Walker didn’t open his eyes at first, the darkness was comforting. Sand-filled his head. Aching. Something pinched his neck, then relief. His eyelids fought hand over fist to stay closed, but he managed them open.

“Uhgh,” he mumbled, it was so bright. Eventually, his eyes adjusted to allow him to see the chestnut ceiling. The wood planks sat perpendicular to his body. From what he could feel, he was laying on a flat surface. He couldn’t lift, nor turn, his head, not because of his state of body, but because something had been wrapped around his head and attached to whatever he was laying on.

Many wouldn’t classify Walker as the most well-rounded person, but even he understood that being tied down, outside of the bedroom, was not a good sign of things to come. He tested his other parts, all tied down.

“Hh…hrrupp…” His tongue struggled to move in his dry, sticky mouth. His throat burned.

He wiggled and strain against his restraints. He didn’t budge, Walker’s limbs were spaghetti. However, whatever he was strapped to wobbled. That meant it stood on legs, probably a table. Just as Walker was considering the pros and cons of flipping the table over, the creak of a door that required no less than a can of WD-40 filled the room.

“Relax, not going to hurt you.”

Walker found the raspy voice familiar, that fact, along with the setting, allowed him to piece together where he was. Not that it made him feel much better. He licked the inside of his mouth before responding, “Egor.”

His bruised, wrinkled face appeared above him, “Calmed down?”

“What?” The tongue in his mouth could have imitated a log rolled in dust.

Walker smacked his cracked lips, desperate for moisture. Egor in his white coat disappeared; in a couple of seconds, a pressure Walker didn’t realize existed was lifted from his head. The same procedure occurred for his arms and legs.

“Take it easy now, your body’s barely holding itself together,” Egor warned.

Walker could only moan in response as he struggled to move his head, arms, and legs. Only at this point did he realize that the only thing that covered his body was bandages and a towel wrapped around his waist. He swung his legs over the table and used his arms to keep him sitting up.

Before Walker could open his mouth Egor greeted him with a glass of water and instructed him to drink. He guzzled it down and motioned for another. After greedily drinking from two cups, Walker slowed down.

“What happ-”

Egor cut him off, “tests first, questions after.”

Walker simply sighed and nodded. While Egor checked his temperature, blood pressure, and BPM, Walker inspected the room he was in. If the room was empty, it would be classified as quite large. However, it was stuffed to the brim with various tools, materials, vegetation, vats, tubes, and jars holding organisms that it felt cramped. The room was abuzz with the hum of electricity, the clinking of glassware, and the occasional plink of water hitting metal.

From his vantage point, he was sitting in the center of the room on a stainless-steel table that housed five leather straps connected by chains. A cylindrical metallic staircase sat in a corner northeast of the table.

Walker tore his eyes away from a dirt-filled jar to Egor, who removed the stethoscope from his chest to unravel the bandages around his left wrist. Most of the bandages came off easily, but the final layer was moist, and had to be peeled off. Walker bit his tongue but kept his eyes glued.

Egor caught Walker grimacing, “Looks ten times better than when you came in.” His hand could’ve entered a cold-pizza look-alike contest and won second.

“What happened? I don’t remember past…” he shut his eyes to help search his memory. Found the cavern, caught frogs, found the entrance, boulder, pain.

“I think I’m missing something,” he informed Egor.

Egor chuckled, horrible wet coughs followed, “Not surprised, if the shock didn’t do it, the psychosis afterward definitely did.”

Egor’s tone combined with the leather straps, bruises, and upon closer inspection, scratches along his face and neck explained to Walker what Egor implied.

“Did I?” Walker waved at his own face, “Sorry man.”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ve had worse. You should be apologizing to your tall friend though, gave him a nasty concussion.”

Walker stared at the floor, he’d have to make it up to him.

Egor replaced the rest of his bandages, even the ones that covered his jaw and throat, then motioned for him to roll onto his side, “Relax you’re going to feel some pressure.”

The reflective table made his head pulse with pain, so he simply closed them until Egor finished, then he sat back up. Egor had his back to him and faced a shelf, the sound of clinking glasses briefly overtook the room.

“I don’t feel anything,” Walker announced.

Egor turned around, he carried a clipboard and a pencil, “I’m not surprised, you pumped up with enough painkillers to knock out a horse. I had to inject you with epinephrine just to get you awake.” He eyed Walker before scribbling something down, “Sonya thought that was it for you, I was a bit more optimistic.”

He finished whatever he was writing then returned to the desk, “I thought you’d only be in a coma.”

“Coma, huh…” Walker murmured. “How did I end up like this? Did one of those-” he paused to cough. A metallic taste coated his mouth.

Stolen novel; please report.

“Did one of those frogs do this to me?”

“Yes and no,” Egor responded. “Yes, the poison exuded through the Welting Frog’s dermis dealt most of the skin damage as well as the internal injuries. However, from what I pieced together from Sonya and Mr. Thundercock’s hazy testimony. One of them got into something it shouldn’t have.”

Egor approached the table and held up a half-full glass vial, “Do you know what this is?”

“Grass?” He squinted at the vial “Wait… moss.”

Egor nodded, “Correct, this was moss scraped from a stone that sat in the twilight zone-”

Walker cocked his head.

“The area receiving sunlight not far from an entrance of a cave,” Egor clarified. “Not particularly rare, in fact, in some places, they are an invasive species. No, what makes it interesting is the fact that it grew from a meteorite.”

Walker widened his drooping eyelids, “You’re kidding, Stardust?”

Egor scratched his scraggly chin, “Bit of a misnomer actually, but yes. Residue from the meteorite altered the cellular components of the moss.”

