//Writing Soundtrack: FTL OST

Reality came to me as a kind of blur, it was a sensation I could not describe. My mind was hazy and my memories scattered among the winds as I woke up, my entire being feeling like I had been in a slugging match with a dumpster.

I had trouble sorting the sensory input, in the first few seconds I could taste sounds and hear colours, or so it seemed, feeling fundamentally wrong in all the wrong places.

It was not so much that I was hurt, no, it was that something about me had changed. Although at that moment I could not have told you for the life of me what it was.

As the moments stretched by slowly my mind pieced itself back together, my memories slowly falling back into place where they were missing, although it would be a long road until I could say that process was complete. I could feel parts of my history being washed away by a great torrent, stolen from me and leaving me with nothing in their place.

When I was finally conscious and awake enough to make sense of it all I opened my eyes, struck in a kind of fugue for a while in which nothing seemed to make sense.

I had no idea how long I was stuck in that state, although when I finally came to I was upright and wandering, with no idea as to where or why.

Suddenly a few important bits and pieces slotted in their correct place in my mind and I knew who I was.

My name was Tal and I had… died? Things still didn’t make much sense but at least I knew my name, my age, and my hometown. I revelled in that knowledge, feeling much better about the weird situation I found myself in.

I remembered that I had been on my way to work, a job I had started all but three months ago. It was not my dream job, but it was a good job and I felt happy about it. It paid well enough, a little more than I needed to so I could put money aside for my true dream… A dream I could no longer remember.

Admittedly that scared me. A lot. During my teenage years I kind of went along with the rotation of the planet, living day to day with nothing to truly motivate me. Only once I figured out what I wanted did I find the motivation and the energy to work on bettering myself and my life.

So to have that part stripped from me, horrified me. I could almost feel myself longing for my old habits once more, habits that had been rather destructive, although not outright hurtful.

While I was slowly going down the mental breakdown slide I noticed something. Before I had not really paid attention to much around me, more focused on trying to sort through the changes to my mind and memories, but now that I was paying attention I was shocked once more, quickly followed by caution and fear.

During my fugue I had walked around with no memory of doing so, probably taking random directions on auto pilot, so I didn’t know where I even came from. And all around me were the ruins of a once great civilisation.

I stood in a big chamber, probably some form of meeting chamber or grand hall, considering the rotten and ruined decorations around me, fallen apart furniture littering the floor, mostly couches and chairs.

The room was easily a hundred metres on a side, with it being slightly longer in one direction than the other, and a good thirty metres tall. On the ceiling were the remnants of grand fractal forms, and in the centre of the ceiling were the remains of what once might have been some grand lamp or maybe display. I had trouble figuring out what the things I saw might have been once.

While it all had more or less familiar forms, the materials it was made out of looked almost Sci Fi compared to what I knew. For those familiar with the Sci Fi that the late 20th and early 21st century produced, it looked like a grand mixture between the sleek and clean Design of Star Trek, the kitbashing prevalent in Star Wars, and a bit of the utilitarian design from the Mass Effect video game series, although none of them was an accurate description.

As I looked around I noticed there was no light here, none at all, which was odd since I could see everything without issue. And while I had pretty good night vision for any normal person before, that was within the context of an urban human where even the nights were lit up by the afterglow of a city.

This room was filled with total darkness.

Slowly I turned in a circle, taking all of it in. There were a total of three doors out of the room, all looking much more futuristic than anything I’ve ever seen. They would be right at home in a Venator-class Star Destroyer from the Clone Wars series, were it not for the overly flowery script on them.

It had a definite meaning, a language of sorts, but I had never seen something like this before, nor had I any idea of what they meant. I took a step towards the closer one, when I finally noticed that my body was not what I was used to.

I had to admit, the changes I had gone through should have been something I noticed much earlier, but I was so distracted by my mental distress and the sheer impossibility of it all that I hadn’t even thought of checking myself over. Which in hindsight could have been a lethal mistake.

I never had a particularly impressive body. I was a little chubby, although not directly fat even if I may have been closer to that label than I would like to admit, with a little bit of muscle from my carpentry years. My face looked a little immature, despite my fully grown, but only somewhat cared for, beard and after going through a few hairstyles I ended up keeping a short cut of hair which was already falling out despite my young age.

In short, I was a somewhat chubby guy with the only saving grace that I would probably only be the second biggest disappointment for a girl in terms of my manhood.

However, that was before. Now things were entirely different.

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For starters I was pretty sure I was shorter now. I was just barely over six feet before, but now I was closer to five. If it would have just been that I would have been okay with things. Losing a little height wasn’t really an issue for me.

What was an issue though was the entire rest of my body.

My limbs were a little longer than seems reasonable, especially my legs. The little skin I had left was deathly pale and weirdly looked almost translucent. Not that I had much visible skin left.

My entire torso, as well as the lower half of my arms and legs, were covered in a somewhat soft and also pale white chitinous substance. I knew instinctively that eventually those would harden out.

What really threw me for a loop was the fact that my gender had changed. Instead of Tal Junior I had a vagina between my legs, neatly covered up by four pieces of chitin that I could shift to the side at will, like a biological crotch protection.

My chest was now adorned by a pair of small breasts, even though there were no nipples and everything was chitin covered. I had to question the purpose of those if it wasn’t for nourishment of children.

Yet, despite all those things, that was almost harmless compared to the fact I had five more limbs!

