With a shrug Benjamin clicks through the warning, which initiates a startup loading bar on the Chronivac program, sitting squarely at 0%. He stares at it a moment before his attention is drawn toward the Portable Emitter which has begun to hum in a strange mechanical fashion, the earlier sense of static across his body returning full force. He blinks hard, shivering at the sensation before reaching out to touch the emitter and turn it off- being met with a an electric jolt!
He jumps up from his seat and stumbles backward, clutching his smarting hand as the static tingles intensify over his whole body, the progress bar moving to 1%. A sudden heat washes over him, the temperature of the room seeming to rise with a crawling sensation across his chest, prompting him to quickly pull his shirt off, panting. He touches his forehead, fanning himself when an abrupt stiffness creeps through his joints, making each and every movement a little bit harder...
5% ....
Without warning his elbows lock up, arms stretched out and stiff, wincing as he takes in the situation... what the hell was going on!? Did he need to call in an emergency? What was this thing doing...! Benjamin moves to take a step toward the phone when both knees lock up just as his elbows had a moment prior, stuck at a 90 degree angle and sending him toppling backward onto his hands and feet.
10% ...
He looks down with a gasp, seeing the skin along his arms begin to darken, taking on an alien texture of slight grain, replacing the pink and hair of his normal skin. His whole chest seems to puff outward slightly, turning darker red, softening, with a different texture... Benjamin is speechless as his whole body shudders, stiffening up even further, his neck and spine now locking in rigid, awkward fashion like his limbs had. Slowly his elbows were drawn up closer to his body, the space between his upper arms and torso fusing together, sticking his upper arms fast to his sides, the lower stretching slightly to bring his sitting position level with the ground.
25% ...
Benjamin tries to gasp out a call for help, but his lungs seem to have failed him, the red pattern across his chest plumped out into soft, textured fabric, a thick fluffy sensation of cotton filling up his rigid torso where lungs and heart should have been. He shivers deeply, eyes wandering to his his legs, thighs flattening out and merging together into one, pushing his jeans down past his knees where they slid to the ground around his ankles, upper legs now forming a seat that began to plump upward with similar cloth to his chest.
50% ...
The creaking of wood filled the air, reaching his ears as his whole body contracted and condensed into a more inanimate form, what was left of his arms thinning out and taking on more geometric shape, rectangular pillars down to his as of yet unchanged hands on the carpet. His legs underwent a similar change, below the knees turned seat, they sloped forward into an elegant curve, turning to rigid mahogany and pulling his feet up to his tip-toes. He twists and squirms as much as he can, trying to flex his fingers and toes in a way that he could shimmy to the the computer to somehow cancel this transformation, but to no avail, the progression at five minutes now was too far gone for such movements...
75%...
Benjamin's fingers pulled together, fusing solid into a featureless point, indiscernible from the chair legs that had been his arms. His ankles stuck fast, feet twisting outward and forming his toes into rigid clawed paws made of hardwood, balls of his new clawfeet rounding out into a sphere, cracking and popping as they settled into inanimate form. His body below his shoulders was now that of a chair, leaving only his head unchanged....
90%...
He felt his neck recede backward, thinking to himself- No! No! This is impossible... it can't happen! But it seemed all too real at the moment as the shape of his head fused downward into the frame of the back of the chair he was becoming. The red cloth crept upward, subsuming his face completely beneath it as his jaws and lips fused shut, the sensation of cotton filling up his ears and head overwhelming with the creaking sound of wood.
100%...
One minute later, he found himself in silence, sitting in the middle of his living room, a perfect and rather striking antique clawfoot chair, his clothes piled beneath him. His vision remained, albeit colluded behind the veil of red fabric that had taken over his face, sight locked forward, unblinking. His hearing was still intact, though muffled as if his ears were full of fluff, and he could feel the cool movement of air over his now rigid and unclothed inanimate body. The length of time seemed interminable before the Chronivac program beeped softly...
'Transition complete! Altering reality... please wait...'
He could barely make out those words on the screen, realizing the full breadth of his predicament now that he understood the strange, almost magical abilities of this computer program. The world seemed to suddenly fade away around him, a sensation of falling that he couldn't react to as he tumbled through a rip in space and time brought by the program...
In a flash he found himself sitting in a new room, the sight before him slowly fading back in to see where he has been transported to...