A "Winds of Change" Story

By Bryan Derksen

"I've decided," I told Maxine in a voice that sounded much steadier than I actually felt. "We don't have time for me to learn how to fly. You'd better deer me." Maxine nodded and reached toward me. "But," I quickly added, "put a two hour time limit on the transformation." She hesitated, but I'd let a little Power slip into my words and so she just nodded again. I steeled myself as she touched my shoulder.

I let out the breath I'd been holding. After all my concern and all the effort I'd put into avoiding this, it was definitely anticlimactic; I'd gained a little height, but otherwise I felt completely normal. I turned to Maxine. "I don't- woah!" Maxine grabbed my shoulder again, this time to keep me from falling over. My sense of balance had been thrown out of kilter, and I suddenly realized why; I tried to glance upwards at my new set of antlers.

Looking up turned out to be the worst thing to do when one's suddenly got a huge rack like that sprouting out of the top of one's head. I fell heavily on my rear, Maxine and the others exclaiming concern. "I'm okay! I'm okay!" I said with embarrassment. "Darned antlers threw me off. Help me up, willya?" They helped pull me back to my feet, and I took a moment to straighten myself out and regain my dignity. "Okay. I was just saying I don't mean anything personal by asking for that time limit, Maxine. It's just that your power's been having some glitches lately..."

She nodded, more brusquely this time. "Right. No offence taken." She glanced impatiently in the general direction Jon had headed.

"Oh. Right." I turned and shifted to my new norm form with the sound of tearing cloth. I looked back at myself. "Aw crap," I lisped. My clothes were normally able to handle shifting and remain unrestrictive even in quadrupedal mode, since Dall's sheep weren't much bigger than an adult human. But deer were. I stepped out of the tattered shreds of cloth piled around my hooves and nosed them in annoyance.

"We'll worry about that when you get back," Maxine said impatiently, shooing me onward. "Hurry. I'll try to catch up as soon as I find a mirror."

I nodded, handling the weight of my antlers much more easily this time now that I was on all fours, and bounded away from the rest area. My enlarged ears flicked back and were able to catch Tim asking Maxine "...why did you make him that deer, in particular?" even as I was losing sight of them visually. I snorted in amazement. Deer hearing really was all that Jon had boasted it was.

Unfortunately, though, deer vision wasn't as good as that of sheep and I had little experience with using my other senses for tracking. Actually, I had little experience using sight for that purpose either. But I pushed onward at high speed, nonetheless somehow certain that I was on the right track. I reasoned that all I had to do was let my subconscious guide my path; it was closer to my 'prey animal' nature, and provided I didn't come across anything of special significance to Dall's Sheep it should give similar impulses to those that now guided Jon.

As I ran and let my mind wander, I reflected with some amazement on how calm I was. Not only had I finally let Maxine transform me, a concept that had literally given me a nervous breakdown when Brian had been in almost exactly this predicament, but I was giving my inner animal free rein in combination with that. I was nervous, sure, but I could handle it. The most unnerving thing for me right now was the lack of obstructions in my peripheral vision; for the last several months I had lived with the tips of my massive ram's horns curling up on either side of my face, and now they were gone.

In fact, I was almost relieved to be out here away from the rest stop; it was giving me a chance to work off some of my anger. If I'd stayed behind with those animals that had done this to Jon, who'd wanted to leave Kim to be killed by scavengers... I worried that I'd have been happily ripping their minds into bite-sized chunks by now. Now that was a scary thought.

I suddenly snapped out of my introspection and skidded to a halt as I approached a large patch of trees beside a field. What had caught my attention? I scanned the trees intensely as I caught my breath from the run, trying to find it. "Aha!" I exclaimed, not a normal sound for a deer to make. Jon was standing in there motionlessly, camouflaged in the branches and watching me with a puzzled and apprehensive expression. His eyes were clearly devoid of human thought. Firing up my Power, I hoped my antlers would work just as well as my horns had to focus it. "Jon, come..."

...is herdmate? Who is selfbuck?

I broke off instantly at the 'sound', my tail flicking up in surprise and alarm. Jon saw that and responded in kind, bolting deeper into the forest with his own tail flagging. I gritted my teeth, forcing my tail back down and my heart to slow. By the time I'd succeeded Jon was long gone again, but for the moment my mind was on other matters. I had 'heard' that mental voice before, Jack had given me a sample that he'd picked up from Jon's mind. It represented Jon's animal side, a genuine "voice in his head." It had always seemed a little unhealthy to me. Was I cracking up now too? My suppressed fear began bubbling back up from the pit in which I'd buried it.

But no, I realized with some relief, that voice hadn't come from my mind. It was Jon; somehow I'd managed to receive his thoughts with my Power. I thought back to last night, when I'd talked with Tim and somehow experienced his memory of the Change. I had failed to duplicate that connection the next morning, and had almost passed it off as imagination or a dream...

