Prologue (Margul)

CRACK! Rumblerumblerumble......

I squeeled in terror. After all, I was only six years old. Barely old enough to understand what lightning was, musch less how unlikely it was I would be struck.

Of course, it didn't help that the Lightning Man (called such by the neighborhood children because he claimed to have been struck by lightning five times) had often recounted his own experiences with being struck.

Indeed, I was a six-year-old boy and had no idea I was safe....or was I?

Slowly, cautiosly, I creeped over to the nearest of the family mansion's many massive, looming windows. My tiny hands reached up and grabbed the bottom of the window frame. I nearly pulled them back in shock at finding how frigid the metal was. Timidly, I puled myself up and peered out at the sky. The sky of varying patches of cloud and star-lit blackness. Another crack of lightning illuminated the darkness of the night and my head shot back beneath the window's edge.

Once the rumbling had stopped, I peeked, slowly, back over the window's edge. A small bolt of lightning forked across the sky above the mountains, many miles away.

I laughed wildly. What was I so scared of? It was so small. So far away. It couldn't touch me.

Another lightning strike, even more distant, and I burst into a fresh bout of laughter.

I looked down at my desk. There....in a box by my laptop.....it was the Thunder Stone my father had given me for my birthday.

An odd impulse washed over me and I dropped to the floor. I heard my sister stir in the room below mine. Ignoring my twin, I walked over to my desk and opened the box. Swiftly, I scooped up the Stone. I pulled a chair over and set it in front of the window. Stepping up on the chair, I stretched up as high as I could and put the Stone a mere millimeter from the window. "Here's to you, lightning!" I shouted.

BOOM!!!!!!

I looked around, blinking from my new position on the floor.

I knew exactly what had happened, but I didn't feel it for some reason. The Lightning Man had said that being struck left you tingling all over and in mind-numbing pain.

But I felt nothing out of the ordinary save a dull ache on the back of my head from hitting the floor. Since I was lying next to my bed, it was just as though I had rolled over in bed and fallen out.

I reached up to grab my blankets and pull myself to a stand. But I never got that far.

My hand! My entire arm! It was covered with bright yellow fur!

Finaly, I pulled myself up. Slowly, I stumbled over to my body length mirror. In a course of about two seconds, I filled my lungs to the max and emptied them again in an ear-splitting scream.

Screaming back at me from the reflection was the most bizzare creature I had ever seen. It looked almost exactly like a six-year-old boy. But instead of skin, every visible part of his body showed a thick coat of light yellow fur. Hardened, spike-shaped clumps of snowy white fur stuck out through the gaps between the buttons of his pajama shirt. Instead of a human head, the creature had a slightly-enlarged Jolteon head.

Then, I realized: I had become the creature in the mirror. No dream this, I was some freakish thing halfway between human and Jolteon.