Huh. Something here feels… Weird. My body is… Something is wrong. I feel… Not bad, not good, just…

My heart beats like a gong. I buckle over but there’s nothing to empty and I feel small and big and sick. All of my limbs are trembling. The world is becoming blurry but no matter how much I blink it won’t go away. I feel so much it’s like the world suddenly went into high definition and yet I can’t feel anything at all: I’m totally numb.

My body doesn’t even feel real.

The leaf collapses from under me and I flail into the water, but I don’t have a gazillion limbs anymore, I only have two, and my vision is edged by spikes as though I’m looking out through the maw of a dinosaur. The two limbs I have aren’t even arms, and they feel strangely elongated, specifically my feet. Everything is so weird and bad but I still can’t even gasp for breath as the waves overtake me and it isn’t long before I bob under the surface.

I try to hold my breath, but there’s no breath to hold. Closing my eye feels like closing my mouth.

Down, down, down I go, into the depths below.

Bubbles go past and in the distance I can see swarms of colourful, brightly visible fish. That can’t be good camouflage, and the appearance of a massive monster swimming by and chomping up almost an entire school is enough to prove my observation.

…But I’m not drowning. I can’t breathe, but I couldn’t do that on land, either. Even so, I feel somehow choked. I can barely move my neck at all.

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Hang on. Neck?

I try to touch the part below my head but I only have two limbs now. Still, these legs are agile enough to let me lick my own toes, so I can very well feel that I’m, uh, wearing something? It’s not exactly a necklace, or even a collar. It’s more like a big, stone neck-brace. It makes it really difficult for me to look down, but looking upwards is alright. Combined with my legs (which have two joints and are very much clawed) and the tail I only now realised I have, swimming is remarkably easy. At least now that I’m under the surface.

…What in the world happened to my body? I can’t even compare it to what I was before. For one, I’m bigger, as you might expect on account of the leaf not being able to hold my weight. And, strangely enough, I feel stronger. My body isn’t made of dust and yarn; this is actually flesh. And maybe bone. I’m not sure, I don’t have X-ray vision.

It’s like I’ve evolved.

…Didn’t Elecmon say something about that? Yeah, sure, I was kind of paralysed by fear, but I’m sure that he mentioned something about ‘evolving into my child form’ or whatever.

Ah, but I still can’t talk. Blub blub blub.

Kind of a useless evolution if I can’t talk, but being able to swim effectively is nice. I’m not going nearly as fast as some of these other creatures, but I am going. Just maybe a bit slowly. I’m a no-armed lizard, so being able to swim at all is nice. The more I swim, the more easily I can use my tail for the movement. Back and forth, side to side, like one of those sea-snakes. My tail is actually much more effective at this than my legs, so after swimming around for a few minutes, I stop moving my legs at all.

I am a lizard. Lizarding forward. Lizzzard.

Something emerges into my vision and I jerk back.

Shit! What the hell was-,

A brownish little dragon thing is floating in front of my vision. It’s got the face and tail of a lizard, but all it's got for movement is a single pair of tiny flippers. I’d see it as a lot more aquatic if it didn’t have a tiny fire sprouting from atop its head. Yeah, it’s a flame. Flickering. My attention trains on it.

“Hi!” it says in a squeaky, annoying voice. My eye falls back to its face. “I’m Bukamon! Who are you?”