The science classroom door opened and Gallus poked his head inside, checking around to ensure it was vacant. “Okay, c’mon,” he said, motioning to the pony behind him as he slipped inside. “The coast is clear!”
Sandbar followed the griffon, but only reluctantly. “You really sure this is a good idea?” he asked tentatively, not for the first time, as they entered the room. “Because I can still think of a whole laundry list of things that could go disastrously wrong with this…”
“Relax,” Gallus assured him as they filed in-between the rows of empty desks. “This is a great idea. And besides, you’re the one who’s been taking the Thaumatical Physics class, right? So you’ll know how to help me do this right, no problem.”
“What I know is that this is a really risky idea of yours, messing with thaumatical energy nobody should really be messing with like this,” Sandbar retorted. He looked very on edge. “And never mind that part—what if somebody comes in and sees us?”
“Ah, but that’s just it, my hooved friend!” Gallus replied smugly, holding up a confident talon. “Nobody is here to see us, because this is a Saturday afternoon, relatively late into that afternoon, too. Most of the students are either not even on campus or holed up in their dorms and same with the teachers, too! So who’d even be poking their heads into an empty classroom right now anyway?”
“But Professor Sunburst—” Sandbar began to object.
But Gallus gently pressed the talon to the pale green pony’s lips. “…is with Smolder looking to resupply the cafeteria’s gem supplies out in that cave network Professor Pinkie’s monotonous sister lives in. They’ll probably be gone for another hour or longer before Sunburst even thinks to pop back into his classroom to do…whatever teachers do in classrooms outside of school hours. We’ll be done ages before then—sooner, if you can stop fretting so much.” He waved for Sandbar to keep following him as they arrived at the front of the classroom. “So c’mon, stop dragging your hooves and let’s do this.”
They both gathered around the teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom, upon which still sat an idle mechanical device Sunburst had been using to teach his class with for the past week. Having a much better understanding of its capabilities than Gallus did, Sandbar eyed it warily despite its currently inactive state—he knew that, if they did this, it wasn’t going to be staying like that for much longer.
“I’m seriously regretting even telling you about the professor’s demonstrations in class,” Sandbar mumbled, watching as Gallus set down an object of his own beside the device. “I still don’t see why this is so worth it to you.”
“I told you—my radio needs a recharge if I’m going to catch tonight’s buckball game in Fillydelphia,” Gallus said, patting the radio in question now that he had it set on the desk.
“And you can’t just run to the store and buy a new battery like a normal creature, because…?”
“What, and pay the whole five bits for it?” Gallus retorted. The blue griffon snorted in mocking. “No, no, no, no, doing it this way I can get a working radio again for free and while still using the same battery! This is basically recycling, Sandy! I’m thinking of the environment here!”
“No, you’re trying to get out of paying bits for it,” Sandbar argued back.
“That too,” Gallus instead spun in his favor. “So I’m being frugal. Now are you going to help me with this or not?”
“Well, if you’re so adamant about it then, why don’t you do it yourself?” Sandbar challenged.
“Because you know I don’t know how to work this thing,” Gallus replied and gave him a smug smirk. “Why else did you follow me this far if you weren’t going to help?”
“I’m only here to make sure you don’t somehow kill yourself doing this.”
“Oh, stop being so melodramatic, Sandy…”
“I’m not!” Sandbar pointed his hooves at the device next to Gallus’s radio. “That’s a thaumic energy generator, Gallus! It’s not even a proper one, it’s just meant for demonstration purposes! To show how magical energies work and their properties in a classroom setting! It wasn’t built for this sort of use, much less use by anyone less than an expert like us! It takes very fine understanding to use safely—why do you think it has those warning labels in the first place?” He motioned a hoof at a large label printed on the side of the cylindrical device, showing the stylized design of a magical spark in an ominous red-violet color, with the words CAUTION: HIGH THAUMIC ENERGY—PROFESSIONAL USE ONLY printed around it. “It may generate the thaumic energy you want to use to recharge your radio, but that doesn’t mean that energy will be stable when produced or transmit into the radio the way you want it or…or any number of other bad things!”
