MISANTHOPIC MORAL OBLIGATIONS

1

As I walk up to the check out line I am inexplicably struck by a wave of dizziness and my vision goes fuzzy around the edges. Before I have a chance to close my eyes my entire body experiences that pins and needles feeling normally felt when a limb falls asleep and I realize that I can not move. My vision narrows as the fuzziness spreads, and I find myself frozen unable to blink or even breath. I think I am about to die, that I've had an aneurysm or a stroke when from the core of my being a wave of extreme heat radiates outward followed a second later by a wave of intense freezing cold. The heat returns then the cold over and over again with increasing frequency all while the pins and needles feeling grows ever more severe. As my mind struggles to comprehend all the various sensations I am enduring my ears begin ringing as the very air around me increases in pressure and begins to crush me from all directions. I want to scream, I am in so much pain, but I am completely paralyzed. My lungs will not expand, I can't even blink, I think my heart has stopped. My vision is now completely occluded by the fuzziness so reminiscent of the static that plagued televisions before the advent of cable. The entirety of my existence has been reduced to this miserable collection of overwhelming sensations and after what feels like hours my consciousness doesn't finally fade away but rather snaps suddenly and without warning.

I don't know how long I was unconscious but when my mind regains its functions I am surprised. I think I may be dead, I find myself in impenetrable darkness and soothing silence. Gently embraced by soothing coolness I feel as if I am floating and instinctively try to stretch. Interestingly I have a body and am not some random soul floating in some infinite abyss, unless souls have bodies. Do souls have bodies? Attempting to stretch reveals a few things to me, first is that I am confined in a space barely bigger than my body while curled into a fetal position, and secondly my body has extra limbs. Quickly taking stock I find the standard human amount of arms, legs, fingers, and toes, but I also find a long slender tail, and two pairs of what must be wings, I also have growths like an anemone's tentacles sprouting out of my head and from my chin. Perhaps the most interesting thing I notice is that I can see and feel various types of energy flowing throughout my body, the space around me and the surface of the thing that think may be an egg in which I find myself.

Upon concluding my self examination I begin to try to free myself from what I believe to be an egg. I try pushing outward first only to find it will flex but not break or crack no matter how hard I push. Just as I was about to try striking the shell I heard a swishing sound followed by muffled voices and so I pause to listen hoping to figure out what they are saying. Try as I might my senses barely let me hear whats going on outside of the egg, after what feels like a fair bit of time the voices fade away before a swishing sound cuts them off leaving me free to once more try to get out. Pushing against the shell doesn't work and considering the tight confines and the subsequent lack of leverage I don't expect striking it to work either, this leaves me in a bit of a conundrum. Being in this predicament has me becoming irritated and as I become more and more annoyed I notice that one of the types of energy coursing though my body is building up in an exponential sort of way.

Eventually the energy builds up to the point where I have to release it, and my instincts reveal the way. I breath it out dragon style, quickly filling my tight confine before the shell begins to dissolve. With the first opening in my eggy prison my senses come alive stunning me into stopping my breath attack so that I can process the torrential flood of information. Not only are the senses I had before substantially heightened but I now posses several new ones as well. My brain seems to function much faster and more effectively as well because although the egg, it was apparently hovering a foot above the floor, succumbed to gravity as soon as it began dissolving I managed to filter and process all the information my senses provided before it reached the ground.

I found myself to be in a sterile room surrounded by cameras microphones and a variety of other electronic devices unknown to me. To my left was the only door and on the wall opposite were the air intake and outtake vents. By the time I landed on the floor the egg had entirely dissolved and the gray breath I used to free myself and the liquid leftovers from the egg itself began absorbing into my shadow. Somewhere beyond the door an alarm sounds and as my shadow finishes absorbing the eggy goo I detect what I can only think of as people rapidly approaching as well as every shadow within 100 meters of my current position. Something about the shadows spoke to me, metaphorically, on a primal level I could tell that I could do all sorts of things with them. Before I had much of a chance do do anything else the people arrived, three of them, decked out in bio-hazard suits.

Now either I am in some parallel world where humans are twice as big as they aught to be or I am much smaller than I used to be. As I am now I am only half as tall as these people and in spite of that they seem afraid of me. While they stare at me I take advantage of their hesitation or trepidation to ask the most pressing question on my mind. “Where are we?” Caught off guard one of them responds saying, “Battelle National Bio-defense Institute.” While a second one said, “In Maryland.” So I reply, “Good to know, thanks, and I'll be leaving now.” I then attempt to walk past them, this does not go over well with the one who had thus far remained silent because she moves to block the door while telling me that I can't leave because I might be carrying contagious biological agents and that I am responsible for the disappearance of and suspected death of a citizen of the U.S.A. When I asked for this missing persons name I was told that it hadn't been released but I was shown a video taken from the stores security feed.

The video showed me walking up to the back of the line of customers when I just froze, for ten minutes I remained frozen and totally unresponsive. At the ten minute mark things got weird, every shadow in the store moved in defiance of light sources. They all reached towards me before climbing up and forming a cocoon like structure around me. Once I was completely encased in the shadows they began compressing around me until all that was left was an egg shape about three feet from top to bottom hovering a foot off the floor. The shadows then exploded before everything went back to normal except for the floating gray egg. I am kinda stunned, that video was wild and it explains the feeling of being crushed at least. “That explains how I got into the egg but not why.” Oh judging by the bio-hazards people's reaction I said that out loud, I need to get out of here but they said I might be contagious but I need air, or rather space.

