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Shortly after you next awaken you feel disorientation, the first thing you notice is that your hair is falling out. It falls to the ground in clumps only some of the youngest and shortest foliacles survive.

Your arms hurt as you look at them and see the new feather growth that is forcing it's way through your arms. Even as the colorful feathers grow longer and quite impressive all the way down your arm. An impossible urge for flight from your bird side crossing your mind.

Your eyes buldge a bit and tear up a bit, as you close them, your eyelid slowly grows and changes into a clear scale. As despite having wanted to close your eyes for the rest of this, you are no longer able to. Your eyes wider and snake-like.

If this wasn't horrible enough it is followed by a horrible pain as your body.. scretches itself. The area between your legs and your rib cage growing longer and thinner as new bone growth occurs. At the same time, your tail bone is thickening and lethening and changing into more of a snake styled spine.

You see that your legs, which you were already missing a lot of, seem to be growing shorter and less and less defined. Of course, this is offset by the fact that your body seems to be able to... akwardly slither now.

Your throat begins to hurt first, as your jaw muscles grow stronger, more equiped to swallow whole prey. You feel a pain, and a horrible sounding crack as your jaw dislodges, gaining the ability to do so whenever you want. These changes emphisized by both familar and strange cravings for live prey that are now only that much stronger.

Cassidy awoke from her dream, confused and bleary past the usual level for having just woken up. She shifted in her bed, felt Vasile's warmth beside her, and was just about ready to turn over and go back to sleep when she felt something under her hand, on the pillow.

It was long, thin, and rather slippery; it took her a moment to identify it as a lock of loose hair, and while it was certainly hers, it was also not attached.

There were other coils of hair in the bed. Cass blinked at them for a moment before she thought to put a hand up to her scalp. It did not feel right, sparse and short, and the longer strands left came away in her hand; she hadn't cut her hair, nothing more than a trim, in a good six or seven years.

"Oh, no."

Cass jerked violently as the first of the new feathers began to grow; she let out a moan.

"Feathers! Feathers!" She was, already, a bit close to hysterical. "Oh, help!"

The feathers in themselves weren't so bad. It was what might follow that terrified her.

She tried to cling to Vasile, half-sobbing. The feathers continued sprouting down her arms, each one painful as it breaks the skin.

"I don't want this. I don't. Make it stop!"

Cassidy clapped a hand over her eyes as they began to change, too.

Cassidy clung to Vasile as tightly as she could, too frightened to think about whether or not she might be hurting him, trying to keep her eyes shut against it all. Somehow, no matter how tight she tried to squeeze them closed, it wasn't doing any good. She could still see. She didn't want to.

As her body began to lengthen, Cass cried out sharply. This was worse than the last injection, far worse, this was a nightmare, it couldn't be actually happening...

Vasile's touch did nothing to ease the pain, but it was at the very least a comfort. Her tearless sobbing was mixed with a whimper.

Unconsciously, in her desire to cling to Vasile and anything else familiar and comfortable, her growing tail began to coil around his leg.

Cassidy sucked hard at the air. "Bastards," she managed to echo Vasile; it came out coloured with all her pain and anger and fear.

Where were her legs? They didn't feel right, not at all. Distantly, she wondered if she'd have to get new prosthetics; the full impact of her changes had not really hit her yet.

"Hate them," she croaked; it came out roughly, and was followed almost immediately by a whimper as Cass discovered that talking, for the moment, was far too painful to attempt. She pressed her hand against the side of her jaw, her mouth agape.

Crack.

It sounded like something had broken, and for a brief moment, Cassidy was convinced that was what had happened; something had gone horribly wrong, she'd broken her jaw, or worse.

But nothing was broken. The crack almost seemed like a release. She worked her jaw for a moment; everything felt so... so strange.

With the last pains from her spine beginning to fade, but sore all over, Cass released her death grip on Vasile a little. She was gasping from the adrenaline, and for a moment she could only stare at him wordlessly.

She put up a hand to touch her face.

Cassidy looked up at him, still stunned. She had been exploring her face with her fingertips while he'd been gone. She had no eyelids. This had finally sunk in, but it seemed unreal. She couldn't even properly concieve of not having eyelids.

And... oh god, those horrible half-legs. She was afraid to leave the bed. She'd fall over. She'd be stuck in bed forever. How, she wondered in a weird sort of haze, would she ever manage to go to the bathroom?

Cass took a deep breath. "Some aspirin," she said softly. "Or some advil. Something."

Cassidy nodded, feeling rather numb.

I'm still me, she told herself firmly, and only half-believed it. She picked up a piece of hair from her bed, and looked at it for a long moment, scared.

She shifted a little, the process slow and awkward; there were too many muscles, now, she wasn't really sure how to work properly. She managed to gather up, though, a hank of blonde hair. For a while, she squeezed it tightly, smelled it, and then at last tucked it into the drawer of her bedside table.

All of a sudden, there seemed to be so much of her.