One morning, as Sanny Dalag woke from strange dreams of alien thoughts and sensations, filling his mind with disjointed visions of a world subsumed by tainted flesh, he discovered than in his sleep he had become a twisted, inhuman monstrosity of flesh-rending mouths in places they shouldn't be, tentacles that tasted the air and hungered for flesh, eyes that saw in the sunlight strange colors from out of space, and a urgent hunger that wished to be slaked.

Naturally, the first thing he did was check if somewhere in this asymmetrical, non-bilateral body he'd woken up in were his bits.

Eventually he found them inside one of the random mouths, in the middle of one of the tentacles that seemed to have grown from his left leg. Assured those important organs were intact– she was getting better at leaving those alone when freestyling while he was asleep– he forced order to come back to his body. He sealed the mouths first, all but the one with the bits, then worked on regrowing his internal skeleton. The one that he'd woken up with was mostly strange supporting bones for the tentacles, and he didn't even have a rib cage. When he wasn't in charge, this body kept opting for exoskeletons and invertebrates of some sort.

It took a while for him to finally feel like himself. Internal skeleton, bilaterally symmetrical bipedalism, manly bits on the outside and where they belong, the face he'd been born and grew up with… he kept looking back and forth between his reflection in the bathroom mirror and the various laminated photos of himself he'd taped next to it, but couldn't spot any major deviations. Sometimes he worried he'd forget what he was supposed to look like, that he'd greet his parents and he'd just be a stranger to them because too many things– his face, his height, his voice– were different. So he had those vaguely-narcissistic photos next to the mirror, the most recent photos he'd been able to track down that showed what he'd looked like. Thank goodness he lived alone and didn't need to explain that to anyone.

He didn't worry so much about losing the 60 pounds of body fat and sneaking in twelve inches of height into his bones. Those were purely for health reasons! Yup, totally health reasons.

After that he went through the usual morning routine. Shower, dress, a quick breakfast heated from the leftovers of the night before, eaten with the news running in the background. In the back of his head, he felt hunger stir at each mention of every unnatural thing now roaming Metro Manila's streets. He wondered how long before it spread. There was at least one thing hunting in the bay. How many had chosen not to hunt, but instead find new territory?

He took notes on new sightings, scribbling it down on the little cube of memo paper he'd started leaving on the table for that, then turned off the TV when it moved on to mindless celebrity news. He wouldn't be missing anything important. It was celebrities, after all. The whole segment was just a way to shoehorn in advertising about the hot new show full of bland young people and old, still-marketable standbys looking constipated because they thought that made them look intense that the channel was trying to get people to watch.

After the notes, he went back to his room, and updated the conspiracy-theory map of the confirmed general locations. The spider was still in Makati, and evacuations were slowed by the usual nonsense of people not wanting to evacuate; people in Pasay were asked to stay in their homes lest they become dog food, as if people didn't need to go out for food; there was traffic in Katipunan as drivers kept away from the erupting sewer openings, meaning all traffic was being concentrated on one lane in a 3-to-4 lane road…

He marked a neighborhood in Quezon City where a giant snake he'd been tracking had disappeared in the area. Sanny stared at the map, then grabbed his phone and began taking pictures. Something he could show them…

And he was procrastinating, he realized.

This wasn't a date, that much he knew. This was… what? Two, maybe three fresh acquaintances getting together to get to know each other better. Possibly move on from merely acquaintances to co-workers. Maybe they'd even be friends, and he'd be able to tell them who he really was. The plant girl… no, Tammy… she'd been the one to mention heroics, and she'd seemed to have comic book superheroics in mind when she'd said it. Secret identities were a thing, after all. It was as old as masks, older than the comic book genre. He hoped they understood.

That would be nice. He'd always wanted to have friends IRL.

Now, he just had to get a good reference for who to turn into.

––––––––––––––––––

When he'd walked into the coffee shop the message from Tammy had suggested they meet at, Sanny couldn't help but feel awkward. True, he'd done this before, but that was at home, just him and the guilty pleasure of seeing a naked girl in the mirror. This was in public, and with every step he couldn't help but worry he was doing something wrong. Was he not swinging his arms enough? Was he swinging them too much? Was he not doing it the right way? Was the way he moved too exaggerated, too flaming? Was he obviously a dude trying to pass himself off as a woman?

