AnotherArchetype
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129. Muscle
🕑 Added 2025-03-23 10:33:38 +0000 UTCAt last Azad brought us to a wall that would have been twice my height were I still my normal self.
“It’s here,” said Azad.
He had his hands at his hips and he took several steps ahead of Xandra and I to examine the wall.
“If we follow the wall round there’ll be a hole we could climb through, and there’s several places where anti-climbing spikes have been cut off. But, we don’t need any of that.”
Azad readied himself to scale the wall.
“Wait,” I said, my deep voice piercing the relative quiet of the forest we were in.
Azad looked back at me and Xandra, who was standing holding the blanket and blue basket filled with our food supplies, with a hint of frustration.
“Yeah?” said Azad.
“Let’s listen out for trouble,” I said, “Make sure nobody’s in there.”
“Good idea,” said Xandra.
“Sure,” said Azad.
The three of us made an effort to heighten our hearing and listen out for trouble. I had found, thankfully, that I could tap into the power without causing the fox-frog-monster body I was in to become more eldritch. My best guess for why this was, was twofold: the first was that I had eaten, and drank, and had some time to rest between the bouts of running through the night and early in the morning. The second was that I was getting very familiar with the fox-frog-monster body, moving in it as the active controller rather than a helpless trapped-behind-the-eyes passenger. The body was starting to feel very familiar to me, and I quite liked how strangely confident I felt in it too. I still wanted to return to my body as soon as possible, but I felt more secure knowing I would be able to since I could tap into the power, changing things about my form; having changed the fox-frog-monster’s jaws into a human-shaped mouth had relieved a good deal of the anxiety I had about being potentially stuck as the fox-frog-monster for the foreseeable future.
I could hear much farther with my enlarged, pointy ears. Birds. Insects. Distant planes. Distant cars. Critters roaming on the ground and in the trees. The beating of Azad and Xandra’s hearts, and more sounds, such as their internal organs squelching and sloshing.
Although I couldn’t see the mansion, using just my heightened hearing already gave me a decent idea of its sheer enormity of the mansion and the surrounding grounds. It wasn’t quite echo-location, but I could imagine that, if I were to do so, I could find a way to push the power to achieve an ability to that affect.
After nearly a minute of searching we all reduced our hearing enough to be able to speak casually to each other.
“All clear,” I said.
“Same,” said Azad.
“We. Are. Good,” said Xandra, in a sing-song tone.
Azad was the most eager out of the three of us to get over the wall. He ran up to it and climbed over, using his powerful legs and arms to scale it with relative ease. He didn’t appear to be coiling or using the power beyond his own basic softly-superhuman strength and dextrousness.
The thud which followed on the other side sounded suspiciously like Azad may have fell and fallen face-first onto the grass, left Xandra and me trying not to smirk too much.
Xandra went next. Thanks to her changed rubbery body she bounced on the spot twice, going a little higher each time, and then, still holding the blanket and blue basket, she sailed over the wall and landed deftly on the other side.
It was my turn. For some reason I felt nervous about going over the wall. For a moment I considered finding the hole further along Azad had mentioned, but then decided I was just being silly. This fox-frog-monster-body was capable of incredible speed and agility once it got going, the odds of me failing to cleanly get over the wall was minimal. Or maybe I was afraid of breaking through the wall like a wrecking ball. I pictured myself charging through the gray brick with ease and felt my body tensing up from the effort to not act on the impulse. I had no intention of breaking through the wall, but I still had to fight the urge the same way one might have to stop themselves from throwing their phone out of a car window on a strange, illogical impulse.
I took several thumping steps backwards and then charged at the wall. I jumped as I neared it and found I could leap over the entire wall without touching it, though I did have to bring my huge legs up as much as possible to be able to clear the upper black-arrow-shaped spikes.
I landed on both feet on the other side and again I was in awe of what the fox-frog-monster’s body was capable of.
Azad and Xandra had moved several paces away from the wall since they knew I would be leaping over and didn’t want to get crushed under me.
I heard the sound of clapping from Xandra, who had the blanket and blue basket by her feet.
“Don’t be condescending,” I said, smiling.
Azad joined Xandra’s mock-impressed-clapping, and together, both smiling and on the verge of breaking out into laughter, they clapped even harder.
I stood to my full height and gave a bow, then gestured ahead to the huge looming mansion further off.
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “Let’s get moving.”