Gallus, however, only gave the warning label a passing glance before promptly ignoring it. “Oh c’mon, you’re acting like it’ll explode if I even look at it wrong.”
“It could if you don’t use it right!”
“See, that’s why you’re here!” Gallus nudged him with one wing. “You’ve been taking Sunburst’s class on this stuff, you’ve seen him use it without problem in class, so you ought to know how to work this thing better than I would, right? And how can it go wrong if a pro like you is the one who’s operating it?”
Sandbar regarded the generator for a long moment. “And if I refuse?” he asked.
Gallus shrugged with his wings. “Then I guess I’ll just mash buttons until I get the results I want,” he reasoned simply.
Knowing that would only end in disaster though, Sandbar sighed and relented. “Fine,” He proceeded to lean over the controls so to begin starting up the generator. “But if anything goes wrong, you’re going to be the one responsible for it, not me.”
“Deal,” Gallus said with a nod, watching Sandbar work. “But relax—this is foolproof! We’ll just have it on long enough to jumpstart my radio and then we’ll be out of here, laughing it off for the rest of the evening.”
“I wish I could share in your confidence on that,” Sandbar mumbled as, under his careful control, the generator started up and began to produce a low hum. A purplish glow started to emit from within its interior.
“Look, I’ll let you have some of the nachos I made for the game after this, since you’re helping and all,” Gallus promised.
Sandbar sighed again, but this time managed a small smile. “Your nachos are pretty good,” he admitted as he worked, bringing the generator up to a level he felt would be the safest to use for their purposes. He then cleared his throat and faced the griffon. “Anyway, if we’re doing this, then I guess this is ready for it.”
“All right,” Gallus said eagerly, pushing his radio closer. “So how do we need to hook this thing up?”
“I’m hoping you do have something approximating the right cord for it, right?” Sandbar asked, realizing now that he probably should’ve asked about that sooner.
But Gallus just shrugged and picked up a few of the jumper cables Sunburst had been using in his class demonstrations. “I figured we were just going to use these, honestly.”
Sandbar gritted his teeth and pressed the frogs of his hooves into his eyes. “Of course you did,” he muttered to himself, but knew there was little point debating the matter now and sighed for a third time. “Okay…okay, we can still make this work.” He picked up two of the cables and attached them to the corresponding points on the generator. “Pop open the battery case on that radio, Gallus,” he instructed.
Gallus did so, and then held it out before Sandbar, showing off the battery they wished to charge. Sandbar picked up a jumper cable in each hoof and turned to attach them to it. He had a pretty good idea of how he’d need to do it for it to work, but the moment he envisioned just how janky of a set-up that was going to be, he felt his stomach drop and hesitated.
Gallus saw this though and egged him on. “Hey, you’ll get this,” he assured. “Just…do it as a standard procedure for a non-standard setup.”
Sandbar tutted at that, annoyed at Gallus’s probably deliberate ignorance of the subject, but nevertheless moved to hook up the first cable. He did so with a very shaky hoof and with much hesitation, ready to whip it away at the first sign of trouble, before finally, squeezing his eyes shut and turning his head away, the first cable connected with a quick click.
Nothing happened.
Sandbar let out his breath in a relieved whoosh while Gallus gave him a quick thump on the back. “See? You’ve got this!”
“Yeah, okay, maybe you were right about me overreacting,” Sandbar relented, and went ahead and attached the second cable with much less hesitation.
Everything then went immediately wrong, the cables releasing a storm of arcing magical energy violent enough that both of them jumped back in surprise.
“Whoa!” Gallus cried, dropping the radio.
“Shut it down, shut it down!” Sandbar shouted aloud as he turned immediately to the generator, the hum of which had spiked worryingly in pitch. To his alarm though, the generator was very reluctant to respond. “It’s not…it’s not shutting down!”
“Oh, just…do this!” Gallus finally intervened, grabbing both of the jumper cables still attached to the sparking radio.
Horrified, Sandbar leapt to stop him. “No, don’t—!”
But he was too late, and with one solid yank, Gallus jerked the cables free from the radio. This only made things worse, as the severing resulted in a burst of energy that knocked them both onto the floor. A second later, something in the still-running generator popped, and a sparkling magical mist started gushing out of it in huge volumes. Both of the boys stared at this in dread.
