It was after guests were beginning to stand expectantly on the dance floor for music to start that Fyora began to speak to the people. Up until then, she had been sitting tentatively on a throne behind the DJ who was still setting up, checking whether or not his music was adept enough for mixing. Fyora had looked as if she were about to explode from the ants crawling up and down her metaphorical pants--she wore her dress, still, but her hair had been relaxed and the train removed. She looked much more comfortable taking the microphone from a baffled DJ, who immediately began warning her that he had not finished testing his equipment.
"My subjects," she said, smiling with forced ingenuity. She gave a loving sweep of her hand, and I almost died laughing from the utter insincerity of it all. Everyone, though, slightly drunk from the abundant wine or sleepy from the excessive food, replied with loving replies, oblivious to her dishonesty. "Tonight, I have a special event for all of you. Any of you who know the illustrious history of the coronation reception know that there are two special events that everyone looks forward to."
I began listening attentively at this point. I knew that the battle for the title of Battle Faerie would be one of them, and the details would be outlined. Also, I might be able to catch a hint to my fate.
"The first event"—she held up one finger dramatically, pausing for effect—"is to decide who will be my utmost protector from the outside world. My ultimate body guard—the Battle Faerie." There was modest applause here, and Fyora gave time for the clapping to die down. "You all know our former Battle Faerie resigned as soon as my mother, the late Queen Faerie VI, perished. This has left me without security, and as such, I have had an intensive staff of guards around me as of late. However, once this competition has finished, I will have one companion with me at all times."
'What about the other?' I wanted to scream, but Fyora waited for a moment to let everything sink in. Once the crowd began to murmur again as if demanding speech, Fyora spoke up once more.
"The loser of this competition will remain as a guard at my side." The tension in my shoulders disappeared, and a relieved smile stretched across my face. No matter the outcome, Hoshi would be all right. "This transitions nicely into the second event that all look forward to. While the winner of the Battle Faerie competition will be shuttled away for paperwork, the defeated will be able to spend their aggravation on our whipping boy." Without warning, Fyora held out a hand in my direction, and the mass' eyes fell on me. I swallowed, feeling a fish in a bowl about to go belly-up. "Also known as, the Coronation Jester."
My stomach began an artful practice of tying knots with itself, two sides conflicting with another. On the odd chance Valeane lost, I was dead meat—literally. It was coming back to me slowly now, but I distinctly remembered the barbarous nature of the second half of these events. The loser, in defeat, often expelled more rage than necessary on their defenseless opponent, and practically carved their gravestone. It was a more common practice than not to kill the Coronation Jester in recent years, and a fear for my life erupted in my throat.
On the other hand, Hoshi was, in my mind, more likely to lose. I didn't doubt she could give me a lashing I wouldn't forget, but a part of me didn't think she would go so far as murder. After all, I had practically paid for all her necessary expenses throughout her time at my place, and for her to take my life as well would be a crime even Hoshi couldn't commit.
I brooded for a while until suddenly my cage was being pushed into the arena, much to my surprise. The guards were shoving my cage into place next to the throne in the arena, levitating me up a few flights of stairs to set it in its proper space. The colosseum around me was beginning to fill with people rapidly as the faeries began to realize that the action was not on the dance floor for the time being. The sound of bustle began to slowly crescendo as more people were added to the crowd, until it was a full-on roar. Faeries began to send some people back to the tables to grab some leftovers as snack food, and children raced down and up the bleachers in the few open spots, giggling manically. Their charming obliviousness and naiveté made them precious to me, even if they were the spawn of adults who loathed me.
As soon as Fyora approached, flanked by two guards, the crowd was lulled into silence. She walked delicately to her throne and sat down, putting both arms regally on the arm rests. She seemed to be getting adjusted to her role as supreme royalty rather than a subordinate to her mother, her back far more arched and her eyes tending to look down her nose. She turned to either guard and then eyed those in the back to ensure their readiness for formalities.
"Guards, please bring forth our contenders."
