Bryan realised he’d been on this Chronivac Programme for more than a little while: Exploring the options available; It’s many functions; And options, when he began to make up his mind about what he was going to use it for.
Selecting the Animal Options, Bryan was greeted by a massive wall of names on one side of the screen, and a list of options on the other. The former having a Search and Species Bar above it to help narrow down the list, the latter a series of commands with either sliding bars from 0-100%, Yes/No, or Timers. Some of said commands being:
SPECIES CHANGE
USER AWARENESS
LOCAL AWARENESS
GLOBAL AWARENESS
REALITY SHIFT
CHANGE DELAY
CHANGE TIME
CHANGE DURATION
REVERSION TIME
There were plenty of other options in the Advanced Settings, mainly for allowing Stop/Start changes, uneven changes, size, build, and special options specific to each individual species selected. But what caught Bryan’s attention was the avatar of himself on the screen. Far too alike to him for comfort.
On a whim, he decided to select Snake (Burmese Python) and ran the Change bar along the line, seeing his on-screen avatar change the more he moved the bar. By 30/70 Snake/Human, a snake’s head replaced his own with a few hints of human in it, such as a nose, squashed and splayed as it was, and patterned scales covering the body, while still having external genitalia. 50/50 seemed to finish the head and gave him a tail about the length of his legs, the genitalia internal now, while by 70/30 his legs had wizened away, the tail making up his whole lower body. And naturally, by 100/0, just a snake.
But before Bryan entered anything else, he went back and looked at some more animal options to try out. 50/50 Horse (Clydesdale) was that, hoofed feet, dexterous hands, horse’s head, fur, mane and tail, and still rather human-like in one sense. 75/25 widened the torso and made the hands hooves, but it was only after the line crossed 80/20 that the avatar image showed a change to a quadruped stance.
The last one Bryan checked was wolf, where the feet didn’t change until 45%, the tail came at 50, though the head and fur were essentially complete by just 40.
“Well, what to do?” He murmured quietly, until he made his choice.