I woke up with a belch. This alone would have been unusual. Not to assume I never belch in my sleep. I might, but I've never NOTICED it before. Not like this.
I've never had a belch so intense that I was actually forced to sit up to do it. Nor have I ever had one so foul smelling that I instinctively ranked it as Toxic. That doesn't even begin to describe the acrid, coppery, rotten egg taste it left in my mouth. This belch was so intense that I heard thumps against the walls from my cats hurling themselves off my bed so fast. In the back of my mind, I wondered why there were four thumps when I only had three cats, but my brain still wasn't ready to be awake, and that thought got shelved.
I groaned and panted, trying to clear the taste out of my mouth. I rolled onto my stomach to get a little more comfortable, plus there was light filtering in through a crack in my thick curtains and I wanted to bury my face in my pillow before the light brought me out of that lucid state that meant I still had a chance to fall back asleep. I wasn't sure exactly what time it was, but I had work tonight, and if I didn't get back to sleep now, I'd need to take a nap after my fiance was back from work and online, or risk being so out of it that I wouldn't be safe to drive back home after work.
That thought was interrupted by my biggest cat, Rubeus, jumping back up onto the bed. He padded gently up next to me, sniffing around my covers for several minutes before finally climbing up on top of me and sprawling out across the length of my body. Good GOD I never could get over how huge this bastard was. It felt like he had managed to stretch out even taller than I was. He was also purring right into my ear, and I was left debating whether it was comforting enough counter how absolutely noisy it sounded.
I stretched my arm out, reaching for where my phone sat next to my computer, fumbling by touch. The light came from that direction, and thus opening eyes was against protocol, at least not until I managed to bring my phone close enough to see what time it was.
"4:13pm... good plenty of time going back to sleep."
With that, I let my phone slide out of my fingers, not even bothering to put it back in its place, and let the noisy lawnmower engine of my cat's purr sooth me back into sleep.
This time, around 7pm, I was awoken properly by my phone. By now I had gotten something close to a decent 6-8 hours sleep, so I didn't feel quite so bad about it. That didn't mean getting up would be any easier; sometime during the last hour or so, my other two cats had decided they would huddle up around me for warmth, which they often did since my room often felt as frigid as the winter air outside.
I hated disturbing them when they were like this. I didn't have much of a chance to own pets as a kid, despite generally loving animals, so those times they cuddled up to me while I slept was something I treasured. Fortunately I was able to silence my alarm before it disturbed them.
That's when my computer rang. My cats got up and moved off of me on their own for that one, they had long since learned the drill; If my fiance is online, they get out of the way. Just like I made a point that they only get fed after I get home from work, not by waking me up early.
I groggily fumbled with my mouse. My laptop was on a breakfast tray stand next to my bed, so I didn't even have to get up to use it, but I still had trouble seeing the pointer on the screen when I first woke up. I squinted, trying to track it down while I clicked a few times. Eventually I managed to hit the button to answer the call. I pulled my headset out and placed it over my head. They were stuck in the expanded size setting, so they weren't sitting on my head properly. I growled in frustration as I tried to get them resized, but I finally gave up.
"Hey, Angel. How was work?" I asked into the microphone, laying back on my pillow. I coughed, trying to clear my throat of whatever it was that was making my voice pitch weird and go raspy. Angel was her pet name, but it succinctly summed up everything she was to me. It was because I was doing it for her that anything I did had meaning. Yet still, she was so far out of my reach.
"Are you okay?" She asked, "I think there's something wrong with the audio, you sound really weird."
"I'm fine, just-" I coughed again, trying to clear whatever it was, but whatever it was, it was stubborn, "-something in my throat."
"Oh. Well. It was a rough day, the system needs so much work if it's going to be able to compete with what's already out there. I can't believe they want to be making this a public release before Christmas. The customers are going to freak and if this team doesn't get off their butts, I'm going to be the one having to figure out how to NOT tell our customers that this is a load of garbage... URGH!"
I could recognize the pattern, it would take a bit of venting before she would really be ready to discuss anything else. She needed time to wind down from the stress of work. I didn't mind, since knowing how her day was helped me feel like the distance wasn't so far, and it was something I could do for her that no one else seemed to be capable of. I rubbed my eyes, staring up at the ceiling while I prompted her to continue with some noises of confirmation, or a question to clarify I was losing track of her rant.
"WHAT THE HELL?" I shouted. There was a big black patch on my ceiling just above the foot of my bed. It looked like it had been burned, and I suddenly realized that there was the faint smell of smoke lingering in the air.
"What's wrong?" Angel asked from the other end of the line, "Glasny, your video is still off. Can I see what's going on?"
I sat up to get a closer look at the patch, but then switched gears, trying to meet my fiance's request to turn the webcamera to my computer on. While it loaded up, I walked across my bed to peer at the black patch on my ceiling. It definitely looked like it had been burned, though apparently not badly enough to cause a full scale fire, thank god, but still, how had this happened?