“Oh droppings!” Gallus uttered in dismay, seeing his previously “foolproof” plan going up in smoke.
Sandbar, meanwhile, was already springing back up and was grabbing the griffon by the tail so to drag him back towards the classroom door. “Run!” he hissed as he did.
For once, Gallus listened to him, and as the mist spewing from the generator started to flood the classroom, they rushed out the open door and slammed it shut behind them. They then leaned against it, breathing heavily while listening to the malfunctioning generator in the room behind them continuing to whine.
“Well,” Gallus finally remarked after a beat, “That could’ve gone better.”
“Grraaaah!” Sandbar suddenly snapped and whirled upon the griffon, beating at his shoulder with his hooves. “I told you this was a bad idea!”
“Okay, okay, okay, I get it, I get it!” Gallus replied back, wrapping himself with his wings so to shield himself against the blows. “I’m sorry! So we better go now before somebody finds out we did it, and…”
“What?! No, no, no, no!” Even though Gallus hadn’t the chance to even turn to leave, Sandbar quickly ran around the griffon so to physically block his path. “We can’t just leave!”
“Why not?” Gallus demanded, throwing his claws into the air. “If we go back to our dorms now, it’ll be like we weren’t even here and the generator blew up on its own! So by the time anybody figures out what’s happened…”
“You don’t understand!” Sandbar hissed and jabbed a hoof back at the classroom. “That was raw thaumic radiation the generator was spewing out there!”
“Yeah, so?” Gallus replied, not understanding. He motioned to the closed door. “Seems like it’ll stay contained in there pretty well so long as nobody opens that door…”
“Gallus, that’s basically raw, untamed, magical energy, all concentrated into one room! Don’t you realize what could happen in there if it’s allowed to build up?”
“I dunno…it’ll zap somebody?”
“More like it could cause an uncontrolled chain reaction of random magical effects!” Sandbar said. “The longer that leak continues the more it’ll wreak havoc in there until it snowballs into one big disastrous event!”
Gallus pshawed dismissively. “That’ll probably take ages to happen,” he reasoned. “Plenty of time for somebody else to find it and have it be their problem, right?”
“Wrong! We might not that have that kind of time at all! For all we know, that generator could go critical at any moment!”
Gallus paused before hesitantly asking the question. “So…theoretically speaking…what happens if it does?”
“I don’t know, any number of bad things! A magical explosion, a wrinkle in time, an uncontrolled polarity inversion of the neutron flow—hay, worse case, we could even be talking about a resonance cascade here!”
“Oh c’mon! The possibility of a resonance cascade must be extremely unlikely!”
“Oh sure, that’s what they all say, but then the next thing you know, you’re running down corridors fighting off interdimensional creatures with nothing but a crowbar!”
“Fine, fine, okay!” Gallus pinched at his beak for a second. “So what do you have in mind?”
“Okay, we need to go find one of the professors,” Sandbar said, anxiously looking around as if deciding where to go next. “Best bet would be Headmare Starlight if she’s still in her office…”
“This late on a Saturday afternoon?” Gallus repeated skeptically. “C’mon, Sandbar, she’s long gone for the day by now!”
“Then our next bet would be to get Professor Sunburst. If you fly fast enough, Gallus, you just might be able to bring him back from the caves in time to…”
“Hey, I’m good flyer, but I’m not Professor Rainbow Gotta-Go-Fast good!” Gallus motioned in the direction of the student dorms. “Why don’t we just go get the professor who’s chaperoning the dorms tonight? Who is that, anyway?”
“Professor Fluttershy,” Sandbar deadpanned.
Gallus blinked to himself for a second before facepalming. “Yeah, okay, point taken.” He faced Sandbar again. “But I thought you said we were short on time here!”
“Well, I don’t know what else we could do, Gallus!” Sandbar answered back.
“We could try and fix this ourselves, seeing we apparently don’t have the time to wait for help!”
Sandbar gaped at him. “Gallus, that room’s filling with thaumic radiation!”
