Jeff always felt unlucky. Most of the time, he got the short end of the stick, or something would happen that reversed the fortune in his life.
When he was filling out his Notepad document with 20 options, he picked a variety of animals he always wanted to be, but decided to put the most desirable thing he could think of at #20. And let’s face it - he would never roll a 20.
If he somehow did, though... it’d be something spectacular.
He decided to put ‘dragon’. Dragons were the epitome of all creatures, the inspiration for the Dungeons and Dragons’ twenty-sided die on his desk, and—honestly? A truly majestic being. He shivered just thinking about what it would be like to have scales, horns, and wings...
Unfortunately, though, Jeff was a little too giddy. Dragons were categorized under mythical creature transformations - and *not* under the furry transform packages.
Regardless, Jeff’s anticipation turned into utter disbelief when he picked up that 20-sided die, unleashed it from his clenched hand, gave it a good roll on his desk. Staring back at him, no joke, was the largest possible number.
He blinked, and shook his head. No way he got a ‘20’... no way! This was a game he made up himself; he didn’t ‘have’ to accept good fortune. So let’s just roll again.
So he did.
And he got 20 again.
He looked up at the screen. Wow, this never happens. What luck! He wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. With tense excitement, Jeff began typing into the Chronivac program.
Furry Transform (applied to all ten choices unless specified below):
Name: Jeff Gauthier
Gender: Male
Species: Human ---> Dragon
Age: 17
Height: 5'10''
Weight: 172
Time of Transformation: Default (3 minutes)
Duration: Default (24 hours)
Perception/Reality: Default (Shift)
The Chronivac had grabbed most of the settings when he got scanned. To his amazement, it knew his age and full name - perhaps it was pre-registered? The only thing he really needed to do was identify the species, and adjust any default settings to whatever he wanted. But instead of bothering with adjustments, he left it as it was. After all, this was new to him - he didn’t want to mess anything up...
“I’ll just do what it wants… I can change it later. Let’s just do this!!”
With nervous breaths of excitement, and a shaking hand, Jeff clicked with his mouse to proceed, and happily confirmed the defaults.
…
But Jeff never felt he was a lucky person: he didn’t review the settings. The Furry Transform package didn’t have a listing for ‘dragon’. And to be fair, the program should have caught this kind of mistake. But instead of throwing an error, or stopping the process, the package went alphabetically to the next creature in the list: a dragonfly. Perhaps it had something to do with a name-handler defect in the software. Jeff was enthusiastic about what he was doing, so he didn’t notice the difference.
Jeff watched the software did with morbid curiosity. The Chronivac itself buzzed and whizzed for a few moments, then a progress bar appeared on his screen that immediately began counting down from three minutes. After the first few seconds went by, which were spent just sitting with held breath, he started feeling something a bit strange all over, like his body was going to begin vibrating. Then he felt pressure in his face, under his skin, and especially under the front of his eyes... The beginnings of a muzzle?
He looked down. Visually he could distinguish his skin looking - no, turning more pale in color! Oh my gosh, he thought, he just remembered: what type of dragon would he become? … Who cared! Holy shit, he was turning into a half-human dragon! He was turning into a - well, hopefully, an anthro dragon! The Chronivac worked! The thrill of the idea itself was enough for Jeff to leap up from his desk with joy!
It had only been 10, 15 seconds into it all. Then his vision started getting blurry, and he couldn’t focus. The sides of his body, and right underneath his arms, were burning up with odd-feeling pressures. The flames went all the way down his back, where it felt like something was grabbing his skin and pulling it out. Down between his legs, too; he felt a pushing sensation. He’s going to have dragon wings, and a tail! He could feel them push against the skin on his back! Oh no, will it hurt? Will it bleed? In fact, he could swear…
Suddenly, he felt sick to his stomach. He lurched forward—and this only made his face burn more. Geez, it was like his eyes were popping out and… growing?
There was no time to analyze further. He turned to the computer screen for clues... but he couldn’t see anything right now. Again, his vision was too fuzzy.
Even if he wanted to, it didn’t matter much. The skin in his back was pushing out against his shirt, and then he heard the material of his shirt tear from the pressure. A small sacrifice, he reassured himself.
But then it happened from both sides of his chest. Threads of cloth fell to the floor. Little nubs of...
Wait… what were these little nubs?
He could feel his backbone extending downward, outward… pushing down his pants…
God, he couldn’t look at anything anymore. It physically hurt to turn his eyes at all. They must be really fucked up. He reached up with his left hand and -
Wait, what? He could … his eye was big, and swollen… too big! Certainly? And… what was that weird feeling of… wait, where was his nose?
Where was the muzzle? Horns?
Something was off. He didn’t know what, exactly, but even in this crazy moment of impossibility, of pure excitement and fantasy, that undeniable queasiness started to seep in; the kind that Jeff felt when something was off. Was everything going correctly with the transformation? Maybe it happened in stages? Either that, or this was the strangest dragon he’d ever-
OOF!
Jeff fell down to the floor in mind-numbing anguish. Now he couldn’t shut his eyelids! Something cracked underneath his face, like his skull was being cut apart from inside his head. He would’ve taken interest, but he so badly in that moment wanted to just be able to close his eyes, but he literally couldn’t. It preoccupied his entire train of thought, and he began to panic. The appendage that felt like a tail continued growing outward, but he didn’t know whether to trust it, to move it, or if he even was moving it at all.
