchanger looked at me was exactly the same as how her cat would look at mice before it killed them, except it had a very human grin on its face. One with more very sharp teeth than I cared to think about.

It must have had some mercy in it, or it just got bored of tormenting me. I didn’t even see him move his paw to strike me, and it only hurt for a second before I fell unconscious.

Katherine Sato sipped at her styrofoam cup, the hot cocoa’s steam warming her muzzle. She blocked out the lobby of First Federal; the rows of tellers and lines of patrons; the obsidian floor, and the high glass windows that looked out on snow-covered skyscrapers. There was only her, and her wet coat and cold desk, and the delicious warm drink in her claws.

She winced, and squirmed in her seat, trying to get her tails comfortable again. They were still sore from where she had fallen on them. And they were dirty and wet, and the back of her coat was dirty and wet, and her hair was all dirty and wet too. At least her side desk faced out into the lobby, so that no one would notice. But she noticed, and it grated on her like her unpaid credit card bills, and her boyfriend’s unbought Christmas gift.

She found her claws digging into the styrofoam, and forced herself to relax. Zen, she thought. Clear mind. Nothing in the world except cocoa. Nothing in the world but expensive, overpriced-

She sipped a little too deeply, and started breathing through her muzzle trying to cool off her burning tongue. Good cocoa, she thought, and fanned cool air onto her tongue. Very good.

Stupid Kath.

Something made her tails twitch and her ears perk, and she looked up to see an unusual presence enter the building. It wavered like it was out of focus, and she shifted gears back and forth with her mind to look at both sides of it, like she would have at one of those books with the 3d illusions. One side was a young man in a business suit, clean and executive looking. The other side was a Kitsune like her, with brilliant white fur that had a golden sheen. But he only had one tail, and his clothes — his real clothes — looked old and cheap. A worn out jacket covered a thin t-shirt, and a pair of jeans that went down over his shoes.

Kath raised her eyebrows, watching him from across the lobby without his noticing her, and wondered what kind of prank he was trying to pull. She remembered her older Kitsune brothers’ dumb antics back home in Vancouver, and the thought of someone like them trying to pull something at First Federal made her grin with anticipation. Go ahead, she thought. Bring it on. We’ll see who has the last laugh — the foolish young fox or the corporate behemoth.

Over the next few minutes, she kept glancing up from her paperwork to see how far he had gotten in line. A fox scent drifted towards her, on the cold air blown in by the doorway, and she detected a hint of forced confidence, overlaying an intense nervousness. She began to sweat as she realized that, because it made her recall her Becoming, and she didn’t want to remember it. Or how scared she had been, or how much her brothers had tormented her.

Her conscience began chiding her, and as always it had her mother’s thickly accented voice. “He is scared young man who has first Become, and you are just to ignoring him? You should getting up, going over there, saying hello to him. Those papers will still being there when you are to getting back.” She imagined her mother’s tails fluffed out, as she folded her arms in a huff.

Not NOW, Mother, Katherine thought, and made herself focus on work. But her mind kept drifting off. Was he really trying to prank them, she wondered, or just trying on a persona? Did he have any foxes in his family? Had anyone explained to him what had happened?

A few minutes passed, a few frustrating minutes spent writing reports in Microsoft Word. Then something loomed over the flat panel display on her desk, and she looked up to see the other fox. He was projecting a sheen of businesslike confidence, so strongly that she could only see the young man in the suit coat.

His eyes flicked down to the nameplate on her desk. “Hello, Miss Sato.” He smiled at her.

His persona was strong, but felt so fake that it was off-putting. Just like most of the real execs I know, Kath thought. She vanished her own persona for him, letting him see her fox muzzle and three bushy tails, and relished the look of shock on his face. His persona flickered a moment, and past him Kath saw someone in line staring at his fox tail.

To his credit, the young fox recovered quickly. “Do they, uh … ” His eyes flicked to the side, and when he looked back down at her he seemed sheepish. “Do they hire a lot of Kitsune here?” He grinned nervously.

“Oh yeah,” she said, and typed something into her report. “Lots. We’re just all over the place here.” She looked up at him. “Can I help you?”

“Well I, uh … ” He coughed, and pulled up a chair to her desk. “I was told you had a job for me,” he said, and sounded like he was trying to be professional.

“Ah, yes,” Kath deadpanned, still typing and looking away from him. “Can I see your resume?”

He got something out of his briefcase, and slid it across the glass desk towards her. She took it and glanced at it for a second. High school graduate, Microsoft Office experience, last position held two years ago. Unhireable. No wonder he was trying so hard to fit in.

“I’ll make sure my boss sees it,” she lied, and put it into a drawer without looking. “If you like, you can take a card,” she said, and waved a hand at her business card holder.

He took one, and sat there looking at it for a long moment. Kath’s face started to burn, as she realized that he wasn’t going away that easily.

“Can I ask you a question?” he finally said.

“Make it quick,” she told him.

“How’d you get hired on, here?”

And Kath knew what he meant. He had just Become, after all; he had discovered his powers all on his own, and the world seemed like a new place to him. Kath remembered flying for the first time, and thinking her brothers could never find her up there. She remembered trying on new personas, and grinning at herself in the mirror, and discreetly playing with foxfire, careful not to burn anything important.

But she also remembered the shock of discovering that her brothers were Kitsune too, and that now that she knew they had no end of ways to torment her. She remembered how quickly her elation and self-confidence had worn off, and how the Monday after that weekend had been just another school day, and how her friends hadn’t even been able to tell that there was anything different about her.

She remembered her teenage years, and how irrelevant it had been that she was a mythical creature. Because nobody had liked her, and nothing could make up for that.

Kath remembered all this as she looked over at him, narrowly considering the naive young fox. And she knew that someone would have to burst his bubble, and that it’d be better done sooner than later.

“Fine,” Kath said. “You want to know how I got this job?” She stood up, and indicated herself from the neck down. “This is how I got this job.”

The young fox’s face turned red, and he looked away.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, her own face reddened, and folded her arms as she spoke. “You’re thinking ‘Oh, I’m a Kitsune now, the world is magic! My every dream can be fulfilled! I’m going to go in and get a job at the bank, even though I haven’t held a position in two flipping years.‘” She gave him a scornful look. “You think anything can make up for that? Or for your lack of a degree?”

He had clasped his hands in his lap as she spoke, and was looking down at them now. “But … ” He looked up at her. “Isn’t the world a magical place?”

“Yes.” She sat back down. “And you know what the magical force that drives this world is? Money. That’s why you are applying to work at a bank, and not at a dumb charity.”

“But … ” And now all she could see was his real side, his fox side, sitting in a chair that cost more than his worn-out clothes did. “Today I … I discovered that I can become anyone that I want to. And I flew. I flew under my own power! Does all that count for nothing?” He gave her a pleading look, and his voice cracked as he spoke.

“Have you tried foxfire yet?” she asked, abruptly.

“Fox … fire? No,” he said, twisting his face as he tried to think.

Kath held out her hand, and a flame the size of a cigarette lighter’s appeared in between her fingers. “This is foxfire. See? There it is,” she said, and idly played with the flame for a moment, a bored look on her face.

He held out his hand and concentrated on it, but failed to produce a spark.

“Know what it’s good for?”

He looked up at her, his eyes daring to hope.

“Setting off the sprinkler system, and lighting cigarettes. That’s it.” She snapped her fingers together, and snuffed out the flame. Along with his hopes.

He looked shocked and hurt, and Kath found that she didn’t enjoy that look on his face as much as she’d thought she would. She glanced back over at her display, and hoped that he would leave soon.

The corners of his eyes moistened, and his face twitched as he fought to maintain his composure. “I’ll show you,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I’ll show you what Kitsune powers can do. I’ll imagine myself as the brightest, most successful college student ever. I’ll get the financial aid that I need. I’ll ace every test, and I’ll get that stupid degree, and I’ll come right back here and shove it in your face.” He glared at her, his eyes wet. “And then I’ll rise to the top! I’ll-”

“Want to know a secret?” Kath asked, her hands clasped underneath her chin and her elbows leaning on the top of her desk.

He stopped, and gave her a confused look.

She beckoned him closer. As he leaned over the table towards her, she pointed out into the lobby, and he looked where her fingers were pointing. “See that lady right there?”

“The, uh, African-American one? In the red suitcoat?”

“That’s the one.” Kath looked up at him. “She’s a Kitsune.”

He stared at Kath, not sure if she was joking or not. Then he looked back out into the lobby and squinted at the woman she’d indicated, trying to see her fox muzzle and tails.

“She comes in here every week,” Kath went on, “to deposit her paycheck. Every now and then she asks us about a loan.”

“What does she do?” the young fox asked.

“Some high-level position. President, Vice President, VP of Marketing. I dunno. She’s gotten promoted a few times since I first saw her. Works at some Internet company.”

Kath followed his gaze out into the lobby. The woman looked like a lioness … poised, elegant and powerful. She looked like she didn’t have the time to be waiting there. And in fact, as he watched a man came out of a back room and greeted her apologetically. She forgave him and shook his hand, and then they went down the hallway together.

“I couldn’t see her tails,” the young fox said.

“That’s because she’s forgotten she has them.”

He recoiled, and stared at her again.

“That’s what happens, when you take on a persona so intensely. You become it, and it becomes you, and you forget who you actually are.” Kath continued to look out into the lobby, idly kicking her feet. “First you forget how many tails you have … then you forget that you have a fox tail at all … then you forget you can fly.” She looked up at him. “Go ahead. Ask her if she’s a Kitsune. See what kind of response you get.”

He stared into the hallway, visibly shaken, trying to comprehend what he’d just heard. “How … why?” He looked down at her. “Why would anyone let that happen?”