It had seemed so logical at the time. He was a guy, so in order to hide his identity, he'd used a feminine voice to talk so she'd think he was one. Simple. Obvious. Basic. Totally doable now that his body was malleable down to the cells. His bits were safe, somewhere up where ovaries would normally be. There were so many ways for the human body to have nonstandard parts after all. When he'd first started looking them up on the internet, the descriptions alone had made him squeamish. Now he was just frustrated the articles seldom came with some sort of diagram so he could work out the most efficient placement.

His disguise was mostly biological. The smooth, even, pale mestiza features so formulaic among television actresses, with just enough minor asymmetry to keep it from falling into the uncanny valley. He'd tried for perfect symmetry once and… yeah, that had seemed weird and unnerving, and he'd woken up with his dick in his own mouth this morning. He'd thrown in a mole– sorry, beauty mark– under his left eye for some variety, and had grown blonde hair with dark roots to make it seemed dyed. Because he wasn't going as himself, he'd made himself taller, though not as tall as he'd been yesterday, and just slim enough to be either a fairly unreasonable feminine body standard or a lucky bitch that had an viable metabolism. Limbs of lean muscle, some fat reserves to round everything out, and his disguise was set.

He wore a yellow shirt, hastily bought yesterday because all of the yellow shirts he'd already owned had been too big for his intended disguise and would have left him looking frumpy (new jeans too, since this disguise was a whole head taller than he normally was, even with his 'growth spurt', almost as tall as his armored form), as per Tammy's request so they could identify each other. In fact, he saw her as soon as he walked in, since the girl in the plain green shirt with her hand upraised and waving to him probably wasn't anyone else. There was a disposable paper cup on the table in front of her, which contained some kind of plant, which was slightly more confirmation. Sanny couldn't tell what it was, since it was basically some green stalks sticking out of dirt.

Next to her was a girl in a blue shirt who was even taller than he was, the kind that probably got all sort of tiring comments about basketball. She had a rather unfortunate resting bitch face, which was Sanny giving her the benefit of the doubt, otherwise she was actually making a bitch face at him. Well, not directly at him, since she wouldn't meet his gaze, instead facing probably-Tammy after one glance.

As he waved back to show he'd seen them, hunger stirred in the back of his head, and with an effort, Sanny pushed it back. It stirred again, stronger, and while Sanny repressed it again, he also went to the counter get something to eat. That made the urges subside slightly, though he could discern a faint whiff of… petulance? Well, at least it wasn't going to be a problem, for now. And now he knew for sure these were the people he was looking for. Normal people didn't provoke hunger in him. Well, they didn't provoke that hunger in him.

He had to wonder what Tammy and her friend had felt when he'd walked in. Had they gotten hungry too? He decided to go the bribery route of getting people to like you and got them cookies.

Tammy's eyes seemed to light up when he came back with a tray of three cookies and a corned beef pandesal. He took one of the cookies– chocolate chunk, all of them– and pushed the rest to the two girls. "Ah, a woman of culture, I see," Tammy said, grabbing the cookie and taking a happy bite instead of using the fork next to it. "Thank you very much!"

Sanny liked her already. Why eat with a fork? The other one with the blue shirt had to be prompted to accept the cookie, and her thanks sounded rote. He amended his assessment of her naturally having that expression upwards, as her face didn't really change even as she clearly enjoyed the cookie.

"So…" most-likely-Tammy said about halfway through her cookie, "you're Sanny?"

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"Yeah," he said, his voice sounding weird in his ears. Still, he'd have to get used to it if he was going to keep it as part of his secret identity. "You're Tammy?"

"Yup," Tammy said brightly. Sanny was very glad he'd come disguised and not his usual self. Tammy looked like she was in her early teens, and wouldn't even be in high school yet. Eighth Grade, as it's called nowadays. "I'm glad we could meet up. Ever since you gave us that tip, I've been trying it out and… look, look!" She held out the paper cup.

Sanny took it warily, careful not to let their fingers touch. He still wasn't sure that happened to the… the… the essence of plague?... that he'd devoured, and he didn't want to accidentally give her a flesh-eating virus or something. It hadn't… fit in… inside him the way the previous one, the flies that had devoured all the people– and animals and plants and food– in that slum along the Pasig River had. He had felt that one become a part of… them. Not completely, not perfectly, but the parts of it that could fit, had been fit in.

He looked inside the cup. At first, he saw nothing but dirt– high bacterial count, the back of his head conveyed to the rest of him in the same way his body told him his bladder was full– from which sprouted small, green stalks and leaves, the two parts the same color, as if fresh from the seed. As he looked, wondering what he was supposed to be looking it, the stalks moved, beginning to wrap and braid themselves around each other, stems firming and growing brown as–

Hunger welled in him, hunger that made him want to throw his head back and chug the contents of that cup, to devour it–

Sanny, with effort, pushed that urge into the back of his head.

