You close your eyes and focus as hard as you can, trying to think about every detail of how your lower body ought to be. It’s surprisingly difficult. Even though you’ve had legs your whole life, you’re a bit shocked to realize that attempting to think about how they felt to touch or use is kind of similar to trying to remember how you felt in a strange, half-forgotten dream. You push your concerns at this aside with some effort, only focusing more on the way you want your lower half to be.
As the image settles more and more in your mind, you begin to feel something happening. A strange squirming sensation becomes noticeable throughout your tail. It manifests differently in different areas, some feeling like they’re being pressed on, others pulled steadily or experiencing sudden tugs. You can’t help but twitch muscles in response. As you do, you can feel individual sections of your tail moving in different manners than they did only moments ago.
As the odd feelings intensify, you find it easier and easier to focus on how your legs should feel. It’s almost as if you feel the physical resistance of the mental image being imposed onto your latex lower body, and the further along you go, the less strain there is in pushing it into place. Slowly, the sensations are dominated by a feeling of your tail being pulled in two opposite directions. The body image you’re focusing on seems to take less resolve to hold at this point, and you think you can keep it in control well enough even with your eyes open, so you look down to see what exactly is happening.
You’re pleased to find that your tail has drawn back in on itself considerably, and you can begin to see the outline of your legs and feet taking shape under the latex. In between them, the latex flesh of your tail is thinning more and more. A lump begins to form out of the latex at your crotch, slowly resolving into your genitals. Eventually, the tip of the snake tail has completely retracted up to the thinning rubber between your legs. The tip recedes to be even with the bottoms of where your feet are forming, then continues, dividing the rubber down the middle.
Once the division reaches your perineum, something suddenly snaps into place. All the feelings of reshaping disappear with a final heave, and it no longer feels like you’re imagining an image of how your body ought to feel, but instead are just focusing on and experiencing the various sensations from your legs. You look down and run your hands across them in astonishment.
It’s very unnerving at first, as the shape is right and the sensation from your legs of your hand against them feels normal, but the flesh you’re touching isn’t flesh at all. Instead, your legs still have the same deep blue latex consistency, albeit without the scaled effect of the serpentine tail you sported only moments earlier. However, other than the latex, everything seems to be in place.
“Huh, well look at that. You actually did it,” Tex says, flitting down next to your legs for a closer look. “I really didn’t think you would be able to manipulate your actualized essence without external help, even with the extra you had. Do you, uh… Well how do you feel?” she asks, looking up at you out of the corner of her eye.
“Fine, I guess,” you reply, “why?”
“Oh, no reason. Just checking I suppose,” she says nonchalantly before hopping up on your thigh and walking along it. You quickly realize that she’s uncomfortably close to your penis and looks to be getting closer.
“Hey, leave that alone!” you snap.
“Why? It’s just another body part, and I hadn’t seen that bit of you before,” she explains casually.
“No, it’s not just another body part, it’s—stop that!” you exclaim, flicking her outstretched hand away.
You quickly scramble up to your feet, knocking her off the edge of your lap. You probably shouldn’t have done this so fast, as you’re more unsteady on your newly restored legs than you expected, and you about fall over on the way up, but you regain your balance and take a few experimental steps. It only takes a moment before you feel steady and confident that you can walk around.
“Hmph, no need to be so rude, Human,” Tex pouts.
“I was the one being rude?!” you protest, “What you were doing was--”
“Fine, call it a cultural misunderstanding,” she interrupts. “You humans don’t make much sense. You keep so much of yourselves covered, but only some parts seem to actually matter in that regard.”
You don’t feel like having this conversation right now, but this does highlight a problem.
“What happened to my clothes?” you ask.
Your lower body has been changed back into its old shape, if not its original consistency, but the underwear, trousers, and shoes your had on are no where to be found. Currently, all you have on is a loose sweater that doesn’t hang low enough to keep you decent. Even though you probably look like you’re wearing some sort of skin-tight covering from a distance, you still can’t help feeling exposed. Also, the idea of having to walk around barefoot doesn’t appeal to you.
“Oh, those are gone,” Tex answers.
“What do you mean ‘gone’?”
“I mean they’re gone. Poof. Forget about them. What else could I mean?”
“What?! Why?” you ask in exasperation. “What about what was in my pockets? Shit! My phone!”