The masses made two breaks in their continuum of chaos in order to let a figure through, guided by at least one threatening, male guard. Each figure was female in appearance, and though they wore no armor, it was clear they were dressed for battle. Pulled in front of the crowds by the guards, they were put in the center of the stage for all to see.
Fyora stood up and everyone followed suit. Fyora seemed surprised by this for a moment, and then seemed to relax, remembering she had taken her mother's role. A chuckle seemed to tickle at her lips as she began to announce the warriors.
"To my left—one of our veteran guards and warriors, adept with weapons of all kinds and studied in magic some have only dreamed of. The fierce and beautiful Valeane!"
Valeane stepped forward from her guard and smiled harshly. It wasn't so much of a smile as it was baring of her teeth, like a dog snarling. The crowd cheered wildly anyway, and I gave a few modest claps. She was fitted into a loose-fitting body suit of a stretchy green material, some random tears marring the fabric in non-offensive places. In her hands she held what appeared to be two sais with hilts of an intricate, leafy design. Though her hair was a different color than most, I was fairly confident that Valeane was an earth faerie. Earth faeries were fairly common in my area, as well as Faerie City. A surge of confidence filled my veins—Hoshi's odds were losing weight rapidly.
"To my right—a new but quickly rising warrior and guard with a knack for long spears and magic, the mysterious and illustrious Hoshiya!"
The crowd seemed to be more interested in Hoshi, their screams a shade louder, but backing off when Valeane looked displeased with Hoshi's popularity. I looked over to Hoshi, trying to do it carefully so arrows would not sabotage my heart. She wore a skin-tight leotard with red cords at the shoulders, waist, and hips, accentuating her form. A red V spanned the blue chest, and the material on her legs transitioned from the blue of the body to the dark navy of her hair, accented by stars so it looked like her legs faded to nothing. It was the outfit she would soon be notorious for.
Additionally, I noticed, for the first time, that her hair was cut—she had held it up in a bun before, so it had been impossible to distinguish the length. The cut looked as if it had been done by a blind man with a rusty razor, crooked, choppy, and chock full of split ends. Yet somehow it sort of fit this new persona she had adopted—edgy yet disciplined, as it was short enough to stay out of her way. She had finally made her full transformation physically to the Neopian defender she would someday be; my transformation, however, still had to wait.
"Contenders, will you take your places?"
As if choreographed for this moment, Hoshi took the right side of the field and Valeane the left.
"Get set."
Valeane held up her sais, as if readying them for attack position. Hoshi thrust forward her hands and closed her eyes. Her hair waved a little as magic exuded from her body and a long spear began to formulate at the tips of her fingers. When it had fully solidified, she took a grasp on the wooden rod part of the weapon and flipped the spear end towards Valeane. The spear was ornately built, a crescent moon in shape with a star fitted in the middle. Despite its fanciful nature, it was still undoubtedly dangerous.
"Begin!"
No one moved—besides Fyora, who took her seat. (The rest of the audience, at her command, had taken their seats earlier.) Valeane and Hoshi stood stiff in their starting positions, staring straight in each other's eyes. The audience's behinds were aching on the edges of their seats (the stands were made of wood, with no cushion) and I leaned forward on my cage, grasping the bars without regard to the blood it sent trickling down them.
Valeane was the first opponent to act. I figured her for a fan of battles cries and charges, but she moved silently and moved through air as if it were calm water. Once she was within striking distance of Hoshi, she thrust both her sais forward, seemingly at the same spot. As Hoshi blocked it, catching both sais on their curved hilts, I saw that Valeane had shifted the position of each in the last second: one was near Hoshi's face while the other jabbed at her from below.
Hoshi spun her spear to untangle the sais and while Valeane was regaining her grip on them, Hoshi struck. She held her spear horizontally and shoved upwards towards Valeane's chin. Valeane barely managed to duck under the attack, and then flew at Hoshi from beneath it, slashing with the sais. Hoshi jumped upwards to avoid the attack and did a grace flip over Valeane's head, landing near Valeane's back.
