"I ... I want to stay with you!" you tell your new friend Angee. "You're already different than I expected a wolf to be. I ... don't have any reason to leave if you'll take me in. If I had real friends and family to spend time with, I wouldn't have come here alone."
"Very well, then," he said, "the choice is yours. I've gotta warn you, this isn't gonna feel great. The old dog wasn't lying when he said you'd have to be a wolf like us. But if you're meant to stay here, you'll survive it."
"I joined a gang once, I know how hazing works," you tell him, expecting some sort of strange unpleasant right of passage. "So where do I--oof!"
Your sentence is cut off by a sudden sharp pain through the center of your chest and abdomen. You double over and clutch your belly and groan. You start to feel things moving deep inside you! You here squishy rumbles coming from your belly, and you almost vomit.
"You're going to eat what we eat, so you'll need the guts to handle it," said Angee. "And you can't just be a useless extra mouth, either. In time, you'll learn to hunt like us, so you'll need to see and hear what we can."
The strange turbulence inside you gradually subsides, and then you feel things happening in your face. It's hard to be sure what you're feeling at first, but you can tell your surroundings are coming alive with sounds and scents you've never encountered before. You can smell each wolf individually, as well as the dirt and the trees and the tiny animals that smell like food. You can hear your heart and Angee's. You can hear the birds and leaves and the faraway zoo personnel whom you've almost forgotten. But your favorite smells are Angee's and your own -- you smell so harmonious together. The burning in your ears and the pressure in your sinuses are somewhat hard to deal with, but you feel like you can handle anything with your new caretaker nearby.
All at once, you scream because a terrible sensation has ripped through your back! At first, it feels like every bone is getting tugged on like a link in a chain, but soon, you realize that most of what you are feeling is in at the very end of your spine near your bottom. Angee tucked his tail and flattened his ears at the piercing sound of your shrieks and the smell of your fear.
"I'm sorry, child, but there's no way for a new part of your body to come from nowhere and truly be yours. You have to want it! The human part of you doesn't. Your body will resist. There is no way I can make this feel better for you. You have to finish it on your own."
You don't know what he means, but you do know that you "want it" whatever "it" is. You want this ritual to be over. You want to be part of the pack. You want this terrible pain to be over! You want to be with Angee instead of where you came from. And as you think these things, the pain gets worse, but not without starting to get better. It stops being much of a pressure in your back and changes to be more like a stretching feeling over your butt. You can feel it out past where think your backbone ought to end, and somehow it's a relief to have some sort of feeling back there. But then a pressure starts building back up in your spine again, as though some new part of it is getting blocked from extending backward the way it should. You can feel some strange part of you getting squeezed by your underwear, as though they are suddenly too tight for some reason. You wince hard as the tightness gets worse.
"Take off those useless clothes, kid, they're only getting in your way," said Angee. "Wolves like us don't need them anyway."
You slip out of your jeans hurriedly, just in time to hear your undies ripping in the back. The relief is unspeakable! You can still feel stretching up and down your spine, but it's the pangs of growth and not the tightness of your restrictive garment. Soon even the growing pains subside, and you feel okay, but ... strange. There's something dangling that wasn't there before. You turn to look at the rip in your briefs and see a long appendage hanging down behind you. It rises up on impulse, and you can feel that you could make it move again. You start at it with widened eyes and curl around to get a closer look. Angee laughs a bit.
"You'll have plenty of time to chase your tail later, my newfound pup. You still need some more changes to be more like us."
Your feet cramp up, and you take off your shoes as fast as you can. You can feel them growing, and then you can see it. They're getting longer! They're also getting thinner. Your nails become your new claws, and a sudden heat starts to burn the balls of your feet and the undersides of your toes. Gasping and reaching forward to rub the sensitive new spots, you find the heat subsides, but what's left is hard callouses that soften and feel a little more like ... pads?
"It's ... real ...," you say in between your exhausted panting, "I'm ... an animal ... a ... wolf!"
"Well, not quite yet, but your getting there. Did you think magic wolves couldn't do it? Your tail and your paws are a good start, but let's finish you up."
Your hands go limp and start to stretch the way your feet did. Your upper arm bones shrink a bit, and your shoulders lose some flexibility. The claws and pads form on your hands as well, and you start to lose all feeling in your thumbs. You realize you're staring at a wolf's front legs. Your new tail wags a bit because you know your getting closer. Then it wags some more because you're glad you have a tail. You realize what the strange feelings in your face were when you realize the strange, looming darkness in front of your eyes is not a sudden vision problem but a snout. You can see your wet black nose at the end of your finally full-sized muzzle! You sniff the air and drink in the smells that you are thrilled to have access to now.
"Much better," said Angee, "but without clothes, you'll need a fur coat. And you can't have a full-sized body like that until you've properly grown up as a wolf."
Angee gets bigger, but you realize that's because you've begun to shrink. It's okay though, because the growth of your new fur actually feels excellent. You have embraced becoming a wolf, and it no longer feels wrong to have what a wolf has, including the long gray hairs that are sprouting from your hardy hide. You believe Angee will take care of you. You believe you will get good at taking care of yourself in this new form. You may be a puppy now, but you are going to be a mighty wolf!