Then you awoke and found yourself in your bed.
It had been another nightmare,the sort you'd started having a month ago.
Now you weren't to worried about Michael being a dragon,since
you'd been the one to find his corpse strapped into the chair a decade
earlier in Dr Croyden's lab at the now closed down Nervyw University.
As the research journals reported,Dr Croyden had claimed that decades
earlier,when he'd fallen into a crevice on a Greenland glacier during WW2,
he'd found the frozen remains of a female winged reptile locked in
a death struggle with a mammoth.
The remains of the winged reptile were too far gone to determine what it was,wyvern,dragoness or even just a winged T rex.
However he'd managed to take out a slitted eyeball from the beasts exposed skull
as well as hammered through the glacier ice to take a few tissue samples.
He'd turned back to the foreend of the dead beast and noticed the glint of gold and green where the bony neck could be seen embedded in the ice.
So Croyden took out his hammer and chisel again and soon had a golden chain
with a glowing gemstone attached and dumped it
in his sample bag.
Out of the crevice he crawled with his samples and was a hundred paces away when it finally occured to him that critters from 75 thound years ago didn't go about with necklaces and gemstones around their lengthy
reptillian necks everyday.
So he turned around and began racing towards the crevice to get a
better look at the crypto.
Alas suddenly the glacier shook and rumbled and the crevice closed up
and the crypto was lost forever.
A decade ago you ,Ellery Quinn, and your college buddy Michael Brigham
had got scholarships to study at Nervyw University and had because
the now aged Croydens lab assistants.
Transmogrification Ray Amplification Machines had just been invented
three years earlier and one of the huge hulking things had been installed in Croydens Advanced Relativity Medicines department.
It all sounds pretty arcane,but all it meant was that scientists had
figured out how to heal cuts and bruises with a hour under the
Transmogrification Ray.
Naturally Croyden had other plans for his machine,such as
seeing if we could turn a human into a huge winged reptile beastie.
He'd shown the two of you the secret hiding place behind one of the
instrument cabinets where he kept nine cylinder filters that could be inserted into the
machines ray generation chamber to cause the ray to do something
radically different then regenerate human skin.
One cylinder contained the glowing green stone,and the other
eight contained the mounted reptillian eye and other samples from the long lost monster.
Michael was the daring one and so you thought Michael would be the
one to volunteer to be the test subject.
It didn't work out that way.
You ,Croyden and Michael had gone to a bar to celebrate the
upcoming test and was more drunk then alarmed when you
passed out from all the drinks Michael
had poured out for you.
When you wakened hours later you were strapped into the
Transmogrifier's chair and Michael and Croyden,to your horror were inserting the nine filters into the machines chamber.
You joked with them at first,telling them
funny guys but the jokes over let me out
but they ignored you and kept on
firing up the nuclear reactors that would fuel your change
from a human male to a monster.
Then they fired the Ray at you and you began to writh and scream in pain as the first phase was completed,the transformation of your DNA from human to
dragoness.
Then they increased the power and your screams grew deeper and more bestial as your inner organs reshaped.
When your body began to expand and iron knots of growing dragon muscle swelled to the point where the leather straps restraining you burst,you staggered out of the chair,taller,bigger and
hungrier then before and fled,smashing through a door with ease
and rushed onto the facilities parking lot.
You'd hoped that getting away from the altering rays of the transmogrifier
would halt and perhaps reverse the changes,but Croyden
Michael simply smashed out a lab window facing you and fed you the full power of the ray.
The final transformation and growth swept through you
and when it was done a 99 foot long horny dragoness
got up on her hind legs ,raised her thick muscled 25 foot
long neck and glowered at the two tiny humans who were staring at
you with awe.
You on the other hand felt no awe for the tiny mammals
just contempt.
You swung around your toothy snout to gaze down upon the University guards staring up at you with terror,then casually swung the
spiky club at the end of your tail and smashed in the roof
of a metal object on four wheels that
annoyed you for some reason.
You spread out your wings,flew as high in the sky as
you could then roared to claim your territory.
Then when fuzzy,and when you awakened in a mountain cave a day
later you could tell that the process was beginning to ,not reverse
itself exactly,but collapse.
Your body began to lose size and mass and after a week you were
human sized and able to walk on your hind legs all the time
and after another week of the Collapse your human intellect was returning.
Finally after 33 days since your initial transformation,you seemed to be
your own self again.
You hitched a ride back into town and
discovered that Croyden was missing and Michael had been found strapped to the chair dead.
All a decade earlier.
And now ...