Valeane, seeming to sense her opponent's trickery, made a back flip that ended with her in a handstand. She kicked with her available feet, managing to connect unexpectedly with Hoshi's face. Hoshi recovered quickly, but this still allowed time for Valeane to flip back to her feet and slash upwards with her sai, leaving a scrape and tear on Hoshi's body.
As they continued to fight, I noticed that their fight was more like dancing than melee warfare. Each attack seemed to ooze into the next, giving the sensation of pre-meditated moves. I had read about this technique somewhere, a type of fighting style called Faefu. It involved transferring the energy lost from dodging an attack into a graceful counterattack, so that the fighter flowed from one move to the next.
The combatants weren't merely limited to the ground; this was where Faefu had an advantage over other groundbound forms of martial arts. Soon after they began fighting, the two took to the wing, spiraling up into the air like butterflies in spring. The crowd gave appreciative "ooos" at the elegant danger that ascended to the ceiling, appearing like a whirlwind of colored wings and steel. Many faeries took to the wing to see detailed action, hovering parallel to where Hoshi and Valeane flew, braided together in battle. These crowds had to disperse and maneuver quickly, though, for Hoshi and Valeane would often exceed the limits of their makeshift circles, locked together and soaring without direction.
Every so often, a shower of blood would rain to the ground, and the crowd gave a synchronized gasp. Some perverts tried to collect the blood, racing out into the middle of the arena and drunkenly trying to scoop it up, but they were quickly chastised by guards and returned to their seat. I cringed and craned my neck upwards when these scarlet showers came, squinting to see who had suffered damage. It was useless—from my vantage point, they appeared like a set of wings and feet, shifting and struggling for nothing.
Finally, an angel fell from the heavens, knocked down by a divine strike. Throughout their freefall, I could not tell who it was—the crowd leaned forward and gasped, waiting for the form to be identified. It hit the ground with a sickening thud, suggesting that she had been turned to dead weight. I practically threw my head through the bars of the cage to see who it was, vision obscured by faeries standing in front of me. I didn't get a chance to see the body before Fyora was on her feet, instructing the masses to sit down with a wave of her hand, while simultaneously announcing the victor.
"Valeane has fallen! Our new Battle Faerie: Hoshiya!"
The crowd erupted into an explosion of cheers, confetti and balloons tumbling down from the ceiling. Hoshi, who was still in the air, began to descend slowly, a bewildered look on her face. Her hair was disheveled and her face bruised like a boxer, bleeding at the lip. Her clothes were in tatters, barely rags from the battle, and even her wings showed scars and puncture wounds from the sais.
Yet as soon as she touched the ground, she was boosted into the air by the welcoming hands of ecstatic crowds, especially those who had been gunning for her the whole time. Hoshi looked baffled at first, but then a smile began to unveil itself across her face until she was full-on beaming, allowing herself to be lifted high into the air by the approving mass. The occasional crowd-member tossed her a healing vial, and Hoshi drank thirstily from them, her wounds healing as she was traded among the crowd's hands.
Valeane, meanwhile, was being peeled from the ground by guards who held healing potions to her lips, practically forcing the purple liquid down her throat. Through this, Valeane, much to my dismay, was slowly regaining consciousness, the open, oozing wounds tattooed on her skin beginning to fold into themselves and heal. Her eyes fluttered open, and looked around hazily at the guards surrounding her. At first, she barely seemed to register anything—until her eyes wandered to the exalted Hoshi. A fire rekindled in her eyes, she seemed to try and wrest herself from the guards' arms for a rematch, but they held her down, assuring she would have an opportunity to release her rage.
That opportunity was me.
Once the crowd had calmed down, Hoshiya was instructed by two guards to walk ceremoniously in front of Fyora. Hoshi held her head down as she approached, evaporating the long spear in her hand. The crowd settled back down, and Hoshi kneeled reverently in front of Fyora. Fyora turned to a line of guards that had formed, the lowest ranking furthest from Fyora and the highest ranking closest, and they slowly passed down a sword nestled on a gigantic velvet pillow. When it came to the last guard, she held the pillow up to Fyora, and the Faerie Queen took the sword gently from the cushion, holding the blade above Hoshi's head. Hoshi bowed her head as if to receive a blessing.
