FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Strapped into his seat on board the exploration space craft he was a crew member on, Tom held his eyes shut tightly as the ship shuddered violently. As they were coming in to land on this world which had yet to be explored by humans a freak electrical discharge struck the ship. The moment the electrical discharge struck nearly every system on the ship was cooked in a flash of electrical energy and sparks from the fires the surge started. The only sounds Tom heard were the blaring alarms from those systems that were still operational and shouts from the two pilots who were fighting desperately to control the ship.

With a final lurch of the craft he heard one of two pilots say as loudly as needed, "Oh shit!" before a terrible screeching sound tore through the ship. The ship began violently twisting and rolling as momentum carried them along the ground. With a final screech of rending metal Tom felt a sudden pain in his abdomen from the back before passing out from whatever had injured him. Finally the violently pitching space craft came to rest a mere fragment of what it had once been.

With a start Meredith came too in the dark wreckage of the space craft, flashes of light from arcing electrical lines occasionally lit the craft. With a groan of mild discomfort she picked herself up and began looking around the craft. At first glance she discounted anyone else having survived the crash, but then from her left she heard the rasp of ragged breathing. Standing to her full height of nearly six feet she looked to her left noticing Tom. He was still strapped into his flight seat, immediately she could see why he was breathing so raggedly.

Without hesitation she unbuckled his harness and looked over his injuries, looking behind his flight seat she saw what had injured him. A jagged piece of the flight seat had been torn loose during the crash and stabbed into his back. With a strength beyond her small frame the woman easily lifted Tom out of the flight seat and laid him on his stomach. Knowing she had little time she thought quickly about what to do before saying, "To hell with the code."

Taking a suitably sharp piece of wreckage in her hands she held her forearm over the wound in Tom's back and cut into her arm. The cut she made was not deep, but it did bleed heavily as she held her arm over Tom's wound and allowed her blood to drip into his injured flesh. After several seconds of dripping her blood in his wounds she moved her arm. It never ceased to amaze her how quickly she healed from wounds, as she watched, the cut on her arm began to stop bleeding before her eyes. Finally the jagged wound began to seal itself shut as if she had never cut herself.

Tom awoke to sounds of sparking wires from the wreckage of the space craft and the smells of dense jungle. Wincing a bit at a tremendously loud banging sound to his right he moved his right arm to prop himself up and try to look for the source. He found out just how monumental a mistake that was, sparks of fiery pain shot up his arm and into his chest. The painful banging sound he had heard finally ceased as he let his arm lay limp by his side.

A voice began emanating from where he'd been hearing the banging come from, "Take it easy there Tom, you've been through quite an ordeal. Given what I had to do in order to save your life I'm surprised you're even awake now. Just relax and let yourself recover, you were injured and I had to move you."

Remaining still as he heard the female voice he waited for her to finish before speaking, "The last thing I remember is the ship coming apart as we crashed. After that I don't have any recollection of what's happened. No matter, thank you for doing what you did to save me. Who else survived the crash?"

Meredith came over and knelt by his side, "No one else survived, you wouldn't have survived if I hadn't acted. There are some things you need to know about what I did to save you. With little time to act I did something that has quite drastically changed you. If you can't recognize me I am Meredith."

Tom hadn't recognized her initially but now that she mentioned her name he began to realize it was her. He gave up on trying to talk to her any further and just relaxed his mind to rest and recover. He was smelling things in the jungle air that he had never noticed any other time he had been in a jungle. With a mental shrug he chalked it up to having been through a painful and traumatic injury during the crash and expected to lose this sense of smell once he regained use of his eyes.

Awakened the next day by the cries of birds fleeing from the treetops, Tom sat upright and groaned a little from the lingering pain he still felt. His head no longer buzzed with pain and he opened his eyes to look around. The sight that greeted him was a shock, sticking out in front of his face was a snout adorned with glistening blue scales. Being farsighted as he was Tom next realized that without the glasses he had grown accustomed to he could see every scale on the snout as clearly as if he were wearing his glasses.

Raising his hands up to his view he saw they too were covered by blue scales, and each digit on his hands ended in a long sharp talon. Looking down over the rest of his body he found he was covered in the scales that now adorned his body. Furthermore he observed that his body was bigger, groaning a bit from the pain still wracking his body he stood. Looking around the crash site he estimated his height to be at or above twelve feet.

As he moved around to look at the crash site he felt an odd weight pulling on his upper back. Reaching one of his taloned hands he found a pair of folded wings protruding from his shoulder blades. Just then he heard footsteps of someone approaching and turned to face whoever it was. With a sigh of relief he saw it was Meredith, after identifying her a flood of questions entered his mind.

Before Tom could speak any of the questions flowing through his mind Meredith spoke, "I know you have a plethora of questions about why you look the way you do. I believe I can answer them with a couple of simple answers. During the crash you were injured, mortally injured at that. In order to save your life I cut myself and allowed my blood to drip into your wound. The human you see before you and had gotten to know as much as you did is merely a facade."

When Meredith said the word facade she began to shimmer with light, the shimmering of light culminated in a bright flash that blinded Tom. Shutting his eyes at the intensity of the flash he kept them closed as ghosts of light danced across his darkened vision. Once the ghosts of light vanished from his sight he opened his eyes to observe a female dragon standing in the place Meredith had been standing. She stood around nine feet tall and said nothing to him for the moment as he just stood there in awe.

