Not Quite Punishment
This is the first story I've done in a very very long time. It's also quite disgusting body horror, as most of my stories have been. Second-person: after a fateful night, you find yourself changing into a mouse in the middle of a corporate meeting. Being second-person, I tried to tag this as genderless as possible, but if it comes across as male regardless, I apologize. (The lack of genitalia technically makes it safe for work. Ha, just kidding.)
Hat tip to The Witches (Movie) and The Warlocks (Story).
Read those tags very carefully before proceeding.
Your alarm blares into your face for the second time, and you crack open your eyes. You can't remember what happened last night; the only thing you're left with is a massive hangover and a throbbing headache. You are barely able to reach the alarm to turn off its screaming, and then to turn on the light.
There's something that bugs you about your lack of memory as you crawl out of bed, take several ibuprofen pills, sleepwalk into the shower, mechanically put on your clothing, and wrestle with trying to remember how to work a car. You were supposed to remember something, something important. But that thought is quickly drowned by the remnants of your headache, the car radio, and your horrific morning commute.
You stumble into your long-scheduled 8am meeting and take a seat midway down the conference table, not too close to the door, not too far away. Gently cradling your coffee, a Starbucks from downstairs, bitter but your only savior. Every Monday, 8am sharp, beckons the weekly software status meeting, where one of the software development managers outlines the current progress and future plans for all the managers. You're a middle manager, just enough to require you to attend the droning meeting. Every week.
You still can't remember what happened last night.
The software development manager approaches the back of the room and fires up his PowerPoint slide deck, a boring series of dull points that always begin with the company purpose and motto, then the yearly checkpoints, then the monthlies...
"Our twice-yearly review of the codebase has been completed. There has been an escalation of bugs recently, which caused priorities..."
You let forth an incredible roaring belch, as you feel a tightness to your body, a sudden pressure building up inside of it. You try your best to ignore it, but also notice that the presentation has stopped for just a moment. A few people have turned to stare at you.
"Anyway," the developer continues after another uncomfortable beat of silence, "Our priorities have shifted as a result of the bugs we discovered in the last round. We are now trying to assess whether we can make the deadlines originally set by the management..."
The words quickly dull you into a catatonic state once more, but there's something about the pressure inside of you, pulsing, continuing to grow and bubble. You shift restlessly in your seat, unable to make your body settle down, but continuing to try to do so regardless. Then new words surround and constrict you, hitting you like lightning as your body stiffens.
"Customer escalation will be handled through the usual channels, but obvious new bugs should be escalated immediately..."
A loud, vibrating, cacophonous fart echoes through the conference room and everything stops and falls silent once again. Now people are really turning and looking at you, as you only just realize that sound - that gas - came from you. Your guts continue to insistently grumble. You realize that you must leave. Now.
"Excuse me," you say to the room, blushing, trying desperately to get out of your chair to relieve the swollen pressure inside your body. You stumble to walk out of the room, when you suddenly freeze midway out the door and can't move a muscle. You feel a warm wetness start to trickle down both your legs, slowly at first, then with increasing force, letting forth another whining, keening fart as the pressure continues to build inside of you, demanding release. You soak your shoes and the carpet underneath you.
"They've pissed their pants. Hey you - what do you think that you're doing there?"
"That's disgusting. Use the goddamn bathroom." A disapproving murmur grows through the crowd and you can't do anything but sit there and begin to shake feverishly, looking down in horror at your darkened slacks and the growing puddle on the carpet. You did piss yourself, helpless incontinence. You feel your heart pounding inside your body, thump-thump, thump-thump. Sweat begins to soak other parts of your clothing, as a sudden enveloping warmth assaults your senses.
A memory finally flashing through your brain of the night before.
You were painfully lonely, nursing a drink at your local bar when she showed up. She was another regular at the bar, a beautiful redhead with just the right kind of confident walk to make the heart go a flutter. But she had gone her own way until tonight. You were only made aware when the bartender placed a beer in front of you and said, "Courtesy of the lady at the other end of the bar. Make sure to savor it, fella."
