//------------------------------// // 1 In Which A Nervous Breakdown Occurs, A Plan Is Formed. // Story: Our Not So Simple Plan // by WolfmanWhite //------------------------------// The sky above the hotel was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel — which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue. A nice sunny day is a rarity in the UK, so you learned to enjoy it while you could. I’d just finished work for the day as a dishwasher in the hotel’s kitchen and my feet were absolutely killing me. I slung my backpack into my crappy blue two-door clio and drove in silence, since I’d lost the activation key for the radio five years back. It was Friday and I was looking forward to the weekend immensely. On Sunday, I’d be driving to Manchester with my parents and flying to California, where I’d spend a wonderful two weeks with my boyfriend. Admittedly, my family coming along was a bit of a fly in the ointment, but they’d be too busy doing stereotypical touristy stuff, so that shouldn’t be too bad. I idly gazed at the Welcome to Wales (croeso i gymru) sign and the red dragon flag that signified I was over the border. The Hotel was half an hours drive from my hometown despite being in England so I hopped the border regularly via a large motorway bridge that cut across a large forested valley, typical of Wales. I idly took in the view of the river Dee, tired but attentively keeping most of my focus on the road. Soon enough, I pulled into the town of Wrexham, my hometown, and where I’d lived the last 24 years of my life. It’s not as though it was a bad town per se but to me it was just so stale and samey. Outside of having the most pubs and bars in a square mile radius in all of Wales, the only entertainment to be found was a bowling alley and an Odeon cinema. Having no friends locally to attend either of these facilities with basically left me confined to my house. As I turned into the Cul-de-Sac of my street, I saw my parents’ two cars parked up the driveway. I parked my Clio on the small stretch of pavement just outside so as not to block them in. Tomorrow, I’d have to follow both of them as they parked their cars in work for storage. I’d have to drive them home. Dinner was a forgettable blur of cheap supermarket pizza and my parents sniping at each other, turning on me when they ran out of ammunition to spend on themselves. Like most family meals we had, I tried to avoid them whenever I could. Our seats were wooden and uncomfortable because they lacked padding, which would leave me awkwardly shuffling around on my skinny ass as I’d try to keep it from falling asleep. I didn’t exactly get on well with my family. They were completely unpleasable and would hold anything positive they ever did for me over my head, much like parents pretty much everywhere. I knew for a fact they’d be holding this trip over my head for the next year or so, even though I offered to pay for my share of it. I quietly excused myself and promised to start packing my case tomorrow. I slouched up the stairs and browsed the internet half-heartedly clicking links and generally loafing around Killing Time™ until Sunday hit. I really, really needed this vacation. I’d get to see all my friends again; even some who wouldn’t normally be in California. “Q” lived in Alabama and was going out of his way to visit Cali at the same time as me so we could all meet up in person and have a good time. He was bringing his own local brew and I had already packed what I was bringing: A large bottle of single malt Penderyn whiskey. 25 years old, just older than me by a year. Cost a pretty penny, but it’d be worth it. Q was a fun drunk, and so was I. It wouldn’t take much to convince “Neon”, my boyfriend, to join in on the festivities, which I could imagine being mostly irritating and teasing “LF”, who didn’t drink. With any luck, our two other friends Lexi and Max would be able to make it if they hadn’t moved to Oklahoma yet. The evening passed the same way all my evenings did. Soon, all of the laugher and interesting conversation had to come to an end. Checking my computer’s clock, it was close to 2am, and it was time to sleep. I made my goodbyes into my headset before taking it off, along with my glasses, setting both down on my desktop, next to my keyboard. Almost forgetting, I removed the toothpick I’d idly been chewing, sweeping up the shredded remains of a few others I’d been gnawing on all night. I’d chew on anything. Toothpicks, matches, pens, paperclips. Anything. I always felt more comfortable when I had something to do with my mouth. Sleep came, and I embraced it. I’ve never been the most restful sleeper. My dreams are (I’d like to assume) relatively normal. Normal in that they usually consist of me running through treacle across various landscapes while being pursued by mundane things made terrifying. I recall one of my most vivid dreams was of being chased by an angry ninja with melon ballers for hands who seemed to be very upset with