(Hello, I'm the person who wrote the first cougar story on this page, and after going over it, I'm completely dissatisfied with it. The transformation was terrible, the reasons that Jake's friend transformed were too ambiguous and generally everything was too repetitive. I'm sorry to bore you like this, but I think that you'll like this story a lot more. So sit back and enjoy.)
As you drink the water, your body is suddenly overcome with a series of painful headaches. Clutching your head in pain, you fall to the ground near the riverbank and black out. Your thoughts during this time are plagued with very strange dreams.
There aren't that many tangible images, mostly the dreams are filled with random flashes of color and sound.
Eventually, some time later, you wake up. "Wow, Mom and Dad were right," you think to yourself. "This is the last time I go drinking out of some river in the middle of the woods." Getting up on all fours, you walk over to a nearby tree and stretch out on it.
Wait a minute! Since when did you walk on all fours? And when did you start stretching out as soon as you woke up?
Looking down at yourself, you are hit with several odd surprises at once. Well, first of all, your hands aren't your hands anymore. The bone structure is different and you don't seem to have any thumbs. Plus, when you tense up from shock, black claws pop out of your fingernails. When a look at the bottoms of your hands reveals that you have pads on your 'palms' (could you really call them that now?) you remember seeing this kind of thing before. As you rack your brain to come up with the right memory, you suddenly realize that you have paws. Looking at the rest of your body, you realize that even more things have changed. Well, first of all, you are covered from head to toe in light brown fur. Also, all of your clothes are gone, and looking at the area where you passed out, you see a few tattered scraps that are all that remain of your favorite shirt and jeans. Your arms and legs have shifted slightly, into a new digitigrade form. You have always been a flabby kind of kid, covered with what your mother calls puppy fat, "Har har har," you inwardly chuckle to yourself, and what your dad calls an indication of the need for major dietary changes. But now, you have almost no visible fat at all. You know it's probably there, but really what catches your attention is how lithe and sleek your muscles are. You're not overly buff, but you feel like you're capable of a lot of speed, more so than you were as a human. Your feet have changed too, becoming paws like your hands, and when you try to move some strange muscles that you just noticed at the base of your spine, you realize that you have a light brown tail.
Padding over to the river that started this all, you look down at yourself. First of all you realize that your lower face has pushed out into a muzzle, your ears have rounded and moved to the top of your head, you have whiskers, and your eyes have turned yellow. You then discover that you actually AREN'T brown furred from head to tail. You have the black tipped ears and distinguishing muzzle markings of a cougar or mountain lion.
"I'm a cougar," you say to yourself. "A cougar." Suddenly the realization of what this means hits you. You never have to go to school again, or pick up your room, or deal with your annoying parents and bratty older brother. "WHOOOHOOOO!" You exclaim in pure cougarish delight, running around the clearing a few times in pure delight. Suddenly you stop, hearing a rustling in some bushes at the other side of the clearing. Inwardly shrugging, you pad over to investigate. (Well, I think that went a lot better) Please feel free to add on to this)