Some Monstrous Side Effects
#34 of Transformation Stories
I've touched on transformation and growth themes before, but monsters were something I mostly stayed away from...until Deertai came along and commissioned this story from me!
In it, Tai is our protagonist, and one who seems to be in great distress when we join him. His stomach is twisted, his body is in pain and the world around him is changing in weird ways, but he can't put his finger on what's happening until the ground starts moving away from his face...he isn't flying; he's just getting bigger, as worried citizens flee from the area. His antlers turn jagged, his teeth grow into terrible, deadly fangs, and his hooves splinter into weapons as he makes his way for downtown, but why he's headed there, no one can be sure! The only thing that's sure is that no one is safe.
As always, read, comment and enjoy!
Tai couldn't be entirely sure what it was that started the change. The answers were lost on him, as he hunched over the side of a post office drop box and dug his claws into the thin, blue metal casing.
He only knew that he was completely wracked with pain, and his vision was going blurry as he tried to keep himself upright. It was all in vain, and the pain was only spreading out from his head the harder that he tried to fight it. His every nerve ending felt as though it were on fire, and his skin crawled with all of the most nervous, tingling sensations that his body could generate.
It was a terrible sensation, and it was only made worse by the fact that he couldn't pinpoint the origin of it.
"E-excuse me, mister? Are you okay?" asked a passerby, as people walking up and down the sidewalk were giving Tai a little extra space. No one wanted to get too close to him as he grunted and gasped; he looked every bit the part of a psychotic beast, having totally lost control of both his mind and body. It was only when a wayward wolf stopped and gave him a gentle tap on the shoulder that he realized just how far gone he was.
Typically, Tai was a fairly common and well-blended hybrid. Though orange fur wrapped around the outside of his body and stripes played across it like a typical tiger, he had a cream underbelly and antlers that shot up proudly on either side of his head. The true selling point to his hybrid nature was the hooves that sat just below his ankles, rather than typical footpaws, but nothing about him was typical, anymore.
Tai hadn't taken a look in the mirror lately, but he turned and looked at the large, reflective windows of the post office that he stood outside of, and couldn't keep from gasping in shock. His antlers were growing wildly out of control, and the thin chitin that composed them was growing thicker, and disconcertingly, the rounded ends were turning jagged. His hooves were no longer so smooth and rounded on the edges, either, as massive growths protruded from each one, turning the semi-circle edges into sharp, deadly points that could easily spear a man, if Tai were so inclined to use them that way.
"...Sir...?"
"G-get back... please, get back!" Tai finally managed to speak, despite the horrible discomfort that ran across the whole of his body. His muscles quaked, and his legs trembled as he clung tightly to the deposit box, but soon, it wouldn't be nearly enough support for the tiger-deer hybrid to lean on. His body was clearly changing, as even the fangs within his muzzle began to expand. They slipped further and further down until his lips could no longer contain them, and the enamel grew sharper until Tai was fearful of closing his own mouth, for fear of biting himself.
The friendly stranger was quick to heed Tai's advice, and soon, the hybrid was standing by himself, watching as his growing claws tore easily through the sides of the deposit box. It was all an accident, but mail was suddenly tossed everywhere as Tai clumsily fell back, having trouble adjusting to the feeling of his new, modified hooves, and his lurching, growing back. The muscles upon it were expanding rapidly and growing outward, taking on the proper shape of a body builder's physique.
As a comparison of size, however, Tai was growing larger than any competitive lifter could ever hope to be, and he fell down to all fours, knowing that whatever was happening was well beyond his control. He didn't want to just sit and accept it, but he wasn't seeing any other option...
...Especially when the police finally arrived on the scene, after countless calls were placed about a maniac destroying public property.
"All right, pal. Put your hands behind your head and stay down on your knees. We don't want to hurt you, we just want to help you out!" called out one of the officers, as he stepped out of his squad car. The flashing lights atop of the vehicle and the loud, blaring siren weren't helping to calm Tai down at all, and even had the opposite effect that they should have, as Tai tried to keep control of what little sanity he still had left.
The request of the officer might have been a bit more reasonable for someone who wasn't in terrible and inexplicable pain, but for Tai, it was almost impossible to move, and the officers quickly saw why, as several more arrived on the scene and surrounded the collapsed hybrid. His musculature was still growing rapidly out of control, and on the smaller frame of his ordinary sized bones, it was a bit terrifying to gaze upon, until his body finally started to make the proper adjustments. Tai groaned in discomfort as his skeletal system tried to catch up with the rapid changes from the rest of his body. A lump of writhing muscles upon the sidewalk, the police slowly backed away from Tai as his bones cracked and reformed themselves inside of his frame.
Shockingly, it wasn't the most painful sensation that Tai felt that afternoon. It was almost soothing at that point, as his body expanded properly...at first, he was just a normal sized hybrid, but as bones elongated and reformed themselves into a fitting position, he grew to stand ten feet tall, and quickly approached twenty...and he wasn't nearly done growing. The jagged, terrifying antlers upon his head continued to spread and expand across the sidewalk as the police retreated to their squad cars. His sharpened hooves grew larger and larger until they were nearly the size of the squad cars, themselves, and the pointed tips dragged through the road and the sidewalk, carving deep trenches into the man-made pathways and leaving them completely gutted, all by accident.