me for some reason (I am assuming due to the aforementioned hand situation) before he had to abscond because he was being chased by a horde of snakes. Yaknow, normal dreams. Which is what made this dream so… well. So weird. I don't remember much about it, which is par for the course. But what I do remember was... heat. Heat. Hunger. And, for some reason, eggshells? Yeah. I was inside an egg. And when I opened my eyes I could see brilliant, dazzling light. A twinkling light that made me salivate with a hunger I have never, ever felt before. And then I was dragged kicking and screaming, back into the real world, forcing me to abandon every shred of memory I couldn’t cling onto. With a groggy blink, I opened my eyes to the real world once again. And then immediately turned over and planted my pillow over my head. Ten more minutes couldn’t hurt, right? Well, considering my pillow made a quiet tearing sound, they probably could. “Fhshmn?” I burbled. Consciousness fighting me every step of the way, I felt my hand around for the tear in the pillow. I was able to find the pillow on my third try. I attributed this to my grogginess, for now. I lifted the pillow off of my head, and found it incredibly difficult to let go. After shaking it around for a few seconds, it ripped loose with another, louder shredding noise. A slip of cotton stuck to my reddish-pink, stubby fingers. I pawed absentmindedly at it to pull it loose and found my other hand in a completely different spatial area than I was used to. Wait, what? Stubby fingers? Reddish-pink?! My one exposed eye opened as wide as a black hole, staring in horror at the offending appendage. Reddish-pink. Scaley. Stubby fingers. And sharp. Very sharp. Okay, the important thing to do is stay calm and wake up. “AWAAAAGH!” As I flailed in my sheer terror to get out of bed, two unknown modifiers to the situation presented themselves. As I rolled off of my bed, I found myself a lot smaller than my usual 5”11’. A lot. The second factor was that my bedsheets had become ensnared and entangled across my body, like some kind of bedsheet anaconda. Every struggle just choked the life out of me a little more. I fell to the floor with a surprisingly light “thwump”. Okay. Okay. We’re calm. We’re calm. I’m calm. Okay. Breathe. Breathe. Situation. Movement? I wiggled my neck, and felt the bedding constrict. A quick shimmy around proved similar for all of my limbs. Both my arms, both my legs and my ta- “WAIT WHAT?!” A tail. I have a tail. Okay. This is the part where I wake up. This is that part. I closed my eyes vault tight and examined the insides of my eyelids, telling reality that what was currently transpiring wasn’t happening at this moment in time and I was about to wake up right…. NOW! My eyes sprang open and once again found themselves staring at the floor. Oh god. Oh godohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod… It was at this point the nervous breakdown hit. I don’t remember how long it lasted, and I don’t remember what I thought, except for sheer, unbridled terror. In fact, I’m pretty sure I thought nothing but the purest form of terror ever thought of in the history of mankind. ...or whatever the hell I was now. On the plus side, I was free of my bedsheet anaconda prison. It lay in tatters after my panicked, primal fear-spasm. But obviously that was the least of my rapidly growing list of problems, which I had still yet to mentally sort. Okay, where to begin? One. Currently too small to see over my bed. This was a biggie. Two…. eeeeh, forget about two…. My wardrobe was on the other side of the room, conveniently blocked from my sight by my current vertically challenged position. Its doors were mirrored, I could check my reflection! I scampered blindly around my bed, falling to the floor as my new… tail-y appendage got snagged by my desk chair. Half crawling, half sprinting in dead panic, I skidded to a halt in front of my wardrobe. Well… This is a lot to take in… Where to start? I’m about 3 feet, maybe, from my toes to the tip of my… well, horns, I guess. Horns. I had horns. Not too long, maybe a foot in size, tucked behind my head instead of out to the side like a bull’s. Or a demon’s, that would be more fitting. A tiny, reddish-pink demon. Wait, am I a demon? Am I, like, an imp or something? Oh god, am I in hell?! Is this my penance for being a gay atheist?! “Aw FUCK!” I shrieked, my hands instantly slapping up to my mouth. My voice was a few million octaves higher than I was used to. I didn’t have the deepest voice on the planet, but considering its default vocal style was the deadest of deadpan, I was surprised to find my voice having the ability to break glass at the slightest tremble of my vocal cords. “Okay. Okay…” I said, beginning to speak just so I could get accustomed to the change. My fairly long, blonde hair had been replaced with small scales, shimmering almost like they were constantly wet. They looked like Industrial Light and Magic was working overtime, all