Tom finally worked up the courage to say something his voice was much deeper then before and had a deep rumble to it, "So I suppose that when your blood came into contact with mine it began to fundamentally change me. What gave you the right to make such drastic changes to me? Is there a way to reverse the changes or am I stuck like this forever? And how in blazes are you talking to me without moving your mouth?"

Meredith shifted a bit nervously as he vented his anger at her before she tried to calm him, "Would you prefer it if I had let you die? As to reversing the process, no it cannot be done. The only thing I can do for you is to teach you how to use your new abilities to hide your dragon form from prying eyes. We will be stuck here for quite some time, I've activated the distress beacon from the emergency kit. And I am speaking to you through your mind, all dragons can do it. You did it yesterday when you were laid out recovering from the transformation you went through."

Tom just stood there for a few seconds before letting out a very angry growl and stomped off, as he went by the ship he punched it in frustration leaving a large dent in the hull where he had struck it. Walking off into the woods Tom silently ran over what had happened and what he had been turned into, he still could smell all of the new scents he had been smelling when he was recovering. Now he knew why everything smelled so differently, his heightened dragon senses were showing him the world as he never would have known it before.

As he stalked off into the woods he thought about why he was angry, his life as he had known it was over. By all rights he shouldn't even be here at all, in many ways he wished he were dead, it would be easier then the new life he would have to learn to live through. But as he thought about it he began to realize that the life he'd been living before may not have turned out as he had hoped. He wasn't able to participate in as many activities as others he knew took part in.

Thinking back to the ship and the dent he made he thought of all the other things he could do now that he had the strength of a dragon. Hearing the roar of a stream ahead of him he headed toward it and soon found it. Kneeling beside the stream he leaned over it and peered at the reflection he saw in the water. No longer did he see the human he had come to know himself as, remembering the reflection he would have seen he was repulsed at that image.

Clearing his mind of his former human visage he looked at the reflection in the water before him. What he saw gave him pride and he smiled a bit at the realization that he was now free of the limits his former body had placed upon him. Then came the realization that he couldn't be welcome in human society looking like this, he would have to learn from Meredith how to hide his true self from view.

With a growl of his stomach Tom realized it had been a while since he had eaten anything, a moment after he had that thought he saw a fish swim by in the stream. Analyzing the fish and its coloring for any signs it might be dangerous he determined it was not. Slashing out at the fish with his newfound strength and speed he caught the fish by surprise and grabbed it out of the water. Without hesitation he bit off the head and swallowed the rest of the fish in one gulp.

Looking at his reflection in the water again he smiled before standing and turning to head back to the crash site. Meredith was waiting for him near the wreckage as he returned, taking a seat across from her Tom says, "I'm more at ease with what was done, and am ready to more fully accept it. I just need your help to learn how to hide myself in plain sight. So whenever you are ready to teach me the tricks of the trade so to speak I'll be ready to learn them."

With a nod she smiled a bit before offering up an emergency ration pack, watching him as he shook his head to decline it. He quickly told her about the fish he had caught and eaten to which Meredith nodded and smiled more widely. "It's fairly simple to change yourself to a fully human form. Just close your eyes and concentrate as hard as you can on looking like what you want to look like. You should probably stick to what you looked like before you were changed by me. At least you should stay the same until you get back to civilization."

With a nod Tom looked at her before closing his eyes and focusing as hard as he could on changing himself back to what he had once considered himself. As he sat there he at first was ready to give up in frustration before he began to feel a tingle running through his body. The tingle started in his toes and the digits on his hands before beginning to slowly spread through the rest of his body. After the tingle coursing through his body had ceased he opened his eyes to be greeted by a view unobstructed by the snout he had just moments before.

Meredith watched as Tom transformed and then congratulated him before giving him a similar explanation of how to do the reverse. Reversing the process he again felt the tingling as his body went through the process of becoming a dragon once again. Meredith watched for several minutes as he practiced with this new talent before finally stopping him and saying, "In time you will learn how to breath fire, but that can wait for later. For now just know that your ability to shift from form to form is limited and you should only transform when absolutely necessary. Also the first law of the dragon code is that no dragon reveal themselves to a human no matter the circumstance.

Meredith began to teach Tom other abilities he had as the days stretched on and on while the pair awaited rescue. Tom quickly mastered his shapeshifting ability and was well on his way to mastering his other abilities. Meredith explained that the energy to execute the various transformations or other abilities came from absorbing cosmic background radiation. After a week of instruction Meredith finally began instructing Tom in the art of fire breathing.

The days soon stretched into weeks for the two survivors of the crash, little of what remained from the space craft was salvageable. The one saving grace of the wreckage was that a survival radio had been spared from destruction. Three weeks after the crash the survival supplies from the ship ran out and the pair began to hunt and fish for the food they needed. Finally as their survival expedition entered the sixth week the radio crackled to life.

"Explorer seven nine this is the Reliant, we received your distress signal and have come to rescue you. We are two days out from your position, be ready to leave by that time. Pardon our delay we suffered some troubles with our slipstream engines. Reliant out." Meredith and Tom both listened intently to the transmission before they broke out in mild celebration.

As the atmospheric transit craft lifted off the pair winked at each other to congratulate themselves on a well survived disaster. They did not weep for their fallen comrades as they had already done that weeks ago shortly after the crash. The pair now looked forward to moving on with their lives, looking out the window Tom watched as the Reliant came into view. The Reliant was a small lightly armed military craft whose primary mission was rescue of stranded individuals. In times of conflict it could slip in past enemy defenses and extract downed pilots or injured soldiers to a place of safety.