“Oh c’mon, it can’t be that bad,” Gallus reasoned, and to prove it, went to the classroom door and threw it open again.
He and Sandbar immediately jumped back again when the mist-like magical energy instead spilled out the open door, the room beyond completely filled with the stuff to the point it had almost entirely vanished from view in sparkling mist of a color they could only describe as ultraviolet.
Sandbar gave Gallus a pointed look. “Still want to try and fix it ourselves?”
Careful to not step in the swirling energy spilling on the floor, Gallus threw a pair of talons back at him. “Well, if there’s really as much danger as you say, it’s gotta be better than wasting time getting some creature else!” he argued.
“I don’t think we have any other choice!” Sandbar stressed, “And we’re wasting time just standing here arguing about it, so we’ll just have to pray the generator will hold for that long!”
It was at that moment the still-running generator hidden somewhere within the magical mists let out a loud crack and a wave of sparking energy washed out, cascading through the room towards them. Gallus and Sandbar had just enough time to throw themselves to either side of the door before the wave burst out and across the hall where it impacted a table and decorative plant that happened to be sitting directly across from the classroom. Both started to float up into the air under the random magical effects it’d been bombarded with before crashing back to the floor with a thump.
“…Yeah, I think praying isn’t going to be enough at this point, Sandbar,” Gallus reasoned before side-glancing at the pony. “Look, what would need to be done to stop this anyway?”
“Ideally, we’d just need to shut down the generator,” Sandbar replied, side-glancing back at him.
“You tried that already when it first started going cuckoo.”
“It’s a complicated process!” Sandbar retorted, but sighed, rubbing at his head. “But I guess at this point you might as well use the emergency stop. It’ll likely damage the generator beyond repair, though.”
“But that’ll be enough to stop all of this?”
“It should.”
Gallus started to circle around the magical mist still spilling out of the room so he could better see into the room. “Where is this emergency stop?”
“It’s a big switch on one end of the generator. When you twist it, it’ll force the mechanisms inside to stop moving,” Sandbar explained. His eyes then went wide. “You aren’t thinking about doing it yourself, are you?”
“Not unless you want to do it,” Gallus said, now looking around the hallway for something.
“Gallus, that room’s so flooded with magic energy you’ll get overdosed with it almost immediately!” Sandbar objected. “I can’t even predict what sort of effect that’d have on you, other than it’d obviously be bad!”
“Hey, we can both agree this whole mess wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t decided to mess with it, right?” Gallus argued, flapping up suddenly to where a long banner-like drapery was decoratively hung in the hallway. “So it might as well be me that fixes it!” He yanked the drapery free of its hooks and brought it back down to the floor. “Besides, the generator’s still on the teacher’s desk, right? That’s just a straight line from here all the way to the other side of the room. If I move quick, I can be in and out before too much bad stuff happens, right?”
Sandbar hesitated as he mulled it over. “I don’t know…” he replied reluctantly. “Gallus, we’re talking about wild and uncontrolled magic here, potentially powerful enough to do just about anything at random.” He motioned to the table and plant across the hall. “You saw what happened to that from just a brief exposure. That could happen to you, but getting increasingly worse the longer you’re in there!”
“Then I’ll just have to be quick,” Gallus reasoned as he tied one end of the drapery around his middle. “Maybe when the professors see I took the risk so to fix my own mess, they’ll go easy on the punishment.” He offered the other end of the drapery to Sandbar. “Besides, if anything goes wrong, you can just pull me back out with this, okay?”
Sandbar sighed and snatched the end of the drapery from him. “Just…be quick, okay? It’s bad enough you’re putting yourself at risk like this, I don’t want it to be in vain too.”
Gallus brushed it aside. “It’ll be fine, you’ll see.” They heard the generator let out a crack again. It didn’t release another wave of energy this time, but it served as a reminder that time was short. “Look, let’s just get it over with, and then we can still laugh it off over nachos like before.”
“I highly doubt that’s what we’ll be doing, but fine,” Sandbar said, moving to stand in front of the door, nodding at the griffon. “When you’re ready, Gallus. And remember—move fast.”
