Steve crawled behind Xandal as the lioness walked to the door. Before opening it, Steve watched as Xandal held the phone up and tapped around on the screen. Seemingly satisfied, the lioness threw the door open to a gagging delivery driver.
“Oh god what is that smell?” the man asked, before scanning over the pregnant anthros standing before him. “What…” he stammered, “what the hell are…?”
Xandal reached out and grabbed the delivery man by the neck. Xandal’s new body was far from strong, but the delivery man was a scrawny, nerdy looking man in his early twenties. That lack of physique, combined with his obvious shock at both the sight and smell of the apartment in front of him, meant that the lioness was able to easily overpower the delivery man. Pulling him inside, Xandal threw the pizza box to the floor and slammed the door shut.
“You’re probably wondering what I am, right?” The delivery driver just nodded fearfully, before following the leash in Xandal’s other hand down until he was looking at Steve’s pitiful body. “Don’t worry about her, you’re not going to end up like that.” The delivery man just shook his head but otherwise seemed unable to produce a meaningful response to what was happening.
“Your name is Ned?” Xandal asked with a sneer, which elicited another quick nod from the delivery driver. Holding up the phone, Xandal looked straight into the delivery driver’s eyes. “You’re probably wondering how I know that. Well, this phone has a magical app on it that lets me alter reality. All I have to do is generate a sentence about you, then edit it, and my changes become your new reality.”
Xandal let go of the delivery man, who shrunk back against the closed door as much as he could. Tapping at the app, Xandal looked back up at him and asked, “tell me, do you like chicken?”
The delivery man only managed another frightened nod, to which Xandal continued, “Good, then you’ll enjoy this. The sentence I generated says: ‘Ned the delivery man wants to run away.’ I’m going to change ‘delivery man’ to ‘laying hen’. That’s going to change you into a hen who is laying an egg. Do you understand?”
Clearly overwhelmed, the delivery man could only shake his head as he mouthed ‘no’. Xandal let out a disappointed sigh, almost as though she had expected a different level of comprehension on the delivery man’s part. “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? Because it’s happening whether you understand it or not. You’re going to turn into a hen, but I’m not cruel. I turned the range on this app down to 10 feet. If you can get that far away before the changes are finished, then you’ll change back.”
“Ready?” Xandal shouted as she tapped the phone again, “go!” Taking a step back, the lioness seemed to expect that the driver would fling open the door and make a run for it, but for a brief instant, he just kept standing against the door.
Still standing against the door, the driver’s brief inaction was punctuated as he started moaning, “oww… what’s… what’s that?” The source of his discomfort quickly became apparent as the man’s arms clasped against his stomach. Despite the confusion permeating the man in front of her, the lioness just laughed, “that’s your first egg, dear. It’s forming inside of your stomach as we speak.”
The driver looked down just in time to see his fingers merging into blunt wingtips, all while tiny white feathers began growing out of the goosebumps that now dotted his skin. Bringing his increasingly winglike stump to his face, the man just stared at the downy feathers that were now obscuring the skin below them.
He looked at Xandal, who stated very matter of factly, “yes, Ned, you’re turning into a hen.”
“I’m... turning into a hen?” The man managed to choke the words out as his lips hardened into the beginning of a yellow beak. “But… but I don’t want to turn into a chi-kkkaaawwwnn!”
“Then you better run, chicken-man.” Xandal took a small amount of pity on the man and threw the door open, all while the man’s eyes went wide with the sudden realization of just what exactly was happening to him. Turning, he began to run towards the outer stairs.
By the time the driver had taken his first step out the door, his clothes had disintegrated into nothing, revealing the shrinking, plump, white feathered body that had been hiding underneath. A few more steps and the man stood at the top of the steps, now less than three feet tall, with his arms tucked against his sides as they finished their conversation into full wings.
With a leap, the mostly transformed hen flapped its wings, causing it to glide through the air as its head shrunk and its ears receded into its feathers. By the time it was halfway down, its butt had pulled backwards as a tall plume of feathers burst out of it. Now fully shaped like a chicken, it continued to shrink down until two yellow scaled legs touched down at the base stairs.
The hen quickly scanned the area, then tried to take a step, only for her leg to pull up tightly against her belly as she felt pain lash against the unfamiliar organs now filling her stomach. Clucking softly, she had no choice but to squat down at the base of the stairs as her body prepared to lay its first egg.
Ned had always bought the extra-large sized eggs when he went to the store. But despite them being the largest size available, Ned had always thought that they were tiny – especially for what you paid for them.
But now that Ned found herself trapped in the body of a young hen, whose stomach was filled to the brim by the extra large egg slowly and painfully stretching its way out of her, she found herself having a new appreciation for just how big these eggs really were, and just how difficult they were to lay.