...And the wings? They… well, there were certainly things growing out of his back. But there were more than two?
Jeff couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Maybe a couple minutes? He could barely breathe or operate his brain. As his eyes got bigger, his eyesight started changing. Anything he could see was like little chunks of color; it was hard to describe.
He made a concerted effort to move his hands in front of his face to gain some control of the situation. But suddenly... there were two sets of claw-like hands moving in front of his head, and they were all wiggling about.
My god, he had four arms!
...But dragons don’t have four arms.
“I… what’s happening to me?!”
He was able to speak, but his mouth was all wrong and disjointed. Jeff was confused, bewildered, worried - and weird things kept on happening. The immense pressure kept coming up everywhere, albeit without pain.
Stop this and turn back, he thought - but he couldn’t even stand, or see, or control his body...
The feeling of the long appendage between his legs - his tail touching the floor - changed his focus away from what his arms were doing, momentarily. Then there was another big push and stretch places on his back, and a jolt from his neck. Something was floating above his head that he couldn’t get a sense for. His mouth was so backwards that he couldn’t open it consciously. He still couldn’t see what his hands were doing (all four?) and something from across the room fell down.
He tried one last time to close his eyes but the signal - the ability - just wasn’t there; nothing happened at all. He had no eyelids to speak of.
Was he becoming some kind of insect? He should’ve been happy that the Chronivac worked, but maybe it was working a little too well. A wave of coolness swept throughout the space of his room. Even though things weren’t visually making sense, his desk, bed, and shelves were changing and moving, stretching, in a strange and fluid way. He turned around, and where his closet used to be was a trove of weird clothes that resembled nothing he’d ever seen before.
Reality was shifting. But… he didn’t want this reality…
He was starting to gain focus back at a rampant speed, and the little boxes in his vision got smaller. Things still felt like they were changing, but perhaps not so quickly.
Jeff noticed that the floor of his room was not carpet, but still very soft and … actually, it felt like grass. Maybe it was grass? But it wasn’t green. Then he realized that not only was he seeing things that looked different from before, and that they were colored differently, but that he hadn’t even turned his head to see them.
Colors flooded in from all over the place. He could feel the air flow around his wings, which certainly looked like insect wings. And while the skin of his body was disjointed and brittle, it didn’t have a consistent look or feel. At times he felt nothing, then he would feel everything at once.
“What the hell am I seeing?” he anxiously thought.
Was he in enough control of his body to push up or get off the floor? He wanted to try and crawl back into his desk chair. The action alone was too disorienting, however, and he slid back.
A few seconds later, something on his computer beeped. Jeff noticed a mirror by the transformed closet on one side of his room, and aimed to get up and walk to it - if he could try again and do it.
One step at a time. His legs still felt like legs, at least. He pushed up from the floor again, but his weight distribution was off. His new tail was so long that trying to straighten his body out was completely out of the question - and he didn’t know how to “move” the tail. He was about to give up again and go into panic mode.
Something clicked in his brain, though. It was completely natural, and yet it felt brand new. The insect wings on his back moved up and down, and with a little bit more of a push from his feet, he was suddenly up in the air… and floating! Was… he was flying? He must have been! Holy shit! Either that, or he was floating. Thank god… now he could get his tail underneath him—and then something deep within his mental state activated. He felt liberated and at ease. Off the ground, although maybe just a foot or so, was so much more comfortable.
Jeff recovered from temporary subconsciousness to realize that, hey - he could see nearly everything in his room right now. His gigantic eyes must have had nearly 360° vision, which suddenly made moving about insanely odd, like … seeing yourself move closer to things in front of you while simultaneously seeing things behind you move further away.
So he floated toward the mirror - and got a full-frontal view of his new body.
He just looked with an awestruck, disturbed, mind-numbing stare. His head was completely alien. The new eyes were nearly half the size of his head. There was a mouth, if you could call it that—and a lot of other things on his face that were arguably insectoid. Those ‘things’ floating above his head were antennae. His body frame had thinned out along with the chitinous coating, and he had two long, dark, multi-jointed legs. They were kinda human, but then again, inevitably transformed. A thin, straight-like dragonfly tail went past his feet. His four arms matched the style of his legs, and his top two arms were covered with sharp edges. Each hand on each arm had three claw-like fingers.
Four translucent, veiny wings on his back were nearly the length of his entire body and were flapping slowly to keep him afloat.
If Jeff found insects repulsive by nature, he may have puked right then and there. It was a lot to take in at once. He was some kind of anthropomorphic dragonfly. Some sensations were still unclear, but he had had enough of a look.
He was in his “room,” and things were generally still arranged the way they had been, but it wasn’t as he knew it. Knowing a little bit about how the reality alteration was supposed to work from the brief reading he had done, he suddenly realized the unplanned, daunting feeling of uncertainty about where he was, or what time it was... or even if he lived in the same house or world any more. All because he (accidentally) changed himself with the Chronivac. What a “lucky” person he was.
Then something behind him beeped again, but it wasn’t his computer - rather, an alarm clock.