"In the name of the Faerie Council, and the Royal Faerie Family"—here Fyora began touching Hoshi's shoulders gently with the flat tip of the sword, until she finally anointed her head—"I garner upon you the title of our Kingdom's three hundredth and first Battle Faerie."
I wanted to scream out and throw Hoshi aside, taking the edge of the sword to my body rather than her take the flat. As soon as she had been declared, a tectonic plate shifted inside our relationship. While we had become alienated and distant throughout these past weeks, a earthquake was now irreversibly marring the landscape of our union, creating fissures that could not be healed.
The crowd knew not to be as wild during this official ceremony, and clapped politely for Hoshi's apparent knighting. Fyora bent over and lifted Hoshi's chin up so her face stared into hers. Hoshi appeared frightened but Fyora's smile seemed to calm her. Fyora stood back, and then held out the sword for Hoshi to take. "This is the sword of the Battle Faerie before you, and for thousands of generations past. Wield it with honor and the Kingdom's blessing."
Hoshi took it breathlessly, only allowing her fingertips to touch the weapon. She looked as if she would faint in awe—and perhaps rightly so. Although the sword was notched and not the most modern, efficient thing in Faerieland, it possessed a certain aura of power that radiated from it, a power of an object that had slain many trespasser and criminal lives. My heart ached at seeing the transformation in her. Some horrible light had been bestowed upon her that I didn't understand, transferred to her body through three touches of that sword. Now she held it in her hands, and would carry it with her eternally—a manifestation of the change in her I could not accept.
With Hoshi still handling the sword as if it were a baby, four guards ushered her out of the ballroom, Fyora announcing that Hoshi would be debriefed of her duties by the Royal Advisor Pandora. The crowd's eyes followed Hoshi until she was out of the room, and then zeroed in on the fuming Valeane, who had been reluctantly standing amongst two guards during the ceremony. While I only had regret in my heart while Hoshi had been knighted, now my heart sunk to the depths of my intestines in cold-blooded fear.
Though I now wondered if Hoshi would not have killed me if she had lost, I knew for sure that Valeane had nothing but my blood running down her sais in mind, and that if some miracle didn't shine on my head, there would be nothing left to shine on. Fyora smirked at me as soon as Hoshi was out of sight, and that was indication enough of what came next.
"Now, for our next competition—Valeane, the defeated, will now regain her status through our very own Coronation Jester!"
The crowd howled in laughter as they turned to me, paying little attention to Valeane. Valeane was stepping out into the arena, healed back to perfect condition except her mood. A renewed fierceness was in her eyes—yet this time her victory was assured. The ferocity was merely to turn a massacre into a bloodbath.
The guards came over to my cage and opened the lock. I stayed on the opposite end of the cage, refusing to come out with swears and kicks. They waited impatiently for a moment, and then three came into the cage to manually remove me, holding me at the arms with their muscles like steel. They dragged me down, quite literally kicking and screaming, to the middle of the arena while fruit rained over their head. I tried to bite the guards that held me prisoner, but their hides seemed to be made of the armor that encased them, with their hearts forged in the same fashion.
One of the guards bent down to the ground and touched the spot with her open palm that seemed to be precisely the middle of the battle stage. Slowly, she raised her hand up and revealed a metal pole rising from the ground, covered with a dried, rusty substance. Attached to the top of the pole were chain links, their ends still buried deep in the ground. When the guard had removed the pole so that it was about hip-high, she began to tug gently at the chain links, which eased up from the ground to reveal shackles.
The guards that still held me pushed me forwards, and offered my wrists to the one who had produced the pole from the ground. I watched in terror as the shackles were clamped and locked around my wrists. The guard adjusted them with a stroke of her hand big enough to be loose but small enough to be inescapable. With my arms secured, the guards seemed to be satisfied with their work and retreated from where I stood, vulnerable.
