Dream
A dream. That strange woman is back. She called you a brother in truth.
You are home, however. You are inside the strange dimension, but as you turn your head all the way around your neck, you feel comfort here, as if you're somewhere that you've been looking for your whole life.
Yhnhn speaks, yet her voice is garbled and cloudy. Her words are beautiful but your heart seizes trying to understand her. Is she speaking comfort? Acceptance? Love?
She extends her hand to you as she had before. As you grasp it, you can feel with such clarity her soft hand and the fur and gentle follicles as they brush against your palm. Your fingers interlock and your hand begins to glow with warmth.
Your hand, interlocking with hers, is also covered in fur. An effervescent orange fur with black stripes running down your wrist.
Upon the shock of seeing your hand transformed, you wake up with a start.
You felt a strange repulsion upon seeing your hand covered in fur, but understanding it to be a dream, you find yourself calming down quickly. You pull the covers off of you to get up and get a drink.
The moment you grip your blanket, your heart drops as your hand feels significantly... furrier.
Turning on the light and throwing your hands in front of your face, it's just as you feared, your hands have transformed into furry, animal-like hands. Your fur is orange and those same black stripes run their way down your wrists and across the back of your hand. Looking further up your arm, the fur continues up to your shoulder.
You race toward the bathroom to see yourself in the mirror. Quickly switching on the light, the truth reveals itself: you are growing distinctly tiger-like features.
It is a good twenty minutes before you are able to accept what is happening before your very eyes. You can't pull the emergency button, you can't even imagine anyone seeing you like this. Why? Maybe they can help you. And yet you can't. There's something inside of you crying out to not let anyone see your true form.
You mean your new form. Not true form. You didn't mean to think 'true form', that's crazy.
You just can't let anyone see you like this. Your mind begins to race through the different options in front of you. There's the option of staying where you are and seeing what happens to you in the morning. Will you be a real tiger by then? You can't imagine that's the case. Your mind isn't going, you're just as lucid and capable of human thought as ever. Plus, that gazelle woman wasn’t fully a gazelle and she acted as though she had existed the way she does for a long time.
You can run away... but then you'd never be able to return to that world or find the gazelle woman.
That's it, isn't it? You need to find that woman, Yhnhn. So that's what has to be done. You are still inside the laboratory building. So it's time.
Written by Martin Prance on 13 February 2016
