A "Winds of Change" Story
As we reached the corner of Centennial and Salem Avenues, Jim and I parted company on our respective routes home. We lost sight of each other only a moment or two later. With no one left to talk to except myself, I quickened the pace a little.
As usual, my mind started to wander. As it had often done for the last few years, it drifted to the Change. Ever since David, or Stripes, started his own, it seemed to be all I could think about. It was amazing to see him covered now in black and white stripes. He was very proud of that furry layer of his, that was for sure. He showed it off whenever he could.
It was plain to see how fast Stripes life had changed. He'd already been pulled from the normal rotation of classes to start in on his Change Year batch. Other than a couple of normal classes left in his schedule to fill it out, I didn't see him often at school anymore. But it was also plain that he was getting close with someone else. Someone even his best friend couldn't compete with: Amanda Suzuki.
She had started Changing at almost the same time that Stripes had. But she was changing a lot. She'd been a smallish girl, but the doctor had discovered that she was turning into a Clydesdale morph. What's more, it was expected that she'd be high degree.
Ah well, everything changes. I though with a bit of a sigh.
I reached my front door and walked through, banging my guitar case into the wall. "Todd! Watch it, will ya?" I head from the living room.
I poked my head in. My parents were both sitting in a nest-like rattan chair in front of the TV. Both of them were considered exotics, my father a toucan and mother a species of bird of prey that years after the Change had yet to be identified. She was some type of falcon, similar to a Peregrine, but there were enough differences when she was in norm that no ornithologist yet had figured it out. It was either an undiscovered or extinct species.
I set my case on the floor and kicked off my shoes. "Sorry. I'll try to be more careful." I walked over toward them. My father was in norm eating grapes out of a bowl while my mother went over an inventory sheet for the auto parts store they owned. I gave her a quick hug and stole a grape. "Anyone call?"
She shook her head. "Nope, no one. Oh, but can you stop by the store tomorrow after school? We need a hand moving some displays."
I thought a second but couldn't think of anything that pressing tomorrow. "Okay, I'll stop by."
She smiled, an expression that I was long used to. "I'll try not to keep you too long."
I nodded and went up to my room. Setting down my guitar, I looked over my desk quickly. My homework was already done and I didn't have any tests this week, so I put together all the books that I needed for the next day and shoved them into my bag.
I quickly undressed, grabbed a book
and laid in bed. I tried to read the adventure novel, but simply couldn't
get into it. I felt restless but tired at the same time. It was an odd
feeling, one that I couldn't place. After just a few pages, I set the book
on my nightstand and double checked the alarm. After turning off the light,
I settled in and fell asleep.
I knew it was a dream.
Nothing seemed right, so it had to be a dream.
The forest was too big, or I was too small.
It was night, but the light still seemed bright.
I could hear the wind rustling though the trees, but it seemed too loud.
I could smell the sweet and musty smells of the woods, but they were too strong.
I sat still, silent, for a long time.
I wasn't scared, but confused. I realized for the first time that I was
up in a tree. I started to look down at my hands...
"Todd! Wake up!"
I fought my eyes open, the dream already fading from my mind. "Five more minutes..." I muttered sleepily. There was a loud sigh from my father, but no more knocking. I heard the light footsteps go down the stairs while he let me sleep a little longer.
But laying there in that half awake state, something seemed wrong. Something I couldn't place a finger on. The memory of the dream went from vivid to fragments.
I opened my eyes and looked at the green numbers on the clock. It was almost 6:30, fifteen minutes after I normally woke to my alarm. Frowning slightly, I reached up to see if I'd forgotten to set it the night before.
My hand never reached the alarm clock. Instead, it hovered over the white plastic cube for a long, long time. It was a moment that I could never forget, burned by that long stare into my brain.
The hand that I reached out to the clock for wasn't the same one that I'd gone to bed with. That pink hand was completely gone, replaced with a hand of almost gray skin and a light coating of fur. My fingers were longer by about half and ended in elongated fingernails that looked vaguely like claws, but not exactly. Starting at my wrist and extending back a few inches was a much heavier covering of dark fur.
Slowly, as if a spell had broken, I pulled the hand back toward my eye and took a closer look. Suddenly, as if I'd forgotten that I had a second hand, I pulled the other one out from under the blanket and stared some more. It was almost identical to the first.
I have no idea how long I lay there. No matter how much I had wanted the Change to happen, it was suddenly different when it did. Thoughts ran through my mind like crazy, but nothing that I was able to remember later. A few did stick out, though. I didn't know yet what I was becoming, but I knew that it was a mammal. That was a blow to my hopes. With both parents birds, I'd heard how wonderful flying was for as long as I could remember.
I couldn't even hope that I'd be something like David. In a way, when he started changing, I'd hoped to be something similar. But there wasn't an equine that I knew of that had hands like these.
But what was I?
There was another knock at the door. "Todd? Are you ever going to get up? You have school today!" my father said loudly through the door.
"Dad?" I said, surprised how shaky my voice was. "You'd better come in here."
There was a slight pause, but the door opened carefully. My fathers colorful beak preceded him into the room. He stopped an instant later. "Your hands!" he said with a start. He moved to the side of the bed and took one gently. "You've finally started!" he said happily. "Sandy! Come up here!"