"...What...what the hell..." one of the officers muttered in total disbelief, as they backed their cars away from the scene. Tai was still growing, and as his headache subsided, he regained enough control of his body to finally stand upright. The police had taken a leave from the situation, so Tai didn't see any need to comply with their requests any longer, especially when they were suddenly so tiny compared to him. As he finally came fully upright again, he stood at least 50 feet tall, and he was still growing, as evidenced by the ground that seemed to get further and further away with each passing minute. His body was a rippled mass of powerful muscles, and despite his concern and confusion earlier, Tai was determined to put them to the test, as he leaned down and pinched the mail deposit box between his pawtips.
It ripped away from the ground easily, carrying a tiny chunk of concrete with it from the bolts that once kept it adhered to the ground. Snickering at just how cute the box looked in his pawtips, Tai gave it a quick flick and tossed it across the parking lot of the post office, without a care in the world for the car that it landed on and completely crushed. Whatever concern he had for his own body was gone with the wind, replaced by something far more sinister, and even if he couldn't explain it, he wasn't going to try to argue with it.
Traffic was backing up on both sides of the street as Tai stood there, and down at the ends of the line of cars, angry drivers were laying on their horns, thinking that it might do something to solve the problem, but before long, Tai was plenty tall enough for them to see that he was the cause. The horns eventually fell silent, but the silence was shattered only moments later as Tai started walking toward the rude drivers, and screams of terror filled the downtown block. The terrified citizens spread in every direction as Tai made his way down the street, stomping on cars and grinning wildly at the delightful and pleasant CRUNCH of steel twisting and collapsing under his hooves, and the shattering of glass and plastic parts as he walked down the street. The pavement was no match for him, either, as tiny cracks radiated out from his prints and spread to the sidewalks as he carried on past the line of cars, setting his sights on the taller buildings of the city lights.
The source of the change, something that Tai had been so worried about before, was completely forgotten as he watched people fleeing from him in every direction. Even the police were running the other way, knowing that there was little that they could do to stop the rampage of the ever growing Tai, who now stood over most of the smaller buildings on the outskirts of the city. His height was approaching 200 feet by the time he reached the major interstates that fed the city with workers and residents, and those who hadn't seen Tai in his growing stages were immediately overwhelmed as the sight of a monstrous hybrid came into view over the edges of the highway.
"M-mommy...was...was dat?" asked a little girl, sitting in the back seat of a sedan and looking out of the window of her car. To the right, she could see the massive, rampaging tiger-deer, but her mother was focused on the road, rightly as she should be.
"What's what, honey?" the mother asked, without taking her eyes off of the road. Brake lights were piling up in front of her, and she tried to contain her frustration, as she'd worked so hard to beat the morning traffic rush, only to end up right in the middle of it...at least, she assumed that was the cause of it.
"That big, scawy monstah over dere!" the child cried out, as the massive steps of Tai brought him that much closer to the interstate. The mother in the vehicle slammed on her brakes as traffic came to a complete halt, and her jaw dropped as she looked up in the sky and saw a massive hoof coming down towards them. In a panic, she stepped out of her car and rushed around to the back, prying her daughter free from her car seat and having just enough time to get out of the way as Tai came down on her car with so much force that it turned instantly into a metal pancake. There was no slow, gradual crush, but Tai found it satisfying all the same as he gave up on trying to fight his instincts. Something inside of him was telling him to smash every little thing that he could get his hooves on, and people began to flee from their cars and run for the sides of the highway as they looked on helplessly, able to see what a game of hopscotch might look like if the average participant were over 300 feet tall.
There was no telling how much larger Tai would get as he took a lazy stroll down the highway, but his pace appeared much faster than that, as his massive strides carried him into the city in mere minutes. His only frustration were the overpass bridges that constantly smacked into his shins and caused him terrible aches and pains, but he came up with an easy answer for the last few, as he leaned over and caught them in the wide, jagged spread of his antlers and tossed them aside, crushing some of the nearby buildings into nothing more than dust clouds.
Nothing was going to get in the way of the monstrous hybrid now, as his body finally attained the peak of its transformation. Once rounded antlers now acted as thick, wide and sharp hooks that could catch and skewer anything that they wished. Hooves were decorated with a single, but deadly claw that jutted out from the middle and carved up the roadways as easily as an electric knife through tender meat, and his tail, despite being a small, lifted tuft, still swung with enough force to create small gusts of wind behind him. No part of his body allowed the citizens to settle in, as they all tried to take whatever cover they could. The air raid sirens rang out in the background of the city as Tai approached the massive buildings, clearly having a goal in mind, but no one could figure out what it was. The citizens, the authorities, and even the local government, who was already putting military plans into action, were lost on figuring out what his target could be.
It wasn't until Tai finally made his way down the main street of the city, his broad shoulders tearing out chunks of the buildings around him, and his hooves crushing the pavement into dust, that anyone got a hint of where he was headed. Massive as he was, he managed to be polite one last time, as he tapped a gigantic, clawed pawtip upon the door of a small coffee shop.
One nervous, terrified employee poked his head out the door, and looked up at the massive hybrid, who leaned down to meet at eye level with the minuscule creature. "Y-yes...mister monster, sir?"
" Hi," Tai replied simply, through his booming voice nearly through the poor creature backwards into the coffee shop.
" Another monster mocha, please..."