Azad set off towards the mansion and Xandra and I followed. We cleared the huge grassy garden and reached one of the large broken windows. The glass was fully removed from one of the panels, suggesting plenty of people must have come and gone through that particular section of the window.
Azad didn’t waste any time climbing inside.
“Take the basket,” said Xandra to Azad.
After a bit of back and forth, Xandra pushed through the blanket-wrapped basket through the broken window over to Azad. Xandra looked about cautiously, then looked to me, and then finally climbed through the window herself.
It was already obvious to me that I wasn’t going to fit through the window opening at my current size.
A surge of anxiety shot up in me because I realised it was a good time to try changing back some more. It occurred to me that, for the time being, it perhaps wouldn’t be so bad to stay as the fox-frog-monster. Sure, I looked frightening, and would potentially illicit horrified screams from normal people thinking I was some B-movie horror monster come to life; but, as strange as it was to admit to myself, there was something deeply comforting about being the fox-frog-monster.
For one thing, I noticed Azad and Xandra listened to me more. Another was that I felt like I was driving a tank; powerful, and steady.
But what appeal there was of remaining as the fox-frog-monster held little weight when I thought about more than just my immediate future. One day, someday, I would see my family again. Not only that, I would see my friend again. And there was no way I was going to do that with a fox-ish face and a froggish throat-sack wobbling at my neck. No sir.
Which left me with only one option. Change back.
Azad and Xandra noticed I hadn’t attempted to climb or otherwise break my way in through the window they had entered in from. Both emerged at the window, looking out to me.
I entered into a power stance similar to the one I had done several times back at the Wedder Gorge facility when first learning to coil up.
I closed my eyes and concentrated, asking the power to undo the fox-frog-monster changes. As expected, nothing changed for the first few seconds. I had learned through experience that there was often a delay of a few seconds whenever I attempted something unfamiliar with the power.
Then I felt the unlocking sensation sparking up like a node in the power network I imagined inside my mind.
THROMP!
THROMP!
THROMP!
Bit by bit, like reverse-coiling up, my body reduced in size.
This continued for several seconds, all the sections of bone-armour and muscle-mass sinking away, until I was close to my normal self again.
Stop, I thought, working on intuition for a moment as new inspiration took hold in my head. I had originally intended to fully change back to normal, and that was what I intended to continue doing, but a new way to use the power occurred to me all of a sudden.
What set off this sudden inspiration for what I was trying to do with my power had its origin in not wanting to be naked in front of Xandra and Azad. Without being in the fox-frog-monster body, I would be back to my normal self, and that was great and all, but I had remembered a little too late I didn’t have any clothes – the ones I had were either burned or shredded to pieces, or were lost with the carry bags when Xandra and I were under attack at the World War Two bunker. I had thought many times about going back for those carry bags, and Xandra had mentioned going back for them a few times; but we both knew that it was unlikely those carry bags hadn’t been confiscated, and it was still very likely some Pied Piper Task Force members were keeping watch of the area should Xandra and I decide to return for any reason; the carry bags had simply not been worth the risk returning for.
I finally returned myself back to normal. Azad and Xandra gasped at the sight of me, but it wasn’t because I was naked, or because they were simply impressed that I had managed to return to my normal self.
My body was covered in a mesh-like weaving of what appeared to be muscle and tendons; very similar to the fox-frog-monster’s outward appearance. There were no openings in this muscle-suit, I had made, which fit me as snugly as a morph-suit. The muscle-suit reached up to the bottom of my jaw. It almost might have looked like my skin from the upper-neck down was missing, but the layering of the muscle-suit was too uniform and intricate to make that impression last for more than a moment or two of observation. I noticed I was still leanly muscled, as if coiled up, beneath the muscle-suit, which seemed second-nature and something needed in order to make the suit cling to my skin underneath so effectively.
I reached up, and, though I was wearing the muscle-suit which covered my hands all over too, I could feel my own head of brown messy hair as if I were touching it with the palms of my own hands.
It’s like an outward layer of nerve-endings, I thought, in awe. Some vague intuition had led me to figure out how to accomplish this strange new form over my otherwise normal self.
I was so in awe of what I had managed to do with the power I had almost forgotten about Azad and Xandra.
“Wow!” said Xandra.
“Cool!” said Azad, “What is that? It looks like a super suit!”
“Yeah,” I said, hearing my wonderfully normal voice leaving my awesomely normal mouth, “It kind of is, isn’t it?”
