Sam unlocked the door to his apartment and hefted his grocery bags into the kitchen, nearly forgetting to duck his head down to avoid hitting his head on the door frame for the second time that day. Being this tall had its benefits when it came to intimidating stupid teenagers, but in most other situations it was starting to become a pain to deal with. At least Gio had said something about heightening things to accommodate taller anthros, but until then Sam reluctantly realized he’d probably have to get used to a few bruises until he adjusted to his new height.
Gio happily padded into the room behind him, his bare paws and claws harmlessly gliding over the newly treated floors. “I’m telling you, these treatments for flooring are such a load off… I’ve been wearing those rubber claw-tips for weeks now, and they really start to pinch after an hour or so…” the wolf sighed as leaned against the counter and watched Sam unload his purchases. Sam let out an annoyed whinny as he looked over all the food he’d have to throw out in his fridge now that he was on a strictly vegan diet.
“All yours, Gio,” Sam said quietly as he tossed a package of deli meat to the wolf, followed by some hard-boiled eggs and half a gallon of milk. “You can turn a guy into a horse, but you can’t figure out a way to change all this into tofu or something?”
“Sorry, bud. We’re working with what we’ve got here…” Gio laughed as he tossed back a few slices of turkey and chugged the milk. “We’re pretty limited in what we can do, to be honest. We can’t just snap out fingers and change everything just like that. It’s limited to transforming humans and messing with your heads. No changing reality to suddenly make your clothes fit right or to suddenly make this whole city suited for anthros.”
“...Which is why you still need construction workers to do all the heavy lifting and renovation,” Sam added as he chopped up some lettuce and other vegetables before piling them into a bowl.
“Now you’re getting it. If we can’t magically make the world suit our needs, we’ll have to put in the work and change it ourselves. That’s Anthro Renovation’s motto,” Gio cheerfully explained. “Well, the secret motto that we don’t tell the humans, at least.”
There was a silence between the two men for a moment as they thoughtfully chewed their food. Sam took in the sheer scale of what Gio, Hank, Zeke, and their organization were trying to do; Even with their ‘capsules’ and ‘dampeners’ and who the hell knew what else, it seemed like a momentous undertaking with any number of things that could go wrong. A dampener goes on the fritz, one of the workers says something they shouldn’t, someone who shouldn’t get transformed gets hit with a-
Hold on.
“Gio? What’s gonna happen to that kid from the alley? The one you hit with that rat capsule?”
“Uhh… He’ll turn into a rat. Why?” Gio mumbled nervously, hit tail whipping around behind him.
“Don’t give me that, pup,” Sam snorted, noticing that nickname seemed to get a blush from the big wolf. “You and Hank were here easing me through things when I turned into this, but who the hell knows what it’s going to be like for some rando punk like him! You don’t even know where he lives!”
“L-look, it’ll be fine, okay? We’ve got mental dampeners covering a radius of at least ten blocks around this building, so he’ll just think whatever’s happening to him is perfectly normal…” Gio replied confidently. “As long as nothing happens to shake him out of it, by midnight he’ll be just another oblivious anthro like anyone else.”
“Something like what? Like looking too closely at himself while he’s changing? Like seeing his dick like what happened with me?” Sam piled on the questions, making Gio flinch back nervously and avoid the horse’s eye. “Gio, he was barely eighteen. He’s going to look at his dick sometime, that’s what guys his age do…”
Gio let out a sigh and dejectedly chugged the remaining milk that he’d gotten from Sam’s fridge.
“Yeah, you’re right. Zeke’s probably gonna have my pelt in the morning, isn’t he?” the wolf whined pathetically, praying that he’d get lucky and not have to deal with a cleanup operation when morning came around. “Well, if tonight’s gonna be my last night alive, might as well enjoy it. Grab that bottle of wine I saw in the fridge and let’s try out that bed of yours, shall we?”
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Russ stumbled down the street for a few blocks after getting tossed on his ass by that stupid wolf and horse. The base of his spine throbbed with every step, and he was pretty sure he’d bruised his tailbone.
Tail.
Right, bruised his tail. He reached back and felt the slightly scaly and very tender skin where his tail met his back, wincing at the pain but at least feeling confident that nothing was broken. He could remember breaking his tail in a few spots before, and it wasn’t something he was in any hurry to experience again…
“...What? No, that doesn’t make sense,” Russ muttered aloud as he braced himself against a building to catch his breath. “I don’t… A tail? That’s crazy…”
The evidence’s all there in back. Tail.
“Right, sure. I’m not arguing that, but…” Russ continued to talk to himself, attracting a few odd glances from the people on the street. He felt his ears twitching nervously at the attention, barely even registering it as each twitch brought his ears higher and higher on his head, subtly tugging them into a larger, rounder shape to stick straight out of the grey fur-hair atop his head. Russ absentmindedly ran one of his hands through his hair, feeling comfort in the sensation of stroking his ears and their almost unnoticeably thin coating of fuzz. Instinctively, they swiveled around frantically under his fingers to track every little noise, every voice of the people that passed him by.