– as the stems became supple wood, as the leaves braided together to form little arms. A little vaguely-humanoid thing looked up at him from the cup, with hands and a head made of small sprouting leaves, a body of woven stalks and, presumably, feet of more stalks and roots. It waved at him.

"I am Tammy?" he said, setting the cut back on the table pushing it towards her gently with one finger.

She giggled. "I am Tammy," she said, and twitches of movement in the cup said the little figurine was at least physically mimicking her actions. "I can work through it, as soon as I make it bigger. It's great, I don't have to keep losing clothes anymore, I can just send one of these and keep wearing my clothes somewhere else! Willy here–" ah, a name! "– can do it too, though I don't think she can show you. Oh! This is Willy, my cousin. Say hi, Willy."

"Hi," Willy said blandly, giving Sanny only the barest of looks and nods.

"Hi…?" Sanny said right back, still unsure if the girl was being antagonistic or just awkward. He really couldn't blame her, he felt awkward himself. If he'd shown up as a guy and sat with them, he'd probably have felt very self-conscious.

"Sorry, Willy takes a while to open up to people," Tammy said, her smile becoming awkward for a moment before it brightened again. "So don't get discouraged! She's really nice, it just takes a while."

Sanny glanced at Willy for her to either confirm or deny this, but she was watching Tammy as if the shorter girl was the only thing important in the world. Okay…?

"Are you two… together?" Sanny asked awkwardly, not sure how to phrase it any other way.

"No, she's my cousin," Tammy repeated. As if realizing that for some people this wasn't exactly a deal breaker, Tammy sighed and reluctantly added, "No, Willy's just… special, okay?"

"Aren't we all?" Sanny said, but he got the message. Still, that meant so many things these days, from having trouble paying attention because you never learned self-discipline due to bad parenting to actually having something different about you. Well, no reason not to be nice and just get to know her over time. "Well, I'm glad you found my little tip helpful. How many have you managed to learn to control at once?"

Tammy stared at him. "You can do that?" she breathed.

"Well, yeah," Sanny said. "It's useful."

Surprisingly, Tammy shuddered. "Every time I do that, I keep getting lost and start thinking I'm a tree."

Sanny frowned. "I… don't know about that," he said honestly. "Maybe you just need practice. Like with juggling, you start with two balls, then add on another one when you're ready."

"What sort of practice did you do?" Tammy said.

"Just… practice," Sanny said lamely. "Try controlling one more body besides this one," he gestured down at himself, "then when I get the hang of that, I make another one until I was used to that, then another one, and so on. After a while you sort of get the trick to it to just keep adding more, but yeah, I guess it can be overwhelming? After thirty or so, I sort of have to step back and just have it do the work for me while I focus on what I want them to do."

Tammy blinked. "It?" she said.

Sanny went still. Completely still. Muscles stopped moving, lungs stopped pumping, heart stopped beating, letting blood languish in the veins…

Sanny took a deliberate breath, made his heart deliberately beat, then went over every function of his body one at a time to make sure they were, in fact, functioning. "Yeah," Sanny said. "The power. This… thing that's not normal and in us." He looked Tammy directly in the eyes. "You know what I'm talking about, right? The whatever it is that lets us do… what we've been doing." He took a risk. "The thing that we had after we woke up that wasn't there when we went to sleep." Sanny tapped the back of his head. "The place in the back where the urges come from. The one that wants you to eat. No, not just eat. Devour. Make things... a part of you."

His tongue touched one of his teeth and Sanny tasted blood.

He blinked, then slapped a hand over his mouth, groaning as he felt their configuration. Narrow, triangular, pointed, serrated edges. Shark teeth, except for two long, needle-like incisors. The hinge of his jaw had moved way back, and had bifurcated in the middle to let him open his mouth wide.

"Sorry, sorry," he said through his closed mouth and he sternly forced his dental array to square up and number significantly less than sixty as he flushed in embarrassment. At least those were still working on proper involuntary systems and not being reconfigured to pump venom or something. "Ugh, so sorry. It just… it really wants me to do something about how hungry it is. Sorry, I swear I don't usually have this problem…" Ugh, what was with this obsession with sharks? Every time there was teeth it was always sharky!

