MermaidsTail
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Blue Change
🕑 Added 2021-10-30 12:48:23 +0000 UTCWoman with permission of Saledin
Butterfly: Creative Commons (Castaway in Scotland)
Trina, like everyone else in the world, had watched with horror at the mad bishop's attack on the Holy land. Seeing people converted partially or totally into the animals that most disgusted them was unbelievable and sickening. His religious fanaticism, when he admitted his 'success', was excessive and so like every other terrorist.
Trina, at the time though, was on a tour she'd saved for years to afford. She had saved enough money to take a number of ecotours to the rainforest was visiting Brazil. The rain forests, from their majestic tops through to their quiet depths, provided weeks of fascination. She felt the wonder and awe of forests that stretched from horizon to horizon and beyond. The entire party had come down with a mild flu about three weeks later and had to rest in Rio de Janeiro for several days before they were well enough to travel again. She would remember the rain forests for the rest of her life ...
Some six months later and back in the United States, Trina noticed a collection of small yellow and brownish spots on her legs. They were hard, like some kind of scab, and she quickly reported to her doctor. The Change of Life virus had been affecting people world-wide for the past few weeks and authorities now required people to report to doctors as soon as any strange symptoms appeared. Since she'd been to the tropics, she was hopeful (and maybe a bit fearful) that it was only something she'd picked up there instead of CoL virus.
It didn't take the doctor long to identify the source. It was CoL virus and Trina found herself whisked off to a quarantine station in a converted hotel. There, sequestered in a room, she discovered the meaning of boredom. TV and movies provided the only entertainment and there was only so much of that she was able to stomach. Online browsing and books helped also but she missed her morning and evening walks along the river. She feared gaining all the weight back she worked so hard over the past two years to lose.
Her spots slowly grew and merged until her entire body was covered by bands of green and brown. She looked like some kind of strange alien from the bad sci-fi movies she'd watched. she wondered how far things were going to go. Some people, the lucky ones, only had to suffer through minor changes. Others were completely changed. Trina hoped she'd only have some minor changes and could, maybe, return to her life.
About a week after she arrived in quarantine, she noticed a strange bump at the base of her spine. It felt like some kind of hard marshmallow encased in a plastic shell. It was small but dashed her hopes of minor changes. Over the next few days it grew out until she found herself dragging a two meter long tail that matched the pattern on the rest of her body. It was unbelievably inconvenient and was hard to move about as it caught on everything. The tail, once it reached its maximum length, began to increase in size. Trina found herself hungry and consumed anything and everything they brought her. Nothing seemed to be enough and she drove the people running the quarantine station to distraction. They'd learned, through a few unfortunate incidents, that it was essential to follow the instincts of the change. No one could count on normal caloric intake for someone undergoing the change. Trina's tastes changed, too. She began to avoid meat and meat products entirely. Only green leafy food sated her hunger and then never for very long.
It took a full week for the next stage of her change to manifest. The tail, which had grown slowly over the week, began to split where it joined her body. After nearly an hour of spasms that travelled the length of the tail, Trina discovered she'd shed the skin of the tail and it had grown significantly. Dragging like some great lizard's tail behind her, it had acquired sensation, too. She could actually feel the damned thing as part of her body. Soon, the sensation of presence was joined by other sensations. The tail had muscles that Trina found she could move. It only took three days for her to learn to move the tail and for it to go from inert lump to a part of her body. One evening, towards the end of the second week, she was feeling ill at ease. She couldn't find a comfortable position no matter how hard she tried. Once again, she was moulting. Once again, it split but this time, the split came farther up her body. Some of her own skin was involved in addition to the caterpillar body. Once the moult was finished, she took stock of her new body with its much increased caterpillar tail. It was then she discovered her new legs. Short and stubby, they had grown in during the moult. Not terribly strong, they
nonetheless helped her move the bulk of that unwanted appendage. She learned to inchworm forward using her human legs to move forward a little and then using the back legs to bring her rear forward. It was slow, far slower than running or jogging, but more convenient than any other method she could figure out.
That only lasted a few days. One morning, she awoke with six tiny buds pushing through the carapace on her belly and another moulted skin in the bed with her. She was developing another set of the caterpillar-like legs. The six buds became six stubby legs matched the eight at the end of her tail except they had much sharper claws at their tips. Her own legs, meanwhile, were weaker. She could hardly move. Her human legs had become emaciated as if they had been consumed by something. After a few days and another moult, all that was left of her legs was a tiny rubbery pair of legs consisting of little more than a skin covered set of bones. These vanished with the next moult after a few more days.