"I... uh. I'm not sure what's going on..." I told her distractedly, "I- ugh, hold on! Bathroom!"
My change to a standing position had shifted things so that gravity acting on my bladder made it no longer possible to ignore. I sat back down next to my computer and hung the headset on the screen, leaving it running so she could hear when I got back.
"Be right, back, Angel. Love you!"
With that I slid off my bed, putting my feet down to stand up.
A few things unexpectedly went wrong with this. For one, my feet didn't seem to reach the floor quite the right way. For another, my butt somehow caught the edge of my bed, causing me to pitch forward out of bed and onto the floor with a resounding thump of impact, that very nearly shook my laptop off of its cooling stand. I managed to catch some of the force on my hands, but for the most part I did a full out bellyflop and faceplant right into my carpet. There wasn't much of a splash, just a dull pain.
I could hear my fiance's voice coming out quietly through the speakers in my headphones; "Are you okay? What was that? It sounded like something fell."
"Ny'im okay!" I called, prying myself off the floor.
When I finally got back to my feet, I had the absolute oddest feeling of disorientation. My laptop was above my head, heck the edge of my bed was taller than my head.
I blinked and straightened up, as if I was somehow hunched over to my normal thigh level without realizing it. I gained maybe an inch of height. I stared down at myself. Instead of fleshy colors of five toed feet and five fingered hands, I was seeing a green belly, and purple hands and feet, covered in claws and scales.
I wiggled my fingers. The purple clawed hands followed suit. I wiggled my toes. Much the same reaction from the purple clawed feet. I rubbed my belly. As the purple clawed hands moved over the green plated scales of the belly, I could feel a similar sensation of my own hand touching plated scales, and my belly being touched by a clawed, scaly hand.
I briefly wondered if I was dreaming, but I've never actually wondered if I was dreaming while I was actually dreaming. Or if I had, it immediately shifted to a lucid dream that I could do whatever I wanted. Plus I never seemed to dream in full sensory before. I tended to dream more conceptually, instead of actually seeing an object and identifying it as a table, I would identify it as a table, and then the details that supported it being a table would sort of fill in generically from there.
I also tended to have tunnel vision in my dreams. Or things would be pixely, or colors wouldn't be right, or as soon as my mind wandered my dreams would just be swept up along the ride. Heck, just this line of questioning alone should have shifted my dream to some completely unrelated scene about 5 times over. Colors did seem a little bit off from my usual, but still consistent and everything I looked at had the expected amount of detail in a nice crisp focus.
That actually caught my attention. I was anything but blind, but without my glasses, I usually had to strain a bit to get my vision to be as clear as it was now. I looked around the room. Everything seemed twice to three times... maybe four times as large as it would normally be. My doorknob would usually be at belly button level, but now it was firmly out of reach. Rubeus and my other cats slowly poked their heads out to peer at me. They seemed like Mountain Lions now, adorable Mountain Lions, but still; yeesh.
I looked back to... "my" hands and flexed my fingers, making fists, then opening and closing my fingers in rippling waves. I was missing a pinky finger, and it threw off the pattern a little, but nothing too problematic. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, then rocked back and forth from my heels to my toes my balance was all sorts of funky on that issue. It was like I had something pulling at my hips every time I moved.
I twisted to look behind me and suddenly realized what my problem was, and also why I had tipped out of bed. I had a tail now. Also purple, with green ridgey scales running down its length, and a spade shaped tip to the tail. I was pretty sure I recognized who that tail belonged to. And the hands and feet... and generally everything.
I walked over to my dresser, and hopped, scrabbling to grab onto the edge and pull myself up so I could look at the mirror. I winced at the gouges my claws dug into the wood, but right now peace of mind was more important than a chunk of wood. It took a ton more effort to pull myself up than I had expected. I had gained a little weight, but climbing usually was something I was reasonably good at. I've done both rock and tree climbing, and I could always at LEAST handle pulling my own body weight up a couple times over. Now I had barely managed to throw myself up onto the edge of my own dresser, even with putting a thick series of scratches in the front of it with the claws on my toes, and I was STILL panting and out of breath from the effort.
I could hear my fiance continuing to call out in concern, but for now I ignored her, intent on finding out enough answers to know what the hell was going on before I got back to her. I pushed myself back up to my feet and turned to look at the mirror...
Only to have my foot slip of the edge and come crashing back down to the floor.
This time I intelligently opened the drawers in my dresser, forming a simple, easy to climb staircase to get on top of my dresser with. I made a note to mentally berate myself for not having thought of it earlier, but then changed my mind; I hadn't realized it would take any effort to climb my own dresser until after I had started, so it simply hadn't occurred to me to bother thinking of an easier way to get up on top of it. With that thought aside, I stood on top of my dresser and looked into the mirror at myself.
"Huh."
Yep, I'm Spike now.
And I still needed to go to the bathroom.