“Didn’t you just tell me, yourself? You don’t really want to be a Kitsune. You want to be another successful human, with money and power and fame. And you don’t mind having Kitsune powers, if they’ll help you accomplish your goal. But if they won’t, you’re willing to set them aside, and do whatever it takes.” She smiled at him, a sly kind of smile that enjoyed the horrified look on his face. “You’re starting to see how the world really works.”

He looked away and just stood there, his hands in his pockets, staring down at the floor. And after a moment, Kath turned back to her PC’s display, and started typing again.

The young fox mumbled something, and Katherine’s ears perked. “Excuse me?”

“You,” he said, and looked up at her. “How come you’re still a Kitsune?”

She gave him an incredulous look. “I beg your pardon?”

“How come you still remember that you’re a Kitsune? I mean, if that’s really what you’re supposed to do. Forget who you are, and forget you can fly, and do whatever it takes to earn money and buy things. Then why do you still have your tails?” His eyes bored into hers. “Did you lie to me, when you said your Kitsune powers don’t help with anything? Or when you told me that’s how the world really works, were you just lying to yourself?”

Kath stood up, kicked her chair back and gripped the edge of her desk. “Listen, you little snot!” He jumped back as her tails went ablaze behind her, the air rippling with heat distortions, and several people in line gasped. “Don’t you ever talk that way to me. Ever!”

She glared up at his shocked face, and her eyes glowed. “Yes, I have my tails. Yes, I have my stupid powers! But I also have a job, and a life, and a place to stay besides my parents’ house. And you’ll never have any of that, because you’re worthless! The corporate world doesn’t want you, and you’ll be lucky if you can find a job scrubbing tables at Arby’s! Do you hear me!? I said-”

A loud, beeping noise cut her off. And for a second she looked around, startled, before the sprinkler came on over her desk.

The people in line cried out in alarm, unable to see why her outburst had made the sprinkler system go off but able to see the results. Her tails went out, and her suit was instantly soaked through. A second later her computer fizzled and gave off a loud spark, then shut down. Steam poured out of the case.

The young fox was nowhere to be seen.

Kath stood her chair back up and slumped into it, soaking wet all the way through, as her mother’s voice chided her. “That was not a wery nice thing you did, Katerina.”

She sighed. It’s not a nice world, mom …

* * *

Two weeks later

* * *

“ … consumer confidence at an all-time low, as evidenced by this year’s dismal holiday sales. Macy’s and JC Penney’s have revised their fourth quarter earnings projections, and … ”

The TV newscaster went on, unaware that he was sitting inside of a beat-up plastic box on a bare wooden floor. The furniture had already been moved out, and Katherine’s things were piled up in boxes, hastily patched up with boxing tape and with black marker scrawlings across them.

She stood in the kitchen nook, wearing blue jeans and a white sweater with the sleeves rolled up, and mopped at her face with the bandana she’d been using to tie back her hair. Then she looked past the TV set out the window, at the tops of the trees on the street outside, and sighed into the telephone. “Hi, mom … ”

“ … been unable to stem the tide of rampant bankruptcy. Many lending institutions have been forced to close their doors altogether, including the First Federal Bank of … ”

“Yeah, it’s me.” Kath smiled a sad smile, and twisted the telephone cord around her finger. “Listen, can I … ” She coughed. “Can I ask a favor of you and dad? I kinda need a place to stay for a few weeks — maybe months — and I … ” Her voice cracked.

She turned away from the window and hid her face, as she started to cry uncontrollably. “I know, mom,” she said, her voice husky. “I know.”

“ … pleas for a bailout were soundly rejected by both parties. But leading analysts warn that if taxpayer money isn’t pumped into the system, and soon, the entire country could face a financial crisis.”

Kath sniffled, and tore off a wad of paper towels before pressing it to her eyes, and then blowing her nose on it. She kept the phone to her pointed ear, occasionally nodding to it. “Yes,” she said, and sniffled again. “Yes. Yes, I’m looking forward to your cooking, too.” She opened the refrigerator door. There were a pizza delivery box and a half-empty two-liter bottle inside. “Believe me, mom, I’m looking forward to it.”

“ … was brought to you by Consumer Refinancing Center. Got debt? We can help!”

“I love you too, mom.” She nodded, then laughed, then sniffled again and brought another paper towel to her muzzle. “Yes. Okay, I’ll see you there then. Do svidaniya!”

She hung up the phone, turned around and then stopped, taken aback. Floating outside her window was a familiar-looking young fox, leaning one arm on the windowsill and looking up at her blankly.

He didn’t move or say anything. And Kath finally stormed over to the window, unlocked it and pulled it upward, paint flaking off as she did so. Cold air poured inside, and she ignited a foxfire in one hand, to ward off the cold and ward back the intruder. “What do you want?”

“Do you need any help?” he asked, unfazed.

“What makes you think I need your help?” she said, and sniffed.

He said nothing, but looked past her. And she turned and saw the stack of boxes piled up against the wall, haphazardly placed and crushing each other.

Kath took a deep breath, then let it out in a sigh. She hung her head in defeat, and squeezed her palm shut to extinguish the flames. “Come in,” she said, without looking up.

He went around to the front door. And the TV played a commercial, that ended with scenes of a family playing on swings in a park. “So you can forget about your finances … and spend time on what’s really important.“

“Hayaikawa!” His mother pounded on the door again. “Hayaikawa Iwao! Come out of there at once! We’re not paying for your Internet if you’re not going to get a job.”

One ear on top of his head cocked towards the door. And a part of Hayaikawa’s brain, the part that hadn’t panicked, thought “Hey, that’s kind of neat.” The rest of him just stared at his fox ears and muzzle, and the white fur and claws on his hands, and the bushy tail that was brushing the bathroom wall as he crouched on the sink in front of the mirror. And he was so scared that he was starting to have those detached thoughts, because it was like the part of his brain that could think and the part of his brain that could feel were no longer speaking to each other.

“I wonder what my friends online will think?” the part of his brain that was still working thought, and it was like the thought just came to him without his having to think it. The rest of him was gripped with this panic that was just getting worse and worse.

More pounding on the door. “Hayaikawa! You don’t have time to be staying in there. I’m supposed to be at work right now. Come out of there, I still need to drop you off at the bus stop!”

“That would not be a good idea,” his brain thought, unbidden.

His throat began to tighten.

“What if somebody saw me?”

An animal whine started to build up in his throat, and he fought it back, not knowing what would happen if his family heard it.

“I mean, if you saw me, for instance. You’d start crying and screaming … ”

He tried to hold it back as best as he could, but his eyes began to water. He could no longer breathe.

“ … and you’ve already been mad at me for not getting the grades that you want me to. So what’re you going to do when you see … that … ”

The whine came out of his throat.

“What was that?” His mother was startled.

Hayaikawa jumped down from the sink and curled up next to the bathtub, hugging his shoulders and burying his head in his arms and rocking back and forth slowly, too terrified to do anything else. “Go away go away go away … ”

He kept repeating that in his head, as his fox ears cocked towards the door and listened to his mom and his dad arguing. They were talking about what to do with him, and they had switched to Japanese but he still understood most of it. So he knew that his mom was talking about grounding him for life, and his dad was being patient with her and suggesting that she wait on that.

Finally his mom left for work, and his dad knocked on the door. “Hayaikawa?” he asked. “Are you alright?”

“Go away go away please just go away … ”

“Your mother is worried about you. You’re not talking to us, and we don’t know what’s happened.”

The thought came to him that “I’d like to talk to you right now, but I don’t know what my voice will sound like and I’m scared that you’ll find out what’s happened.”

“She’s worried that you are using drugs, and are trying to hide their effects from us.”

“I’m not, dad. I’ve just been having these strange dreams lately, and they’ve been getting so real and vivid … ”

“I told her that that was preposterous, because our son would never do that. But it’s hard to defend you to her when you are refusing to talk to us.”

“ … and I learned how to control them, and I looked forward to them every night. And that’s why I started getting my homework done fast, so I could get to sleep and get back to the dreams … ”

“I would very much like it if you would talk to us.”

“ … and I never … I … I … ”

“Are you alright?”

Another short whine escaped his throat. He buried his face in his arms and shook as he cried his new eyes out silently, choking back the noise that he wanted to make and just screaming inside.

His father stood outside, saying nothing, the entire time. Then, finally, “I have got to leave for work, or I will be late. You have my cellphone number. Please call me and let me know how you are.”

Footsteps went away from the bathroom door. Then the front door opened and closed, and the car door opened and closed, and the engine started and his dad drove off. Hayaikawa was amazed at how clearly he could hear it all.

Then he heard a loud CLICK somewhere in the house, and it made him jump up and look around, fur standing on end. A second later there was another click, and then the heater vents turned on. Warm air blew into the room.

Hayaikawa huddled next to the heater vent, letting it dry his tears. He sniffled, and grabbed a tissue from off the sink to dry his muzzle with. Then another, and another, until he had a small pile of them. He threw them all in the trash, and shivered next to the vent.

What was he supposed to do now?

The thought came to him that what was happening was impossible. Because of that, he realized, he had to be dreaming still. The thought gave him hope, and helped him to calm down.

How had he lost control of the dream? How had he forgotten that he was dreaming? Hayaikawa did not know. But he knew a few ways to find out.

The first way he knew was to look in the mirror. If he wasn’t himself when he looked in the mirror inside a dream, his reflection was always distorted, and he was unable to look at it clearly. Hayaikawa had already looked in the mirror that morning, but he wanted to be thorough, because dreaming could mess up one’s perception of time. (He made a mental note to make sure that the clock readouts made sense.) So he crawled back onto the sink, and looked at his face.

His face was not even the slightest bit human. It looked just like that of an arctic fox, with thin white fur that was tinged with ice blue. His nose was black and his eyes were brown, and he stared into them, seeing a wide-eyed fox on the other side of the mirror and unable to comprehend that it was him.