the time. If it were on anything that wasn’t ME, I would have been entranced by them. My hands were obviously small and claw like. I could still wiggle my fingers, but it felt like each of my fingernails had merged with the tips of my fingers. I touched them together experimentally. The clacking they made resonated in my ears. Ears... I have no ears! I tossed my head left and right, scanning each side of my skull. The examination turned up a couple of tiny holes beneath my horns, which… well, what else could they have been? If I had been more confident, I would have stuck one of my fingers inside of them, but that would probably have been the second worst thing I did that day, outside of waking up. My feet told a story similar to my hands, except with feet. Claws lined my toes and threatened to trip me up as they got caught in the carpet of my floor. Which just left… My tail was about half the length of my body. It seemed content to just sit there and pout, twitching on occasion, as if resenting me for looking at it. Well, two could play at that game. I gave it a look of complete and utter contempt, and it responded by smacking itself against my bedpost. It was smooth, scaly and the same reddish-pink that made up the rest of my body. The tip was made of the same material as my claws and toes, but not as sharp. Welp. This is me. This is the individual formally known as… well, Tom. My parents are gonna fucking flip. I’ll be responsible for this, I just know it. It’ll be my fault… Well, guess I’d better go come out of the demonic imp closest to my parents. And I was hoping once in a lifetime was enough. I briefly considered toying with crawling back into bed, wrapping the remains of the bedsheet anaconda around me and gently weeping until I died of dehydration or depression or for simply being me, the universe’s plaything. After dismissing that plan of action as thoroughly useless, I shuffled awkwardly over to my door, past one of the poems I had framed upon my wall: The Raven. Ah. Problem number… pick one. The door handle was JUST out of reach. Universe’s plaything. After wheeling my desktop chair to the door and shimmying the handle, I realised that as far as problems go, getting the door open wasn’t really a big one. I padded out into the upstairs hallway of my home. I could see my parents’ room, which was right next to mine, with the bathroom on the other side. It was late morning, and normally I was the one who’d sleep in. My parents should have been awake by then. And yet, the shadow looming underneath their bedroom door suggested that at the very least, my dad was still in his lair. Heh. Lair. God, I hoped my dad wasn’t a demon too. That would have just sucked. A shudder went down my spine as an even more dreadful thought emerged… What if my mother was?! The mere inkling of that thought paralyzed me with fear. After a small eternity, I quietly pushed the door open. I forget how long I stood there on the precipice. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting… Eventually, I gathered up what little courage was in my little body and stepped into my parents’ room. The smell of my father left for several hours in an unaired room drifted into my snoutish nose. “Uhm… Guys?” I quavered. The bed stayed silent, and nothing more. I tiptoed towards it, losing balance once as a toe snagged the carpet. I tugged at the unkempt bedspread. “...Dad?” The bed remained silent, and nothing more. I slinked past the bed to their window. I flung back the curtains and opened the window, letting the stale air out. The bed completely and utterly failed to react. Eventually, I simply settled for throwing the sheets off the bed. I was greeted by a complete and utter lack of any form of paternal unit. As the hour passed, I turned the house upside down, having to practically slide down the stairs on my ass like a five year old child. But absolutely no trace of my family could be found. “O-kay. Either this is the rapture, or… a nuke or something hit. Or something. Okay. Okay. Outside. Someone has to be in on our street, right?” I said to myself, acutely aware of the first sign of madness. I found that point moot though, as I was a 3 foot tall lizard thing. Repeating the previous door opening scenario with my front door and a kitchen chair, I absconded my abode and stepped out into a very desolate street. One of my neighbors across the road was a nurse, a charity worker and a well known member of the church. If this was the rapture, I knew for a fact that she wouldn’t be around. A peek through all of her windows confirmed this suspicion. A complete lack of neighbor. Another of my neighbors a few doors down was a young couple with two children: unmarried, alcoholic, and, if rumor were to be believed, weren’t above dealing in narcotics to their friends, very loudly, at 3am. I was pretty confident that they were at least as knee-deep in sin as me, which left me very worried when it turned out that they had vanished too. Either being a