“Sorry, those are gone too. We can only absorb essence of living things. Anything else in the way gets… discarded. I’m not sure what exactly happens to it. It’s not pleasant to absorb either, so most of us will try to get it out of the way first if possible, but the lower types often don’t bother. In fact that may have helped you there with the puddle, as absorbing enough nonliving matter can temporarily inhibit our ability to feed, especially if we aren’t reproducing in the process.”
This just keeps getting better, you think to yourself. Well, if you make it home, you should at least have a spare key in one of your planters out front. The loss of the cell phone really sucks though.
“Well, that’s just great,” you mutter. “I guess if nothing else can be done about it, we might as well get on our way.”
Tex agrees and the two of you carefully continue your trek through the trees.
It doesn’t take much longer before you’ve found your way back on the light of the forest trail. Though you have to walk barefoot, the rubbery consistency of your feet allow them to warp around some of the rougher terrain and partially absorb forces that would be less pleasant to flesh-and-blood soles. The feeling is a bit odd at first, but it doesn’t take long to get used to it.
Once the two of you are reasonably sure you’re safe from any latex creatures in the area and have made it safely onto the trail, you decide to start heading home. It’s well past midnight, but still hours before dawn, and you would typically be tired enough as is. But after what you’ve experienced so far, you’re absolutely exhausted, too much so to expect to put up a decent fight if you’re caught unawares again. Hopefully you can get far away from all this weirdness to at least find safety enough for a night’s rest. After explaining your thoughts to Tex, the two of you head back down the trail in the direction you came from, no other sounds present but the dull buzz of insects and frogs echoing off the leaves around you.
As you make your way out of the trees and back into view of familiar buildings, you can’t help but feel a bit self conscious. The nudity is definitely a big part of it, but it only helps remind you how conspicuous you must be with your strange avian face and elongated neck. Thinking back to how you got your legs back, you stop for a moment.
“What’s wrong, human?” Tex asks.
“I want to try something really quick,” you reply.
You focus again, shutting your eyes and trying to imagine how your face and neck should feel. However, this time something’s different. With the tail, it was like trying to recall a distant, forgotten memory, but if you tried hard enough, you could just make out what your legs should feel like in place of the tail. This time, there wasn’t even the faintest hint of what to remember.
Try as you might, you couldn’t think of how your face felt. Sure, you could remember how you looked, and if you thought about it, you could remember doing things like brushing your teeth. But even in those memories you felt removed somehow, like you could think of them objectively, but the actual sensations and actions involved just wouldn’t quite come to you. Any sense of how a normal human head should feel was just… gone. It was extremely unsettling.
“What’s wrong? Why are you frowning like that?” Tex asks.
“I was trying to see if I could fix this,” you reply, opening your eyes and pointing at your head. “I tried doing what I did before, but I couldn’t make it work.”
“Oh?” Tex says, arching an eyebrow, “Any idea why it might not work this time?”
“I guess I don’t have any form essence to work with?” you answer, half in question.
“Hey, I knew you would start to get this,” Tex beams. “Yeah, unfortunately, you’ll need to find a way to get some essence to swap with if you want to get rid of that beak or any other new addition of yours. Assuming you even can swap essences again.”
“Huh? I already did it once. I’m sure I could again,” you say.
“Yeah, hopefully. Who knows, though,” she says with a shrug. “I’m not sure what exactly is happening to you, especially since your middle part still seems fully human. Even my prey sensing instincts don’t exactly know what to make of you in your current state. You fixed the lower part of yourself, but maybe the top part is completely separate. I honestly have no clue how this is even working at this point.”
You hadn’t really considered that. It did concern you that your legs didn’t go fully back to human even after you changed them, but it was convenient enough in the moment that you didn’t bother trying harder to fix it.
You sigh. You’re far too tired to try to process all this right now, but it does give you yet another thing to ponder on your way home. The pair of you make your way through the eerily silent streets, hoping not to encounter anyone on your way home, or rather, anything. Though you can hear the occasional traffic off in the distance, you’re only a few minutes away from your apartment at this point, and the area is mostly residential. Hopefully at this hour, no one else should be on the streets.
Tex looks around in wonder, often asking you about various signs, buildings, or other fixtures. As you talk to her, you get the impression that she’s never seen anything resembling a modern town, and you can’t help but wonder just how long ago her last interactions with humans were. For now, you’re content just to be the one answering her questions for once.
Before long…