He touched the tip of his muzzle, and could feel the pressure placed on his nose bone. Then he pinched it shut and tried to breathe through it, and was unable to. Finally he traced one claw all the way up to his forehead, and it made him want to sneeze. A thought came to him, and he scritched at the top of his head, but he wasn’t sure what to make of the feeling.

He held up his hands to the mirror. They looked strange, but he could see them clearly, too. He did not have fingernails anymore, but dull claws, which he could not retract and which stretched out past his fingertips. And the undersides of his fingers and the palms of his hands were coated in black, leathery pads. He pressed his two palms together, and it felt like he was wearing gloves. But from the back, his hands looked almost normal.

So did his arms, except that they had thin white fur on them. These are my arms, he thought, looking at them. And yet they’re not. They weren’t like his face, which looked all fox. They almost looked human. He traced a claw along the top of his forearm, feeling the hairs part in front of it. And then he carefully pinched himself. It hurt, just like it always had, and he smoothed out his fur afterwards.

Okay … he thought, and looked in the mirror again. Now what?

Behind him, his tail swished, and he turned around to look at it. It was bushy and pure white, and looked spectacular. Hayaikawa wished that it weren’t stuck behind him, because he very much wanted to look at it. He reached around and felt it, running his hand all along it, and it felt fluffy and soft. But it was uncomfortable for him to do that, because his tail didn’t want to be pulled upwards in the arc that his arm was traveling. He let go of it and let it do what it wanted to, and it swished itself as he looked at it and grinned.

Hayaikawa sniffled and blew his muzzle again, then tossed the tissue into the trash and looked back up at the mirror. There he was, a real live fox, with ears and tail and a muzzle.

He shrank from himself, because he didn’t want to accept it. It wasn’t a thought so much as a feeling; his subconscious was scared, and wanted his human parts to be him, and to think that his fox features weren’t. It felt like it had been violated, and was refusing to let itself be this.

Hayaikawa closed his eyes, and counted to ten in his mind. And when he opened them and looked in the mirror again, he was the fox, tail and facial features and all. And he sniffled, and grinned nervously, and let his subconscious stop worring about “How can I be that?” and just accept that he was.

Then he hopped down from the sink, unlocked and opened the door, and went to go set up his webcam.

* * *

Hayaikawa took a whole slew of pictures of himself, after drawing the curtains and making sure that the front and back doors were locked. Then he realized that he hadn’t showered yet, and decided he might as well do so.

It took him a long time, because his fur wanted to tangle instead of wash. By the time that he finally got out he was covered in soaking wet fur, which stayed damp even after he’d used two thick towels. He wiped the fog off of the mirror and looked at his messed-up fur, and decided that it was a good thing that he’d already taken the pictures. Afterwards he put on his pants backwards, so that his tail would have someplace to go.

It was eleven o’clock when he finally ate breakfast. Sugary cereal didn’t appeal to him at the moment, so he fried up some vegetarian sausage instead. It was warm and delicious, and he didn’t even need to add cheese.

He tried not to think as he ate, because he knew if he did he’d be scared again. But he couldn’t help it, because his mind was starting to wander. “What’s going to happen to me?” it thought. “What should I do?”

“What can I do?”

He tried to think of a government agency he could call. Then he imagined men in black suitcoats quarantining his house, their guns photoshopped into walkie-talkies as people in spacesuits climbed through the windows. And he didn’t think that he liked that idea.

Try as he might, though, Hayaikawa couldn’t think of any scenario in which that didn’t end up happening. The only question was, what would he tell his parents?

He did not want to face them, because he was scared of how his mother would panic and he had no idea what his father’s response might be. So he decided instead that he’d write them a letter, and somehow manage to be outside the house by the time they came back home. He wasn’t sure how he’d get anywhere on foot in suburbia without being noticed, but he decided he had to try …

… after he was done on the ‘net.

It was easy to get distracted on the Internet, because Hayaikawa really wanted to be distracted right now. He didn’t want to think about what he’d have to do, or how badly things would turn out, or what sort of panic his mom would be in. So he sat there on the chair in his messy room, in front of his old computer, and played Flash games for two hours.

After that he decided he needed to start planning what he would do. He wanted to pace, but there was nowhere in his room where he could, so he crawled over the clothes and things on the floor and went out to the hallway. Then he started pacing, going up and down the hallway, thinking with hands clasped behind his back and occasionally fiddling with his tail.

He had to go someplace. But where? Who could he trust? Was there anyone he knew online well enough? Would his relatives take him in?

His tail really was fluffy, he thought.

Hayaikawa began pacing faster and faster, not because he felt nervous but because he was forgetting how nervous he was, and realizing that he wanted to be out and about. He included the kitchen and living room in his circuit, weaving around obstacles and moving them aside when he could, surprised by how good it felt just to move around.

The lights were off, and the only light came from through the cracks in the drawn curtains. Hayaikawa wanted to look outside, but he didn’t want to be seen in case a car was driving past outside. And he knew what he’d see out there, anyway … suburbia, with its two-car garages and seven-foot fences that went all the way down to the curb.

All of a sudden, Hayaikawa wished that his family still lived at their old house up in the hills. His mom had hated driving down their dirt path to get into town, then coming back home when it was raining and driving uphill over ice and slush. He remembered looking out the window at wet branches that brushed over the window, and clanked along the roof, and went on forever in the thick forest … and he remembered breathing onto the window, in the chill air, and drawing faces in the fog.

But he also remembered how he had cringed, as his mother had shouted and swore and stepped on the gas pedal, making the wheels whine as they struggled to pull their car up. And he remembered sitting there in the stuck car for over an hour, listening to furious silence from his mom and talk radio from the speakers, and waiting for his dad to come down there and tow them up. By the time his dad had shown up, he’d really needed to use the restroom, and the jarring motions of the tow cable on his mom’s car hadn’t helped matters any.

Hayaikawa remembered curling up next to the wood-burning stove in a blanket, sipping hot cocoa and thawing out from the cold. He remembered looking outside at the rain, and thinking of how it would snow soon, and of how much he loved to sled down the hill that his house was on top of. And he realized that he missed it terribly, and wanted so much to be out there again.

“Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do,” he said, talking aloud to himself and listening to the sound of his voice. It sounded like it always had. “I could go out and live in the forest … I’ve got the instincts for it, right?” And he knew that this was a big thing that he was suggesting, but it seemed so unreal that the impact did not even register. All he knew was that he had to get away, because being seen by his parents — or by anyone — was not an option. He didn’t want to think about what would happen afterwards.

Hayaikawa imagined himself catching rabbits, fishing with his bare hands, and climbing up trees to get away from bears. It didn’t seem like it’d be so hard. After all, foxes were designed to live in the woods, and he was a fox now, wasn’t he?

He set a pizza cooking for dinner while he thought about what he would do, and imagined himself living off of the land, running barefoot through the trees and starting a tribe of fox people with other outcasts like him. These thoughts kept him occupied, and helped to take his mind off of things. But pretty soon his mom pulled up in the driveway, and Hayaikawa took off for his room and shut and locked the door.

He knew that it didn’t make sense. But somehow, the thought of how he would deal with his parents didn’t seem half as upsetting as the fact that he’d had to leave that pizza behind.

* * *

For awhile, the house was silent. He heard his mom watching TV in the living room, and after a little while he smelled smoke and heard her open the oven.

When his dad came home they started to talk around the table while eating his pizza, and Hayaikawa realized that he did not want to hear what they said. So he put on his headphones and turned up his loudest MP3s, and played more Flash games with the curtains drawn and the door locked. Later on, when his dad knocked on the door, he turned the volume up even louder, until he couldn’t hear anything his dad was saying.

The headphones were kind of uncomfortable, since they weren’t designed to fit onto a fox’s ears. But he made himself tolerate it, because he did not want to talk to his parents. He couldn’t talk to his parents. He was barely sane as it was, and if he had to confront them and see their reactions he knew that he would break down again. And he did not want that to happen. So he turned up the volume as loud as it would go, and felt like a heel for it but knew that he had to.

Finally his parents went to bed. And he took off the headphones and sat there in silence, and knew that he was just delaying the inevitable. But he couldn’t deal with it now … he didn’t know when he’d be able to deal with it.

Hayaikawa was hungry, and his throat was dry. But he didn’t want to go out there yet, not until they were sound asleep. So he kept on surfing the ‘net.

An interesting idea occurred to Hayaikawa, and it was late enough at night that it made sense to him. So he went into his favorite IRC chat, and onto his favorite messageboards, and showed everyone the pictures he’d taken, just to see what would happen.

His thread didn’t get too many hits, and most of the people on IRC ignored him. But a few of them said “o.o;;;” and told him that he was amazing with Photoshop, while the people on the messageboards said “lol” and told him that’d made their day. One person posted a lengthy critique, saying that Hayaikawa should have used better lighting conditions, and that he could see the seam where he’d cut-and-pasted the fox’s head onto himself.

Hayaikawa was amused, and reiterated that he hadn’t used photo editing software at all. Pretty soon somebody called him on it, and made him take a video on his webcam. But his webcam was an older model, and was not very light-sensitive. And in the light of his 40-watt overhead bulb, all that could be seen was a blur.

Most of the people who’d clicked on the link stopped watching him, but a handful of them continued, in between doing other things. And when Hayaikawa finally held his flashlight right up to his face and waved at the camera, and spoke for the microphone, and held open his muzzle and ran his tongue along his teeth, they said “o.o;;;” again and started telling everyone else to watch.

Hayaikawa was sweating by now, but it was late and he didn’t feel he could back out. So he did his routine a few more times, and started taking requests like picking things up and balancing them on his nose. As time went on the requests got weirder and weirder, but it wasn’t until someone insulted him that he got embarrassed and turned off the webcam. After that, he watched people speculate as to how he had done that, and realized that he did not want to tell them.

He went back to the forums, to see that he’d gotten a personal message:

i kno that u did not fotoshop thos pics. u r a real fox n i believ that u r.