Every shriek and encouraging scream from the audience in Valeane's favor rang like the squeals of a violin string in a horror movie. The adrenaline was rampant in my veins, pressing against my skin like air to the rubber of a balloon. Both a heightened sense of death and an animalistic fear combined inside my brain to send it into an intelligible frenzy, only allowing my lips to spurt out whimpers and nonsense. Pathetic as I sounded, a clear terror did penetrate my body. Never before had I felt something so pure and unshakeable, cementing itself in every cell in my body. On the odd chance I walked away alive, that dread would still linger within my body until it atrophied its way out months later.
Fyora calmed the crowds, her ability to control the people's mouths having increased in the span of one night. She gave a hateful look towards me, a supportive look towards Valeane, and then turned her attention to the whole of the crowd. "My subjects, our Coronation Jester has given us a rousing performance and a great deal of belly laughs. Unfortunately, all things must come to an end. Valeane will now display that she is quite qualified for the position of Battle Faerie, if Hoshiya were to perish. Valeane, you may start your demonstration."
Valeane wiped some sweat off her nose and looked at me. The crowds continued to jeer at my state, despite the fact that my death sentence had been written. I looked amongst the crowds for a second, trying to find a friendly face—a face that spelled remorse, or horror at the act that was about to unfold. All their countenances blended together, forming a super faerie that only desired to scream and laugh at my face, to throw fruit at my freshly fallen corpse. The world had turned its back on me even as I faced it with desperation and hopelessness, holding out my arms for help.
This was my last impression of the crowds before I felt Valeane's fingers around my neck. Apparently, a death by her sais would be too impersonal—so instead she grasped my throat like it was a stress ball. Her hands were long and surrounded my neck, but the added force, I ascertained, was contributed from a magic spell, pulling the air from my lungs. I began to flail a bit against the asphyxiation, but I soon concluded this only made me feel weaker, and used the limited oxygen I had left too quickly.
So I became still as Valeane, her face in a cruel grimace, pushed me to the crowd and pressed my neck into the stage, utterly silent. The crowd contributed background noise, putting the curses into Valeane's mouth that she did not speak. I could do little more than look her in the eye, the fear draining color from my face. I kept my eyes courageous as possible, not daring to look away—for I knew as soon as I found an easier object than Valeane to stare at (namely, anything) I would not be able to re-muster the bravery to stare her down.
She kept me without air until the world around me became darker, and faerie's voices mixed into a muddled fray. I could hear Valeane speak her first words to me in the distance, but I was unable to distinguish their nature. The world in my peripheral vision became black, and I saw through a tunnel with no light but Valeane's vicious eyes at the end, damning me to all sorts of brimstone underworlds.
The sensation of suffocating ceased soon after, and I was baffled to find I was still conscious. My mouth stayed open and tried to spoon in the air my body required, but it was difficult to shove in all the air I required without popping my lungs. Valeane seemed to have disappeared, and I was alone in my quest to regain oxygen to a functioning level. I was paralyzed, unable to move except for the heaves of my chest, but that didn't seem to concern me. My only troubles lay in distributing enough air to eradicate the haziness from my vision and the beginnings of death in my muscles and brain.
Then, the framed view of my world yielded a picture. It was the face of Valeane, coming at me at high speeds. From my limited comprehension, she seemed to move in slow, strobe-light motion, jerking towards my chest with the blade of her sai pointed downwards.
At this point, I was complacent with the concept of death, and stared at the sai mildly with the hints of a smile. Demise seemed like a mother coming to sing me a lullaby—a mother I never had and a song I'd never heard, ambient, droning, pillow-like in my ears. I saw my life flashing before my eyes—not exactly mine, but a version thereof, a version seen from a third person perspective, objectively. I pitied myself the child, and loathed myself the adult while simultaneously playing in the puddles of childhood on a rainy day and relaxing in a blissful high with Jhudora. Death came slowly, I realized at that moment—it was a distant and warm experience, like a symphony played piano. It was slow and swelling summer day, punctuated only by the painful accents of the physical world.