To his surprise, Tammy laughed. "Nah, it's fine, it's fine," she said. "It happens. Sometimes if I'm not paying…" She paused, seemed to remember they were trying to be secretive, and leaned forward. Sanny did so as well, being very careful to make sure his face wasn't developing a second mouth that spat venom or sprayed acid, and that his teeth were very, very square and regular and human. "…if I'm not paying attention, sometimes I grow roots and start drinking Willy," she admitted conspiratorially. "I think we should forgive each other lapses like that, or else we'll be here all day. Everything's fine as long as no one gets eaten."

Hunger rose. Sanny told it to shut up.

"People are friends, not food," he repeated, and she nodded.

"People are friends, not food," she agreed.

They both leaned back, and Sanny saw Tammy was visibly forcing herself to relax, and kept her hands under the table. Impulsively, Sanny made a tear open on his arm, which opened to reveal an eye. Under the table, he saw thorns on the tips of her fingers and the backs of her arms, and her feet, which were wearing open, narrow, strapped girl sandal things, had turned wooden, with roots growing everywhere, and had been pulled back underneath her and as far from his own feet as possible.

Sanny looked at Willy, who seemed completely ignorant to the byplay, or at least didn't care to participate. "Why is she not having problems?" Sanny had to ask.

Tammy glanced at her cousin, who seemed to respond to the attention by leaning just a bit closer. "I can't be sure, but… tell me, does… it… ever step back? Stay passive? Sort of… hide and shove you to the front?"

"Never," Sanny said immediately. "It always tries to have a say. Sort of like an assistant manager who wants your job but can't get it, and tries to keep telling you what to do." He paused, then added conscientiously, "They really help out, and I wouldn't be able to do a thing without them, but sometimes they can be pretty pesky. Especially since I don't think they're used to me telling them 'no'."

Tammy smiled a little at the description, before frowning. "Yeah, my… thing is like that too. Like nagging, nagging and nagging all the time, but softly, so it sort of becomes background. Hypnotic…" She shook her head with an annoyed frown that Sanny was almost sure was self-directed. She looked at him seriously. "It's hard to say, since I only have the three of us to compare, but… I think… I think Willy's might be… special."

Sanny had to blink at that, and he looked at Willy, bewildered. To his surprise, there seemed to be an echo in the back of his head. The hunger that rose again was… not as strong.

"Huh," was all he managed to say. "What does that even mean?"

"I have no idea," Tammy said. "I could be wrong though. Three people is a terrible sample size for an average. Maybe it's waiting for Willy to have some sort of moment of insight before letting her have access to its full power so she becomes Super Water Willy. It could be a programming error, or whatever it is wasn't made to deal with someone as awesome as my cousin." That last was said with pride.

Sanny nodded, tearing off a bit of the corned beef pandesal and taking a bite. He grimaced. Nothing but bread and potato. He took another. Much better.

"So…" Tammy said. "Can you show us how to practice? Being in more than one place at a time? It sounds disorienting."

"Not really," Sanny said, putting the pandesal down. "You just have to get used to having multiple inputs. Like reading a book and watching a TV show at the same time."

He waited for the confusion, the exclamation of 'that's not easy', but instead, Tammy brightened. "Oh, I can do that!" she said. "I thought it would be hard, but if it's like that… Wait, are we talking a show with just dialogue, or a show with subtitles?"

Wait, did she just…

"Dubs or subs?" he asked impulsively.

"Subs, always," she said instantly. "Dubs always sound so whiny."

And suddenly, all of Sanny's misgivings and worries fell away.

"Tammy, I'm really glad we met," he said seriously. "I really hope we can be friends."

She smiled, no, grinned back. It was a bright, radiant look as she extended a hand. "Thomasina Olivarez," she said. "This is my cousin, Wilhelmina Azul."

As if that was a cue, Willy held out a hand next to Tammy, waiting patiently. A drop of water fell from her palm.

Sanny reached forward and gently but firmly grasped Tammy's hand, ready to throttle any changes that might happen to his anatomy that might hurt her. Her hand felt so small, so soft, so delicate... for an outgoing girl, her handshake was surprisingly shy. "Sanny Dalag," he said. He shook Willy's hand to. Her grip was awkward and a bit too hard, but not the crushingly malicious sort. Just… off.

"So… we're free for the rest of the day," Tammy said. "Do you think you can show us a few moves? I mean, we might not be able to do them, but it might help? Your suggestion did, after all."

Sanny considered. Well, it wasn't like he had anywhere to be… "Sure," he said. "But we'll need somewhere private. No people, no surveillance cameras. Do you know of anywhere close by?"

Tammy tapped her lips. "Huh… actually, I do."