there's only so much I can turn into

[mswoods]

The thirteen-year-old girl is coming back home from school, on foot.

There's a cat following her. It's been following her for a while, but from a distance.

She decides to be friendly. She stops and turns around to look at it. It stops as well. "Mow?"

The girl's face- changes. It's still a human face, mostly, but now there's something different about it. More feline than anything. Whiskers grow, her pupils dilate and her eyes get a bit rounder, her bones move under her skin, their shape changing a bit. "Mew," she says, vocal apparatus having changed a bit, apparently.

The cat blinks and approaches cautiously. "Moow...?"

She doesn't giggle, but she feels like giggling. She's talking to a kitty! Well, kinda talking to a kitty, it's not like she can understand kitty-speech. But still! "Maw!"

Comments

[mrwoods]

Which just means Sadde will make sure they will never personally show up and tell him to do anything.

Not until he overturns them and takes over, at any rate. Because that is a thing he will do.

"Okay. The mating thing?"

[taste_tester]

"Oh, you people with your squishy feelings will occasionally meet someone else with compatible squishy feelings and then the vampire or vampires of the pair will squishy feelings to end all squishy feelings forever and ever. If somebody present is human they don't tend to stay that way. Can't be losing your eternal mate to ordinary human mortality, to say nothing of how awkward it would be to consummate the relationship and how poorly mated vampires sometimes deal with unreciprocated eternal adoration."

[mrwoods]

"Hm."

Pause for a few seconds, some chewing on lip, some scratching of head.

"Can I email a couple of people to say I'm sick and/or going on a short vacation as may be the case?"

[taste_tester]

"If you don't mind me reading over your shoulder. But you probably shouldn't try to hang out with anybody you like for... say a year, maybe less maybe more, depends how quick you adjust and whether you can turn off your sense of smell."

[mrwoods]

He nods slowly. "Yeah, sure, you can read over my shoulder."

Emails are sent! He has a pretty good computer, for 2004, and pretty good internet, for 2004. That's all done pretty quickly.

"Right, then. Might I want to store buckets worth of blood somewhere before turning?"

[taste_tester]

"Yeah, you'll be hungry. And in case you can't cheat on the pain we will want to be somewhere no one can hear you scream."

[mrwoods]

He nods. "Erm, you got anywhere in mind? I guess I could probably rent some remote cabin in the woods on pretty short notice, thanks for the help with the power by the way, I got pretty rich off it, but anyway that might take a few hours to arrange and then to actually go there, I'm not sure how pressed for time or worried about the possibility that I'll run away screaming you are."

[taste_tester]

"I'm not in a dramatic hurry, but I do need to be recently fed to turn you without killing you, a state I am in right now and will stop being if you take forever about it. A cabin is not necessary, the woods themselves will do. And you're welcome."

[mrwoods]

"...right, then, woods it is. Erm, I have a car, is that fine for you or do you prefer another mode of transportation? I should also obtain containers for lots of blood."

[taste_tester]

"Car is fine."

[mrwoods]

Car it is!

Off they go. They find a suitably remote location, and Sadde produces suitable amounts of blood for his own later consumption.

[taste_tester]

Addy waits patiently.

[mrwoods]

"Okay. I guess I'm as ready as I can be within the constraints. Oh, actually-" He closes his eyes, he doesn't really need to but it helps with concentration. There's some shifting of stuff under his skin, and it barely takes a minute, but when he opens his eyes he pinches his arm and declares that "I cannot feel any pain now."

[taste_tester]

"That'll be one for the recordbooks."

She grabs him and gives him a chomp.

[mrprop]

At first, there is nothing. It's a pretty neat nothing, he doesn't even feel the pain of the chomp. That lasts a couple of hours. He reports this to Addy.

Then there is heat.

As his nerves start returning, he pokes at them from the inside, using his power's awareness. It's quite a curious feeling, and he can actually notice the venom working its way along his body. The way stuff changes, he suspects there's some genetic rewriting going on, which is absolutely fascinating.

As more nerves return, the heat starts becoming really uncomfortable, so he kills the nerves again. Yet they keep returning. He keeps killing them.

They return faster. And faster. He reports this with some alarm, and he reports that he's not quite able to keep up with them anymore. That's disappointing, but so far-



FIRE

He has no idea what has just happened, why there was a sudden return of all his nerves at the same time, but he was not prepared for it. He was not prepared to be seared from the inside, to be blindsided by such pain that he completely loses control of his body. When he opens his eyes again, he's lying on the ground, and he's sure they're lying to him, because they tell him the woods are not on fire, but they are, that's the only possible explanation.

He tries to kill his nerves again, but he can't. Or rather, he can, but they return as soon as he does that anyway.

He reports this to Addy between clenched teeth.

It has been three hours and twenty-seven minutes.

[taste_tester]

"Well, you get a truncated version, that's better than most people get," Addy says soothingly. "It'll all go away when you're done. You won't even be traumatized, it's neat."

[mrprop]

"I would not describe this as neat," he says, or maybe he screams, he's not quite sure anymore.

It gets worse.

And the worst part is that he can see it getting worse, he can see the venom working on changing him, so he knows, an instant before he feels it, just how bad the next second is going to be.

And the next.

And the next.

And the next.

Fire consumes. It does not create. It makes no sense. Addy lied to him, she must have, he's not becoming anything he's just dying. Maybe she killed him in his apartment and this is Hell, maybe there's a god and it's pissed off that he didn't donate more to charity, or it's really irritated about the way he got really rich using magic, or maybe it was all the pranks. Or befriending a mass murderer, maybe that was worse. In retrospect that was pretty bad, he's sure there's something he could have done to her when she told him this, anything that would have kept him out of this Hell. Maybe she'd have killed him anyway but he'd not be in Hell now.

He is no longer reporting anything to Addy.

It has been seven hours and forty-four minutes.

A part of his mind still remembers that she told him this would last three days, but that's ludicrous, he's certain he's been feeling this for at least a month, maybe two, except he's also certain it has very much not been half a day yet and he's not sure he can take over two and a half more days of this.

[taste_tester]

Addy hangs out, fiddling with her phone, whistling.

[mrprop]

It has been two days and something looks really wrong. Sadde does not look like he's two days along his transformation. He looks like it's only been a day.

[taste_tester]

"Are you fucking with your cosmetic features or are you just fighting the venom so hard that it's actually slowing down the whole process?"

[mrprop]

"Make it STOP make it go AWAY I don't WANT IT-"

Incoherent screaming.

[taste_tester]

"Sadde, if you haven't made it stop yet you're not going to. You're making it take longer."

[mrprop]

"I'm UNDOING, it's WORKING, I can SEE IT WORKING, if I'm fast enough-"

More incoherent screaming.

[taste_tester]

"You're not going to be fast enough. Speed it up instead, get it over with."

[mrprop]

He doesn't have anything to say to that. He just screams more.

He never begs for death. It doesn't occur to him that she'll have to kill him if he does in fact manage to revert it, though, so he does beg for that.