“Like I’d really want to dawdle around in there,” Gallus muttered back, before taking a deep breath and rushing into the flooded room.
He had wanted to speed through at a full run, but the moment the sparkling mist engulfed him, visibility dropped dramatically, and suddenly Gallus could barely see anything but a faint glow of light from the classroom windows to his left, and the vague dark shapes of other objects in the room. Afraid he might run into something in his blind rush, he was forced to slow down some, but already feeling a tingly pin-and-needles feeling all over his body, he dared not slow down too much. He was quickly proven right to be cautious because not long thereafter a shape flew directly in front of him. He realized almost too late that it was one of the classroom desks, sent floating by the thaumic radiation filling the room. Up until then he had been holding his breath for safety’s sake, but he let it out suddenly in a sharp gasp of surprise as the tumbling desk narrowly missed hitting him.
“Gallus!” he heard Sandbar cry out back from the door.
“I’m fine, I’m still here!” Gallus called back in reassurance, ducking under the floating desk and pressing on. “I’m nearly there!”
“Just hurry!”
“What do you think I’m doing?” After all, now that he was breathing the likely contaminated air, he could feel an unsettling feathery feeling form in his lungs that he didn’t like, urging him onwards.
But nearly a minute later and Gallus suddenly realized he still hadn’t reached the teacher’s desk like he should’ve by now. Confused, he looked back the way he had come to make sure he hadn’t somehow strayed off course, but saw from the drapery trailing behind him that he still seemed to be going in a straight line as planned. So how hadn’t he reached it yet? But with no alternatives other than continuing onwards, he did, hoping he’d just misjudged the distance. When he realized he could suddenly and inexplicably smell fudge, this spurred him further onwards, worrying the magical mist was doing weird things to him as Sandbar had forewarned.
Finally, he reached another classroom wall that Gallus initially thought was the right one in his low visibility, but as he drew closer, he instead saw it was the wrong wall entirely and stopped, wondering if he had indeed strayed off course anyway. But there was a closed door ahead of him that looked suspiciously like the same door he had entered from, so he instinctively opened it to double-check he hadn’t somehow traveled in a circle. Instead, the door impossibly opened back into the classroom itself…except leading in from its ceiling instead of the usual entrance. Gallus then had the sinking feeling that the magical radiation had somehow dramatically altered the layout of the whole room.
“Gallus!” he heard Sandbar call again, sounding so distant now.
“Moving!” Gallus called back, and knowing he still needed to hurry, decided to follow the wall in hopes it would eventually lead him to where he wanted to be.
Partway there, Gallus’s vision suddenly started changing so that everything appeared in a whole rainbow of random colors. Shuddering at the idea of whatever the thaumic radiation was doing to him, he nevertheless pressed on, becoming increasingly eager to find that generator. He instead found the row of windows lining one side of the classroom…only halfway up, the wall of windows abruptly merged with a mirror-flipped version of itself—Gallus could even dimly make out a reflection of himself flipped upside-down and hanging above him, but reminded himself not to waste time ogling. Seriously wondering if maybe Sandbar’s plan had been the better one after all though, Gallus nevertheless stopped to use the windows to get his bearings again before pressing on, hoping the teacher’s desk still lay in roughly the same spot in relation to them.
As he went, he heard another ominous crack from the generator vaguely ahead of him, but he couldn’t tell if the generator had released any new bursts of energy in the process. Not that this improved anything—he could feel the wild magic already swirling around him pulling and twisting at his body in small ways increasingly more and more often. The more it increased, the more his body started to feel…weird, and the more parts started to feel like they weren’t working totally right. Gallus started to fear he had been in here too long already.
But just when he was about to give up and call it all off, he almost blindly stumbled into the teacher’s desk at last. Letting out a victorious cry, he started searching for the generator. But with his vision as distorted by both magical effects and the thick mist filling the room, it took a moment of blindly feeling around before he finally found it. It was still whirling away, but it had a very unhealthy sound to it, and touching it passed an electric tingle through Gallus’s talons…assuming they were still actually talons, as he was finding it harder and harder to work them on at least one of his paws.
“Gallus!” he heard Sandbar call distantly from somewhere behind him, sounding increasingly worried.
