Daryn opened the book to a beautiful two-page spread of a strange creature. It was a girl of about fifteen, close to his own age, but her lower body was a giant snake's tail. He couldn't read the strange writing that was scattered around the illustration, but he spent a long time staring at the picture. Despite the bizarre nature of the girl, he found her very attractive. Gently, without thinking about it, Daryn reached out and touched the picture.
He yelped in surprise as his body tingled with a strange shock. He yanked his hand off the page, but a soft glow trailed from his hand to the book, like a cobweb of light. Daryn tried to brush it off, but every swipe only stretched it out larger and makde it cover more of him. By the time he gave in, the light had entwined itself around both his arms, leaving them wrapped up in masses of soft blue light like clouds of cotton candy. Daryn was screaming by this point, but there was nobody in the library, and the heavy wooden doors provided too much noise insulation for anybody in the hall to hear him.
Daryn knew by now that his attempts to remove the light weren't working, but he couldn't just hold still in a situation like this. He went into Modified Stationary Panic mode, wildly flailing his arms. Unfortunately, it seemed that any motion was sufficient to fuel the light's growth, and soon both of his arms were entirely covered.
All sense deserted Daryn as he ran away from the table, but the further away he got, the harder it got to keep going. The light was tethering him to the book, and his thrashing and yanking against the chain of luminescence only served to entangle his whole body in the light, and the more light covered him, the more it restricted his movement. Nevertheless, he kept struggling until he was completely surrounded in a coccoon of soft blue light.
Coccooned and unable to move. He could breathe, but that was it; he couldn't even turn his head. His clothes had disappeared. The light had changed from a cloud that surrounded him to a soft glow that entirely replaced the library; he felt like he was floating in space, only instead of darkness, there was electric blue. Daryn wondered what was going to happen to him.
Whatever was going to happen, it started happening pretty quickly. His entire body began to tingle with strange sensations, the area of focus constantly shifting. First it was his scalp, and Daryn felt his hair suddenly spill down his back, tickling at the base of his spine. Next, his face tingled, and he felt the strange sensation of his facial features rearranging. What was happening to him?
The next point of focus was his upper body. As the tingling subsided back down to the same level as the rest of his body, Daryn could feel a narrowing of his shoulders and a slight stretching sensation in his fingers, like they were getting a little longer. But that was nothing next to the feeling in his chest, where there was a pressure pushing things outward. Daryn desperately wanted to know what was happening, but he was still unable to move.
After his torso was finished, the focus of the tingling moved to his lower body. There was a bizarre and uncomfortable feeling in his groin and abdomen, and his legs were stretching...stretching...no, he couldn't even feel his legs anymore, it was just some part of his lower body that was being stretched out. As the stretching sensation subsided, the tingling suddenly shot up in intensity until it was the whole of Daryn's sensation. Unable to handle it, he blacked out.
Daryn came to with something pressing against him. Oh, it was the floor. Only it wasn't pressing against him, gravity was pressing him against it. Right. What had happened, again? He felt groggy; had he been asleep? Oh, right, there was that whole thing with the book. Maybe that had been a dream. Maybe he'd gotten so bored sorting books that he'd just nodded off right there in the library. That made sense.
But it didn't explain why his hair was tickling at the base of his spine. Daryn's hair wasn't anywhere near that long, and he shouldn't have bare skin that far down anyway. What was going on here? He took a deep breath and pushed himself up off the floor.
His next clue that something was drastically wrong was that not all of him lifted off the floor at the same time. There were two...things on his chest that were squashed beneath him, decompressing as he lifted himself and finally leaving the floor some time after the rest of his torso. It took him a moment to make the connection; suddenly, shocked, Daryn put the pieces together. Hoping he was wrong, he rolled over and sat up for a look.
His fears were confirmed. Somehow, he had become a girl; the things on his chest were obviously (very obviously) breasts. But that wasn't all; she had also become a half-snake creature like in the picture. At least fifteen feet of snake tail, as thick as her torso at the widest, spread out in a straight line before her. Unlike the girl in the picture, whose snake half had been a vivid green, Daryn's scales were alternating bands of red, black, and yellow, matching perfectly with her black hair, which now spilled down her back and over her shoulders, reaching all the way down to the base of her tail.
Daryn screamed a very girly scream. How could this have happened? How could she have gone from a normal fifteen-year-old boy to a freakish snake-girl? Had that dream with the book actually been a dream? If it hadn't, was there a way the book could change her back?