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As I thought that the shadows in the room reached out towards me and once they did I sank into them vanishing from the room and reappearing on the labs roof out of another shadow. As soon as the sun touched my now gray scaled skin I began to smoke, it burns but it heals just as fast and the healing was getting faster and within a minute the only sign of burning was the continuing presence of smoke rising from my scales. With a sigh I sit down in the shadow I arrived from and ponder my current situation while using my wondrous new senses to observe the bio-hazard people they, were in full on panic, terrified that I would spread some doomsday virus or some other horrible illness. With another sigh I sink back into the shadow and reappear into the room the bio-hazard people were in, they don't notice me because they are frantically searching security feeds trying to find me.

While they are distracted I let my senses find a syringe but since I'm not a doctor when I find some I grab a one of each type pulling them through their own shadows, and once I have them I return to the roof. Sadly none of the needles will pierce my skin, I even try the soft skin inside my mouth to no avail. I sit there for a while debating the pros and cons of this new durability before I realize that I don't really care one way or another because I have other more pressing concerns. Most importantly I am currently naked and my man parts are just hanging out for the world to see, I should probably get myself some pants. The second thing is I no longer seem to be a human, this is good because humans are horrible and bad because as a non-human it is likely that I will be refused basic rights by the humans they likely already want to capture and study me. I am unwilling to be a lab rat or prisoner and so I used the shadows to retrieve a note pad and a pen so I can write a farewell note to these bio-hazard people.

[Dear bio-hazard people, I have come to the conclusion that because I am obviously not human your sort are unlikely to respect my rights or autonomy. I tried to draw some blood and tissue samples to satisfy your desire to do science on me but alas none of the syringes and such I found in this building are able to pierce my skin. Anyway I'm going to leave now. Have a nice day. Signed the one whose egg you stole. P.S. Kidnapping is not nice.]

I take the note and the ruined syringes and such and use the shadows to place them on the desk of the person I believe to be the leader of the bio-hazard people. With my moral obligations taken care off I stand up, stretch, and with a running leap I launch my self off of the roof. Spreading my wings I begin gliding away from the lab heading west north west while hopefully figuring out how to fly. Thankfully this body of mine comes equipped with instinctual knowledge allowing me to fly without much effort at all. I can fly significantly faster than a human can run as it turns out, I move faster than a few cars I fly over but I don't know what the local speed limits are. I am flying about 100 feet above the ground while I get used to this and I don't want to go to high until I figure out the limits of my stamina and this is high enough that I don''t have to worry about running into any houses, trees, or power lines.

I have never been good at tracking time and it is even harder to do while having a blast, and flying by my own power is incredibly fun, and so even though it feels like a few minutes I am pretty sure that a few hours have past considering how the sun is now casting longer shadows compared to when I left that lab. Anyway I am almost back home and I'm a tad bit nervous about my impending landing. To be somewhat safe once I reach my neighborhood I decide to try my first landing in the baseball field at the local park. I begin by gliding in a spiral to loose altitude but in the end I fuck it up and come in to fast. Luckily my instincts take over and as I crash my shadow engulfs me, somehow it negates my momentum and I casually step out of the shadow of a tree across the park.

Suddenly it dawns on me that I just flew what had to be well over a hundred miles and I am not even winded. I am frankly full of energy, and not sure what I should do or where I should go. First I need clothes because civilized people don't go around naked, well outside of nudist gatherings, unfortunately none of my clothes will fit me. After some thinking I end up using my smaller set of wings to wrap around my waist like a skirt, it will do for now. Second I need to retrieve my phone, it should be in the work truck, since my wallet was in my pocket when I got stuffed into that egg it seems to have vanished along with my clothes, gun, knife, and smokes. Just as I think I can go for a smoke the pack I had in my pocket falls out of my hand startling me before I pick them up. As I look at the cigarettes in my hand I think I could really go for some pot and nothing happens. With a laugh I take out a smoke and light it starting to walk home to find out what time it is and smoke a bowl before I go to the yard in search of the work truck and my phone. It was early morning when I was in that store and around noon when I hatched, I wonder if it is even the same day.

I make it a few steps before I realize that I should probably try to avoid being seen so the government doesn't try to kidnap me again. I run toward the treeline at the edge of the park and through it up the hill and onto the train tracks. With my senses on alert I begin making my way home, I quickly cross the first road and rush down the tracks until I dip into the valley between to other streets and follow the crick until I get to my neighbors back yard. Once I make sure the coast is clear I cut up the hill through his yard, dart across the street and rush up my steps and into my house. Now safe at home I grab my pot collapse on my couch and pack a bowl, as I elevate my mind I take some time to digest all the crazy that has taken up my day so far. A few minutes pass before I begin to try and figure out my abilities and I find myself kinda shocked that I can sense the entire path I took from the lab. Rather it is like every shadow along this hundred meter wide path is me and it's all linked and I can feel the presence of all the stuff I had on me when I was transformed is contained in sort of pocket within the shadows. I will call it shadow storage or more likely just storage. I have a bunch of senses now, the five that humans have and a fair few others and they extend not only from me but also from every shadow within that path. Thankfully most of it is just background noise unless I focus on it, disturbingly if I do focus on it I can track every person, animal, plant, hell I could count the bacteria, but I don't want to. I should also make this clear dust has shadows, bacteria have shadows, everything light touches has shadows. For my sanity's sake I am going to not actively focus on most of these shadow senses, however they have made me aware of some creatures living in my house uninvited.