A "Winds of Change" Story

By Brian Eirik Coe

There is something seriously depressing about a hospital after visiting hours. It’s too quiet, too sterile. Only the sounds of the staff occasionally walking or flying the halls and checking on their charges broke up the night.

I couldn’t sleep. The dull, throbbing pain in my leg just wouldn’t allow it. Dr. Chin had given me some pain killers, but they only took the edge off. My femur, the long bone in the upper leg, had been broken in five places, including one small fragment that had penetrated the skin. Right now, it was heavily bandaged up; completely immobile. I couldn’t even roll off my back to sleep on my side like I always did.

And I was laying right on my slowly growing tail.

I tried to recall the memories of the day, a day that had started out so normally. It wasn’t easy. There was a gap in my memories, a gap filled with images filtered through the eyes and mind of a terrified raccoon. Even once I returned to my own mind, it wasn’t easy. My world seemed to change by the minute. Stripes wasn’t really striped anymore. I hadn’t actually seen his zebra visage since I woke back up, only that dolphin face with the etched in smile.

I really hadn’t seen Jim either, and what bothered me was that no one would tell me what was happening with him. He’d only visited long enough to show me, nervously, the light coating of feathers on his back. I was happy for him, despite his own fears. At least he would be able to fly someday soon.

I heard the sound of wings flapping down the hall and noted a flash of red past the door. My mind connected it to an orderly, a cardinal morph, I’d seen earlier. Must have been in a hurry somewhere.

A minute later, the sound came again from the direction in which he’d flown, but it was a slightly heavier sound now. It stopped briefly just before I heard the sound of talons on the waxed tile floor. There was a slight, high pitched "Oof!" as a flash of green slid past the door, it’s wings splayed out awkwardly.

I was about to reach for the nurse call button when the annoyed parrot walked into the room. He stopped at the open doorway and peered in silently, as if being quiet now could erase the sounds of a crash landing. We stared at each other a moment before I took a wild guess. "Jim?"

The bird perked up instantly when he realized I was awake and bobbed his head. "It me." He said in a voice that was slightly high pitched, but defiantly his. He walked to the side of the bed. "How are you doing?"

I shifted to get a better look at him, not easy to do with my leg braced. "I’m okay, I guess." I shifted again. "What are you doing here, anyway? Visiting hours ended at eight."

He shrugged his wings. "I’m a patient here tonight, myself." He said. "An oddity with my Power." He said a little sullenly.

"You’re stuck?" I ventured. It wasn’t unheard of for kids to get stuck in norm their first time shifting, but this hospital had a couple of inducers on staff.

He nodded again. "Yeah, Dr. Chin doesn’t want to force my shift back until he can talk to a Power expert tomorrow morning." He yawned. "Good thing that I can talk in this form. Though it’s a bit hard on my throat. Do you have some water?"

I smiled and reached for the pitcher and glass on my nightstand. "Can you at least climb up here?" I asked. "This isn’t easy." He obliged by climbing up the sheets and railing to the top of the bed. I set the glass down on the mattress and he gingerly dipped his beak in to take a drink, gaining more confidence as he sipped. "You’re taking this better than I thought." I mused.

He stopped drinking and looked at me. "I’m not sure it’s hit me yet." He jutted one wing out toward the cast. "How’s the leg?"

It was my turn to sigh. "Not good. They decided after you left that I need a bit more extensive surgery than they thought. They need to hold the bone in place so it won’t move while I finish my Change."
Somehow, Jim managed a worried look. "How soon?"

"Tomorrow morning, about ten." I replied.

He considered that a second. "I should go, then." He said. "You need to get some sleep."

"Wait. Don’t go." I said quietly. "I could use the company." It seemed silly to me, but I was scared.
Jim nodded. I think of all my friends, he might have understood my fears right then the most. "Sure. I guess I should learn how to sleep perched anyway." He climbed up off my mattress and onto the railing.

Eventually, I managed to finally fall asleep.

I woke up to the sound of a parrots warning call. I found Jim still perched on my bed railing, but now an annoyed looking nurse with vaguely rodentine features was rousing him.

"Mr. Yates." She said forcefully, "You’ve already given us a scare by vanishing like that. Now come along before you wake up your friend."

"What time is it?" I asked. I could see the sun was coming though the window, but it didn’t look that high in the sky.

The nurse shot Jim an I told you so look and smiled semi-sweetly at me. "It’s a little after six. Let me take care of Mr. Yates here and I’ll be back to prepare you for surgery."

I groaned and laid my head back on the pillow. "Good luck, Todd." I heard Jim say.

I looked up and smiled. "I’ll be up and about by Halloween." I said with false confidence.