gay atheist was the pinnacle of sin, or this wasn’t the rapture. Which left nuclear war. A scan of the skyline revealed no ominous mushroom cloud. It was actually a pretty nice day, all told. All of our windows were intact, too. I recalled exploded windows being a major thing regarding a nuclear detonation. In fact, the field at the end of my road continued to contain a herd of very alive-looking cows, cows which persisted in not looking decayed or sickly or demonic or… anything really. Just cowlike. So what the hell happened here?! I scampered back inside my house, anxiety building in my throat. Before, there was the breakdown, but here came the inevitable panic attack. I was prone to these years ago, and it had taken me the better part of five years to keep them under control with proper breathing exercises and positive thinking. The latter was in very short supply. I had just made it to the big trash can in my kitchen and popped the lid when it came. I shut my eyes and let it all out. The acidic vomit burned in my throat and somehow summoned the curling, acrid smell of smoke to my nostrils. I closed the trash can without looking at my mess. And obviously not noticing the small fire smoldering inside the trash. I sat in my room, on my bed, and hugged myself. Everyone was gone. Except for animals and myself. I guess I was an animal too now, right? Never did have much self esteem… A loud buzzing went off next to my tail: my alarm. If I’d slept in, I’d only just be waking up to this nightmare. I scratched the screen with my claw to silence it. And that’s when I saw it… My phone’s background was a picture of my boyfriend smiling dorkily at me. I was supposed to be flying out to see him tomorrow. I let the phone slip from my grip, hearing it bounce on the mattress as I curled up into a ball. It wasn’t fair! I’m all that’s left. Me. “Worthless White”. Why now? Why couldn’t I vanish like everyone else?! My computer silently flashed its blue light at me. Winking at me. Drawing me in. Well, if anyone else were around, there was always Reddit, I guessed. I scooted my chair back over and struggled into it. My claws chipped and scratched at my keyboard, but who the hell cared?! The internet was still up. And Reddit was dead. Completely dead. I don’t know why I bothered. The last activity was several hours ago, and it was a stupid cat gif. I clicked it and let it load anyway, the silent watcher of humanity’s last moments. ...heh. It was pretty funny though… A thought occurred to me: this was sorted by most popular. Most viral. Not most recent. Seizing this opportunity, I put my claw through my left mouse button. A POST! A… post… by “LF”?! The same “LF” as… MY LF? I booted up Steam. Please. Please. Come on universe. Come on. Cut me a break, right?! Four users online. “LF”, “Neon”, “Wolf”, and myself. I shepherded the remains of my mouse and coaxed a final left click, starting up voice chat. Noise started squawking out of my headset, left suspended on a bedpost. I crammed it as best I could over my “ears” and…. well. I unleashed the floodgates. "Oh, Jesus christ FINALLY! I woke up as some TINY-ASS LIZARD THING! And there's nobody around. I've spent all day running around town and it's dead. Not a soul online either! Reddit's dead! Did I miss some sort of evacuation memo? Am I a horribly mutated radioactive freak? I'm going nuts here guys..." At this point, I stopped to breathe as silence filled the air. "Hold up, so we’re all seeing the same thing?” A low voice rumbled into my ears. It sounded gravelly. And I don’t mean like, fifteen years of whiskey sours gravelly, I’m talking actual gravel here. The icon said “Capt. Wolf” was talking, but for all I knew, a mountain golem could have been manning the mic. “Aside from you guys I haven't found anyone ANYWHERE around here." “"I mean there's my cat and some dogs and like sheep or whatever but I mean bunkers can't really hold sheep." It was pretty obvious even to me that I was babbling, but I didn’t care. The relief was streaming off of me. Out of everyone in the world to survive, it was my real family. ...which left me wondering what it was WE did to end up in this clusterfuck. It was probably LF’s fault. "You know what I mean, people." Wolfs voice snapped me back. “People” was a very broad term right now. I mean, did I count as a person? "Look, man, I don't even know what I am, let alone- Wait. Are you guys weird lizard things too?" The words once again hung in the air like sodden laundry. "I'm, well, more like a... dog... ape… thing?” Wolf responded. Great. Dog-ape. Dape? Or Aog? No. Definitely Dape. Certainly not a golem. Finally, someone that wasn’t Wolf spoke up. Turns out it was LF. "Nope, I'm some sort of bat-pony hybrid thing." Shrilled a vaguely feminine voice that most certainly was NOT LF. But then again, I sounded like a little girl, so I couldn’t talk. "... shit," Grumbled Wolf. "I don't know if I can draw anymore like this." That was Neon. His voice had changed the least. I