But something interrupted my sanguine moment in the sun. The sai was suddenly knocked out of my view, which was quickly expanding, and with it the hand that held it. However, the arm still remained, a circle of blood and bone replacing where the hand had been. I heard a scream and registered it as Valeane's, a scream of pain and suffering. I myself only felt a cold sensation on my head, and then the feeling of evaporating that I felt only once in my life. It was the sense of teleportation, being thrown across a distance in high speeds in the form of particles, bodiless yet connected.
I formulated and arrived. At first, I could not identify where I was—it was cold beneath me, and smoke obscured most of my immediate surroundings. It was harder to breathe in there, but I managed to regain strength enough to sit up, my eyes blackening and sparkling in front of me. Objects began to manifest themselves through the smoke—and to my surprise, I discovered I was in the lab, utterly alone. The safe where I had stored the chemicals that killed that Feepit was behind me, and I was on one of the tables where we put test tubes of chemicals. I jumped off quickly, scared that my skin might have been contaminated with chemicals in the meantime.
I wondered briefly who had been so kind to save me, but it mattered little at that moment. My mind, as soon as I saw Hoshi knighted, had fallen to one sinister thought: the path that so many other tortured geniuses had walked, with varying amounts of success.
I walked around carefully, my feet bare and the floor with a possibility of being sprinkled with glass shards. Though I was cautious, a trance mode fell over my steps, as if I were walking through a graveyard. So many memories floated past me in the smoke, a terrible nostalgia overcoming me. I walked over the steps where Hoshi had followed me with Feepit in hand, now both of them, one physically and one spiritually, fallen through my fingers. A depression burrowed itself in my stomach, and I found my body wandering back to the safe that contained the chemicals so lethal to those Feepits.
I opened it, hardly aware of what my body was doing. Though I lacked gloves, goggles, or a lab coat, my body was so conditioned to handling the chemicals that I removed them flawlessly, depositing the test tubes onto the experiment table. While there had been a plethora of test tubes before with the solution, now there was only one row. I could only assume that they were keeping these for further research, and had destroyed the rest for safety purposes.
My hands were moving by themselves. They were dumping the chemical into a vacuum packed container, shoving on the lid that helped to pump out the air. My feet led me over to the case where syringes and hypodermic needles were stored, and I opened it with the combination remembered. They hadn't changed it, as one needed an ID that functioned as a card key to get into the institute—and instead of changing all the locks, they had merely deactivated my card key. So it was still easy access for me, and soon, with an assembled syringe, I was diving the needle into the rubber seal of the vacuum packed solution, filling it up to the limit of the syringe.
We had given the Feepits a quarter of this dose and it had killed them. Feepits generally had the capacity to deal with anything a faerie could, and reacted similarly to certain chemicals. Four times the dose was a death sentence for both a Feepit and a faerie, and that was my intention.
I had always mocked people with suicidal intentions before—laughed at their petty angst for lives that were lived and taken for granted, for people who bathed in bourgeois comfort yet couldn't stand to enjoy it. I had never known much more than the orphanage, my crappy little pad, the record store, and the lab, but somehow, before, I had managed to stay content. Perhaps it was due to the disconnection I regarded everyone with. I had lived a life where people where always an arm's length away, smiling at me with only vague recognition and leaving me unbothered. This had aided in not feeling any pain from hurtful comments hurled at me daily, and not being bothered if I was brushed off for an appointment or date with somebody. It even helped in the occasional lay—I didn't feel any deep connection to the person, even if we had been dating, and fucking became a set of healthy pushups that ended in a wave of pleasure. I lived life with a foot outside the door, detached enough to get by.
