The ginger striped tom cat was sitting on the sill of the apartment window, grooming to a backdrop of a Central Park autumn. The orange flame of its thickening fur gave its shadow a golden tint across the white carpet of the floor. It licked a paw, and moved it behind its ear and across its cheek in long, relaxed strokes. The apartment was otherwise empty; the sound of a refrigerator cycling was the only sound besides the muffled wave laps of traffic from below.
I really don't want another dog form. I don't use them.
When we fight Antonescu, we will require a surplus of large mammal forms. As much as you prefer house cats and sparrows, they are not the most well endowed for combat.
Pffft. Whatever. Which dog?
The Rottweiler.
That sick looking one?
I have little doubt it can be fixed.
Riiight. 'Cause you can heal actual sickness now, huh?
...Because we can easily modify it with elements of a healthier dog, once we have identified the cause of the problem.
...Oh. Well, I guess that makes more sense, then. The ginger stripped tom stopped its grooming. It stood, arching its back from shoulders to rear in a gloriously luxurious movement before lightly leaping from the sill.
What hit the floor was an inelegant heap of a dog. It puddled over the joints of its legs, collapsing as a blob of overgrown fur on the floor. Moments later, a small shudder passed through the large form as it took its first breath. A half hour after that, it was stumbling around the room on lethargic legs, knocking into couches and coffee tables. That was pretty typical: it would take a few hours, or a few days, to iron out the creases in its movements. What wasn't typical was the cough. Calley tried to run the dog in a loop. He ended up sitting on the edge of the tiled kitchen floor, panting and coughing. They'd seen this particular dog in a small backyard in a bad neighborhood, chained up to the back porch. It had rolled its head towards them as they walked past. They didn't have a Rottweiler yet, so Calley had copied it on principle, not because he'd ever wanted to use it.
The coughing was getting worse. Something dark hit the title floor between his legs, like a splatter painting. Calley was seeing in black and white, but it didn't take a genius to figure out what color those perfect little circles should be.
Is that blood?
...Yes. I believe it is. There do not seem to be any physical injuries. However, the exercise appears to be triggering--Calley wasn't listening. Calley was standing stock still on his four unhealthily thin legs, his wide muzzle pointed towards the floor but his brown eyes unfocused. He wasn't listening, because he was
feeling.
They were inside of him. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of them. There were miniscule ones in his bloodstream, circulating around, waiting for the trigger that would make them grow. There were larger ones crawling in the muscles of his chest and stomach. The largest ones by far, though--the ones that could be stretched down the length of a ruler--were in his heart. He could feel them. Moving. Feeding. Growing. Breeding.
I have heartworms, Calley realized, with a growing shock that spread outwards, calming his cough.
I have heartworms, Slate. Me. Heartworms. The shock wore off from the outside in; his skin twitched and jumped under his tattered coat as if it was being struck with pebbles. He started hyperventilating. Then coughing. Then pacing, in wide circles around the sparsely furnished apartment that made his gasping vision dance with black specks.
...As I was saying, the exercise appears to be triggering the coughing. If you would simply calm down--
Nu-uh. I'm mastering this form, then I'm shifting the hell out of it. I have heartworms
, Slate! Heartworms!One of the persistent weaknesses of Calley's power was its most limiting: when taking on a new form, he could not shift away from it under any circumstances. Not until he had achieved a basic mastery of it. The quickest this had ever taken was ten minutes; the longest was twenty-three hours. Twenty-three hours with heartworms crawling inside of him. He tried to shift to cat; failed, with a
cluck in his mind that let him know he still had a ways to go. All four legs; tail; breathing, digestive track, eyelids, hackles. He brought them under control one by one, until he couldn't think of anything else to do.
Cluck. But still, his mind refused to trigger the shift. He lay down on the floor under the window sill, panting. He could smell blood on the air. He could feel his heart struggling to catch up; the coils that were strangling it, he could feel, too. He could feel them all.
The Rottweiler's head jerked up. Its hackles rose. He could feel them.
Oh no.He could feel them, mindlessly swirling through his blood.
Oh no no no--He could feel them, moving without purpose in the muscles of his chest, and his abdomen.
Oh no no no no--He could feel them patiently, stupidly wrapped around his heart, as if they were waiting for orders. It wasn't the Rottweiler that was keeping him from shifting away from this form.
Please no.It was the heartworms. He had to master the heartworms. Thousands of heartworms, inside of him, waiting for him to crawl inside their little minds and make their bodies work for them. They were all his forms, now.
The Rottweiler coughed a fine spray of red on its front paws. Then it lowered its head down with a whimper, closed its eyes, and set to work in a pool of Autumn sunlight. One form at a time. Dozens of adults; hundreds, maybe. Thousands of offspring. Every last one of them just another part of himself.
He took a break, seven hours later; the Rottweiler rose to its feet again and padded to the kitchen, where it stuck its head inside of an open bag of cat food that Calley kept on the floor, and lapped at a stainless steel water bowl until the bottom shone. Then he went back to his place under the window. He lay down in a splash of sunset pink, and closed his eyes again. Now and then the large, mistreated dog's ears would flip or his paws flick as if in dream or deep concentration.
At fifteen hours, the dog quietly rose to its feet and urinated in the cat box in the closet. It went back to its place in an incandescent yellow wash of street light. Its eyes closed again.
The sun was laying welcome scorch marks on the dog's back when, at twenty-seven hours, it rose to its feet again, and yawned contentedly. It jumped to place its paws on the windowsill, and looked out at its Central Park view. The trees were a bonfire. It was beautiful.
Click. The abused dog's tail swung back and forth in a content wag. The last microfilariae had fallen into place. Thousands of heartworms, in all shapes and sizes and ages. They whispered in his mind. They were his mind. The dog let his paws drop back to the floor. He gathered himself for a spring--
--and landed, lightly, on the sill of the window as a ginger striped tom. Through its heart was curled a single long worm, like a flame used to focus a meditator's mind. The ginger striped tom lifted a paw, licked it, and began to move it in lazy circles behind its ear and across its cheek, tickling its whiskers. In its chest, the heartworm loosely curled its coils and stilled. It had a lot to think about. There were certain applications of this that neither cat nor heartworm nor the dogs, tigers, eels, hawks, sparrows, and lone human whose templates were in their mind could quite comprehend. Calley could be more than one form at a time. He didn't know what that meant yet. The cat gave a tired yawn, and settled itself down on the sunlit sill. It had been a long day, and certain matters required sleeping upon. The ginger striped cat's eyes slowly drifted shut, and it dreamed.
The heartworm wrapped around its heart, sharing those dreams.
((ooc: The abused Rott from this thread is rescued and brought to the Mansion in
"You don't see anything."; Calley's preparations to take down Hunter continued in
"Preparing for War".))