Hayaikawa grinned. But that grin was frozen on his face as he read the next part:

my dad works for the fbi. i am teling him about u. i traced ur ip adress so i kno wher u live. he is coming to lok u away 4 EVER.

Beter start runing

And Hayaikawa knew, in his head, that this person was just a troll. But that’s not what his heart thought. As soon as he read that, it said “I knew it. I knew this would happen. I’m dead. I’m so dead. My life is over, and I won’t even get to tell my parents how much I … “

He turned off the computer right there and curled up on his bed, rocking back and forth softly and holding his knees to his face. But he only did that for a second, because it reminded him of how long he had locked himself in his room, and when the last time he had used the restroom had been.

Hayaikawa got back to his feet, crawled over the piles of things on the floor and pressed one ear up to the door. When he heard nothing on the other side, he turned off the light, and carefully unlocked the door and went out.

* * *

When he got out of the restroom, it occurred to him that there was probably some leftover pizza in the refrigerator. He went down to the kitchen and got it out on a plate, then set it microwaving. By this time he was starving, but he was worried about the noise he was making, which seemed loud to his ears.

Finally, the microwave dinged, and he took the pizza out of it. Some of the cheese on top had charred, but it smelled and looked delicious, with tiny pools of hot grease amid deep-fried vegetables. Hayaikawa was about to start eating when he heard a door open elsewhere in the house, and his heart stopped.

He held his breath. He felt nothing but fear. His mind went blank. And the footsteps were almost there.

Hayaikawa dropped the dish next to the microwave, then dove behind the counter and cried “Stop!”

The footsteps stopped. Whomever it was said nothing.

Hayaikawa’s mind raced. He tried to think of something to say. “I … you … you can’t look at me right now!”

“What’s wrong?” It was his father’s voice, quiet as always.

Sweat poured down Hayaikawa’s sides. “I don’t know!” he cried. “It just happened!”

“What happened?”

“I can’t tell you!” Now he wanted to cry.

The footsteps came closer, and Hayaikawa panicked. “Please, stop!” he cried.

“I got up to make sure that I locked the car. I will not look at you.”

His father walked past him, opened the front door and went outside. There was the sound of a horn honking for a split-second, and the locks on the car cycling. Then his father came inside and closed and locked the door with his eyes closed.

He went back into the hallway without looking at Hayaikawa. And then he stopped there, as if waiting for something.

Hayaikawa let out his breath. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’ll tell you what happened tomorrow,” he said, without even thinking about it. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

There was a pause. Then, finally, “Good night, Hayaikawa.” His father went back to the bedroom, and Hayaikawa exhaled.

He sat down on the kitchen floor, his shirt soaked with sweat, too exhausted to do anything else. His eyes flicked up to the clock on the microwave; it was late, much later than he was used to staying up.

He microwaved another slice of pizza, then ate it and got out another. A little while after that he went to bed, so tired that he couldn’t think straight. His last thought before falling asleep was that he’d committed to showing himself. But somehow, the thought no longer held much fear for him.

* * *

That night, he had control of his dreams again, and imagined himself becoming a human. The next morning, the start of the weekend, he woke up to find that it’d come true. This made explaining things to his parents a bit awkward. But he made french toast for them, and helped clean the house, and got all of his homework done early so that they could go watch a movie together. They all had a good time, and his parents soon forgot about the whole incident (or at least acted like they did).

Hayaikawa, however, did not. He still had those pics, and when he logged on to check his email he found that he had quite a following. But as the months went on, and turned into years, they forgot about what they’d seen, and explained it away in ways that made sense to him. Later on he was amused to hear people tell him about “the guy who put uploaded vids of himself as a fox,” and to see how many hits those videos had.

He never gave any sign of recognizing his fox self, except for a knowing grin. But later on, when he’d moved out to live on his own, more videos started to circulate on the Internet, from the mysterious real anthro fox. Who knew how to mask his IP address, just in case.

And that real anthro fox was soon joined by others …

The world was a blur.

Lawrence blinked the tears out of his eyes and kept pedaling. The trees swept past him, the branches whipped at him and slid over his helmet, the wind rushed past his ears and the speed — the flying sensation of riding a bike — told him he was going way too fast for this narrow path, and he was going to get himself killed.

He didn’t care. He vaulted a short hill and splashed into a puddle, and brown water soaked the front of his pants legs and splashed the lens of his welder’s goggles. And he just kept going, as it trickled down the lens and across the backs of his hands, rippling in the wind and then flying off to splash onto the leaves behind him.

He didn’t stop until he saw the wolf just down the path.

Lawrence pulled on one of the handbrakes. He realized too late that he’d forgotten which was which, on this new mountain bike, and sent himself flying as the front wheel locked up. He tumbled over the ground, splashed into another mud puddle and cut his leg on a sharp rock, so fast that he didn’t have time to cry out. His bicycle bounced off the ground and landed right next to him in a heap, the back wheel still spinning and chain still rattling, and the only thing left of the wolf was the sound it made crashing through brush to escape.

Lawrence jumped back to his feet, scared and confused, a jumble of emotions and impulses. He checked himself over and didn’t see anything wrong; the cut was on the back of his lower leg, and the pain hadn’t registered yet. He stood there, hands on his knees, gasping for breath and trying to reassure himself that he wasn’t dead. And he looked at his bike, at the metal contraption sprawled out beside him, and could only think I am so glad it didn’t land on me.

Then he remembered the wolf, and all of a sudden he held his breath, for fear that it was still nearby and he’d drive it away even further. His heart was still racing from the accident, and he tried to take slow measured breaths, to get enough air without making noise. The wheel of his bike was still spinning, and he reached out and stopped it. Now the world was quiet, and wind rustled the forest as birds sang above him.

He took his helmet and goggles off, wiped sweat from his brow and looked out into the woods, having trouble controlling his breathing. He wanted to see if the wolf was still there. He had to know if it was still there. He wasn’t afraid it would eat him. He was afraid that he’d scared it off. He could still remember the look on its face, eyes wide and ears swept back, as it’d seen him barrelling down at it on his mountain bike.

Lawrence had seen coyotes before, down in the hills; small dog-like things, not much bigger than a housecat. They were skittish, and ran off when he got near them. This had been a wolf, almost as long as the trail was wide. And if his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on him, it had not been a common gray wolf. It had been a red wolf, a member of an endangered species that had been hunted down and nearly killed off by humans. A creature rarer than hen’s teeth, that he’d never come across in a zoo and had known he would never see in the wild.

A creature that he was in awe of. That he personally identified with. And that he had just frightened away.

Long seconds passed, as squirrels peeked out of their hiding places and bees crawled over weeds on the path. And Lawrence found himself fighting back tears again. Because he could imagine them standing next to him and mocking him again. Making fun of how pathetic he was. Laughing at how he drew pictures of animals instead of plowing them over in Hummers.

The last time he’d gone riding with them, out on the country roads, they’d hit the brakes and backed up to run over a turtle. A little girl had been standing on the side of the road watching it, and he still remembered the hurt look on her face as they laughed at her and took off.

They would have charged ahead whooping and hollering, as the wolf took off into the woods. Maybe they would’ve shot at it, with BB guns … or .22s. And they would have laughed at Laurence’s wipeout, because it wasn’t something a real man would have done. Only a dumb furry.

They wouldn’t have even known what it meant if he hadn’t told them.

He couldn’t believe that he’d told them.

* * *

Lawrence sat there in the dirt, letting the tears out and shuddering. After about a minute he noticed his leg was cut, and while it didn’t look life-threatening it was long, and bleeding, and stung like crazy — a fact that he’d just now noticed.

The pain brought him back to reality. He didn’t have any water to wash it with, or anything with which to bandage it. He stood up to examine his bike, and as he did so his leg stung sharply, making him wince. His bike looked intact, but there was no way he was stretching his leg out to pedal it. And he was at least a mile from home, across the muddy trails behind the house.

He gingerly began to stand up his bike, trying not to pull any muscles in his hurt leg, knowing that he’d need something to lean on for the long walk home. But it was harder than he’d thought, because it’d gotten stuck on something and its center of gravity was towards the other end. He tried to move around it, but pulled on his hurt leg by accident and fell on top of his bike, in a crash of metal and pain.

Sprawled out on top of it, hearing the sounds of the forest around him, feeling the bike press into his organs — and the firey cut in his leg that was going to get infected — he wondered if it would be such a bad idea to just lay there and wait for something to eat him.

He imagined what the others would’ve said; bitter, hurtful and mocking. Those were the sort of words that were supposed to make you get up and fight, just to spite them. But somehow, he couldn’t find the energy.

Then he imagined what his friend would have said. His real friend, his best friend, his friend who’d always been there for him. Who’d expressed her doubts about his latest “friends.” Who’d gotten into arguments with him over whether or not it was a good idea to try to impress them. Who’d never gotten mad with him, even when he’d told her what he thought of her, and the words had been not his but theirs.

He imagined her standing there right now, looking down at him, a look of concern behind her glasses. “What are you doing?” she asked.

He mutterred something incoherent.

“You need to get up,” she said. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

Lawrence stood up. He did it under his own power, even though it hurt, because he didn’t want her to strain herself.

“That’s good,” she said, and brushed her long hair out of her eyes. “Now pick up your bike. I can’t carry you the rest of the way to your house.”

He limped around to the other side of it, and pulled it back upright. Then he situated himself so that he was leaning on it, holding onto the handlebar, facing the way he had come.

“Is there anything you’d like to talk about?” his friend asked.

She kept him company for the next hour or so, as he limped over the trail. He told her everything; his doubts, his misgivings, his pain. And she was forgiving and patient, but she asked him a lot of hard questions, that he spent a long time thinking about. When he said something that did not seem to work, he pretended that he hadn’t, and tried it a different way. And somehow he felt that she knew he was doing that, but was playing along for his benefit.

