"I wish I was a chimera!"
You feel very silly having just made that wish that out loud so sincerely to a prank vending machine behind what looks like a magic-themed novelty store. Of course, the chimera is a silly creature. It is, after all, a mismatched gang of real-world animals spliced together into a biologically implausible mess. Some versions are just a bunch of heads and legs sticking out of a single body. It's more of a funny monster than a scary one, when you stop to think about it. And yet, you have always secretly wished you could be one, even for a few minutes. There is something strangely intriguing about being a bit unnatural: having parts that don't quite fit, sticking out of places they don't quite belong. You giggle, trying to seem as though you were joking, in case there are unseen eavesdroppers who might have overheard.
To your surprise, the machine plays out a cheerful beeping tune and prints out a tiny strip of paper.
-- WISH: GRANTED! HAVE FUN. IT'S GOING TO BE A ROUGH FEW MINUTES, THOUGH. --
You laugh, reading once again over the adorable message that probably prints out every time someone puts in money. You just let it fall where you stand, grateful that even the machine doesn't (seem to) know what you actually wished for, and secretly a little bit disappointed that it didn't work. You do wonder what it could possibly mean by a rough few minutes, but it doesn't really matter, does it?
You're strolling through the outskirts of a big town park on your way home, and you've nearly forgotten all about the wish machine, when a spasm takes hold of your body, making you twist and jerk in a jolt of pain. It happens again, making you jump and yelp out a bit. You don't know whether to be scared or grateful that you're basically just surrounded by trees, with the nearest park-goers chatting obliviously a few hundred meters away. What's happening? Another spasm tears through you, and you can tell you're not quite the same shape or size anymore. There's a dense, swollen feeling in your middle and lower back, and all your clothes are tight and lopsided as if they shrunk unevenly in the wash. Your body twists and jerks again, and all of your skin mildly burns and not-so-mildly itches. -- TWIST! JERK! YELP! -- You're first rubbing and now feverishly scratching every square inch you can reach, even through your clothes. The discomfort continues and you just wish you were out of your clothes already. You kind of want to call the paramedics, but you're too preoccupied with scratching to even try to reach your phone right now.
* scratch scratch scratch scratch SPASM scratch scratch *
Wait a second, you ARE out of your clothes already! How did that happen? The cool breeze calms you very slightly for a moment, and you see shreds of cloth scattered all over the ground around you. Surely your scratching couldn't have...
That's when you see that your hands a much bigger, and aren't exactly quite like hands anymore. They've got tan hair so thick you can't see the skin except where it's swollen out into some rough, blocky patches that look sort of like... paw pads? No, that can't be right. But surely those aren't what demolished your clothes, are they? You flex your hands a bit and find a set of black claws that you can jut out from between your fingers. Whoa!
Your body spasms again and you this time a deep roar comes out. Your chest is covered in thick skin which is covered with more of that tan fur. You also feel a bit like a hunchback at this point, with a burden pushing down near your shoulder blades. The other growth is now dangling between your legs. It doesn't even cross your mind that the wish machine might have started this until you realize the dark green skin there looks like scales. You spasm again, and the growth gets longer, your hump gets bigger, and your whole body gets hairier and taller. Are you... turning into something... unnatural?
Panting deeply between jolts of pain and growth, you want to get a better look at the green scaly thing between your legs. You don't want to grab it and risk digging your claws into whatever scaly new flesh this is. It turns out you don't need to. You can just mentally cause it to rise up and bring its own tip a bit closer to your face. You're hunched over in the shade looking at it when you get your strangest deformity yet. Two round orbs materialize at the end of your new "tail," there's a bright flash of light, and the image of a shaggy-furred beast coalesces in your consciousness even while you're still staring at the lizard-like tail. It takes you a moment to realize that you really are just looking at yourself: but from two different angles! You have a pair eyes at the end of your spine! You can see your own (original) face without a mirror, including the massive lion's mane that seems to have sprouted around it. This is... this is... like being on drugs or something!
"What kind of hallucinogens were on that slip of paper?" you try to ask yourself (but can only manage a duet of hissing and growling noises) as you back away from the snake head that's obviously formed down there. Its tongue even flicks out! You simultaneously watch your furry upper body distancing itself from you while you stick out you (new) black forked tongue. The tastes that come back include fur, dirt, leaves, trees, and even cloth. You can taste the air with your own back end! (or is it your front?)
This is too much... you freak out and just tear off running through the trees, not sure where you're going or how that would even help. You've barely run for ten seconds when another spasm sends you tripping over onto your front paws. You catch yourself, but you immediately notice that it hurts to put your ankles down: you're stuck, not only on all fours but also on your tiptoes. You look down with both heads to see what happened. Your ... your legs have changed! Well, your back legs have changed. They aren't lion legs, though: these appendages end in a pair of cloven hooves, and the fur on them is much darker, basically black. Your rear head hisses.
Your getting all sorts of smells from your front head now that your face has pushed out into a muzzle. You can now smell two distinctly different types of fur on your own body. They weight atop your back also feels very different now and you realize you can shift it around a little bit, too. What's going on up there? You move your lion head from side to side but you can't twist it around enough to get a decent look. No matter. You lift your tail up so you can examine your back with your snake head. You're shocked by what you can see up there. Your "hump" is covered in black fur and has sprouted some long curved horns from above what looks like a little underdeveloped snout. There is also a pair of tiny appendages ending in a smaller version of your new hooves.
The last, and largest, painful spasm reaches every part of your new body. A loud bleat joins your hissing and roaring, and your hearing expands as a pair of floppy ears twitches to life atop your goat head. You open up a new pair of eyelids and get another burst of vision: this time it's an almost panoramic view from a widely separated pair of eyes high above you. You learn to move a new extra pair of front legs but you can't really reach anything with them except the left and right sides of your own lion body. You're now a lion with with a goat's back legs, a snake for tail, and a goats upper body riding on your back.
It's getting harder to focus on any single thought now that your three fully developed brains are working in parallel. You do manage to keep yourself together enough to confirm what's happened.
"I'm an ancient Greek chimera with three heads!" you mentally exclaim. "The wish machine really worked!"