Her world had been thrust into a nightmare of pain. Walking home from a friend's place, she wasn't sure exactly what happened, as she could remember hearing a car behind her and then there was a sharp, piercing pain on left side. Feeling herself flung from the sidewalk, she wasn't certain, but she thought she had slipped into unconsciousness and when she did become aware again, she could feel herself moving.
It took a bit to realise that it was under her own power that she had somehow managed to drag herself further onto the lawn. Confused why she was doing so, but unable to stop, her mind practically screaming to get away from whatever had hurt her, she found it odd, as her breath came in short, ragged, pain-tinged gasps, that she could still feel the pain on her left side, though it had become a dull throb, but not anything else from about her stomach down. Again, the blackness she knew that had nothing to do with night encompassed her once again and this time she could feel herself drifting away.
"It's almost like when I fall asleep. Only, when I do so, it's without the pain and the ability to feel everything about myself," she thought giddily before snapping back awake.
Dimly, she was aware of voices nearby. One sounded hysterical to her, though she could not understand what the voice was saying. The sense of drifting still hovering over her, she tried to piece it together as she realised that, at some point, she had stopped crawling. Everything shifted and for a brief moment, she had the weirdest perception come over her as she felt like not only was she lying in the grass, but she was standing over herself, looking at her own crumpled form. A flash of understanding came to her and as she kenned she was dying, she wanted to wail against it, but found she was unable to articulate even the simplest of sounds.
Thoughts raced inside her head and as she settled on, "It should bother me that I am dying. It's so unfair. What will mama say?" she was eventually aware, in that odd way of both being in her body and looking down at it, that someone was approaching and trying to call out, both as a non-coporeal being and as the form lying in the grass, she was dismayed she still couldn't make any noises.
Again, the sense of a time jump, though she figured it was not as bad as the last two, and as the blackness of unconsciousness left her, she became aware that a second person had joined the other one. Dimly, she was aware that at least one of these two was responsible for her state, yet, at the same time, she found, that with her dying, she didn't care. Telling herself, "It's not my problem. It's an issue for the living," she thought the two were talking, or having a heated argument, she wasn't sure which. And then one of them was bending down and touching her neck.
Elated that she could still feel that, the sensation quickly left her as she realised it was something more of a phantom feeling. "Like what those articles I read once for school that described what some people felt after losing a limb," she thought grimly. And then she did feel something, not anything like the phantom pains she was thinking about, but a shock that seemed to originate from something cool, metallic, pressed against her neck, mixed with something that was there and gone so quickly, she had no time to properly describe what it was she was feeling. And then she was overcome with a flood of new sensations.
As she lay in the grass, vaguely aware that something was happening to one of the two that had been standing over her, she also found she didn't care as she discovered that the sensation of looking down on herself had vanished. Still unable to feel anything of her own body, though some sensations were slowly returning, she was aware that it seemed like her legs and arms were shrinking up into her body. Confused about this, but unable to do anything about it, it came as a start when she did feel something, but found it didn't make any sense.
Hands and feet withdrew and became part of her legs and arms, which shrunk and withdrew until they had become part of her torso And as her empty shoes fell over, her tights deflated, and the short sleeves of her dress dropped limply to rest next to the bodice section, her body started to change again as it began to develop a second set of genitalia. Changing her from a she to something that was actually hermaphroditic, it was the alien sensation of having both male and female reproductive sex organs that first alerted her to the returning of any sort of feeling. And as she puzzled over this, the hair on her head, and what little she had on her groin, withdrew as her neck bulged, then joined with her torso and head, locking it all in place.
Alarmed by this, aware of more and more feeling returning to her body, she had enough time to ask herself, "What the hell is happening to me," before her brain functions started to reduce themselves to that of a simple organism.
Circumferential and longitudinal muscles formed as her skeletal structure diminished and then shifted to a hydrostatic skeleton. As this happened, her eyes and ears merged with what was now an elongating body and as light receptors formed she was soon able to detect the vibrations from things around her. Shrinking faster and faster until she was no more then 10mm long and 1mm wide, her skin took on a reddish hue, mixed with some iridescence and brown hues. Within moments, her transformation had completed itself and where at one time a girl who had been struck by a car had lain there was no sign of her.
At the neck of the dress, inching its way out, its chemoreceptors telling it of the cotton fabric it moved over, an earthworm that was an exact double of the one that accidentally brushed against the amulet and the girl finally found something its primitive brain registered in its own way as familiar. Dropping out of the dress, the burrowing down into the soil, it was unaware that one of the two had finished changing into a duplicate of the girl it had once been, though it could sense the vibrations of their movement. Unaware of anything but what constituted normal, simple thoughts, it wiggled deeper into the soil, sensing in its own ways other like it close and within moments it was gone, leaving behind a dress, jacket, tights, underwear and shoes to attest that at one time there had been someone lying in the grass at one point.