After a while Lawrence wasn’t sure what else he could say to her, and she politely bid him farewell, letting him know that she looked forward to hearing from him. He looked down at the wheels of his bike, now caked with mud and debris, and realized that it was slowing him down more than helping him now.

He walked another ten feet with it, until he got to a fallen branch about an inch or two across. Then he leaned his bike up against a tree, and picked up the stick, testing its ability to support his weight before breaking the twigs off and leaning on it.

His younger brother ran up to tag along with him, in his mind’s eye. “Your friend told me you aren’t hanging out with those kids anymore,” he said.

They weren’t exactly kids, but Lawrence nodded, gritting his teeth as his staff slipped on a rock.

“How come you wanted to hang out with them to begin with?”

“Sometimes,” he took a breath and staggered forward, “when you’re surrounded by people who act a certain way,” he staggered again, “it starts to make sense after awhile.”

“So it’s sorta like peer pressure, huh?”

“Yeah.” The sun was setting behind the trees, and he knew that he’d have to hurry to get home before dark. Lawrence braced himself, then tried to walk normally with his staff, on a level stretch of the path. It worked … his leg did not seem to hurt as much now.

“What happened to your leg?” His brother peered at it, with the morbid fascination that little kids have with blood and injuries.

“Wipeout,” Lawrence told him. “Major wipeout.”

“Awesome.” His brother grinned.

“Yeah.” Lawrence winced. He couldn’t talk much while he was trying to walk on his hurt leg.

“Did you hit a rock or something?”

“No. I saw a wolf in the middle of the path. So I braked to avoid hitting it.”

“You saw a real wolf out there?” His brother was wide-eyed with fascination.

Lawrence told his brother what it’d looked like; the scared look on its face, the gray-red fur of its pelt. The way that it’d taken off when he’d wiped out. And, cautiously, he began to explain why he was so interested in them.

“So you pretend you’re a wolf, on the Internet?”

“Pretty much.” He stepped around a thick root, which was snaking out into the path. “Sometimes we play pretend. Sometimes we write stories, or draw pictures. Maybe someday I’ll have a fursuit — it’s like a big costume.”

They walked in silence for a moment, before his brother said “I wanna be a wolf too.”

Lawrence grinned.

* * *

The two of them walked and lost all track of time, the injured red wolf who leaned on his staff and the energetic young pup, who pounced on anything that moved. The walking had long since become rhythm, and Lawrence could imagine himself as his fursona — as a living, breathing, anthropomorphic red wolf, whose face looked just like the one that he’d seen for a second. He could imagine the way that his ears would move, and his tail would swish, and his fur would ripple in the breeze. And he could imagine the way that it’d feel, to be so alive and so strong and so confident.

He clenched his free hand into a determined fist, and felt not fingers but thick pads and claws. His wolf-self would be able to handle a scrape like what he’d had. And would know how to apologize and set things right, with his family and with his real friends. And so would he.

By the time he got within sight of the edge of the forest path, and bid his brother farewell, he felt like he’d been transformed, in a very real sense. He felt that he could stand up to those people, who were cruel to both people and animals and who’d mocked him for things they did not understand. And as soon as he got his leg treated, he wanted to spend some time with his brother, and call his best friend on the phone. He had a pretty good idea of what he would say to them. And, hopefully, how they would respond, as well.

He inhaled deeply through his muzzle, nose wet with perspiration and breath billowy in the cold, and looked out across the last twenty feet of the path. The illusion was partly dispersed as he stopped to think about it, but it came back to him as soon as he started walking again. He was almost there-

Something rustled, along the path to his right.

Lawrence turned and looked. And there, not ten feet from him, was the red wolf he had seen down the path.

It had a squirrel in its jaws, its bushy tail hanging limply from them. And it had the most shocked look on its face, like it’d been caught with its paw in the cookie jar. Lawrence froze, as his heart leapt into his throat.

Slowly he reached for his pocket. Carefully he pulled out his camera, hoping against hope that it hadn’t been damaged. He turned it on with a beep, and the wolf’s ears went back and its tail stiffened, as it stared up at him in fear.

He lined up the wolf in the viewfinder, and pressed the button. His digital camera made a noise like a real camera’s shutter, and the flash went off and lit up the whole trail. The wolf bolted, crashing through brush and running away from him. And Lawrence pumped his fist. “Yes!” he exclaimed.

His mood could not get any better.

Hastily, Lawrence cycled back through the camera’s options menu, to review the picture he’d taken. His hands were shaking, with the cold and with excitement, and it took him a few tries to press the right button. But when he got it to the right picture, he stopped.

There on the camera’s screen was a tall boy in a green jacket, with a pair of goggles around his neck. Holding a squirrel in his mouth.

Lawrence began to sweat. Then his skin started to itch, and he suddenly felt dizzy …

It was 12:00 AM on a Friday night, and if you stopped outside a white house in the country you could hear a guitar singing. “Magic” Mark Duncan was playing, his sixteen-year-old hands already callused and comfortable with the strings. And he wasn’t playing from memory either, but was lost in his own endless world.

He was all black jeans and metal band t-shirt, loose and way too big for him, with hair that touched his shoulders and got in his eyes and his face. He paused for a second and leaned back in his chair, stretching, and it spilled out onto the computer keyboard behind him. Then he sat back up, shook his head real fast to clear it, and got back to hearing this world that he’s in. His amp was plugged into the PC, and he strummed each chord into Audacity, recording his explorations for the rest of the world to see.

Feet brushed against cards and discarded clothes. Elbow nudged his top hat, upended right next to his keyboard. It was why his friends gave him the nickname. Sometimes he pretended to pull things out of it, and sometimes he actually did. But tonight, his friends were all on dates with each other, and he was stuck here playing the-

Blues? Forget those. Symphonic metal, soul-wrenching lows and soaring heights of dreaming and fantasy, reminding him that magic can happen. Distracting him, delaying discouragement, until he forgot it was there to begin with and was wrapped up in where the music could take him.

By the time he flopped down on his sheets, next to guitar magazines and sweatpants, he remembered nothing but music. The magical world was still with him, and as the GNOME desktop faded his PC’s screen into black, he knew that magic could happen.

Magic can happen …

* * *

He felt dead when he woke up. His body was completely limp, no energy left in it at all, and he wanted to fall back asleep before it persuaded him to get up anyway. What had gotten him up to begin with?

“Mark!” His sister pounded on the door again. “Mark, it’s 11:30 already. Get up so I can take you to get your hair cut.”

His hair … he didn’t want his hair cut. Sadly, his parents had scheduled it, and his sis wouldn’t let him sleep through it. She didn’t like that it was longer than hers.

He shifted around, trying to reach up and feel it, and something tugged at his behind. But he didn’t notice, because he was staring at his hands all of a sudden. They were wrinkled and gnarled, and he thought “How long was I playing guitar last night?” Then he blinked, and cleared his eyes, and saw something else in the light of the window above his bed. Something very Not Right.

He jumped up and leaned up against the windowsill, looking not at the garage but at his arms. They were covered in gray fur all the way down to his hands, and wrinkled unnaturally at the fingertips. They didn’t feel hurt or stiff. But claws curled out of his fingertips as he flexed his hands, and he stared at them.

A cat’s face stared back at him from the window, with green eyes and long, black hair. And his heart leaped into his feline throat and got stuck there.

“Mark! Come on, wake up!”

More pounding on the door. He tried to say something, but it came out as complete gibberish. The shape of his mouth was all wrong.

“Mark, what is wrong with you? Get up now!”

He flexed his mouth, wrapping his sandpaper tongue around it, coughing and swallowing and trying again. “Alrrright, one second … ”

“Did I just say that?” he thought. Mark stood up from his bed and stepped towards the door on reverse-jointed paws, and they felt strange and looked like they couldn’t hold him up. He held out his arms to step over the junk on the floor, but found that he didn’t need to, because his tail reflexively balanced him out. He could feel the new limb where there was none, but he was still too shocked to do more than just feel it, and let it do its own thing.

He looked down at his guitar laying across his chair, and at his desk and the upended top hat. “Maybe this was meant to happen.”

“Mark, come on!”

There was no time to question it. Given the choice between freaking out, not knowing what just happened, and acting as though he did know, he chose the latter. On a whim, he grabbed up the top hat and put it over his head, wriggling his feline ears and feeling the inside felt. Then he opened the door and looked up at his sister, who was now a bit taller than he was.

She jumped back, dropping the laundry basket that she’d been carrying and making a sound like he’d grabbed her by the throat.

“Good morrrning, Sara.”

The wrinkled sweats from the laundry basket were warm on Mark’s bare feet. He could see his sister’s black t-shirt and blue jeans, but the rim of his hat blocked out her face. He heard her struggling to form words. “Wh … wh … what happened to you?”

He tilted his head upwards, to look at her dark hair and makeup, and grinned at her. “Magic,” he said.

And from the look in her eyes, he could tell she believed him.

* * *

“I’ve canceled your appointment at the salon.”

Mark sat in a high-backed chair, hands clasped in his lap, tail swishing out lazily behind him between the chair’s wooden slats. Try as he might, he could not keep from grinning, even though he was scared.

“I called mom and dad. But I didn’t get a chance to tell them what happened, because they started telling me about this hurricane that just hit where they’re at. They’re stuck in Florida at least for the weekend. So we’ve got until Monday to decide what to do.”

He watched Sara pace, in front of the tapestry that hung on the wall segment that divided the kitchen from the dining room. Light shone in through the window, muted by the thick curtains. His sister had run all through the house, covering the windows and locking the doors.

She covered her face with her hands, and pulled downwards. “Oh man oh man oh man. What are we gonna do?”

“Let’s hold a cookout, and invite all our frrriends.” Mark’s grin widened.

Sara gave him a disdainful look. “Oh, sure. And maybe we’ll invite the MI5 over for mouse kabobs, too!” She threw her hands up in the air, and stomped off into the kitchen. “I can’t deal with this!”