The nurse returned shortly with an assistant and started getting me ready. It started with them helping me relieve myself, and it went pretty much downhill from there. After almost an hour of poking and prodding from the nurses, Dr. Chin came in do add his two cents. He got my vitals from the nurse and found out about Jim’s little escape the night before. Dr. Chin, to my relief, seemed far more annoyed that it took the duty nurse all night to realize Jim was missing than the fact that he’d come in here.

At seven on the nose, my parents showed up. Dr. Chin had been waiting for them to go into the details of what would happen. They were going to use old fashioned surgical techniques rather than rely on Powers. There was some fear that even the use of powers might interfere with my Change, though for the most part it was a practical concern. There were very few healers in the world, it had been one of the most rare of all the major Powers, and most of those were extremely costly. As such, they tended to be available only for cases of a life threatening nature. There were hopes that they could get one here later, after the bone was set, to simply accelerate the healing before the Change hit my legs, but they weren’t going to depend on it.

Those details worked out, my mother ran her taloned fingers through the fur that had replaced my hair. "If you’re up to it, your principle wants to talk to you about what happened yesterday."

I thought about it and nodded. "Okay. Might as well get it over with."

My father leaned into the hall and motioned for him to come in. Mr. Niles came in followed by a high degree saber tooth tiger morph. I recognized him, of course. It was Mr. Strider from the PE department. I didn’t have him as a teacher, but whether they liked it or not, people who were morph of notable extinct creatures tended to be minor celebrities. I was a bit mystified as to why he was here though. Mr. Niles patted me on the shoulder. "How are you doing, Todd?"

I shrugged. "Okay, I guess."

"We just want to find out from you what happened yesterday. Mr. Strider here was the one to talk first to everyone, which is why he’s here. Do you mind?"

I wasn’t sure if he meant if I minded telling him or Mr. Striders presence. I shrugged. "No, not really. There isn’t much to tell, though." I related what I remembered from the day before, Nate and Glen accosting me in the hall, threatening me, the pressure on my mind to shift forms, and the flash of black and white that was Stripes coming to my rescue, even if it was a little too late. As I finished, I could see that Mr. Strider was angry.

"Those little…" he growled. "Those two sat in the nurses office and lied right to my face." His voice had a deadly hard edge to it. It was almost funny, but what Nate and Glen had done nearly killed me, and did end up putting me in the hospital, but Strider seemed far more angry that they had the gall to lie right to his face.

Dr. Chin spoke up. "I think that you may have a bigger problem than that." He mused.

Niles looked over at him, noticing the doctor for the first time. "What do you mean?"

Chin shrugged his wings. "I’m not sure. Todd, did you say that you tried to stop shifting? That you knew it was happening?"

I nodded, not sure where he was going with this. "That’s what I remember. I was scared, but didn’t really panic until I realized I was shifting."

Dr. Chin pondered for a second, all eyes on him. "Mr. Niles, do you know if any of your students, particularly this Nate or Glenn, are Inducers?"

The low degree hedgehog stared for a second. "No. There isn’t a single one at the school that I know of." He exchanged a look with Strider. "You know about this?"

Strider, I knew, was head of the PE department and Power training fell under that umbrella. "No, I don’t. You think that one of those two clowns is an Inducer?"

Dr, Chin shrugged again. "It’s possible. But Todd is in a delicate state because of the nature of his Change. It wouldn’t have taken much to force his norm shift. A weak inducer from a distance may have been able to manage it. Perhaps even unintentionally."

I pondered this silently. It wasn’t likely that Glen was an inducer, even a weak one. He’d been Changing for nearly a year now and no Powers had manifested. Nate, on the other hand, was only a few days into his Change. A Power could have come since his First Sign, and he was in direct contact with me when it happened…

I heard Niles swear and flip open a cellular phone. He pushed a speed dial button and waited. "Ellen? It’s Niles. Find out where Nathan Hill and Glenn Corner are first period. I want them in my office immediately. I’ll be back at the school in a few minutes. Get their parents on the phone, too. I want to talk to them." He hung up the phone and looked pointedly at my parents. "We’re going to get to the bottom of this before Todd is out of surgery."

I had always liked Mr. Niles. He was really a students principal. Friendly, easy going and tended to be forgiving of teenage behavior as long as no one was hurt. But right now, between he and Strider, I was almost afraid for Nate and Glenn.

Almost.

It wasn’t long before a few orderlies were called into the room and I was carefully transferred onto a gurney. Dr. Chin had given me some medications, and I was already feeling no pain. Even the slight knocking around of my leg did little to upset me. They slowly walked me down the hall to the elevator and wheeled me in.

Before the doors closed, I caught a glimpse of a more human looking Jim jogging down the hall. He’d apparently managed to shift human again at some point this morning, but not fast enough to see me off. We caught each others eye and managed to give each other a thumbs up sign before the elevator doors closed.

Go Back to Rapid Descent

Go Forward to Discovery

Go the Teen Round Robin Index Page