The next morning, Alex yawned loudly as he stretched out, his head still a little fuzzy from the drinking last night. As his mouth shut after yawning, he felt a sharp pain as he bit his tongue, tasting blood. “Damn it… What the hell?” he muttered to himself, feeling around in his mouth with his tongue and feeling that his canine teeth felt a little longer and sharper than usual. “Whatever, must still be a little drowsy,” he thought to himself as he sat up in bed.
He heard Greg’s voice in the bunk next to his saying, “Alex, I think a bird shit on your pillow or something. You got some crud in your hair.”
Alex rubbed his eyes in annoyance hearing that. “Great. Just add that to the list of bullshit I’ve got to deal with…” he murmured as he rolled out of bed and over to the mirror.
Staring at his face, he immediately noticed the white stripes running through his hair and frowned as he ran his fingers through them. Well, it wasn’t bird shit, so either his hair was going white from stress or one of his friends had dyed his hair overnight. Rolling his eyes, he started to turn around to chew the others out when he noticed a much more pressing concern than the stripes through his hair.
His ears. Round, grey and black animal ears sticking right out of his hair. Like the ears of a bear, or a mouse or something. Or a badger, came a whispering thought into his head, which seemed like an oddly specific animal to think of. He felt around and discovered that his regular human ears were nowhere to be found, leaving only the fuzzy, twitchy animal ears sticking out of the sides of his head.
He spun around frantically and looked at Greg, and saw that his friend had sprouted a pair of fuzzy ears of his own. Not only that, he seemed… different. As he got out of bed, Alex understood what was so wrong. Until now, Greg had stood a few inches taller than any of his other three friends, but now he barely came up to Alex’s chin. And Alex may have been imagining it, his muscles seemed less thick and more lean and toned.
“What’s the matter, dude?” Greg asked with a yawn, showing off a pair of sharpened teeth of his own.
Alex could only stare at his friend in confusion, then he looked over at the pair of beds with Laura and Matt still sleeping soundly. They had both grown taller and slightly muscular overnight, each with an almost identical pair of pointed, horse-like ears poking out of their hair. Speaking of hair, Matt’s newly long hair was spilling out all over him as he slept, and was so long that Alex almost mistook him for Laura at first glance.
Under normal circumstances, Alex would probably be screaming his head off, trying not to jump out the nearest window. But for some reason, he knew he had to do something, he had to keep his friends safe, and he had to figure out what was going on. He had to lead them.
He kept his voice even, then said, “Greg, Matt, Laura. Try to stay calm, but I think something strange is going on here.”
+++++++++++++++++
He still needed to work on keeping his friends calm. Matt and Laura had both leapt out of bed and frantically began touching their ears and running their hands through their hair in the mirror, their mouths agape. Greg was pacing around nervously, holding his boxers up with one hand to keep them from falling down his skinnier frame.
“It’s aliens, guys,” he heard Greg mutter. “Aliens abductions and fucked up human experiments. Check for anal probes…”
“No, it’s gotta be some kind of drugs. Spores that were growing in the sheets on the bed. Making us hallucinate,” Laura proposed.
“Uhh… I dunno… I guess so,” Matt said dumbly, scratching his head cluelessly at the strange situation.
Alex tapped his chin, trying to figure out a way to reverse all this strangeness. He took a deep breath, then clapped his hands to get his friends’ attention. “Okay, you guys. Sitting around in here isn’t going to fix this,” he said calmly. “Get dressed and be ready to go in five minutes. We’re going to look for a way to fix our car. And maybe some medicine in case we’ve been drugged. Or abducted by aliens. Understood?”
Normally, Greg would have snapped back with, ‘Who put you in charge?’, but at the moment he was glad that someone was thinking clearly and rationally in the midst of everything.
The other three looked at one another, waiting for someone else to object, then together they all said, “Understood.”