But Hoshi had changed all that. Coming into my life, she grabbed it by the edges and turned it around like a merry-go-round until it landed emotionally one-eighty degrees backwards. Emotion started emerging in relationships where I didn't want them to, leaking out like a house without sealant. It wasn't until now that I realized Hoshi had opened all of the doors to the room I had isolated myself within just so she could enter anyway she pleased. Yet she forgot to close and lock them on the way out, and now others serenaded around my private room and crushed my belongings. She had left that cubicle of comfort in the most disarray—everything was rearranged now to her liking, but now she had abandoned it and left me to clean up the soft, whitish powder she had left everywhere.
I needed to close them myself, but there were too many to shut on my own. So I would escape that room—escape that house—aided by the chemical I had made for other purposes. Something made for the benefit of faeries was finally doing just that—killing an abomination to their race.
I ripped off a strip of the pathetic clothes I had been forced to wear and tied it around my arm expertly. The veins popped out of my skin, seeming to beg for a hit of smack. I would satisfy their craving for a needle, but not for that exquisite opiate. I found my favorite vein and plunged the needle inside at an angle, pulling back what I had left for that familiar blossom of blood within the syringe. Once I saw it within the murky depth of chemicals, I pushed it back in along with the whole of the contents of the solution, making my vein expand slightly and then go back down as it sucked it into my bloodstream.
The changes began immediately, unlike the slight period of stagnancy that the Feepits had experienced, likely due to the overload of chemicals I had pumped into my body. It began with my hair falling out in clumps, heaping like a pile of green hay at my feet. I kicked it around to stave the fear I was experiencing, partially produced by the churning feeling in my stomach. Soon my head was mostly bald save for three sparse clumps from my forehead, which when I tugged at to remove stayed stubbornly in place.
I felt my muscles begin to stack on top of each other, like a sculpture artist packing clay on their anatomical masterpiece. The skin encasing these muscles began to wilt away to a sickly olive green color, spreading across my body like a fast-acting plague. I touched this new skin, and its texture was rough and calloused, unlike the soft skin I had enjoyed as a faerie. I was too terrified to scream—and yet I had no sensation of regret, just of wonder of the changes overcoming my body. Soon my body outgrew the rags that I wore, ripping them in places as my bones groaned and stretched to accommodate for the added muscles on my frame.
My pinkie began to wither on my hands, and I wondered how I would ever be able to play piano. This was the least of my worries—my feet seemed to be stretching and forming into some sort of raptor claws, keeping me much more balanced but giving even a greater sense of mutation.
My facial features were some of the last things to go. I felt my vision change—the iris expand to fill the whites of my eyes and my pupil following suit, allowing me to see detail I couldn't before. The teeth inside my mouth began to grow sharper and grind against each other, and my cheek bones lifted themselves until I had a look of cruel nobility. I didn't know it at that time, though. All I felt was my bone structure shifting like it was made of sand, feeling as if it were melting.
In a way, I was relieved at the fact that I was clearly not dead, unless my point of view had not changed between the transition of life to afterlife. Halfway through the transformation, a part of me had lurched and regretted my decision—I wanted to live. Now, as I checked my pulse, I was elated to found I did, perhaps more than before. As a steroid, too, the chemical had worked perfectly—I was far more muscular, and fit for heavy lifting.
I was surprised, at first, at the lack of pain the transformation wrought upon me. Though my perspective had changed, thanks to the additional third of a meter I had gained in height, no sensation wracked my body except a slight tingling. The vein where I had shot up was cold rather than hot, as the chemical had been chilling in the safe moments before, but there was nothing painful about the chill. In fact, it almost gave a slight adrenaline rush to the experience, making it fearful yet exciting.
My interest fell to a mirror, an object I had formerly loathed—and would soon have a further reason to think it vile. I fumbled around the lab station in front of me, opening the cabinets that weren't locked. Finally, I found one someone had irresponsibly left open with a mirrors used for a light reflection experiment within. Touching the mirror, I was filled with memories of that experiment—how it had been my very first, so simple yet nerve-wracking. The way I felt after that experienced had been and was indescribable besides the two words 'pure bliss.'
When I looked at myself in the mirror, any form of bliss melted away.