But she could, Mark knew, and she was handling it better than he was. It occured to him that it was fun watching her panic. And it was a lot better than doing it himself. He decided to let her worry about everything, until he stopped being scared and was able to think.

He heard the kitchen cabinets squeaking open and shut. This went on for a minute or so, and he finally decided to see what Sara was up to. He hopped upright, amazed at how fast he felt and how quickly he regained his balance, his tail swishing out behind him. Then he padded out into the kitchen. The linoleum tiles were cool under his paws.

He saw her rummaging through the canned goods inside the cabinet next to the fridge. “What arrre you doing?” he asked.

“Seeing how long we can last.” She closed the door and stood up. “I’m going to try to convince mom and dad to stay there in Florida another week. It’s not likely to work, but it’s worth a shot.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll have to skip school … ” She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “I’ll make up an excuse and cover for you.”

Sara looked over at him. “You’ll make it through this somehow. I know you will.”

Mark wanted to cry all of a sudden, and he had no idea why.

* * *

Sara went out to buy groceries, and Mark spent two hours trying to shower himself. When he came out all his fur was matted, and his clothes felt wet and limp.

He woke his computer from sleep mode and sat down to it, but typing and using the mouse was a chore. His hand would not fit his optical laser mouse the right way, and he had to hold it two-handed just to get it to do anything. With his fingertips gnarled, he could barely type. And his leather chair wasn’t comfortable anymore, because his tail kept getting in the way. He tried to sit on his knees, but that way just pressed his reverse-jointed feet into the back.

Mark finally gave up and sat down on his bed, as the screensaver took over his flat screen. He stayed there for a long moment, thinking without words, letting his subconscious mind churn. It occurred to him that he was still in shock, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

He looked over at his guitar, where he’d set it on one of the piles on the floor. And he knew what was going to happen, but he had to try anyway. Numbly he picked the guitar up, made sure it was connected to the amp and turned everything on. Then he found his pick, and began to strum.

It felt like he had gloves on. He couldn’t carry a tune in these hands, not without learning all over again. Not without more years of practice. On a whim, Mark set the pick aside and tried to play using his claws. But then he snapped one of the strings, and the tune he was picking out SPROINGed to a halt.

He set the guitar aside and looked at it, overtaken by a strange feeling. He was still in shock, so he didn’t know why he felt this way … this strange mixture of fear and homesickness. But tears were starting to well in his slitted eyes.

The front door opened.

Mark wiped his face on his sleeve, and hurried downstairs to help put up groceries.

* * *

“I don’t know what you can eat, so I just bought whatever. Hope you like Spam.”

Mark picked one of the cans up and looked at it. All he could see was canned cat food.

Sara went back out to the car to get the rest of the bags. It occurred to Mark that he was hungry, and he thought about how he could open this can. His claws wouldn’t work, so he needed something to flip the pull-tab with, like a spoon or a fork or-

A knife.

He slid a long, sharp one out of the block and looked at it, fascinated by its gleam. He imagined himself actually trying to open the can with it, and slipping and cutting himself up, and the thought did not make him squeamish at all.

When his sister came back inside she saw him holding the tip of the knife towards his heart, a blank look on his face. “No!” she cried, and dropped all the bags and came running at him.

“She shouldn’t do that,” he thought. “What if I slipped and hurt myself?” But then she was wresting the knife from his hands, and he let go but his claws sliced her. Sara dropped the knife, and it clattered to the floor, and she clutched her hands as blood seeped through her fingers.

She looked up at him, and he looked back. Then she began to cry, and that set him off too. And in a second they were both kneeling there on the kitchen floor, holding each other and crying. Mark saw where she’d kicked the knife to, when she’d dropped to her knees, and he couldn’t believe what he’d been about to do with it.

“Don’t you ever do that again. Do you hear me?”

The blood on her hands was sticking to his hair. He nodded quickly.

“Promise me you won’t do that again!”

He nodded even more vigorously.

They sat there for he didn’t know how long, crying and holding each other, and he clung to her as though to life itself. Then she finally unstuck her hands from his hair and stood up, and he stood up after her. “Come with me while I lock up the car,” she said.

“What if somebody sees me?”

“I don’t care. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

He stepped out into the world and looked around at it, at the overcast sky and the fields and hedgerows and the house across the street. There was no one there, and there were no cars in sight. But he felt a rush of adrenalin at the thought of danger, and the thought that it was okay to be there.

There was a CLUNK of mechanical car locks, and then Sara shut the door. “Okay … let’s go back inside now.” She offered him her hand, and he clasped it in his, this time careful not to extend his claws.

“We’ll make it through this,” she said. “I know we will.”

His tail swished happily.

* * *

They stayed up that night playing Dance Dance Revolution, because neither of them could hold a controller. Then they played board games, and talked, and ate expensive cheeses and snacks while they watched movies. Sara’s friends called to ask why she wasn’t out with them, and she proudly told them she was spending time with her brother.

Mark grinned.

He went to bed that night feeling utterly dead, but glad to be alive. Glowing directional arrows danced in front of his eyes, and it occurred to him he’d been great at that game. “Maybe it’s the tail,” he thought. “I should do that more often.”

“We should do that more often.”

He closed his eyes, and was out like a light.

* * *

The next day he woke up slowly, still feeling tired, remembering what’d happened the day before. Daylight came in through the window, and was just starting to shine in his face. Mark winced, and put up an arm to block it-

His arm was human again.

He sat up and looked at his hands. Then he reached up to feel his face. It was the one he remembered having, with a bit of fuzz on the chin from not having shaved in two days.

Mark pumped his arm in the air triumphantly, and did an air guitar solo as he jumped back to his feet.

“Yesterday was fun,” he thought, as he came down the stairs a few minutes later. “Who would’ve thought that I’d know what it’s like to be a furry? Who would’ve thought that my sister was actually a nice person?” He grinned. “I think that I’m better off for all that.”

“I wonder if I could make it happen again?”

* * *

It was two minutes to the curtain call, and Three Layer Steak was running behind. Axel pounded on Kayleigh’s door, his keytar already slung over his shoulder. “Kay, hurry up!” he shouted. “We have to be there right now!”

Then she opened the door, and he gasped.

The trip to the country was my mother’s idea. My aunt and uncle owned a house about two hours out of town, built in contemporary style. She volunteered me to watch it for them, while they went on vacation in Hawaii.

I refused to go, at first. I needed to keep up with summer school, in order to get into Tokyo University. I knew three other boys from high school who were still taking classes, trying year after year to pass the exam. I didn’t want to end up like them, and I didn’t care what it took, or how many times I broke down. But she arranged with my tutors to let me submit my assignments by email, while I was away. And while I felt guilty for imposing on everyone, I was secretly glad to get away from it all.

No more hearing the twins fight over the DDR mats. No more hearing the rice cooker beep, or the TV hosts babble, or the door swing open and shut. No more feeling the pressure build up until I was ready to kill someone. All I had to do was keep up with my studies, and feed my aunt’s cat. Besides that, I could do anything that I liked. It would practically be a vacation.

I imagined that it would be peaceful and quiet outside the city. No pressure, no distractions, and certainly nothing weird happening.

* * *

My uncle was a gaijin who taught English at a school outside of town. He’d married my mom’s sister a few years back, and bought a house near the school where he taught at. I half-expected that it’d be a western design, a huge mansion with twenty rooms and an indoor swimming pool. But no; it just looked like any other house in its generic suburban neighborhood, with a ceramic tiled roof and dull pastel paint on the walls.

Their house was next to a rice field, and across from a baseball lot. There were mountains in the distance, but the ground nearby was flat. Several other houses were nearby, but it was a ways to the center of the nearest town, and I hadn’t brought my bicycle. I looked down the road, and wondered if I’d be able to walk. Probably not, in this heat … sweat was forming on my brow already.

“Are you sure you’ve got everything, Hiro?” My mom was getting my things out of the car.

“Yes, mother.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, mother.”

She carried my suitcase up to the front doorstep. I remembered when she was talking about my uncle’s courtship, how he’d carried things for my aunt and opened doors for her, and I wondered if she was wishing that I’d taken care of the packing. Then I wondered if she’d try to hug me farewell. But no; she bowed respectfully, and I bowed back.

“I’ll see you next week, Hiro.”

“I’ll see you too, mother.”

She got into the car and drove off, with a last look over her shoulder, and I found the right key on the keyring. Then I got the front door open, and stepped into the house of a foreigner.

I set down my suitcase and took off my shoes in the entryway. It looked fairly normal, with a pair of guest slippers right there on the step. I could see the living area just beyond, with mats lined up next to floor-to-ceiling windows.

The place smelled different, with hints of bamboo and straw instead of cooking rice and fast-food wrappers. I kept an eye out to see what kind of strange things this foreigner kept in his house, but the weirdest thing that I saw on the way to my room was an Xbox 360 hooked up to the television. Pretty soon I was in my new room, which was about as large as the living space back at home. I checked the closet to make sure that they had a futon I could use, then opened my suitcase and got out my laptop.

It was warm in there, but I could manage. And they didn’t have high-speed Internet out here, so that was another distraction gone. It would just be me and my schoolwork. For the first time since leaving home, I allowed myself a smile.

Then I heard a loud THUMP somewhere in the house. What was that? I wondered.

More THUMPs, coming down the hallway towards me. Is that their cat? I thought. That has to be their cat. But it sounds too heavy to be a-

Into the room ran a live catgirl.

I know what you’re thinking that she must have looked like. You’re wrong. She had the ears and the tail, but those were the only things “catgirl” about her. She was a lot shorter than I was, and looked to be about twelve or thirteen. And she had extremely long hair. But it was frazzly and matted, and her jeans and t-shirt were worn out. And she was very overweight. She had to stop and catch her breath, after running into the room.

