Random
Stepping forward with a shrug, you approach that sign, deciding to make the choice of making no choice. As soon as your foot completes that single step forward in the direction of the sign, the entire game starts to re-pixel and shift around you.
“W-wait, I wonder what the options were? I didn’t even look around!” you think, but even as you try to turn towards the opposite direction, the field scene is rapidly disappearing. The blue of a fresh sky is starting to materialized, but it’s darker with gray clouds seeping across the surface of sight. Then, like bricks, the ground falls into place around you. A dark shade of fog seems to be fading into the landscape, bleeding in from the edges while crisped, faded grass droops off from stalks in front of you, mimicking the same field you had been standing in seconds before but now drastically different.
Instantly, your gaze tries to swing around full circle to see what all there is in the new, materializing world in front of you. The grass spreads out from where you stand, rushing towards the edge of the landscape in the same dulled shades of dead, lifeless plants until at the very edges to your right something new formulates. Stiff, needle-less pine trees edge the circle of the field. You squint, zooming the camera there to where the field melds into the edge of woods. Taking a few, short and tentative steps forward, you examined the line closer to see that the trees were not only bare, but blacked up their entire height. The arms that remained on the dark trunks were cut short, stubby and looked fragmented. The edge of the forest, without the proper filling of trees, looked sparse and naked. Through the space of the trees in the front row, you could see deeper into where the grass ended and a coarse, sandy texture coated the ground.
“What is that?” You wondered, squinting before suddenly it clicked. The black coating on the trees, dead limbs, drooping and crusted grasses; everything was just dead, it’d been burned.
“There’s been a forest fire?” you thought, suddenly feeling an urge to glance over both shoulders to check for any lingering damage. Though, suddenly, when your gaze returned to the tree line, time began to speed up. Before your eyes, you started to feel a tight whoosh as everything fast forwarded. In the vague distance, you could see the rising motion of trees growing, but the patch of forest here remained dead, too dead to flourish again. Instead, you watched a year go by with the barren black forms remaining steady and imposing over the Earth. The sharpness of the black and the ash fade into the landscape though, turning burnt into merely dead as age wore away at the wound.
“What’s happening!?” you thought to yourself, trying to look for any game options. The idea that time was escaping so quickly sent an uneasy tension down your entire frame. You just knew something wasn’t right, but no matter where you looked as everything rushed by, no options presented themselves.
“I’ll just take the goggles off!” you thought, but when you moved your ‘arms’ all that moved were your arms in the game as though real life was just a strange memory... or was it?
Looking at your arms, you suddenly realize the shifting of the time all around you has not left you alone. There’s a strange blur in the formatting of your skin. Everything looked jagged and unsettled as though the pixels aren’t put together, there’s spaces or gaps in the design of your figure.
Then, as you watched agape, your skin began to flake away. The familiar, pale tones of your flesh just dropped from view, in pieces while a dark, hardened brown began to fill in behind. Curved, overlapping pieces began to fill in the gaps on your arm’s shape. Perplexion knit your brows together as both eyes locked onto this transformation as one by one scales began to form on the outer curve of your arm. Then, thick and speckled flesh began to harden over the thin, plush texture of human skin. A reptile-like, hardened shell began to encase your skin, replacing it with an armor sort of finish up the entire length of your arm while the scales continued to work, overlapping step by step.
“A-am I going into battle?” Your eyes searched for some sign of combat, expecting the game to prepare you before something severe occurred. “Maybe it’s just equipping me-”
Your thoughts died when your fingers suddenly began to feel the same hardened, the knuckles seeming to break off the tips of each finger while the nails thickened and curved into black, arched points on the end of each shortened finger.
Claws.
“What is happening?!” you thought to yourself, madly trying to search the landscape for a clue, but no assistance is coming from the blank, dead space while the scales continue up onto your shoulder, forming massive, jutting spikes of the thick texture. The trees at the edge of the forest offer no assistance with their blank, black bark staring back at you- staring up at you.
“Wait-” You look down to see your perspective is rising. Your legs contorted backwards, dropping you over into a four-legged stance while your entire body feels the prickling of the scales dropping into place and seeming to meld into the skin there, thickening and adding to what you already have. At the same time, everything grew. Your eyes were suddenly swimming above tree level while your four legs splayed beneath you, slipping on the cold landscape with this new stance.
Your head still spun with confusion and frustration while a flurry of sensations swarmed your entire body. A sudden, yawning sensation hits your jaw, forcing it to part open wide before it hits your that your entire jaw is stretching until you see a snout jutting out between your eyes. You blink madly, confusion rapidly multiplying while you scuttle on the Earth with claws scraping down into the cold ground. Then, spotting a glossy, half-frozen puddle to your back you spin crazily. Then, angling your face down, you try to capture a glimpse of what’s happening to you.
What looks back at you stops your breath. Gone is your feature-less human form. Gone is the simple, bland stance of your two-legged, two-armed short haired character. Instead, thick slates of armored skin travel up your center between two massive, powerful legs covered in layered, small scales that drop down to the massive claws that you felt crunching into the Earth. Drooping, thick fur tufts out beneath the plates of natural armor down your chest. Massive spikes adourn each shoulder, dark gray against the backdrop of brown that is the rest of your form in varying hues. Then, your face is a lean muzzle of smoothed flesh. An array of scaled texture surrounds each eye, branching off into short antlers before massive horns curve out from around the sprouting appendages. Behind you, down your back, you can briefly can the tufts of similar dark fur and scales down your entire frame before a spiked tail waved behind with a single tuft of flicking, brown fur at the end.
“W-what?!”
“What am I?”
Dragon.
Written by Picklesauce69 on 10 December 2015
