Sentinel Green 1.1

Begonia 1.1

The road is bleary. Sometimes coffee helps me stay awake, but most of the time it just sends me on a sugar crash. That’s what’s happening now.

I rarely drive out to visit my mother without Mina and Victor, but tonight they are both otherwise indisposed. Mina has a night shift at the craft store where she caters to picky do-it-yourselfers, and Victor is laid low with a headache. It really would have made more sense to stay in my mother’s neighborhood for one more night, and the thought of turning back around crosses my mind more than once. But I’m committed to the journey now. I fight back a jaw-cracking yawn as I adjust the underwire jabbing me in the side from my falling-apart bra.

My old Dodge rattles and moans as I merge off one highway exit to the next stretch of road. I check to make sure I won’t accidentally veer off towards the wrong turnpike, changing lanes to cruise comfortably in the middle one. The shifting streetlights slide across the rims of my glasses and offer a soothing sort of rhythm to my drive.

It’s the only rhythm going on right now. There’s nothing good on the radio. My co-pilot Mina sometimes shifts through the stations, but in her absence hunting for a good song falls to me. For some reason it’s a lot of static tonight, like something is interfering with the signal.

I glance down at my radio to try to locate the “track” button--something I normally never have to use with my 12 preset radio stations, none of which are working right now. I stare down at the controls and time seems to crawl. It only occurs to me I’ve been looking down there for a second too long when I snap my head up--and veer wildly.

A figure--right in the middle of the freeway, staring ahead at me through my windshield. Going easily 60 I nail her with the driver’s side corner of my car. I hear a sickening crunch as I run over something--a limb, I can’t--can’t count how many crunches and snaps I hear.

“Fuck!” I shout, veering in a question-mark shape to hug the empty road, turning back to mostly face the still form I’ve left in the middle of the asphalt.

I’m mumbling a litany of curses and prayer-blasphemies to various gods as I fumble my seatbelt with shaking hands. I finally kick-thrash myself out of the seat only to find that my driver’s side door is jammed and won’t open no matter how much I yank the handle and throw my body against it. I have to use the passenger side. I tumble wildly out of the car, nearly hitting the ground as I go. My phone is in my hands a second later as I numbly start to dial 9-1-1.

It’s funny. I always worried I was secretly a terrible driver, that I’d be responsible for killing someone, and here I am. I fit into my stereotype as a dangerous, female Asian driver just fine.

I rush around the front of the car, glancing down to get an idea of the impact--and my heart rushes into my throat along with bile. The yellow front quarter panel--the ugly one that had been messily replaced after some jackass backed into me--is positively crumpled now, and that’s why my driver’s side door didn’t open. The flaky, pale yellow paint is stained red. Red, yellow, the blue of the rest of my car--my least favorite color combination is now everywhere.

I run past that to where the girl is, realizing I should have turned on my hazards. -- I can go back and do that later. There aren’t any cars coming and as I skid to a halt, 9-1-1 still dialled up and ready to go on my phone, I see that the crumpled figure in the road is…

I nearly throw up. Her arm and shoulder are crushed and her legs are mangled. The puddle of blood around her--I try to gauge it, try to see if she’s a goner like I think she is.

“Hey,” I stammer. “St-stay with me, okay? Just focus on my voice.” I go to punch “send” when a third presence makes itself known to me, nearly scaring the life out of me.

“Puchuu~” a high-pitched voice cries in dismay from somewhere to the side, near an overpass pylon. “I look away for one minute!”

I straight drop my phone. It’s a natural reaction when your whole body seizes up from shock.

What I’m seeing doesn’t seem possible, and suddenly the world is canting at a 45 degree angle, or so it seems. Time itself holds its breath as I blink once, slowly, not speaking, feeling my face go cold from surprise.

This has only happened to me once or twice before in my life--shock so profound it makes me wonder if I’m going to pass out. The mangled girl hadn’t done it--that had made me want to hurl, to break down and sob. It was horrific, but it was within the realm of reality. This pink mass of impossible, fluffy, sentient matter? That’s what does it. It’s an animal. Animal-esque. It’s speaking. What. The fuck.

“This again! You killed her, so you know what? You get to take her place!” the creature crows, and now that it’s speaking in longer sentences I am forced to deal with the reality that I’m either delirious with shock and guilt and am hallucinating, or that… this thing might be real.

Before I can think of something to say, it waves its limbs in the air to produce a number of glowing coins that float my way. I flinch automatically, jolted out of my shock a little, but the coins don’t seem dangerous. They hover before me, and while I don’t want to touch them they don’t seem to be going anywhere.

“Use those carefully, now, puchuu! You won’t get more!”

I finally manage to unstick my throat, though my voice is hoarse as I ask, “What--are you--” The question stands well enough on its own, but I had more to it. I don’t get a chance to finish, however. Before I can it’s begun to gesticulate towards me. My first instinct is the one I go with--I try to dive out of the way.

The surge of energy hits me in a series of waves--and as I stagger and almost fall the first wave splits my soul with sheer terror. I am shrinking. It’s furious, and it’s trying to snuff me out of existence one atom at a time! I quickly realize I’m not dissolving, but am getting proportionally smaller, but that doesn’t help. I’m already small but I feel myself thinning out, dwindling--my body swells in some areas, but the general youngness of the form I am taking on blinds me with fear. I’m not only becoming younger--my breasts and hips are swelling, exaggerating my femininity, and in a stabbing rush I feel exposed and vulnerable in a way that makes me want anything but this.

The next wave hits me and I can almost feel it echoing in shaky rings of power inside me. It heard me--it is listening. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. It calls back upon itself and my brain glitches as I both understand and don’t understand, both make sense of the shift and can’t.

I stop shrinking. My body lurches and shudders, and I feel like throwing up again. And then…

Then I do the opposite of shrink. I sprout skyward instead, my arms thickening, my ribs expanding as if I’m taking in as deep a breath as I can--but it doesn’t stop there. My spine stretches out, elongating and rippling out echoes of growth to my shoulders, down my thighs and calves. I’m going to die. At the very least I’m going to explode out of my clothes.

Except--those are changing with me as well. My tank top and jeans thrum and cascade into new weaves and shapes. I think to shout--no one is here to help me but I want to call out anyway--and I get to hear my voice change.

I have a fairly low voice for a girl to begin with, but it’s nothing to what happens as my neck thickens and some mischief befalls my vocal chords. My scream changes halfway through and my legs give out--I’d been standing in a tighter, smaller stance and my larger body topples as I become more top-heavy. I hit the ground hard--and something tickles up and down my forearms and hands as my vision swims and goes briefly black.

The second wave isn’t even done when the third one hits me. I feel what can only be described as a vascular, concussion blast surge, tendrils that radiate out through the ground and ripple back at me. My fingertips are alive with tingling, then my palms, forearms, shoulders, chest--the sensation courses over me like water and my vision bleeds green. All the while I am still changing.

It hits me as my hips narrow and my chest goes from the buxomy shape it had tried to become to something very flat--I’m not turning into a buff, bodybuilder broad. I’m…

Oh, holy shit.

I roll frantically over onto my back as my body undergoes changes I can scarcely wrap my brain around, things rushing forward and spilling out into shapes that make me want to pass out from sheer surprise. For all my talk of being a tomboy, I am most definitely, one hundred percent a girl… except…

Now I’m… well.

Not.