Shy and confused, you took the mug in your hand and turned to look at her sharp, slyly smiling face at the other end of the bar. Encouraged, you took a long draught of the beer, swirling it around in your mouth, savoring its dry feel and bubbly effervescence. It tasted of bitterness, earth and soil and home; it wasn't fruity or comfortable but it was welcoming in the throat and begged for a second chance. Which you quickly gave it.
After a minute, you put down the empty mug and climbed off your barstool to walk over to her. That beer had to be quite strong, as you felt your coordination increasingly going awry. You barely climbed upon a stool next to her, trying to calm your swimming mind. Perhaps tonight would not be so lonely after all.
"I'm afraid I don't know your name," you said in a fuzzy half-approximation of a pickup line. You would have tried something more complicated, but your eyes quickly got lost in her red locks and sparkling nails and sweet black dress.
"It's Cynthia," she said softly, if not a little coolly. "You may not know me, but I certainly know you."
"I don't know what you mean. We've never met before in my life."
"We know everything about you. We wanted to give you a wish," she said in a neutral, matter-of-fact tone.
"I don't understand what you mean," you said, looking at her through an increasingly drunken haze. Almost too drunk.
"I'm a witch," she said, staring deeply into your eyes. "And I'm here to offer you a change." Something about her look, her words made her even more fascinating to you. You desperately wanted to know more. You slurred out words of interest, now desperate for her attention. You reach out to touch her hair and she grabs your wrist, shoving it onto the bar. You can't help but accidentally belch into her face, making her grimace. "What do you want out of life?," she said, while you stared at her in increasingly dizzy confusion.
Your Starbucks this morning - the one remaining half-drunk back where you were sitting - was rather bitter this time. Much like your beer last night, you realize. So you had put more artificial sweetener in response... which only made the chemical reaction worse.
Back to the bar. What you said was instinctual but heartfelt. "I just want to be free of this life. Quiet all the voices inside," you slurred.
Her smiling face looking down on you as your wooziness overcame you, tipped you off the barstool, and forced you to your knees on the ground before her. "You'll get everything you deserve in due time. You'll be quiet as a mouse. All it takes is a little escalation," she said, cackling as you collapsed, falling into blackness.
Shoved back into reality, you open your eyes wide in shock as the sudden brightness of the windows sears your brain.
Suddenly, sputtering, you put it all together - this was intentional. Whatever is happening to you, whatever this is, was done to you intentionally. This escalation... That word bounces through your head, over and over again for no reason, escalation. You mouth it, then find your voice saying the word unbidden. "Escalation... escalation escalation escalation escalationescalationescalationescalation!" Each word striking lightning through your body, shaking you further, pushing you onward, your voice tightening and growing higher and higher as you repeat it again and again, becoming nothing more than squeaking gibberish.
Then, in one glorious moment of babbling squeaking screaming, the lightning surges make you cum. And cum again. And again. And again, dribbling into your slacks. And the floodgates begin to open.
You feel your sphincter open involuntarily as you try to release the insistent pressure inside of you in any way possible. Another belch, and you swear you can almost see the gas escaping from you this time. A quick, sloppy fart gives way to bending over, groaning and pushing shit desperately into your underwear in one great shove, piling into your slacks and removing any dignity you had left.
"Are you okay?" You barely hear as the pressure thrums through you, vibrating in time with your heartbeat. "Call a paramedic!" Some are frozen, some are fleeing, some are screaming, everyone is repulsed.
Your heart pulses further, harder, pushing the corruption into every cell of your body, into every pore of your skin. Your body responds by pulsing in time to the beat, each pore beginning to grow, grow more and more hair. A million knifelike pinpricks erupt from your skin as pressure pushes through your limbs, through your skin, into your newly-growing brown fur. You smell the earth, the bitterness of the beer, but this time the scents are coming from you.
You try to make sense of what is happening, but everything is going by too fast for you to understand anything. All you can think of is escalation, and...poisoned? Poisoned, escalation, dying, pressure. Pressure everywhere. Pressure down to the bones... bones.
