Nick was walking home from school in his usual lackadasical manner, he eyes glancing all over the place. His thoughts were all over the place, thinking at first about school, then about homework and whatnot. He quickly spots, on the sidewalk, a black box. He walks towards it slowly, looking around to see if anyone is watching him.
The black box actually looks like a portable computer, sorta like a PSP, but bigger. He has a screen on the front, with buttons and arrow keys on the sides. Nick finds himself intrigued by his new find. He looks around again. No one appears to be watching him.
"Oh well, finders keepers. Loser's weepers!" he says, slipping the box into his backpack.
Nick ran home as quick as he could. He just had to know exactly what he had found. He ran inside, closed the door behind him and ran directly upstairs to his room. He closed the door to his room and jumped up on his bed.
He slowly pulled the black box out of his backpack and pressed the button on the top left, the one with the red circles that was the international symbol for "power button"
The machine powered on and the screen lit up, announcing "Welcome"
The welcome message quickly cleared and was replaced with a longer explanation of what the machine did:
"With this machine, you will be able to alter yourself in any of the ways mentioned on the menus shown. This machine was designed to allow humans to gain more animalistic features, should they so desire, up to and including becoming an animal, if they so desire. You have the option of deciding how long the transformation lasts, from a half hour to permanent. Please think long and hard before selecting permanent, because I warn you, it is irreversable."
"Cool," whispered Nick.
The menu loaded up. Nick perused through the various options, trying to decide what to try first. Nick had a long standing interest in mythical creatures, especially centuars, but also mermaids, or in his case mermen. He also enjoyed werewolves, so was strongly considering trying and anthromorphic wolf as well.
Nick settled on trying something small first. He selected the ears section and selected wolf ears. Then, he selected tails and added a wolf tail as well, figuring that might be fun too. For time, he selected 1/2 hour.
He pressed enter and waited. He watched the hourglass turn and turn on the screen, and then the words "Request processed."
He felt a tingling sensationon his ears and ran to his mirror and watched as his ears reshaped, becoming pointed and growing a small amount of grayish, blackish fur. As soon as his ears stopped changing, he felt a similar tingling in his rear. He pulled down his pants and watched as his tail grew out and bushy gray and black fur grew out to cover it.
He felt so excited by this discovery, his new tail started to wag, which was a foriegn, but exhilirating feeling for young Nick.