Instead of one arm on each side of my torso I had two, although one pair was a lot smaller and grew out from under my main pair of arms. The smaller pair was a lot more dextrous and could be extended a bit for further reach or retracted to fit snugly against my torso beneath my breasts.

The second pair of additional limbs was a lot more horrifying. From my shoulder blades two long and strong limbs grew out, just a tad thicker than my arms, but a lot more powerful. Instead of hands they had two sets of claws at their end, perfect for gripping and crushing enemies with brute force or walls to climb. Their reach was a significant eight feet if fully extended, or a meagre three if fully retracted. As with my two additional arms, these claw arms could fit snugly against my body when retracted for ease of movement. In their case they would simply fit on each side of my spiked spine ending beneath my last new appendage.

A very long and dexterous tail protruded from just above my behind. And when I say long, I mean long. Nearly twenty feet long with a small poisonous spike at the end that could deliver a multitude of different poisons into a target. As with all my other new appendages this one could retract as well, in which case it was only about seven feet long, which was still enormous.

And as if having a twenty feet long poison whip nailed to my arse wasn’t enough I had a pair of eyes on the end of the tail, just above the poisonous stinger, with chitin plating that could be draped over them like an eyelid. The chitin plating was also the reason I hadn’t yet noticed those eyes before, as the default state of being for those eyes was closed. Which made even less sense than having eyes there to begin with.

I shuddered to think what kind of monsters ran around for a species to have eyes at the end of a tail that is obviously meant to attack things. Either the world I just woke up in was tremendously dangerous or this body was just some weird mutation that defied all reasonable evolution.

For some reason I instinctively knew what the appendages were supposed to be used for, but I had no instinctive knowledge of how to use them properly. Folding them against my body if I wasn’t using them was instinctive, just as you knew how the most comfortable way to keep your arm while walking or sitting was for you personally, but to actually move them I had to truly strain my brain.

I theorised that the reason I had such difficulty using them was my intrinsic idea that a human, pardon me, person, since I was definitely not human anymore, was only supposed to have four limbs: Two arms, two legs. Five if you count the head.

I took a few minutes to try and coral my tail into obeying me so that I could look at myself, while I tried to work through the fact that I was no longer human.

I had read a few books and novels in my time about Isekais and some such, it was kind of an interesting idea and if I was honest with myself it was one I theorised about a lot, but not like this.

Maybe I would be reborn as a dashing hero that defeats evil and gets the princess! Or some dark and brooding edgelord assassin that would destroy his order from the shadows. Or maybe some wise old sage that speaks in riddles and can cast spells at a whim!

Or if you really need to change my gender, at least make me some awesome amazon or dragon lady that goes her own way and lets nobody tell her otherwise.

Not… this. Not some creepy insect lady who looks barely old enough to buy a beer. Reasonable beer buying age, not the weird shit some other countries did where you could die for your country before you were allowed to buy a cold one.

I digress. I was not happy, not at all. Of course many men think about what they would do if they woke up as a girl and if this body would have looked even remotely more human I might have tried something, but I knew that even if I did nothing would come from it.

Since this body wasn’t designed to feel pleasure of that kind. I’m pretty sure whatever species I was now reproduced asexually.

It kind of spooked me that I wasn’t a lot more horrified about all of it. I was unhappy, yes. More that I ended up looking like an alien than anything else, although I would probably start getting over myself eventually knowing myself, but I was still unhappy.

However, there was nothing more than that. I wasn’t going crazy, I wasn’t running around like a psycho and I wasn’t thinking about how to get back to Earth as quickly as possible to return to my normal life.

I simply… was. Unhappy, but mostly calm. Truth be told, I was more horrified about my mental state than anything else. Since not only was a good part of my memories missing, I wasn’t freaking out.

While I thought about all of it I made some headway in controlling my tail, and finally managed to get it into position to look at myself from about ten feet away. I opened my other pair of eyes.

It was a little weird to see the new body, but outside of my previous discoveries I didn’t notice much else. Well, there was one thing. My head.

I was never a handsome man, but what I saw now was… Not what I expected. I had hair, a deep black with crimson mixed in and about shoulder length. But the face was a lot more insectoid than I would have liked. It wasn’t an actual insect face, thank goodness, the general shape was still human-ish, but with a lot of insect mixed in. My mouth was pretty normal at first glance, until I noticed that when I smiled it was a lot wider than was reasonable. I had unimaginably sharp teeth made from some kind of silvery metal, which just did not seem to make sense. But apart from that, my lower face was pretty normal.

Normal compared to the upper part. First off, I had six eyes. Two pairs of two where normal eyes were supposed to be, eerily human looking, and an additional pair of eyes centred above the first pairing, those ones closed. I knew immediately that I wouldn’t be able to use those yet for some reason, but I didn’t know why.

The rest of my upper face was covered in chitin plating, going over everything, including my eyes if I closed them. It gave me the weird and grotesque look of wearing a half-mask made from insects.

The entire experience of me seeing me seeing myself made me kind of dizzy, so I closed my tail-eyes and focused on not falling over from the sudden spike of dizziness.

I looked around the room once more, trying to get my bearings, and was even more horrified about my casual acceptance of the entire scenario now that I’ve seen my face.

Whatever had happened to me, I hoped it would only get better from here.

Of course that was the moment I heard something big walk behind one of the doors. Wonderful…