You hear the voice of your uncle from outside the bathroom.
"Kid? I know you're turnin' into a horse, don't be shy, come on out and let me have a look at you."
You're shocked, and let out a panicked "What?!" You note, with horror, that it sounded an awful lot like a neigh.
"Now, nephew, don't panic! Stay calm, come on, get the door open." He seems to be rattling on the handle on his side of the door.
Hesitantly, you open the door and step out. Norman cracks up.
"Hahaha, heh, hoo boy, oh I know I shouldn't laugh son, but you look ridiculous! Lord, if I didn't know it'd look like this when I slipped the potion in your beer, I thought it'd be quicker."
"You *snort* did this to meiigh?!" you manage to get out, your human words start to blend with horse noises, and this combined with your earlier rising panic and reaction to your uncle's revelation sends you over the edge. You begin to panic in earnest, and hyperventilate. Norman notices your distress and seems to share it, sobering fast and grasping your shoulders.
"Now, now, calm down, son!"
To no avail, he continues to try calming you down, and you continue to panic, heaving breaths and horse sounds escaping as your blood pressure rises, threatening to put you into shock. Apparently reaching some point of desperation, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a large white pill.
"Quick Jon, swallow this, it's your only hope!"
Thinking it to be some cure, you do so, and begin calming. Uncle Norman guides you to the living room couch, and helps you lay down despite your now more horse-like state. After a view minutes you are calm, almost sluggish.
"What was that*snort*?" you ask your uncle.
"Horse tranquilizer."
You convulse, but he lays a firm hand on you.
"Calm down! You could have killed yourself, hyperventilating like that. You could go into cardiac arrest."
"I'M TURNEEEIGHING INTO A FUCKING HORSE!"
Again, that firm grip of the shoulders.
"Not permanently!" he says.
You blink, and stutter out "What?*whicker*"
"Transformation only lasts three days. Even if I botched the potion, that'd make it last shorter, not longer."
"So, *snort*, I'll turn back?"
"Yep. I suppose I should explain how this happened..."
"And why you did this to meeeigh!"
"Yeah, sorry kid, I'll make it up to you. Especially if you don't tell baby sister..."
"Oh, Neigh'm so telling meigh Mom." You're finding it harder to talk, now, and growing worried in spite of the sedative and you're uncle's explanation.
"Damn. Alright, I suppose I deserve it. Come on, lets get out to the stables; you're liable to break the couch when you finish growing."
====
On the way out, your uncle explains how he did it, and gives you a lesson in family history while he was at it.
You see, it happens that you had an ancestor who was a missionary, who went out to bring the word of God to the people of the Crow Nation. Now it happened that this ancestor was a genuinely righteous and compassionate man, and intelligent to boot; thus, rather than simply ordering the people to repent or be damned, he sought to come to know them. He wanted to hear their stories, their traditions, feeling as he did that all humanity, being made in God's image, retained some small semblance of His Truth, a semblance he could grasp to help conversions, like Saint Patrick and the shamrock.
Well, it came to pass that he came to love the people he was ministering to, and they loved him in return. His tiny church was the lone permanent structure for miles, but the people tended to set up camp around it or nearby. He developed a healthy respect for the native beliefs, and found no real problem incorporating it alongside his own beliefs; because of that, the people believed, too, and some storytellers among them even came to tell of the adventures that the two great heroes, Old Man Coyote and Christ, had gone through together. The Missionary, a poor horseman when he came West, was even taught some better skills by the horse-loving Crow.
But nothing lasts forever; the American Cavalry came, one day, and had been harassing the locals, the company chaplain especially. Things escalated, more so when the Missionary began to defend a pair of Crow children against the chaplain's verbal tirade against their 'Godless Heathen Ways'. It grew more and more heated till the Missionary shouted aloud.
"God as my witness! I do hereby swear that there never have been a people less Godless than these! I do testify, On the Rood, that Coyote is as much a saint as Paul!"
And then the miracle happened. A storm blew up from nowhere, driving rain and winds at unbelievable speeds. The chaplain smirked. "Now," he said with wicked relish, "see what your blasphemies have wrought? This storm is God's wrath against your false church!"
