Tiger(taur)
This was the second of Leland’s letters to find Jasmine, and yet it offered no less feeling of being watched than the first. She lived in the same address as always, so it made sense Leland still knew where she lived. However, she doubted moving anywhere on Planet Earth would help her escape his omnipresent eye. She folded the letter and set it on the counter. The package was cradled against her in one arm. It was light, or at least it felt that way. Everything on a human scale was smaller to a beefy wolverine, as Jasmine had gotten used to over the past week. Now to find out what was in store next for her if she decided to go through with it again.
She took it with her to the couch where she sat down and put it on the coffee table in front of her. She extended her index claw and wondered what creature would be presented to her this time? Going along with the theme of animals she’d been so far, she expected something like a weasel or a ferret, maybe. Badger? Mink? Stoat? Those were all mustelids, and though skunks weren’t technically mustelids, she included them in the same bunch. More possibilities ran through her mind as she stuck her claw into the box flap and sliced the tape down the middle. She opened the flaps and immediately recognized the orange and black-striped fur pattern of a tiger.
A toothy smile lit up her face. I get to be a tiger? Sweet! She pulled the onesie out of the box and stood up to see it at its full height. Though it was light on the whole, the fur was rough and dense, nearly more so than her own impenetrable wolverine coat. The shoulders were broad, and the sleeves were spacious. The underbelly was a smooth tan color. She pulled up the hood to see cute, black-tipped ears with white dots on the back of them. A fun fact she knew about tigers was that those dots were meant to resemble eyes in order to ward off ambush from other tigers. Jasmine gave them a little flick with her fingers and giggled.
But there was more to the suit than she expected, something very strange. Even as she had stood up to let it unfold to its full height, it wasn’t completely out of the box yet. The legs were out, but the torso they were attached to was still folded up. It looked like the suit was made of an overly long tube of tiger fur with the hind legs haphazardly attached at the center. She picked one leg up and rubbed it between her thumb and fingers. It felt normal like she could fit her legs in them, so why were they so oddly placed?
Jasmine pulled the suit further out of the box, pouring it over her shoulder as she did. It came out of the box in short order, bringing with it another pair of legs and the tail. That confused the hell out of Jasmine. What is it? A six-legged tiger? A tigerpede? She held it in front of her to inspect the legs in the middle again. To see the whole thing she had to hoist it in the air way over her head. Even then, the second pair of legs (the actual hind legs, it seemed) were half on the carpet.
“How the actual hell am I supposed to wear this thing?” Jasmine muttered to herself as she continued looking over the strangely proportioned onesie. The zipper ran down from the collar like always, but was only as long as she’d expect on another suit, reaching just short of the middle set of limbs. She tried envisioning what it would turn her into. There was the tigerpede, an elongated tiger with three sets of legs, a cursed image she didn’t want to hold on to for too long. It didn’t make sense either considering every form she’d taken so far was anthropomorphic. Maybe it stands on two legs and has four arms? Like Goro from Mortal Kombat. That didn’t make much more sense either.
Wait. I think I’m looking at this wrong. Jasmine turned around and laid the suit face down on the couch from. It was long enough to dangle over each armrest. Looking at the deflated onesie from that perspective helped build a more accurate idea of what it really was. What if it isn’t six-legged or anthropomorphic? What if it’s both? She grabbed the suit by the shoulders and lifted the top section upright so that it was at a right angle with the couch. Finally, it clicked. A centaur.
Images of bare-chested men, their torsos rising from the shoulders of a horse’s body, flooded Jasmine’s mind. The horse bodies were promptly replaced by a tiger’s. Then the human portions became tigrine. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense, she thought. What was that supposed to be called? A centiger? A tigertaur? She didn’t know the etymology of the word centaur. Too lazy to look it up, she went with the term Tigertaur for the simple reason that it sounded cooler.
No matter the name, there was still the question of how she was supposed to wear it. Where was she supposed to put her legs? The forelegs made more sense as then the torso portion would fit her, but what about the rear half? Maybe she was supposed to put her legs in the hind pair while her arms went in the forelegs, but that would leave her completely inside of it with the torso section unfilled. She thought of those two-person horse suits where there was one person for each pair of legs; one in the front, another in the back. Maybe I can convince Maria to huddle in this thing with me, she thought facetiously. We’ll both be a tigertaur. Wonder how that’ll work. It wouldn’t, she knew. No doubt Leland intended the suit for Jasmine and for Jasmine only. The previous onesies had changed her in mysterious ways already. Whatever this suit would accomplish couldn’t be too incredible by comparison.
That was if she put it on. The worlds she had traveled to so far were both dramatically different to each other based on the animal she had become. She had trouble imagining what a world full of tigertaurs would entail. The wolverine world she lived in now was a hyper-competitive society based on might-makes-right. What would a world of savage predators entail? How the hell did they even drive cars? Do cars even exist? It seemed dangerous (minus the no cars possibility). Jasmine looked at putting the suit on similarly to jumping into a tiger pit at the zoo. Sure, she would be a tiger too, but that only helped a little when everyone else was one too. Then again, if everyone was a tiger, perhaps nobody was.
