Well, what did you expect?
You decide to take the path marked "lizard," for no particular reason except that it's sunnier than the others. It's a pretty path. You admire the tall jungle trees, listen to the cries of the birds, and wonder what, exactly, the sign meant. You don't see any lizards here. Your arm itches, and you scratch it absent mindedly. Probably mosquitoes. You can already feel bumps rising on your skin. They're harder than usual, though, and there seem to be an awful lot of them...
You look down and let out a squawk to rival the birds above you. Protruding from your skin are the tips of several hundred small green scales. As you watch, they push out another fraction of an inch.
That's when you start running. You've got to get to a doctor. You're growing scales. What on earth makes people grow scales? You can't think of a single thing. Maybe you've just discovered a brand-new tropical disease. Lucky you. Unfortunately, you're too panicked to realize that you're running in the wrong direction. The scales grow faster as you run, edging out of the skin all over your body. The itching gets worse. There's a strange feeling at the base of your spine, too, and in the tips of your fingers, and in your face...
The ground goes flying out from under you, and you hit the dirt face-first. Fortunately, your skin's pretty well armored by now. Standing up proves difficult; your feet are tangled up in what turn out, when you look back, to be your pants. Your rear is bare to the world, as is the two-foot tail growing out of it.
Maybe this isn't a tropical disease.
You try to pull your pants back on, but the tail makes that quite impossible, though your hips are slimmer now. That's probably why you lost your pants in the first place. Of course, you don't need them so much now - there's not much left to see down there anyway. Your hips aren't the only things that have been shrinking. You're not sure whether to be relieved or not. It takes you a moment to find your balance when you stand up, disentangling two sets of extremely long toes from your pants. Small claws have replaced your toenails. Your fingernails are claws now too, and your fingers are almost as insanely long as your toes. Green scales cover your skin everywhere you look.
How much else has changed without you noticing? Running your clawed hands over your head, you find that your ears have melted into mere lumps and your hair is gone completely. Your nose has receded into your bulging lower face; two slitted nostrils are all that are left. A line of bumps down the middle of your hairless scalp seem to be the beginnings of spines. Suddenly, you're glad there isn't a mirror nearby.
Past a bend in the path, you can see an open space and the edge of a stone wall. It looks like a building of some sort - an old one, judging from the vines all over it. You can practically feel the stone, rough and warm, the perfect place for lying in the sun...
You've taken several shuffling steps farther along the path before you stop yourself. As enticing as the building looks, it's still quite far away; judging by the distance you've already come, you'd have turned completely into a lizard by the time you reached it.
That seems a bit too perfect to be a coincidence. Perhaps the building has something to do with your new reptilian side. In that case, it would probably be best to avoid it, even though part of you wants nothing more than to go take a look at it and lie in that warm sun. There's obviously some sort of magical thing going on here. What you ought to do is turn around and go back the way you came. If walking this way made you turn into a lizard, walking the other way should make you turn back... Right?
Written by Chrysalis on 12 September 2010
The end (for now)