I shook my head. Obviously something strange was up, I'd never been able to receive thoughts with my Power before. But I doubted my brain was going to blow up in the next few hours, and in the meantime I still had to get Jon back. Pushing my many various fears back into their boxes again, I took off into the woods after him.

Fortunately the trees weren't very dense, I still wasn't used to the multibranched height of my antlers and if the foliage had been any lower I'm sure I would have snagged them on it. I found Jon again quite quickly. He almost seemed to have been waiting for me on the other side of the patch of woods, and as I slowly walked back out into the open I made an effort to appear totally confident and relaxed this time.

"Jon," I began after I'd caught my breath. "Jon, it's me, Bryan."

Bryan? Bryan is herdmate, Jon's mind realized. I was prepared to hear it this time, and nodded encouragingly.

"Yes, I'm your friend. Maxine sent me. Remember Maxine?

She's worried about you, Jon."

Familiarbuck can't be Bryan, Jon thought. Familiarbuck is like self. Too much like self.

"Maxine changed me so I could catch up with you," I tried to explain, hoping Jon was able to understand a concept like that in his current state.

Familiarbuck is self, Jon insisted stubbornly.

I sighed and shifted tactics. "Yes, I'm like you right now. I'm a deer. But like you I'm more than a deer. I'm part human, too. Like this." As slowly and unthreateningly as I could, I shifted back into morph form. Jon's ears flicked back in surprise, but fortunately he didn't bolt this time.

Familiarbuck is... Jon thought with confusion and dawning recognition ...me? Who am I?

"Jon. Your name is Jon. Remember...?"

I felt it coming; barriers in Jon's mind were breaking down, memories and knowledge were beginning to rush in. I started to smile in relief. Then my expression switched to surprise as the rushing torrent grew, gushing through the link into my mind too.

We both screamed in perfect unison and collapsed, our minds completely overwhelmed.

 

Maxine arrived out of breath a short time later, having run almost the entire way here, and returned to morph form as soon as she saw that both of the deer lying stunned on the ground were also in that state. She hurried over to them. "Jon! Jon, are you alright?"

The two deer groaned. "Oh, that was weird," one of them groaned. "Maxine?" The other asked in confusion.

"Uh, yeah." She replied with equal confusion. "I'm here.

Um... Damn. Which of you is Bryan?"

The two deermorphs blinked in surprise at the question and glanced at each other. They were perfect physical replicas of each other, down to the smallest detail. "Bryan?" One asked. "Who are you?" The other demanded simultaneously.

Maxine looked at them helplessly. "Oh no," she muttered.

"Not again. Will the real Jon raise his hand?" Both deermorphs

solemnly raised their hand. "Oh no."

"I do remember," one of the Jons said. "Bryan was here."

"He was trying to get through to me," the other agreed. "At least, he said his name was Bryan."

"But he looked just like me. Just like you."

"And you," the other countered. "Oh god... you don't think..."

"Not again!" Maxine cursed. "Jon... Bryan... Which one are you?"

"I'm Jon," They both said in unison. Maxine almost felt like laughing, or perhaps crying. The two Jons simply glared at each other suspiciously. "I hate it when this sort of thing happens," one of them muttered.

Maxine helped each of them back to their feet. "It's my fault," she explained quietly. "I wanted Bryan to go after you as quickly as possible, and offered to change him into something that moved faster. He picked deer. You're the deer I'm most familiar with, and I didn't want to delay..." She looked helplessly at the two of them. "Oh, hell. I don't know which of you to apologize to!"

"It's okay, Maxine," one Jon murmured reassuringly, placing his hand on her shoulder. The other did likewise. The two looked at each other in surprise. "Are you going to hug her, or should I?" One asked with a slight hint of anger in his voice.

"Hold it!" Maxine cried, grabbing their arms. "Wait! We've got to figure this out."

The two Jons hesitated. "I'm not exactly sure what we should do about this," one said. "I mean, if you were to just try changing Bryan back..." The two looked at each other oddly.

"...how would you know if you changed the right one back?" the other concluded uneasily. It had just dawned on them that one of them must actually be Bryan. But which one?

"It's okay," Maxine suddenly sounded relieved. "Bryan's transformation has a two-hour time limit. He insisted."

"So we just have to wait and see who changes back when it's up?" "How much time is left?"

"I'm not sure. Probably around an hour now, I would guess."

The two looked at each other uneasily again. "Well," one said at last, "it looks like this... problem... is only temporary, then." The other nodded.

"Good. I hope this all sorts out when Bryan changes back, like it did for Brian... the other Brian, I mean..." The three of them chuckled, though the humor was a little strained.

"God, this is confusing," Jon said. "Let's get out of here, head back to the others. I don't suppose you've got a mirror, Maxine...?" She shook her head. "I guess we should stay in morph, then."