I stared. Is that a catgirl? I thought. That can’t be a catgirl. She looks too-

She looked up at me, and our eyes met. I had no idea what she was thinking about.

As it turned out, she was thinking about less than I’d thought she was. She sat down on the floor with another THUMP, and looked up at me again. “Feed me!” she yelled, and gave me an expectant look.

It was a while before I could say anything in return. “What are you?” I finally asked.

“Feed me!” she yelled again, and her tail swished.

I slowly walked over to where she was sitting, but she did not move or get up. She just sat there and watched.

Her ears looked like a real cat’s. I could see the cartilage inside. I reached out and touched the fur on the outside, and her ear twitched and flattened. “Don’t do that,” she said.

“Sorry, I-”

“Feed me!” she cried.

I stared into her face, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on behind her eyes. She just stared back, still wide-eyed and expectant. And that’s when my shocked brain finally realized it. This girl was dumb as a brick, just like a real cat.

She nuzzled the side of my leg.

“Okay, okay, I’ll feed you,” I said, jumping back a step and trying to get past her into the hallway. She wouldn’t move, and I had to step around her. “Where do they keep your … uh … ”

“Feed me!” she yelled.

I got to their kitchen, sweating profusely. Why me?

* * *

I tried three different cans of cat food, but she turned up her nose at them. “These are yucky!” she said. Finally I opened a can of tuna, the girl practically hanging onto my arm as I did so, then dumped it onto a plate.

She picked up the plate in her hands, and gobbled the tuna in only a couple of bites, licking her lips afterwards. Then she gave me that expectant look again. We went through another two cans of tuna before she cried “I want something to drink!”

I gave her a glass of milk, and she guzzled it. Then she set it down on the table, and ran out into the hall. I stepped out of the kitchen in time to see the door to the toilet room close.

I just stood there, for at least a minute or two. This is impossible, I thought to myself.

The toilet flushed, and I heard the sink running. This is also ridiculous.

When she came out she didn’t even look at me, but just went farther on down the hall. I followed her into my room, where she flopped down onto my open suitcase and curled up on the clothes that I’d brought. She yawned, and fell asleep with a smile.

She’s acting just like a real cat, I thought, because my brain was taking a while to catch up. What has that foreigner done to her?

What’s going to happen to me if I stay here?

It took me a minute to get up the courage, but I slowly reached around her to grab my cellphone out of the suitcase. She barely seemed to notice. Then I ran outside, and I mean ran, just barely remembering to kick off my slippers and put my shoes back on. I tore out the front door, down the driveway that wrapped all the way around the house, and started gasping for breath right next to the street. A car drove past, but I didn’t see who was in it.

I looked down at my cell, and fumbled with the controls and the tiny display until I’d found the number for my aunt’s mobile phone. Then I punched the “call” button, and held the phone up to my ear.

It rang three times. Then it said “Hello! You have reached the voice mailbox of-”

I pressed “end,” and facepalmed. Of course. They were still on their flight to Hawaii.

I tried to think. Who else could I call? Finally I dialed one of my friends’ numbers, the oldest one who was still going to school.

It rang a few times. Then “Hello?” came my friend’s voice. I could hear battle music from Final Fantasy XI Online in the background.

“Daisuke?” I asked.

“Yep,” he told me, then yelled “It’s Hiro!” to someone else. I heard a clatter, and footsteps running up to the phone. “Hey!” two people said at once.

“Hey, Daisuke. Kenjiro. Um, I just got to my uncle’s house … ”

“The NA? Doesn’t he play on Sylph?” Daisuke asked.

I looked back at the house nervously. To my horror, I saw her peering around the corner. “Yeah. Um … ”

“What?”

She trotted up to me, and I panicked. “There’s a catgirl living in their house and she’s coming right at me!”

They both laughed. “Lucky you, huh?”

“No I’m serious there’s this girl and she’s like twelve or thirteen and she’s got ears and a tail and the brain of a refrigerator!” She stopped right next to me, I mean uncomfortably close, and gave me a blank look. I stepped back a bit. “Go on, say something!” I told her, and held the phone up to her.

“Huh?” she said.

There was a pause. Then I heard swearing on the other end of the line. “Dude, are you serious?” Daisuke asked. “And she’s like … they’re … ”

“Yes, her ears and tail are real.” I looked down at her, and saw that her tail was swishing. She was giving me a confused look.

“Take a picture!”

I barely knew how to use this phone, but I got it to take a few pictures and email them to my friends. By this time, the catgirl – whatever her name was – had sat down on the ground, and was pulling up clumps of grass and eating them. I’d had no idea that cats did that.

“I don’t believe it!” Kenjiro exclaimed, and he sounded ecstatic. “An actual Mithra!”

“A Mithra kitten,” Daisuke replied. They were talking about the playable catgirl characters from our online game. I was still watching the thing, afraid that it might touch me or something.

“Look!” I yelled into the phone. “She’s not a Mithra! She’s a … I have no idea what she is! I have no idea what kind of sick things they did to her. Maybe they fed her genetically-modified cat food. Maybe the radiation from their Xbox’s power supply caused a freak accident! But she’s here, and she’s alive, and we’ve got to do something about it!”

“Like what?” Daisuke asked.

“Like … like … I don’t know! But we can’t just leave her like this. She’s a menace to society! Or society’s a menace to her! Or something! I have no idea what I’m saying!” I shouted into the phone.

“Dude, chill out!” Kenjiro said. “You’re panicking over there!”

“Panicking? Who’s panicking? I just AAAAGH!”

Somewhere back in their Tokyo apartment, I just know that Daisuke and Kenjiro were giving each other a look that said “He’s losing it.”

* * *

“Bad kitty!” I shouted. “Bad!”

I’d been waving my hand in the air, as I’d been talking, and I hadn’t noticed her watching intently. Finally she’d leaped up and grabbed it, pulling me down to the ground and wrapping herself around my arm, biting and scratching. I’d freaked out, and tussled with her for a moment before throwing her off, jumping back to my feet and scrambling up to the house.

I stood there next to the wall, trying to catch my breath. She just sat there, a hurt look on her face, her ear smarting from where I had smacked her. “You’re mean!” she yelled. “I don’t like you!”

“I don’t like you either!” I shouted, wide-eyed with terror.

A tiny voice cried out. “What’s going on-”

I pressed “End.”

I ran inside, closed and locked the front door, then called my mom and begged her to take me back home. Then I ran back to the guest room and tried to get all the cat hairs out of my suitcase, before sitting there in a daze and desperately hoping that nothing else would jump out at me. My phone rang twice, but I didn’t answer it.

Finally I heard a car pull up in the driveway. I put my laptop back inside and snapped my suitcase back up, before I realized that thing was still out there. Once again I tore back outside, this time still wearing my shoes. “Mom!” I cried out. “Mom!”

There she was, all 4’10” of her, getting out of the car and giving me a strange look. “Hiro? What’s wrong? You sounded so worried on the phone.”

“Mom, we need to get out of here now!” I thrust my suitcase into her hands. “There’s this strange … cat … ”

My voice trailed off, as I looked down at her feet. There on the ground was a calico cat, an extremely fluffy and fat one. It narrowed its eyes at me, before rubbing up against my mom’s leg.

She reached down to pet it. “Is there something wrong with the cat?” she asked, a look of concern on her face.

“No, I … just … ” I sighed. “Please take me home, mother.”

I kept my eyes on the cat until we’d rounded the corner and pulled out of the driveway.

* * *

My mom decided to go back and take care of the cat herself. She felt that she owed it to her sister. I begged her not to go, but she did anyway, and left me at home to take care of the twins. Every day I waited for her to call and tell me that something bizarre had happened, but she never did.

The twins actually behaved themselves for once. Somehow, I was able to get along with them, even though they were on summer vacation. I think it helped that they went outside a lot. We played against each other a few times in Super Smash Bros. Melee, and I actually had fun with them.

As for my exams? I don’t know how, but I managed to study enough that I was able to pass them. Kenjiro and Daisuke congratulated me, even though neither of them had passed. I promised that I’d email them every day while I was at school.

They tried to get me to come back to the game. But I didn’t need an MMO in my life … I had bigger priorities now.

Like being active in our local kemono fangroup, and studying paranormal genetics.

The air was chill. The stars were bright. Toads qwerk-ed down by the pond; bats rustled and clicked overhead. And the forest was abuzz with a chorus of crickets, a soft and melodious din that almost drowned the other noises out.

But the only things Christopher Lander could hear were the pounding of his heart, and the rustling he made as he fumbled for his flashlight in the dark. Grabbing it in his teeth, still balancing the heated bag with the pizzas in one arm, he twisted it into the “on” position and then shone it onto his bare arm.

Brown fur. Just for a second. Brown fur. It receded into his skin, half of it turning back to his lighter hairs and half of it drifting away in the breeze. Then it was gone, and all that was left were his goosebumps.

Lander realized that he had been holding his breath, and gasped. Then he sniffled, and fumbled with his pockets again, trying to turn his flashlight off and put it away and get out a handkerchief. He brought it to his face, trying not to knock his thick glasses aside, blowing his nose and sniffling against the cold. Then he gasped for breath again, shuddering and scared, his heart still pounding fast.

He looked behind him, and waited for his eyes to adjust. There it was, fifteen feet down the road — the tree branch that he had just jumped over. And he remembered flying, flying for two seconds, then landing and realizing he couldn’t do that. And stopping, and feeling itchy all over, and hurrying to grab his flashlight …

He felt a draft. Then he whirled around to see what had happened, and his bare feet pressed onto rough pavement and loose pebbles. There was a hole in the seat of his pants. And he wasn’t wearing any shoes.

Lander knew what had happened. That was why his heart was still pounding. He was so scared he couldn’t think straight. But it had happened, and it wasn’t happening anymore, and the pizza was going to get cold!

The crickets chirped. And a gust of cold wind picked up, and reminded him that he had bigger things to worry about right now. He shivered convulsively, and straightened his glasses back out.