Your brown-furred legs wobble as you shake harder, faster, then you feel a tearing, a cracking resonating through your body as your legs collapse in a broken pile underneath you, forcing you to your hands and knees. You cry out in pain as seemingly every bone in your rib cage explodes, crumbling, crunching into a different, smaller shape. You feel your heart pound faster and faster, your blood pressure shooting through the roof as muscles take the oxygen at incredible speeds, using it to shift into new, inhuman configurations.
Leaning on what remains of your elbows, you stare at your hands as they shrivel away into smaller, leaner claws, thumbs almost disappearing into your wrists. You've long passed the point of being human, your body reconfiguring itself into Other. Tears stream down your eyes, chin, hitting the floor as you try to say something, beg for it to stop, but all that comes out are chittering squeaks.
You feel the cracks in your lower back as your tailbone shoves, shoves, shoves itself further and further out into your sodden, messy underwear, quickly shoving it aside and pushing itself against your slacks, bunching up, pressing harder into a tail. You would reach to pull it out of them, but you can't do anything but shake as your tail - your twitching, pulsing, wriggling, living tail - pushes ever further out of you, tenting your soiled pants even more obscenely. For a few moments, the bunching feels so painful, more than the agony in your bones. Then, your sodden pants fall down over your knees, exposing your ass to the gasping gathered crowd, your tail unfurling itself completely, acting with a mind of its own.
You hear her say "quiet as a mouse" over and over again in your mind, but your body is anything but quiet as your ass explodes with a triumphant never-ending fart. It can't be happening, it shouldn't be happening, but it is, and now it is you.
Your head feels the pressure now, inflating like a balloon, the pressure forcing itself around and through every crevice. You let forth a screaming, crying belch and suddenly steam flies out of your mouth. You can't breathe, you can't breathe, the pressure growing ever tighter inside your ears until the eardrums collapse, steam flying through your head and out both of your ears, gathering around you as you can't breathe you can't breathe. Your ears flip and flop, bouncing and flapping of their own accord, shifting themselves around your skull, air flying out of them as they grow increasingly round atop your head.
God I can't stop this God I can't stop this God I can't stop this screams through your mind as your brain reshapes, your face violently shoving into a muzzle as gas continues to escape from you, your skull cracking and reforming. A gasp, another screaming belch and teeth fall out of your mouth, half-spat onto the ground, new incisors growing inside your head at record speed, canines nowhere to be seen. Your cheeks feel increasingly full of air as you feel a need to chew. Chew. Chew. Synapses fire off randomly in your brain, instincts being rewritten one by one, prey, not predator, not any longer. Then, suddenly, air into your lungs again, your nose twitching violently. You can smell your scent, your new scent, filling the air around you, from your armpits, from your fur, from your sex. Whiskers explode from your cheeks, and now you can feel the air as well, your eyes darting left, darting right, body desperately trying to read all the new signals being shoved into it.
The world sparkles with stars and then shifts color as your eyes reorient themselves, some things looking blurrier, some things looking more sharp. But you can see - you can suddenly see into dimensions you never knew existed, the sun in the window becoming blindingly rainbow, all-absorbing.
Your body inflates, then collapses, inflates, collapses, each cycle draining your energy further, compressing you, shoving your form ever thinner and tinier. Bones, muscles, sinews shrinking, tumbling in on themselves, creaking and cracking and crumbling, your vision falling downward from door handle height to collar height to nearly no height at all, your clothing falling away from you as you rock and silently scream, your insides wrenched by a vise, smaller, smaller still.
In one glorious, confused moment of transcendent pleasure, your body convulses and collapses one more time deep into the folds of your now-enormous clothing, your horrible transfiguration into a mouse at last complete. You are assaulted by the scents of old human, musk and piss and shit. That was the past. Instinct compels you to run, run now, run away from all of that. Shoving the folds of clothing aside with your sprinting body, a few seconds of existential panic give way as you burst out of your shirt into the open air, scurrying with your reshaped limbs into the sea of cubicles beyond the conference room, your tail twitching frantically behind.
You are free, you are finally free. Free of their screams and horror, insistent murmuring and exasperation. All you hear is blessed silence as you scamper away. Free of your transformation, of your clothing, of your worries, free of everything.