“...A rat? Aren’t there enough of them in this city already?”
“Don’t be like that, honey. He’s just a kid… Although, I’d prefer if there were more… well, respectable anthros moving in. Speaking of, did you see that horse at the store earlier? What a hunk…”
“Really? How am I supposed to compete with a guy like that? And since when did you have a thing for anthros…?”
Russ’s face flushed with anger and shame and he spun around to growl at the rude couple, but his attempt at intimidating them only came out as a flurry of chirping squeaks that only served to startle the two gossipers. At the same time, however, his nose began to push its way out from the front of his face to give him a pointed snout that quickly covered itself in a light-gray fur and sprouted a set of long, twitching whiskers.
“D-did you just see that? He… he didn’t turn into-” the woman stammered, but Russ just turned tail and dashed down the nearest alleyway before they could see any more.
In frustration, Russ kicked over a trash can and sent a few (non-anthro) rats scurrying away. “Fucking assholes… Not like I chose to be born a rat… What’s wrong with a rat, huh!?” he raged angrily at nobody in particular. In a moment of misguided anger, he swung a fist into a nearby sign, only to let out another squeak of pain as his hand connected with the metal. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!!” he snarled as he looked down to see his fingers narrowing and lengthening into thin, pink-skinned paws, each skinny finger tipped with a delicate claw. He stared in stunned silence at the changes unfolding before his eyes (which, by now, had turned completely black and beady), struggling to come up with words to describe how wrong everything seemed.
However, every time he tried to protest, to desperately dispute that he wasn’t a rat, an odd, droning buzz in the back of his head overtook all his thoughts and focused them elsewhere. Of course he was a rat, he thought as fur climbed up his wrists, over his arms, and down his shoulders and chest , which slimmed down and gained a slim and tubelike shape to suit his rodent form. In fact, his shoulders grew so slim and narrow that his shirt nearly slipped off of him.
“Stupid human clothes… Why can’t they open a good anthro shop so I can get something that actually fits my body shape?” Russ whined as he gripped the waist of his jeans to keep them from falling down his slimmer hips. As the fur slipped down his legs to cover the last unchanged parts of his body, Russ felt his toes twisting and shifting inside his shoes, shredding his socks apart as sharp claws burst out from each toe. Soon, his foot-paws were too slim to even stay inside his shoes and he absentmindedly kicked them off and felt the concrete against his pink rat paws.
“Stupid horses… wolves, cats. All those fucking ‘respectable’ anthros make it harder for the rest of us…” Russ growled. His mind lingered on the cat he’d been bullying earlier, on how good it had felt to muss up his oh-so-perfectly brushed fur. Humans loved cats and hated rats. And it was easier to take on a single teenage anthro than a whole crowd of humans.
...He was a cute cat, though.
Russ let out a barely-audible squeak as he felt his arousal beginning to build. Deep down, his emotions were roiling, his shame, anger, and attraction getting mixed together into a fucked-up mess of conflicting feeling. He was pissed off at guys like that cat for being more accepted in society than he’d ever be, and yet he was still finding himself unable to stop thinking about that guy’s big green eyes and long black fur. And he was ashamed at… well…
Glancing around to make sure nobody else was in the alley, he reached down the front of his pants and under his boxers to grope at his sheathed cock, moaning as his thin fingers touched the narrow shaft hidden away within. Narrow and short, just barely long enough to poke out of his grey-furred sheath when fully erect. Rats weren’t well-endowed, and he knew it. Just another thing to be jealous of the rest of anthro society, right? Squeaking and quietly chittering, Russ began to stroke himself, feeling his little rat cock stiffening between his fingers and oozing all over his paw. As he sped up, his jeans and boxers began to slip down his hips and fall in a pile at his feet, and Russ glanced downward to see his paw wrapped around his unimpressive shaft.
“...Hold on a sec. That’s not my-” he started to say before his ears rang out with a drone so deep that he felt like his teeth were about to get shaken right out of his mouth. It build in volume and intensity until Russ finally simply passed out, but not before blowing a load of rat cum all over the concrete just as he slumped down in a pile on the ground.
From around the corner, a boar and skunk quietly walked toward Russ’s unconscious form, hooves and claws clicking against the pavement as the boar fiddled with a handheld device.
“Good thing ‘ya noticed the capsule was missing at the end of the day, Hank,” Zeke grunted as he carefully adjusted the device. “I’m gonna have to have a lil’ chat with Gio about his newfound ‘independence’ before it starts causin’ us even more problems like this…”
“What’re you planning on doing with him, boss?” Hank queried as he watched the boar begin to tap the maximum-strength dampener against Russ’s head with practiced precision.
“We’ll figure something out to keep him busy. Can’t have a loose end like this running around making even more work for us,” Zeke sighed as he tucked his handheld dampener into the front pocket of his jacket. “Check his ID, find out where he lives, then send out a cleanup crew. And dock Gio’s pay for a week, teach that overgrown pup a lesson he won’t forget...”