Dusty was walking through the shop on the way to his office when a thick, hairy arm came from behind and wrapped itself around his chest.
“You’re looking pretty today, how about taking a whiff of these!”
From the sound of the voice and the not subtle attempt to get him to inhale a transformative musk, Dusty knew right away who the arm belonged to – Badger. As an amalgam of Troy and Dustin, Dusty had both of their memories, and he remembered back to when they’d first discovered the shop and Badger had tried to turn Troy into his cub. Evidently, he still was.
Fortunately for Dusty, his discovery of the transformative cologne had led him to take precautions against smell based attacks – on his first weekend off, he had used the Half spell to give himself the olfactory tract of a dolphin. Which is to say, dolphins didn’t have an olfactory tract. In fact, they had no sense of smell. So while externally, Dusty still had his human nose, internally there was nothing there to process scents.
He'd spent the rest of the weekend bedridden – confirming just how draining it was for him to cast even a weak spell. But it was worth it.
As much as he might have missed out on the sensation of smell, losing out on it was a necessary precaution where an accidental sniff or a sudden change in wind direction could mean joining his victim as a dumb hog. Or, given his recent experiments, something much worse.
It also had the side effect of rendering him immune to any further indirect attacks by what he was increasingly beginning to view as his captors at the chop shop. And that immunity was something that he didn’t want them to find out about, at least not yet.
“How’d ya like it boy? You feeling any meatier yet? Want to come back to my office for a quick suck?”
Ugh, Dusty thought to himself. He could only imagine what the kind of submissive tub of lard that Badger was no doubt trying to turn him into – and a glance towards a Bubba, smiling like an idiot in the far corner of the shop meant that he was in on this too.
“Sorry man,” Dusty said as he made an exaggerated sniffle with his nose, “I’ve had a bad cold for the past week, can’t smell anything.”
“No shit!” Badger said as he let Dusty go, “Well shit, I don’t want to get sick too. Hey, I tell you what. When you’re feeling better let me know and we’ll get dinner or something, ok?”
“I mean I’m remodeling my house right now,” Dusty replied, “plus I hear this is a real bad cold that’s going around, maybe in a few weeks…”
“Ya maybe…” came Badger’s disappointed response.
Dusty knew that he couldn’t keep putting Badger off forever. Sooner or later, Badger was going to try to transform him by force and the jig would be up. Dusty knew he needed a plan before then, but if his current experiment went well…
Hah! Dusty laughed to himself. If his current experiment went well, it might be the perfect way to deal with Badger and, perhaps, everyone else in this hellhole of a shop.