was blindsided for the moment. No “Hey, my boyfriend is one of the last vestiges of humanity!”, just “I can’t draw”. Thanks. Love you too, asshole. "I mean, I managed to use the computer, but-" "Drawing?” The gravel gravelled incredulously. “I'm sorry to be the sledgehammer of realism at this point, but we all seem to be doing a bang-up job completely ignoring how royally screwed we are at this given moment, like ... CHRIST!" I cracked again. "I assure you I HAVE NOT BEEN IGNORING IT," I shrieked. "Its not going to do us much good to panic. Panic can come after I'm done backing up stuff for later use.” That was LF again. He definitely had the same speech patterns that he used to, but it was just too weird not hearing his regular voice. “White, why is your voice so high-pitched? Mine feels, almost the same? What the heck?” Neon spoke up, confused as I was. My voice certainly didn’t fit my new looks. If anything, I should have the gravel-gargling voice Wolf did. So why was mine so high pitched? Discounting it being the default voice of all… lizard-thing-kind, it left only two options. And I was only willing to entertain one of those at the moment. “I-... I don't know. I sound like a kid." It hurt, admitting it aloud. But I pressed on. "... and I'm the same size as a kid..." Unless all lizard things were 3 foot tall and squeaky voiced, the only conclusion I could come to was that I was a child. I felt another panic attack come on. "...Oh goddammit." “White, look, even if you are somehow younger, it just means you’ve had some more years added to your life. Don’t get all panicky just yet. ” That was LF, ever the optimist. Me and him were two sides of the same coin. Everything always worked out well for him. Everything was always sunshine and goddamn rainbows and it was always pessimist White that got the short end of the stick karma-wise. Wolf tried to rally us. "We need to focus. What we do know is we're still here, and obviously we're still US.” He trailed off. Constructive thinking was certainly better than blind panic, even I had to agree. “Has anyone else appeared on your contact lists? Mine are still dead as shit.” “No, I've got nothing, and I’ve been here a while. The sun may as well be a brand on my eyes right now, so staring at my computer is at the upper limits of my usefulness at the moment.” LF said. So maybe everything WASN’T all sunshine and rainbows for once… A burst of static heralded the arrival of a new person to the call. There was only one other person it could be: Qesun. "So, I took a walk, guys. Or I tried to. I'm not very good at it right now. You’d think it would be easier with four legs, but you would be wrong. So now I'm trying to discount all this as a dream. Because, frankly, if I keep having to use my mouth for everything and taste all the things our hands have touched, I'm filing a complaint with both reality and causality." The conversation sparked anew, covering everything from how long the internet and power would last and where to meet up. This was naturally a problem for one of us. Me. I was the biggest fly in the ointment. Everyone was in the US, everyone could meet up. They just had to walk. Everyone except me, and goddamn it I was supposed to be there two days from now! It wasn’t fair! "....I don't mind staying in the UK." I lied, badly. I knew it, they knew it. We all knew it. "I mean I WAS supposed to catch a plane in a couple of days, but I mean, what am I gonna do, fly the damn thing myself?!” I asked sarcastically. “I may as well just get used to being by myself instead of tormenting myself with the impossible." It was the truth. I was used to being alone anyway. Better than chasing some foolish risk of death. "You want to speak of impossible? Look in the mirror." Wolf grumbled, trying to channel Kamina. "This is impossible. The fact we still managed to contact each other should be, at best, improbable. As far as I'm concerned, impossible doesn't exist anymore." He wasn’t exactly bad at it. Just… well, he could stand to work on it. "You're.... encouraging me to fly a jet. Completely untrained, and 3 feet tall." I said. Completely flat. I just needed to get it out there. LF responded equally deadpan. “Yes.” “So you would rather sit on your aaaaaa-butt and do nothing?” Qesun followed up, strangely choking on the mild swear word, like I would choke on a mild pepper. “No, White, I’m saying you’ll figure something out though. The worst thing you could do is not try.” Wolf again, still desperately trying to channel Kamina. Still not quite convincing me. "White, all my resources VANISHED. Any help that I could possibly be will be gone by this time tomorrow. This is not something that we can figure out. This one is on you." LF delivered the final deathblow. If I wanted to get on with whatever my life is now, I would have to figure out a way to get to the US. " ... soooo, where are we going?” Neon’s voice echoed in my skull as I zoned out. This was on me now. ... I’m not okay with that.