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.