“I found it!” Gallus turned to call back to him. “I’ve found the generator, I just need to find the switch, and—” he got interrupted when he felt an abrupt bubble of pressure push up his throat and let out an involuntary belch, releasing a burst of multi-colored soap bubbles out of his beak and into the air. Gallus stared at the bubbles as they all, one-by-one, quickly popped again. “Oh my goldfinch,” he cursed, before deciding to stop talking and just shut this thing off already.
He blindly felt around for the emergency shut off switch, nearly panicking when he didn’t immediately find it, but then his claws grasped a large handle that could only be the right switch, and he twisted it as hard as he could. It resisted—he could feel the moving parts within pushing back on the switch, and it was hard to put enough force into it when he was now struggling to keep his footing, his hindlegs suddenly feeling unbalanced. Making another bubble-filled burp didn’t help either. But finally, the switch twisted with a pop followed by the generator letting out a sharp but brief grinding noise then immediately going silent.
Gallus let out a quiet laugh upon realizing he had done it, but he still needed to get out of this room filled with dangerous thaumic radiation. He turned to try and retrace his steps, but one of his legs failed to hit the floor when he expected it to, causing him to stumble and tip over onto his side. Deciding that maybe it would be better to have Sandbar pull him out instead, he turned to call to the pony.
“Heth Thandbah, puth meeth…uhhh…”
…Or at least he would if his tongue hadn’t suddenly felt like it’d swelled to two-sizes-too-big within his beak, making it impossible to speak without any sort of strong lisp. He decided instead to reach around and grab the drapery he was tied to and tug on it, signaling to start pulling. It took a couple tries but eventually Sandbar got the hint and started pulling him slowly back out of the room, dragging him across the floor. As he did so, Gallus felt his body change increasingly more and more, to the point that he was starting to struggle to understand all of the new sensations he was feeling, wondering if it was even worse than he first thought it was.
The absolutely stunned look on Sandbar’s face when Gallus was finally pulled free of the flooded room and back into the safety of the hallway seemed to confirm it.
“Ffat?” Gallus attempted to ask, almost dreading the answer. “Thow bathd ff it?”
Sandbar couldn’t seem to respond though, his jaw simply going up and down uselessly as he failed to find the words and instead continued to just stare at Gallus lying there on the floor. When Gallus let out yet another belch of bubbles, Sandbar only seemed to become even more shocked.
But ultimately he was spared from needing to answer altogether.
“What in the world?!”
Gallus twisted his head around to see they were no longer alone—Professor Sunburst and Smolder had both returned and chose that moment to enter the hallway, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, Pinkie’s sister Maud had apparently chosen to accompany them back to the school too. All three of them stopped to take in the undoubtedly unusual sight before them. Sunburst stared at Gallus in abject horror, probably appreciating the seriousness of the situation more than anyone, but he was the only one to do so. Smolder immediately doubled over into a wheeze, before, on her next inhale, falling over onto her back so to laugh harder than Gallus had ever seen her laugh in the whole time he’d known her. Worse still, he could see that even the normally very stone-faced Maud was cracking a small smile.
Which was how Gallus knew—his state was, indeed, very bad.
Using his magic, Sunburst took Gallus straight to the nurse’s office for treatment. He then left Maud to supervise while the nurse got to work. Smolder also stayed so she could continue to laugh at Gallus’s expense. Sunburst, meanwhile, went back to his classroom so to survey the damage fully. As his thaumic exposure was of little concern in comparison to Gallus’s, Sunburst took Sandbar with so the colt could explain what had happened along the way. As they left though, Gallus demanded a mirror, and while the nurse worked to put on some booties and mask for her own protection while treating Gallus, the unfortunate griffon took the chance to see for himself just what had happened to him. He immediately saw why Sandbar had such a hard time putting it into words—Gallus wasn’t even sure where to start himself once he’d seen the full extent of the random transformations.