"That's probably for the best," Maxine agreed. "At least that way there'll be one less potential complication when one of you changes back into Bryan."

The three stood silently for a moment, and then both Jons shrugged and started walking back the way they'd come. Maxine followed between them.

 

The three remained silent for a long time as they walked, each lost in their own thoughts. Or at least two of them were lost in their own thoughts; one of them had someone else's for now. It was very nerve-wracking for both Jons as they each tried to figure out if it was him.

Tension began to mount, Maxine could feel it quite clearly between

them. The two Jons each tried to stay closer to her than the other,

shooting the other dark glances when he got too close. It was partly due

to the unanswered question of who was real and who wasn't that was hanging

over their heads, but paradoxically the two Jons instinctively saw each other as rivals for Maxine's attention as well. There was little Maxine could think to do about it except try to keep as neutral as possible until the time limit was up. Choosing one over the other right now had a fifty percent chance of being incredibly embarrassing in the long run.

But it wasn't enough, and as the deadline inexorably approached the tension between the two finally escalated almost to the point of coming to blows. Maxine realized they might one day look back on their memory of the two Jons hurling insults at each other and laugh, but right now it had to be stopped.

"All right, you two; stop it!" The Jons instantly stopped bickering and glared at her, waiting to hear what she had to say. Maxine took a deep breath before continuing. "Look, it's obvious that you two aren't willing to wait around to solve this thing the easy way. So perhaps we'd better have this out right now. There should be at least one way of figuring out who's who; one of you must have a kinetic shield that the other doesn't."

The two Jons turned to each other in mutual comprehension.

"Right!" They declared in unison, lowering their heads.

"No, wait! That's not what I..." Maxine protested. But her words fell on deaf ears. The two Jons charged, bringing their antlers together with a loud clack.

One ended up sprawled on the ground, looking up at his double in total astonishment. the Jon left standing had a faint red glow around his antlers. "But... But..." was all the Jon on the ground could manage to say.

Maxine sighed in exasperation. "You two... I mean, you one... Whatever! Why is it always this macho stuff?"

"It worked, didn't it?" Replied the standing Jon. "I proved that I'm the real Jon. That should settle things down a bit until he changes back. Sorry," he apologized sincerely to the fallen Jon, offering him his hand.

"But... I can't be Bryan," Jon muttered as he was pulled back to his feet. "I remember everything! My whole life! It can't be fake."

"I really don't know if it is or not," Maxine told him gently. "The best person to ask would be, um, Jack I guess." She bit her lip; suggesting that he ask Bryan as she'd been about to sounded pretty dumb.

The fallen Jon looked helplessly from one to the other. At some unknown point in the next half hour or so, he realized numbly, who he was was going to change. He was going to lose his identity. "No," he said numbly and rubbed his antler as if, somehow, it itched. "I am Jon."

Maxine looked startled for an instant, but then Jon's statement impressed itself in her mind as Truth and she became merely confused. "But... what about your powers? How did they get switched around?"

Jon realized what he was doing. With Bryan's power, all he had to do was say something and it would be believed. He didn't like the idea any more than Bryan had, but his survival was suddenly at stake. "Something must have happened to transfer it when Bryan went into my mind to rescue me," He told her. The numbness was rapidly fading as he committed himself more deeply to this course of action. He had to struggle to keep a huge grin off his face; he wasn't going to lose himself after all!

"Jon." Jon turned to the other Jon... the real Jon. He was looking at him aghast, also realizing what he was doing with Bryan's Power. "Don't do this, Jon. Please. What about Bryan? He's my friend, so I know he's your friend too."

"You're right. But don't worry; Bryan will be fine. After all, you're Bryan."

"I..." Jon looked stunned. "Oh no. You mean you're the real me? The real Jon?"

Jon nodded. "That's right. Maxine, since I'm the real Jon, that one must be the real Bryan. You'd better change him back to normal quickly. And then, just to be on the safe side, you'd better change me into me.

With a nice, long time limit this time."

Maxine looked slightly puzzled about that last request, but under the influence of Jon's Power it seemed reasonable enough for now. She reached out and touched the designated Bryan on the shoulder, 'returning' him to 'normal'...

 

I regained consciousness suddenly, already standing upright. From the corners of my eyes I saw a pair of familiar horn tips, and realized that I was back in my Dall's Sheepmorph form. I let out a sigh of relief, then blinked in surprise at Jon and Maxine standing in front of me looking worried. "Uh, what happened? Jon, are you okay, are you back to your old self again?" Then I realized that those horn tips were wreathed in a faint red glow. I gasped and reached up to grab them, but stopped before I touched. I didn't want to accidentally blow my hands off if the glow was dangerous. "Forget that, am I okay? What's going on here?"

Jon smiled reassuringly. "It's a long story. I'll fill you in as we head back to the others..."

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