I woke up on day seven, a little sleep deprived after having been kept awake for much of the night by the strange sensations bubbling beneath my skin, but thankfully feeling a little better. Inspecting myself to survey the damage brought no comfort; I now had red pin pricks along significant swaths of my arms, dry and cracked skin covered more than half of my legs, there was a bump on my forehead, and I was sprouting short blue fur over patches of my chest. The fur must be the same thing as on my back, which had now spread significantly and covered half of it.

With a sigh, I climbed out of bed to grab my breakfast, blowing hair out of my mouth as it swung around and landed in there.

...Wait, I have my hair in a pixie cut. It isn't anywhere near long enough to reach my mouth. I felt around, only to find that my hair was double the length that it should be. I pulled a clump forward, trying to get a look at it, and found that while the bottom length of my hair was my normal shade of brown, the new growth was the same pale blue as my new fur.

"I don't suppose I could have a mirror and some scissors?" I asked the empty air. "Might as well keep a consistent colour scheme."

Speaking made my throat feel scratchy. I suppose at one sentence every couple of days, I was probably getting out of practice. And frankly, I couldn't care less about my hair colour; I wanted a mirror to get a better picture of what was happening to me, and scissors were a weapon. For precisely that reason, I doubted I'd get any, but it was worth a try.

I continued the inspection of my body after breakfast. It didn't seem to just be my hair that had grown explosively; my nails had too. If they did give me scissors, they would need a trim. The oldest of the quills on my arms were starting to develop a small amount of fluff near the tips, which was not a feature of any hedgehog I'd seen. Could they be feathers? Was I growing feathers on my arms?

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Why would they do that? What use were feathers to a human? Reluctant to try exercising again, after yesterday made it clear that it just made things worse, I sat back again to read. I'd barely managed a page before the noise of the delivery shelf moving out caught my attention. It was a long time until lunch, so what was it now? It turned out that there was, indeed, a pair of scissors. Also, a note that they must be returned before lunch would be delivered, so they wouldn't let me keep them. A pity, but it had been a long shot to start with.

In that case, where was the mirror? I'd barely had a chance to think that before I heard another grinding sound behind me, on the opposite wall. One panel moved out very slightly, and from behind it, a full-length mirror slid out by a metre. I ran over to peer behind the exposed panel, but there was nothing there but solid steel. That wasn't useful...

Keeping up appearances, I gave my hair a trim. It wasn't easy, being unable to see my own back, and the end result wasn't pretty, but it would get the hair out of my face. I eventually managed my nails too, but the scissors could barely cut them, so it took far longer than it should have. They looked sharp enough, so that hadn't been a problem I was expecting, but I suppose it was no surprise that they'd actually given me blunted ones.

Personal care done, I stopped to inspect myself properly. My face looked fine, although my eyes seemed a little lighter in colour than I remembered. In fact, everything looked fine, other than my mutated patches of skin and my new colour scheme. The colours actually looked familiar, although I couldn't place them.

I noted just how far the mutated patches had spread, and couldn't help feeling a bit like a frog boiling in a pot. I was sitting around doing nothing while my symptoms got gradually worse, telling myself that things weren't bad enough yet to require drastic action and I should continue to feign cooperation until I saw an opportunity for escape, yet never noticing just how hot the metaphorical water was getting.