His head had swelled like a balloon to roughly double its usual size, almost as if it had suffered some sort of extreme allergic reaction. In turn, his cheeks had puffed up to comical proportions like big soft balls and were covered with small polka dots, with no two dots having the same color. One of his eyes had ridiculously grown to twice its size, with his pupil and iris scaling up accordingly to match, making both look severely dilated. His iris color in that eye had also changed to an iridescent rainbow of colors that appeared to shift and change depending on the angle you looked at it. By contrast though, his other eye had shrunk to more than half of its original size, becoming so small he had a hard time even making out the pupil, and was honestly surprised he could even still see out that eye. Together, this drastic contrast in eye sizes gave him a comically wild look, like some stereotypical insane character in a cartoon.
His crest had also scaled up in size, making it look like a cockatiel’s mohawk, and it glowed with a notable yellow light. One of his ears had become long and floppy, draping down one side of his head. His other ear appeared to have remained unchanged, but it had become so swallowed up by the many other changes to his head that it was hard to tell for certain. He also confirmed his tongue had indeed swelled in size until it hung out of his beak, and likely the big contributor to his newfound lisp. It had also become forked like a dragon’s tongue. He’d sprouted cat-like whiskers around his nose that occasionally tickled his face when brushed the wrong way, but they were almost unnoticeable in comparison to the pair of puffy red lips that’d grown onto the tip of his beak, the first time Gallus ever had a pair of actual working lips.
He decided he wasn’t a fan.
The transformations hadn’t stopped there though—continuing down from his head, the patch of fluff on his chest had transformed into quills. The peach coloring that went from his neck across his chest and onto his belly remained largely unchanged except for how it was now broken into wide diagonal stripes. One of his wings had somehow been flipped completely upside-down so that it’s leading edge pointed towards his rear, while the other seemed to have lost all solidity and instead flopped limply on his side like a feathered noodle. Both wings no longer even lined up with each other, perhaps because Gallus’s middle had extended to more than twice its original length, giving his body an almost serpentine look that made him think of Discord (and was glad the personification of chaos wasn’t here to see this). It was long enough that he didn’t fit comfortably in the cot he’d been put in, resulting in his rump having to get propped up on the footboard and even then it still dangled partway over it.
One side of his lower torso was randomly covered in green scales. His rump, however, had become so fuzzy it looked like a giant blue puffball. His tail had become stiff and perfectly straight like a pole, and would only either stand straight up or lie horizontally at a perfect ninety degrees—any other position only caused it to bounce back to either of those positions. The tuff of fur at his tail tip had transformed into a wide and flat surface almost like a flag, and in a stroke of poetic irony displayed a pattern that looked just like the high thaumic energy warning he had seen but dismissed earlier. Finally, the paws on his right front and back legs had somehow swapped, so the footpaw was now on the front leg while his paw of talons was now on the back. Meanwhile, the claws on his left front paw had transformed into what Gallus swore were bananas, while his left back paw had turned into a flipper. Both of his rear legs also appeared to be uneven in length, with one now visibly shorter than the other and explaining why he had been struggling to walk with them earlier.
And that was just the external transformations. When the nurse first started looking him over, she considered maybe using an x-ray spell later so to check his internal organs. But when using a stethoscope to check his heartbeat, not only did it take her a moment to even figure out where his heart now was, she found it was beating to the rhythm of a mambo dance and decided there wasn’t much point to x-rays as it’d only show that his insides were currently “gobbledygook,” as she put it. And Gallus could believe it, considering that he was still seeing everything in a whole rainbow of colors, he could still strongly smell fudge everywhere, and was still belching bursts of bubbles at random intervals. At one point he had even involuntarily farted a cloud of lavender-smelling sparkles, to his embarrassment…and Smolder’s amusement, as this sent her into another fit of laughter.
As such, Gallus wasn’t sure he even wanted to know what sort of chaos his internal organs had been left in.
In any case, the nurse didn’t waste time treating him. She began by preparing a tub of specially treated water and using a sponge to thoroughly wash every bit of Gallus’s body (including the bits Gallus would’ve rathered she left alone) so to scrub off any lingering magical mist that probably still clung to his body. Gallus hoped that would be enough to dramatically improve his state, but instead it appeared to have done so only marginally—the only real improvement he could find was that his lisp lessened enough that he could speak a bit more coherently again. So as the nurse finished the sponge bath, he couldn’t help but be a bit dismayed by his predicament, fearing the worst.