Throughout the entire time of that wandering train of thought she had been holding the suit up. Looking at it again brought images of strapping tiger men, their muscular abs fading into the feral majesty of a tiger whose physique outmatched even the strongest man. She envisioned walking, each step twinging their muscles across a tautly wound collage of black stripes. They walked the streets casually, their splendor nothing out of the ordinary. One would greet the other, no more aware of each other’s species than Jasmine would here in this world. She wondered, more seriously this time, what does a society like that look like? Only one way to find out.
She considered taking the suit to the bathroom like before, but reckoned correctly that it would be too small for what she was going to turn into, even considering that it was sized up for a wolverine like her. The living room would provide the most space, given she moved some furniture around. Quick work was made of the place. Thanks to her wolverine strength moving the couch was no issue, nor the coffee table. It left a broad plane of open carpet featuring square depressions where the couch and table legs had been. From there she stripped herself nude and chucked her clothes aside. I wonder what kind of clothes they’ll have in this place. Will I need two pairs of pants, or just one?
She picked the suit off the couch and brought it over to the center of the floor. Pulling the zipper down from the collar revealed that the portion she would be stepping into did not lead into the back portion. It was smooth fabric/skin with no opening for a second party to fill. So much for that idea, not like I was eager to invite anyone else into this thing. She turned around and held the suit behind her so she could step into it. It fit to her legs snugly thanks to the great fluff of wolverine fur. The back half hung from it awkwardly as she pulled the torso up and fit her arms through the sleeves. Normally the suit would shrink to her skin once the transformation started, but it looked like it was doing that already with how tightly it fit around her. Her muscle gut jutted halfway out of the zipper.
“Hope I can zip this damn thing up,” she muttered to herself as she grabbed the pull tab. It took a deep inhale and some quick jerks, but she was able to close it all the way to the collar. Her belly and bosom looked ready to explode out of the front side, but it was on. She looked over her shoulder at the second half of the suit. It sagged from her lower back like a deflated bounce house. The legs were flat on the carpet with the tail running between them. How is it gonna fill that out?
She turned her head back forward to inspect her chest. The first thing she noticed was that the zipper had disappeared already, trapping her in the suit. “Damn. So we’re doing this already?” Suddenly the suit shrank on her, sucking into her skin more tightly than it already was. “Oof. I’ll take that as a yes.”
The process went as always. Orange fur slipped down her paws, swallowing her palms, thumbs, and fingers to the tips. She saw the same happen to her ankles and feet, thus her massive wolverine steppers were gone. The hoodie performed the same around her head, swallowing her face from every direction until it had filled her visor and snout. There was no mirror for her to look into, but looking to her left she saw the TV’s empty black screen. A hazy reflection of herself looked back, something whose gulonian features were rapidly vanishing.
It started with the usual plunge of pressure onto her musculature. Her physique started to slim, starting with that pronounced gut and bosom of hers. The sensations stretched across her arms and legs as the biceps and hamstrings thinned themselves out. It wasn’t painful, but by no means was it comfortable. It was felt across her entire body, most severely wherever the most drastic changes were occurring. She put her paws over her chest where her breasts were sinking slowly. They flattened out across her pecs which, though smaller than they had been, were still broad and chiseled. The same happened to her trunk which now featured an immaculately carved set of washboard abs.
Am I becoming a man again? She reached between her legs to find out, but found nothing. Literally. There was nothing there. Anything like a reproductive organ was gone, leaving nothing but smooth, fuzzy pelvis. For a moment she panicked, afraid that she’d be robbed of her sex. Then she remembered, If I’m going to be a tigertaur, those are going to be somewhere else behind me. She looked over her shoulder and was shocked to see the rear portion of the suit standing on its hindlegs. It did so shakily, looking like it was only partially filled by air or flesh. Much of the skin was still wrinkled and the tail still sagged. Jasmine dared to touch it. There was something inside of it, ill-defined and turgid, flesh and bone, perhaps. She watched as it rose gradually and gained its footing, becoming a part of her just like a limb.
She was torn out of her fascination by a sudden squeeze of pressure across her bones. The suit was in its final stages, i.e. the suckiest part: bending her skeleton into the proper shape. It was hardest on her limbs and skull which had to force themselves into a tigrine mold. It felt like giant hands were squishing her cranium like it was wet clay. Her snout was underneath an anvil as it shrunk into her face and began sprouting longer, thicker whiskers. She had it no better in the legs as her femurs were squashed into humeri and her tib-fibs became uln-rads.
But the worst of it was in her spine. The hilt of it fell out of her pelvis and drilled into the rear portion of the suit, now officially a tiger body. Nerve-endings spread across it like a million tiny fingers, each one discovering a new part of her to feel and experience. It was like blood rushing into a numb part of the body; pins and needles all around. She hissed and swore throughout. More bones were being created from old ones. Her pelvis turned into a sternum complete with ribs, although they had no lungs to protect. She felt the last of her vertebrae spill into her tail, bringing with them sensation and control. Once they were at the tip, she automatically performed her first tail flick as a tiger.
Then, as always, all of those unpleasant sensations vanished. It was over. The tigertaur was complete.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 04 December 2023