I heard the flapping of wings up the stairwell followed by the creak of the floorboards as my mothers morphic body reformed at the top of the stairs. She walked in and had a similar reaction. "You've started!"
The next few minutes passed with my parents looking over my hands and wrists. They didn't know for sure what I was becoming, and neither of them being prone to speculation, ventured no guesses. Instead, my father called my school to let them know I wouldn't be in and then the doctor to make a morning appointment.
I thought about calling the rest of the guys to let them know, but even as I reached for the phone, my father yelled from downstairs. "The doctor can see him in a few minutes if we hurry!"
There was barely time for me to throw
on some clothes before we were out the door.
I looked at the beaky face of the crow morph expectantly. The doctor was running his rough hands over mine and turning them over and back. "Any other changes yet?" he asked.
I shook my head. "No, nothing. Just my hands and wrists..." my voice trailed off as I looked closed at my arms again.
"What is it?" asked the doctor as he jotted a note on his pad.
I looked more carefully, "It looks like my fur is further up my arm than before. But I didn't feel anything."
The doctor looked at me a moment and
seemed to frown. He tapped his pencil a couple times on the clipboard.
"Well, that's probably nothing to be worried about. Might have been a mini-surge.
It happens. Or for that matter it might have just been that you didn't
notice how far along it had gone before." The doctor tapped his pencil
a couple times more. "Well, let's run you though the standard tests to
make sure all is well and nail down the species."
A raccoon.
As I laid on the gurney getting scanned by the computer, I pondered it. It hadn't even taken the computer to ID it. The doctor had a raccoon technician on the machine whose hands were almost identical. Unless I was a closely related species, that was my new existence.
I'd looked into the techs eyes a moment before I'd been ushered into the machine. Those black eyes seemed to have a glint in them, though if it was the species or the tech it was hard to tell.
I sighed a little. Something so common. Why did that have to be? David gets to be a fast, exotic species and I get to be a lumbering, mischievous night dweller.
I suddenly started to giggle a little. Mischievous. I guess that's a natural for me. Who says that God doesn’t have a sense of humor?
"Don't move, please." Said the tech.
An hour later, the my parents and I were talking in the doctors office. His nurse had ushered us into the private room after the computer scan. There was no reason to expect anything the matter. After all, the Change was a totally normal part of our lives.
But the expression on the doctors face when he walked in was not good. Living with two birds, I could read most any avian expression now, and his was a deep, deep frown. He silently settled onto the low perch behind his chair and looked at the three of us. "I just got the results back from the computer."
The tone of his voice was the final clincher. It seemed like the temperature of the room had dropped 10 degrees. "What is it, doctor?" asked my mother.
The doctor let out a slow breath. "Have any of you ever heard of a non-stop Change?" We all shook our heads. "I didn't think so. It happened to a number of people on the first morning of the Change, usually during the first or second surge. People who changed all the way to animal in a split second."
There was a slight pause as he let that information sink in. But none of us knew where he was going.
He looked at me a moment then continued. "Now, since that day there hasn't been a similar documented case of the same thing. The fastest anyone has gone through the change was 10 hours, and that was into a Low-D form. But in some very rare cases, the Change doesn't surge like normal. Instead, it's a single, continuous Change." He looked at me. "That's what's happening to you, Todd."
I felt my body start to get colder as I realized what I was hearing. "What... what does that mean?" I asked shakily.
The doctor paused a long time before answering. "I honestly don't know, Todd." He looked back at my parents. "There have only been about 200 documented cases of this kind of Change worldwide since 1996. From what I just checked in my reference material, the lowest degree that any of these people became was Hi-Medium degree." He tapped his black nails on the polished wood desk a moment, as if unsure whether or not to continue. "A little more than half didn't stop Changing."
"What are you talking about?" asked my mother. "Nobody's had that happen since Change Day."
The doctor shook his head. "It's happened, but only twice in the United States, both within two years of the Change when the news was still inundated. The rest, up to now, have happened overseas and it's just not been widely reported."
"Is this a Power of some kind?" asked my father.
The doctor shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Which, by the way, is an important point. Todd, whatever you do, don't try to trigger any powers. Don't try to norm shift or anything like that."
That made me more nervous. "Why?"
"Some researchers," he answered, "think that this kind of Change may be tapping into whatever the source for the powers is. But that's basically an untestable theory. What I have just read indicates that the people who went through this and discovered and used their powers while it was happening seemed more likely to Change all the way. It's just a precaution."
I felt myself shudder a little. "What happens if I do something accidentally?"
"Then don't repeat it until we're sure you're finished with the Change." He said. "There will be plenty of time later for all that."
"When will I know? How far I'm going to Change, I mean."
He shrugged. "It's hard to say. Once your feet change, which should be the last part for you, we should have a better idea."
"How long?"
"Three? Maybe four weeks. Probably not longer than that, but it could be faster."
Another thought occurred to me, one that I didn't want to ask. I steeled myself for the answer I feared. "Will I lose my mind?"
The doctor looked at me a long time. "We'll have to wait and see."
For the first time in years, I felt tears rolling down my cheeks.