It may have only cost a single Dollar, but you still decided that you’d been scammed as you returned to your car, wanting nothing more than to lay down and forget about the whole thing. Easier said than done given the poor lighting as you tried to find it thanks to a recent brownout. Thankfully you only suffered a few slips and no trips which meant not being completely peeved off as you drove home.
Not that it was enough to stop your internal chastising at your blowing your money that way as you had to navigate the darkened streets, your car headlights currently the brightest light source around.
A minute later, and still a ways from home, an idea came to mind. Since you were so certain of having been scammed, there couldn’t be any harm in ‘using’ it. Right? So fishing the Ring out and slipped it onto a free finger, you prepped yourself with what you ‘wanted’ to do with it.
“I wish I was a big, muscular Lizardman.” You speak out loud and clear, laughing afterwards at what you’d just said, certain as to it being a gag.
So the cold azure light that caught your eye came as a surprise, nothing in the car able to make that particular colour until you risked a glance at your free hand, to see that it was coming from the Ring itself, well, the stone set into it to be precise.
And that wasn’t the only thing you saw, as in that light, you could make out a pattern forming on your hand, a pattern that could only mean one thing. Scales.
“Holy…” You have time to murmur before you feel the scales spreading.
From the hands and up the arms, your feet and up along your legs, and down from your head, you can tell that however it’s happening, it’s happening. “…It’s for real.” You manage to finish your sentence at last.
And it’s not stopping. Even as they finish joining up around your torso, you can see your face pushing out into your line of sight, filled with sharp teeth that you could detect with your increasingly long and forked tongue. Your hair came out in clumps, collecting around you as you start to be pushed forwards in your seat, the reason being the new tail that is growing from the base of your spine, tearing through your pants before you can even begin to pull them loose.
It’s only now you realise you shouldn’t still be driving while all this is happening but the changes seem to be accelerating, muscles building up at a vastly increased pace while your body grows taller, forming stretch marks on your pants before they start to tear at the seams, and where the hole for the tail’s been made. Your top holds out a moment longer before it too is torn away, the ragged remnants slipping away from your muscle-packed form, while wicked clawed feet destroy your sneakers, leaving bare feet resting on the Gas and Floor.
Now without clothes, you finally manage to find a place to pull over and stop, to take stock of the situation. First order of business is to get yourself more comfortable in the drivers seat where the tail and increased height are leaving you rather pinned in. It takes a while but you manage to move the seat as far back and the backrest as low as they will go, and can now take a look at yourself. At a guess, you suppose you’re now seven-foot-one and built like a tank.
“Unreal.” Your voice is different too, more like a deep hiss as you check to see how your body moves.
The fully-grown tail seems to move well enough under your command, and the rest seems to be okay too and you were about to start moving again when a though hit you. Didn’t that old man say something about the Ring from that batch? With a start that sees your head strike the car roof hard, making a dent in the process, you finally remember that he did give you a warning, that it came from a faulty batch! And you hadn’t been particularly specific about how you wanted to be!