It took nearly thirty minutes of waiting, but Trevor finally saw one of the red lights next to a transformation room on the second floor of the foyer change to green. It was vacant.
“About time,” he grumbled as he stepped past the yellow waiting line painted onto the floor and made his way over the staircase on the right. He still had to wait a second as one of the staff members went into the transformation room and retrieved the bin the previous occupant had left containing her belongings and the empty vial.
No sooner was the staff member out than Trevor stepped into the small room. He found an empty bin on the bench against the wall. In front of him was a steel door about three feet tall with the resort’s rules painted on it.
Knowing they probably wanted him to move as quickly as possible to keep the line moving along, Trevor tapped the button next to the door he walked in to and the door clamped shut with an electronic hiss. A split second later, he was undressing and carefully placing his clothes in the bin. He only remembered to take the vial out of his jeans pocket after he’d stripped down to nothing.
“Well. Here it goes,” he sighed as he popped the top off the vial and downed it like a shot of whiskey. It had a bit of a bitter taste, but went down easily enough. Trevor still let out a shrill gasp after he’d finished swallowing it, though.
Stepping across the cold concrete to the center of the room, Trevor waited for the transformation to begin. A large mirror was built into the wall behind a sheet of plexiglas, but Trevor stepped away from it. As long as he’d been looking forward to becoming a bird, he didn’t really want to watch it happen on a mirror.
A few seconds later, a sharp numbing sensation raced over his body. This was it. Trevor barely had time to process the feeling before he felt pressure building up behind his lips. He crossed his eyes when his teeth merged together and started to slant outwards. Within seconds, they were pushing out past his lips and becoming a solid triangular block. Shortly after cresting out of his lips, his forming beak started to shift from the white of his teeth to solid black.
As his beak was taking shape, the soft cartilage of his nose melted away, sucking his nose into his face. In a matter of seconds, two nostril holes punctuated the top of his beak.
Trevor opened it for the first time and felt the edges of his beak with his shifting tongue. He was so caught up in exploring his new mouth that he barely noticed that he was shrinking, fast. On his way down, he impulsively whisked his arms out to steady himself and felt his bones reshaping and hollowing out. A few seconds later they had changed into bare raven wings. He was disappointed that his feathers hadn’t formed yet, but that was when he became aware of an odd tingling sensation racing over his body.
Glancing down at his arms and legs, where the sensation was most acute, Trevor watched a massive amount of quills start to bud out above his darkening skin. It didn’t take long for the quills to be consumed with dark plumage, though, as feathers started to envelop his body.
He was growing feathers!
Trevor let out an excited laugh, but it exited his beak as a weird mixture between a human scoff and a raven’s cackle. As if all the stuff he’d been watching wasn’t proof enough of it, the cackle brought it all back home to him that he was turning into a raven.
Unable to resist the temptation anymore, Trevor hobbled over to the mirror on his changing feet to try and watch the last bit of his transformation. No sooner had he positioned himself in front of the mirror than he was able to watch the last bits of his skin being covered up by black feathers and saw his mostly human face start to push out, removing the whites of his eyes with the black doll’s eyes of a raven.
After a few more adjustments, including the growth of his tail and tail feathers, and the transition of legs and feet into talons and claws, the numbing sensation subsided and Trevor looked back at himself in bewilderment. He was a raven. He let out a triumphant caw and watched the raven in the mirror do the same. Now it was time to check out The Flight Dome.