//------------------------------//
// 1.2 - Awaken 
// Story: Ponies, Portals, and Physics: A Practical Study on Unscheduled Interplanetary Excursion 
// by superpurple 
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Fffuuuuuck.

That was the concise and accurate summary of my thoughts upon waking up.

I had, evidently, slept like shit.  My whole body ached from head to toe, with a particularly strong concentration of discomfort around my upper back and neck.  I also had a splitting headache.  It felt like my skull had been run through a trash compactor.  Even slight movement was met with protest from the associated muscles.

But if I didn’t move... if I just lay there perfectly still, it was almost nice.  Yes...  I could just go back to sleep and deal with this shit later.  Everything was just fine…  

...except for the continued attempts by that damnable ball of fire in the sky to burrow past my eyelids and skullfuck my retinas.

I turned my head away from the infernal glare.  The movement made my head flare with pain and yet also feel strangely… fuzzy.

I cracked an eye open just a tiny bit, grimacing at the glare.  The ceiling above me was not the familiar white stucco of my dorm room.  

My sleep addled mind worked over that detail.

Other senses decided to join the party.  My ears reported in that everything was abnormally quiet.  No constant buzzing of computer fans nor the ruckus of moronic neighbors. I processed that too.

Come to think of it, this didn’t really feel like my bed, either.  I pushed that thought onto the stack.

Working…

Loading…

Bits and pieces of the previous night surfaced in the turmoil of thoughts and slipped into place.  	My eyes flew open.  

There was something on my face, filling much of my view.

“Aaaargh!” I reached up to knock whatever it was away.  At the same time, a pair of somethings jumped towards my face to join it.  I tried to knock them away too, but they kept fighting me.  

This struggle lasted for a few moments before I realized the entities I was fighting off were my hands.  Except they weren’t my hands.  Not really.  The appendages before me were rough and scaly, and each of the four fingers was tipped in a long, curving, black spike.  

The fuck? 

I closed one eye and focused on the thing protruding from the center of my face.   It was a pale yellow at the base but shifted to black where it tapered off to a hooked tip.  I opened my mouth.  The thing split down the middle, the lower half moving up and down as I worked my jaw.

This was a beak.  From a bird.  On my face.  There was a beak on my face.  I had a beak.

Nope, I wasn’t even going to try to make sense of that just yet.  I moved my apparently taloned hand up across my face, past a large eye— ouch —and through the fluff covering my whole head.  Fluff that definitely wasn’t hair. 

I traced the offending fluff down my neck, shoulder and opposite arm to where I could see it.  I brought the arm closer to my face so I could see the… feathers?  Yup, they’re feathers.  Of course.  Y’know, to go with the beak and talons.  Makes sense, right?  Why the hell not?

The grayish feathers continued across my front (and I assumed my back as well), until about mid-chest.  Where the feathers ended, a coat of thick gray fur began, spreading down a fuzzy belly, to a pair of equally fluffy legs, each ending in a poofy, padded paw.

The whole thing looked like there was an incident at a circus where the lion-taming and sawing-a-person-in-half acts got mixed up and the results got abracadabra-ed onto my unfortunate ass.

And, just like a big cat, my furry butt was completely devoid of any kind of clothing.  Without thinking, I sat up, quickly covering myself with my hands, and then immediately regretted the action as I learned a lesson in being careful with talons around sensitive areas.

Suddenly much more alert, and now more upright, I discovered that the massive piles of white feathers surrounding me were in fact not part of the bedding as I had initially assumed.  Instead, they seemed to be sprouting out of a pair of new limbs dangling limply from my shoulders.

I shook my head.  Nothing about the scene before me changed, so I shook it again, just to be sure.  Everything was still there and still just as fuzzy.  

Beak, feathers, talons, wings, fur, paws.  My sleepy brain parsed the data being presented to it, trying to piece all the parts together into something that might make a lick of sense.  Eventually, it dug something suitable up from the archives.  A single word, from the fiction section.

“Christ on a bike.  I’m a goddamn griffon.”