Well, the storm was certainly God's wrath, but not against the missionary. The storm let loose a mighty crack of thunder, and every horse in the cavalry company reared and threw its rider. The horses began to run in a great circuit around the church, and the storm clouds parted around this circle, leaving the skies above the church and camp clear and blue, while the storm ripped at the cavalry company, driving them into the wilderness, the bemused chaplain at their head. When they were gone, the clouds dissipated, but a strange man had appeared, seemingly out of the storm, right at the circle's edge. He raised a hand, and the running horses calmed. He smiled, and walked towards the Missionary. A tribal elder, who had come to tend to the children the Missionary had been defending, gasped and pointed at the man's shadow.
"Coyote! It's Old Man Coyote!"
And, indeed, the shadow was not of a man, but a coyote. Coyote smiled, and clapped the missionary on the shoulder. He motioned to the church.
"You're a good man, friend. What say we talk a while, just you and me, in the Lion-Lamb's lodge?"
Now, the two talked long into the night. Turns out that Coyote had been the one to start telling the stories about him and Christ having adventures.
"Though if I'm being fair, I got him out of trouble at LEAST as often as he did me. He just kept insisting on playing by normal, human rules. I, however, cheat extensively."
Coyote had seen the way the Missionary had acted, and had asked The Creator if he could be allowed to watch out for him. The Great Creator, ever keen for His/Her/Its creatures to care for one another, assented.
"His/Her/Its?" asked the Missionary.
"Depends on the mood, donchaknow." responded Coyote.
Anyway, seeing the way the Missionary had responded to the wicked chaplain's handling of the two children, and in no small way flattered by his ad hoc canonization, Coyote decided to come down and give him a personal blessing.
"As you have sought to learn more about others, and because I am a trickster known for his many guises, my gift, to you and your heirs, is the gift of transformation. Thus, you may become anything and anyone, for a span of time of three days, so to learn more about, well, whatever it is you transformed into. It's pretty flexible, though, so you could go more or less than three days if you know what you're doing, or change back into something you've changed into once before. Three days is just your basic."
The Missionary man was ecstatic. To think of what he could learn...how much more could he learn about the world if he were to view it for a time from the eyes of a bird? Or a dog? Or a woman? Or a tree? Well, trees don't have eyes, but that's not the point. "Thank you, Coyote, God bless you sir!"
"Hooold on there, Preacher man. There's a price; always is. Same reason your Israelites had their faith in the form of a Covenant, a contract, a two-way deal. Every action has a consequence, donchaknow. So here's the deal: that little display today was facilitated through the help of those horses. Seeing your faith, your charity, your Incorruptible Pure Pureness, as it were, they took it on themselves to give you a hand. So, you gotta pay them back. You, and all who come after you, have got to have your first transformation be into a horse. 's a way of saying Thanks to your equine friends. You good with that deal?"
"Yes, Master Coyote."
"Hmm, Master. Like the sound of that...Come on, Preacher boy, I'll take you out and show you how to do the juju."
And Coyote took him out to the plains, away from the camp. He then instructed him to remove his clothes.
"Wha-what?"
"Oh for- Look. You think your clothes would fit a horse?"
"No."
"You wanna walk back to the church when this is over buck naked before God and everybody?"
"Not really."
"Then off with the clothes."
Having done so, the Missionary began his first change. Like you, first his genitals changed, his foreskin regrowing and his member increasing in size. The Missionary blushed, and attempted to cover himself. Coyote snorted.
"Oh, come off it. I can DETACH mine, and make it dance around and do tricks, not to mention performing complex mathematical equations that you mortals aren't going to figure out for a century or more. Now, given that my dick can solve Fermat's Last Theorem, do you think I really care about yours?"
"Er..."
"Look. God's got angels looking out for the faithful all the time, right?"
"Right..."
"Even in the shower?"
There was a lengthy pause, and then the Missionary grudgingly lowered his hands in the face of a master theologian.