Looking at herself in the mirror that was part of the regular hotel equipment, she realised she was now a caterpillar with human arms. The caterpillar portion, with each moult, had crept up her body until it was now the bulk of her form. Even her breasts had been covered by the chitinous skin of the caterpillar. She wondered what kind of caterpillar and crawled over to the computer in the room. Using that computer proved more difficult than she'd expected. Though her arms and hands looked unchanged, the keys seemed to have increased the force it took to press them and she found typing difficult. She realised what that meant. The same change that had absorbed her legs was now affecting her arms. She wondered how long she'd have use of them. It took several hours to type her requests and finally locate the answer. A Blue Morpho butterfly caterpillar. She'd become a Blue Morpho caterpillar. A
thought came, unbidden, into her mind. Was this only the first stage? After all, caterpillars changed into butterflies. Would she change into a butterfly now?
Three days later after yet another moult, her arms hung uselessly at her sides and dragged along the ground as she moved using only the two sets of legs the caterpillar body provided. Needless to say, her human legs had vanished entirely. There was simply no evidence she could find in her new body that they'd ever existed. She had to learn to eat her greens without benefit of hands and utensils. It was demeaning to have to play grazing animal to eat but her new body insisted on its rations and would not be denied. She curled on the beds (she'd pushed the two beds in the room together some days earlier once she realized what she was becoming) and cried herself to sleep. She didn't want to be a caterpillar nor a butterfly. She wanted her life back. She hated and loathed Bishop Theodric and his flock and wished upon them the worst and most demeaning transformations imaginable.
A few days later, the morning brought the unwelcome discovery that, like her legs, her arms had vanished, absorbed by the process of the transformation. She was left as a human-headed 3 meter long caterpillar. One with a huge appetite. She hated being driven by urges she could not control. But the caterpillar body seemed to be in charge, at least as far as food requirements were concerned.
Two moults and a week saw her new body double in girth but not gain a lot in length. The change, thankfully, did not extend past her neck. At least that much was left to her. By the end of the fourth day, though, her appetite for greens suddenly left her. A different imperative replaced the appetite. She began to search for a place in the room to do something. She didn't know what she was supposed to do but she knew what she was looking for. She found it when she pushed the beds apart. The slot between them was exactly right and she wedged her caterpillar body in backwards and promptly began to feel convulsions along the length of her body. The caterpillar shortened and she felt it bunch up. She hated not being in control but nothing she could do would change the process. Towards the end, she knew what she was becoming. Butterflies became chrysalises when they were about to change. She could no longer do anything and, as the final stages of the change occurred, she found herself increasingly sleepy. Finally, as the change finished, she fell asleep.
Six hours later, when her rations had remained unclaimed and uneaten, the authorities opened the door and found her, safe in her hard chrysalis, barely breathing. They discussed whether they should move her somewhere else to free up the room or leave her. In the end, they left her, marking the door with her state and cancelling her food rations. She'd have no need of them while she was in her current torpor. They arranged for a daily check as no one knew how long she’d remain in the chrysalis.
For ten days, she remained in the chrysalis. One morning, just as the sun began to stream in through the hotel balcony window, she stirred. It took hours to push her way out of the shell. Afterwards, she stood on six skinny legs upon the wreckage of her chrysalis. Two huge bluish sacks hung, pulsating at her back. These slowly inflated until they filled the hotel room. She looked about the room and the mirror caught her attention. Looking back from the mirror
was a composite creature. She could still recognise her human face but her eyes were now huge facetted globes that stuck out on either side of her head. Her mouth, too, had changed. During her metamorphosis, it had been replaced by a butterfly's mouthparts and a huge dark spiral of chitin hung where her lips and mouth had been. At first concerned and worried about her future, she felt a new imperative strike. She felt the urge to fly and pushed her way out onto the balcony. The locked door proved far too weak for her new strength. Standing on the balcony, she fearlessly stepped over the edge and hung for several minutes while her wings finished expanding and drying. Then she calmly released her hold and fluttered off towards the south driven by her next imperative … finding a mate.