How? That was all he could think. What had made it happen? A latent mental disorder? The spoiled mushrooms he’d eaten on a coworker’s dare? Those had given him a stomachache, but he hadn’t thought they’d caused any lasting damage. And they couldn’t explain why he was barefoot, and why he was going to feel very awkward if someone suddenly drove up behind him.

He carefully went to the side of the road, afraid that he’d step on a bug or a nail, and faced away from the woods. Then he looked up at the sky. The moon was bright, and it lit up the logo on his pizza tote. But it wasn’t full, and even if it had been it was shining right on him, right now, and he didn’t feel any different. Not even the fact that it was Halloween night explained things, although it did make him feel nervous about standing around in the dark.

Lander’s stomach was tying itself into knots. He felt like he couldn’t move, couldn’t go anywhere or do anything until he figured out what had just happened, and then just as suddenly un-happened. Part of him was scared that it’d happen again, and wanted to know what had triggered it. But another part was scared that it’d never happen again, and that part was even more desperate.

He remembered the car engine had died, on the old, rusty station wagon with the parlor’s sign on the roof. He remembered nervously calling his boss, and being yelled at to do whatever it took to get that pizza there on time. And he remembered thinking it out in his head, and deciding that he could maybe get there if he hurried …

And then he remembered jogging. He remembered it being hard at first, because he was slightly overweight and spent his whole day sitting down. He remembered sniffling, and feeling like his ears were going to freeze right off in the cold, and speeding up so he would get warm faster.

And then he remembered how easy it’d been, and how alive and full of energy he’d felt. And he remembered seeing the fallen branch up ahead, and thinking I’m going to jump it. And then he had vaulted six feet into the air …

His breath caught. He knew now what had caused his change, and he knew what he had become. Of course he’d become that, he thought; that’d been his fursona for ages.

But why?

Another cold breeze. Lander was shivering constantly now, and was covered in goosebumps. And he realized that why wasn’t important right now. Because he was between his car and the house, and he was going to catch hypothermia. Because whether he came back as a kangaroo or sat in a broken-down car all night, sans shoes and with a hole in the seat of his pants, he was going to have some explaining to do. And because as afraid as he was of what might happen, the one thing that scared him the most was that it might never happen again.

He stood there for another few moments, building up his resolve. He looked down the road in the direction that he’d been going, and closed his eyes. He counted to three, his voice barely a whisper. And then he took off.

Cold wind rushed past his ears. Cold feet pressed into a rough surface, and stung as loose pebbles pressed into his soles, and into his bones. He jumped and came right back down, and his feet stung even more. But he kept jumping, holding the tote tight against him, holding his other arm out to balance. And each jump was longer, and each landing hurt less, until he was bounding over the road, his clothes rustling in the breeze.

Two seconds of freefall. Jump. Two seconds of flight. Jump. A low-hanging branch got in his face, and he tasted bark, and he sputtered and reached up to brush off his mouth but felt a muzzle instead, and laughed.

He didn’t stop. He kept jumping, all the way around the road that wound its way past the pond. He didn’t feel tired, or cold. He felt great. And he was still scared, but was giddy, with an intoxicating mix of adrenaline and runner’s high.

A car wound its way through the trees, somewhere ahead of him, somewhere down the same road. He saw it coming long before it saw him, and for second he thought What to do? Then it was coming towards him, and he was going towards it, and he thought: Jump. And then he did.

For a second he felt real fear, and as he flew at the car he thought I messed up, I’m so dead. Then he was on the other side, and the car had screeched to a halt, and he looked back after two more jumps to see the door open and somebody looking back towards him.

Lander had to slow down a little, because his heart was pounding and his lungs were burning, and he was going uphill and thinking He’s going to turn around and come after me. This is it. I’m so dead. And he wanted to keep going, but couldn’t. So he slowed to a jog, and then stopped all the way, and he looked back down the road from a bend on the side of the hill. Nothing was coming. The air was full of night sounds.

Moonlight shone directly on him, and on the pizza box and the guardrail and the grass at the edge of the slope. And way out past him were hills, and the countryside, and the lights of the cars on the main road. He looked out at them for a second, amazed at how real it all looked when he wasn’t inside of a car himself.

Then he looked down at himself, and his brown furry arms, and around at his huge swishing tail. He looked down at his feet, and pressed one into the grass and felt cold and wet, on reverse-jointed shapes that belonged to him. He reached up and felt his muzzle again, and his tall ears, and his glasses that were now awkwardly positioned. He adjusted them, and it took him a second to get them on straight.

This was it, he thought. This was real; this was him. And there was no mirror, no heart monitor, no scientist with a transformation gun asking him how he felt. Just wet grass, and cool air, and him standing there as an anthro kangaroo. And somehow, it all felt perfectly natural. He didn’t feel anything changing back, and he didn’t feel disoriented or like parts of him were out of place.

Lander grinned like an idiot, thrusting his fist skyward in triumph. He didn’t care what happened next. It was worth it. It was all worth it. Who said you couldn’t live your dreams? The world was such a great place, he thought. And he had such a great life.

And his boss was going to kill him if he didn’t deliver that pizza on time.

Lander took a deep breath, and took off down the road again.

* * *

It took him a few minutes to get to the house, during which he thought about everything. It didn’t even seem possible that anything bad could ever happen to him again. He settled into a steady rhythm, freefall and jump and flying and jump, and he almost missed the turnoff but for the Halloween decorations.

There they were, all over the lawn … glowing pumpkins, and friendly-looking ghosts and black cats. Lander didn’t need to check the address. He’d been past this house before, delivering to other places nearby, and they were decked out like this every year.

He looked down the road at their gravel driveway, imagined it on his bare paws, and decided against it. Then he looked down the grassy slope out at their lawn, and at the house more than a hundred feet away, and thought how small and far away it all looked.

Then he jumped.

He soared, for two … three … four seconds. Then he saw something dark on the ground, a row of small dark things, and for a split-second he wondered What are these? Then his feet smashed into the uncarved pumpkins, and raw pumpkin jammed up his toenails, and he yelped and flailed into the air for a bit before falling face-first onto the grass. The pizza tote slid away from him.

Lander lay there for a moment, arms in front of his face, wondering if any bones were broken. Then his toes started to hurt, and his toenails started to sting, and both his feet turned into masses of pain. He curled them towards him, reached down and tried to get the pumpkins off of his feet, and the fragments were jagged and more painful than he’d thought they would be. Wet pumpkin innards slid over his stinging toes, and wet pumpkin smell reached his sensitive nose.

He got the pumpkins off and stood up, and had to keep from crying out. Both his feet hurt so bad, especially his big toes. And what was that dark shape on the ground in front of him?

It was the pizza tote. He limped over to it, and tried for a second to reach it without bending over. Then he finally knelt down next to it, and cried out and winced as he got it and stood back up. Then he looked up at the house, still halfway across the yard, and at all the cars in the driveway. And he didn’t know what was going to happen once he knocked on that door, but he didn’t think it was going to be good.

Maybe if I hold this in front of my face … no.

I could tell them that it’s a Halloween costume! Nuh-uh.

Maybe no one will notice … No way.

Lander remembered a commercial he’d seen, where a cartoon character on a bottle of juice drink had come to life. The kids had both screamed, and the mom had cried “Run!” and the thing had chased them through the house. It hadn’t been an ad for the juice drink. And he wasn’t a cartoon character. But he was pretty sure that that was how this was going to play out … without the chasing, he thought, and looked down at his feet in the dark and winced.

He imagined being shot at by a desperate homeowner, or causing a panic and getting the party guests hurt. He imagined kids screaming, and horrified looks on people’s faces, and someone rushing to the phone to dial 911. And he could see himself spending the rest of his life in a government research lab, or even a mental hospital, and never jumping again. Never flying again …

A terrible thought struck him, and he got out his flashlight and shone it down on his feet. He had trouble telling the orange from the red, but he was pretty sure that there was a lot of blood on them.

Lander looked over his shoulder, up at the road, and at the miles between him and his broken-down car. Cold air blew across his wet nose, and the crickets seemed far away now.

He sighed, and looked back at the house. Then he limped towards the door, one step at a time, trying to think of what he could say. “This is not what it looks like … ” Ow. “I’m really not going to hurt you.” Ow. “Please don’t hurt me.” Ow. “Please don’t h-ARGH!”

He stumbled the last couple of paces and put out his free hand to stop himself on the wall. Slimy footprints followed him across the patio, streaked with pumpkin innards and trickles of red liquid.

He tried to catch his breath. Inside the house he could hear music, and talking, and people playing a video game. Excited voices called out to each other, and somebody shouted above the din. People laughed in response.

Lander cringed. Then he closed his eyes, counted to three silently, and got up and knocked on the door.

There was no response for a second. Then he heard light footsteps clicking towards him, like high-heels on a hardwood floor, and held his breath.

The door opened. Lander squinted in at the light. And then he gasped.

On the other side was an anthropomorphic bird, with fluffy white underfeathers and brilliant royal blue backfeathers and wings. He didn’t wear (and didn’t need) any clothes besides a many-pocketed belt, and he looked cheerful and pleasant.

Past him, inside the house, was a whole menagerie. A gray tabby cat-boy played DDR against a human girl, holding onto his top hat with one hand. Two red wolves and two foxes, one red and one pink, were crowded around a game console hooked up to a large-screen TV, and the red fox was shouting triumphantly and waving a Wiimote while standing up on the couch. And a young girl with pudgy looks and a cat’s ears and tail stopped in the middle of the room, a bowl of ice cream in her hands, and looked up at the newcomer.

“Hello!” the bird said. “We were wondering when you would get here.”

“Uh … ” Lander blinked.

The bird looked down at the doorstep, and jumped in surprise. He ruffled his feathers, and stared. “What’s happened to your feet?“