Next, his muscles began to expand, and his spine lengthened. Hair then began to sprout all over his body, and his tail finished growing in, along with a new mane. His neck lengthened next, and his feet pushed him up onto his tiptoes. His toenails turned black, hardened, and began to fuse together, covering his toes. Meanwhile his foot lengthened, and his ass and thigh grew into the hindquarters of a horse. At this point Coyote walked over and helped steady him as he was at that awkward point when he was neither properly built for two-legged or four-legged stance. This soon rectified; he could feel his torso widening, his internal organs rearranging, and his shoulders shifting. His arms grew next, and he was able to stand four-footed. Now his fingernails grew black, and just like his feet before them, formed into new hooves.
"This is fascineighting!" whinnied the Missionary.
"Yep, Creation is wonderful, all-things-great-and-small, yadda yadda yadda. I don't mean to rain on your epiphany, it's really wonderful and all, truly, but you get to be my age and little things like physical transformation get boring."
"Oh? What do you do for enterteighnment?"
"Supernova Tennis."
"Wha-neigh?"
"Nevermind. Your face is coming in."
And just as Coyote said that, the Missionary's ears pointed and moved up on his head, as his mouth and nose fused together, just as yours did, and began to push out into a muzzle. A few moments, and it was done: The Missionary was a horse.
*Mmmph. New teeth. Strange feeling.*
"It is, isn't it? Try being a blue whale sometime, they feel freaky!"
*You can still understand me.*
"Hello? You've heard of me and mine? The Powers That Be? Yazatas, Angels, Devas, Kami, Spirits, Etcetera Etcetera Ad Nauseum? Gift of Tongues, donchaknow."
And so Coyote guided the Missionary through three days as a horse, and when the Missionary returned, he was full of new vigor and joy for life. Eventually, white settlers moved into the area, settling around the church and, for two generations, under the watchful eye of the Missionary, they had good relations with the Crow people, and most of the other tribes. The Missionary eventually fell in love and married a girl, with whom he shared his secret and his gift. Legend has it that when they grew old and their children were grown, that he turned them both into birds, and together they flew off, to Heaven.
====
By now, you've been sitting in a stall in the stables for a few minutes, and have calmed down considerably.
"Is that storeigh true?" you ask your uncle.
"Mostly, I assume. Though different branches of the family have different stories about the end of the Missionary's life, we all have the same one about how we got our power."
"Do you alweighs call him the Mis*snort*ary?"
"Well, yes, for politeness. Our branch of the line calls him John, because we say that the son we descend from was named for him, but another branch calls him Daniel, because the daughter they descend from was called Daniella. There are a few others. Maybe he just had a long name." your Uncle Norman said with a shrug.
"It's a leightle hard to beleighve. I mean, a miracle *whicker* storm? Coyote?"
"You're turning into a horse. Why're you so skeptical?"
"Point."
You try to stand up, leaning on the walls of the stall. Your feet have finished their transformation into hooves, so it's a bit awkward.
"So, why now?"
"Well, I needed a stallion to mate with my mares, see?"
"Oh, that's sick! Wheigh not do it yourself?!"
"Would have, if I was sixteen. Funny trick of the magic; if you have sex as an animal when you're still going through puberty, it's guaranteed to result in a pregnancy? But that's the other thing; if you transform during puberty, you get the sexual desires of what you transformed into. After that, you don't. I turn into a dog to find lost sheep sometimes, and I can smell bitches in heat, and I know that male dogs find it attractive, and I understand, deeply, why, but I don't share the attraction. After puberty transformations result in asexuality while transformed. Well, for animal transformations, anyway."
"So, what, you want meigh to fuck your horses?"
"$1,000 a foal."
That got your attention. Horse or not, it seems your libido and greed had ganged up on you. You find it a little ironic, that a gift that came from an ancestor's Virtue could be so successful in pushing the deadly sins of Lust and Greed...
"Alreight, done. But I *whicker* want more payback for just springing this on meigh. I don't know what, but you're gonna pay me back."
"I'm sure you'll think of something." he said with a smile.
"Hey, look at it this way. You're getting free license from an authority figure to fuck yourself senseless. Most kids would KILL for that."
"Point."