Smolder watching all of this with almost non-stop giggles didn’t help either. “Best karmic payback I have ever seen,” she snickered as the nurse put away the tub now that they were done with it.
“Hilarious,” Maud deadpanned in agreement where she also watched, seated against the wall.
“Thut up!” Gallus lisped back at them, shooting them both a scowl. He then turned to the nurse as she came back to his side. “Tell it to me thraight, doc,” he urged. “I’m never gonna live a normal lithe again, am I?”
“Oh, stop being so melodramatic,” the nurse reassured, bapping him with one booted hoof. “All of this should be temporary.”
Gallus’s heart soared from wherever it now resided in his twisted body. “Really?”
“Oh yes, like with every creature, your body already contains a little natural magic, so it has a means of maintaining the right balance of thaumic energy it needs,” the nurse explained as she worked. “So when it gets skewed like this with extra unnatural thaumic energy, then unless that energy is cast on a creature in such a way to more permanently bind it like with a complex spell, your body will just work to flush out the excess and eventually restore a normal balance, gradually undoing the transformations. With enough time, you’ll make a full recovery, and I don’t expect there to be any lasting side-effects after that.”
“Oh, thank the thkies,” Gallus mumbled, flopping his swollen head onto the cot in relief.
“That being said though,” the nurse continued as she measured out some pills from a bottle into her hoof, “the dose you got is still high enough that I’m going to play it safe and help it along by giving you a dose of Canary Yellow.”
“Whatff that?” he asked as the nurse then offered him the pills—unsurprisingly colored canary yellow—and he swallowed them without needing to be instructed to.
“It’s a special type of medicine used in cases of thaumic overdoses like this,” the nurse explained. “It bonds with the extra energies and helps the body flush them out faster, so it’ll hopefully speed this along.” Her gaze then turned more serious. “But you can expect to be in for a long night because of it, and you’re probably going to want to spend all of it not far from a toilet.”
Gallus groaned at that, not looking forward to it. “Underthtood,” he slurred. He heard Smolder snicker again and shot her another scowl. Given his ridiculous appearance at the moment though, he feared it didn’t have the intended effect as she only giggled harder.
Sunburst and Sandbar returned not long thereafter with news. “So the classroom’s a real mess,” the former began by announcing, “but with Starlight and Trixie’s help, and maybe a few other unicorns, we should be able to have it safely cleaned up in plenty of time before classes start again Monday. And it didn’t seem like much of anything else outside of the classroom got contaminated too, so at least there’s that too.” He leveled a hard gaze at Gallus though, nearly peering at the griffon over the brim of his glasses. “The thaumic generator is unsalvageable though.”
Gallus winced. “Thorry.”
Sunburst, however, sighed wearily. “I’m just glad you stopped it before it could get even worse and anything more serious was permanently harmed.”
“We were also able to recover and clean up this,” Sandbar added, holding up Gallus’s radio, looking no worse for wear. He switched it on, tuning into the station it had last been set to. “Turns out we managed to recharge its battery after all.”
“Well, I gueff all this wathn’t for nothing affer all,” Gallus mumbled, motioning to his distorted form.
“Perhaps not,” Sunburst concurred sternly, “but I should stress that you wouldn’t be like this at all had you not tried to haphazardly mess with the generator in the first place.”
Gallus winced again, but he knew better than to deny it. “Yeah, I’ll own up to that,” he admitted. He watched Sunburst’s disapproving gaze for a moment and swallowed uncomfortably. “Am I going to be punithed?
Sunburst sighed for a second time and reached up to adjust his glasses. “No,” he relented and motioned to Gallus on the cot. “Honestly, I think all of this is punishment enough. Just—what have we learned from all of this, Gallus?”
Gallus didn’t miss a beat: “That not haffing to pay thor a new battery thn’t worth all thiff,” he managed to reply with his lisp.
Sunburst’s eyes rolled heavenward and he turned to leave. “Close enough, I suppose.”
Gallus replied by letting out another belch of bubbles, to Smolder’s hooting laughter.