“But frogs don’t eat moss,” Walker retorted.

“No, but welting frogs eat ants. You know why people are paying for wild-caught Welting frogs? Because captive-bred ones aren’t poisonous, and wild-caught ones eventually lose their potency.”

“So, there’s an environmental component,” Walker guessed.

Egor handed him the vial, “There’s ants in the forest that consume certain plants and convert them to venom. Welting frogs consume that venom and synthesize their own poison from them. My guess is that some ants consumed this same moss, the ones that survived the transition must have been eaten by the frogs. Apparently one of the frogs survived that transition as well.”

Walker tried to digest the information, but his foggy mind struggled to make the connection. He stared at the moss. Only some of the ants survived. Only one of the frogs survived.

“Why did only some of the ants survive?”

“You tell me,” Egor retorted.

Walker huffed, “And you can’t tell me because?”

“Cause information isn’t free, or maybe I want to see if you can figure it out. I might just be an asshole. Take your pick.”

Walker glared at Egor “Fine. The ants were different somehow.”

Egor sighed, “different how?”

“I don’t know, environment or genetics. Maybe some ants had a big dick or something.”

“Ants don’t have penises, that’s a mammalian term,” Egor corrected. “Most likely not the environment though.”

“Fine genetics. Some of the ants had mutations that were beneficial in helping them survive. Maybe a frog had the same thing.”

Egor nodded, “Most likely a mutation in one of the genes that influenced the conversion of venom to poison in its body allowed it to survive the transition.”

Walker leisurely raised his arm, as careful as he could, to stop Egor. “What do you mean by transition, are you telling me Stardust actually changed the frog that…”

Something clicked, a shadowed silhouette. The room swam. Walker scratched at the table while his chest rose and fell in quick, shallow, succession. A cup met his lips, and he drank from it. After a few minutes, his breathing slowed and evened out.

“You know? It was… unnatural,” Walker’s voice shook with each word.

“I’m not sure how it grew to such a size without additional input of energy from the environment, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what Stardust can do.”

Walker scratched at his bandages; his skin burned beneath them. He gripped the fabric, threatening to tear them off, but he was already short of breath.

With more sincerity than he wanted, the words tumbled out his mouth “What’s going to happen to me?”

Egor motioned Walker to hand him the vial. His fingers shook the fresh bandages, but he let them go and handed him the vial. “When you were brought here, your heart was erratic, barely beating but you were still alive. Mumbling, moving around.”

Egor tapped on the glass, “I ground this up, added a few things, and forced the concoction down your throat. At that point, your body gave out, so I had to use an AED. Electricity brought you back.”

Though Walker stayed silent, the blood that dripped down his palms betrayed him.

Egor continued his tyrant, “Ingesting that much poison from a Welting frog? You should’ve died in the cave a hundred times over. You know strawberries? The biggest ones are generally the worst tasting. That’s because geneticists bred for genes that coded for size. However, the gene that coded for sweetness and sugar content didn’t change. Thus, the sweetness was spread thin across all the juice, making it less concentrated. Either something changed you before or while at the cave when the poison was introduced, or the frog's poison wasn’t as concentrated in its expulsion-”

“Stop talking.”

Egor fell silent as Walker stared at his hands. His fingernails had cut through his skin, he couldn’t feel it. His body felt alien, unfamiliar, and unfeeling. Minutes ticked by in silence. He knew he was probably in shock, but that didn’t change the fact that just a couple of days ago he was sleeping on the couch in his father’s house.

His father, brother. He read somewhere that when you’re dying you think of your loved ones. He hadn’t thought about them once. He recalled a technique where a doctor would put a patient with mental illness into a chair and spin them around a bunch to shake their brain into place. Walker’s neck hurt too much to try it right now though.

“If the Stardust changed the ants, and the Stardust mutated the frog. What’s…”

Egor dropped the vial into a coat pocket, “I don’t know. No one’s survived an infusion of Stardust before. Congratulations.”

“How hasn’t anyone survived before, surely there’s been at least one?” Walker asked.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of ants in a season, thousands of frogs in a year. There’s a significant chance that eventually, one that could survive a change, would survive. There’s not many people who are willing to try, and not many governments willing to publicly experiment. Ethics and all,” Egor muttered to himself as he grabbed rubbing alcohol and bandages.

Walker let Egor rechange the already damp bandages on his arms. While he did so Walker opened his mouth to ask a question that had been nagging at the back of his mind, “What does this mean for me? Am I going to ‘transition’?”

Egor glanced at him quizzically, “You already have. Some combination of the Welting genomic code, your genes, and environment, allowed the Stardust to alter your body to one that is capable of handling a catabolic poison.”

Egor left the silent young man on the table to pull something from behind a bin.

“Here’s your backpack, most of your clothes were burned. Fresh ones are in here,” Egor dropped the backpack on the table.

“These… marks,” Walker scratched involuntarily at the bandages, “will they heal?”

Egor shrugged, “Maybe, maybe not. So far, they are healing at a rapid pace, so I would say yes. Most likely scar tissue would remain, but that’s fair for what your body’s gone through.” Egor pushed the bag closer to him, “You have a place to stay?”

“Maybe, I don’t know.”

“You can go to a hospital, but with what you’re on right now I don’t think you could hold your dick to piss. I recommend you stay here for a while if you have nowhere else, at least until you're off the meds.”

“Expect me to go crazy?” Walker forced out a laugh.

Egor stared at Walker with an unreadable expression, “I’m going to shoot you straight, yes. Right now, your brain, and body, are a cesspool of chemicals. Trust me when I say this, Stardust will change you, and not in ways you’re going to like.”

At that, Walker struggled the backpack open, and retrieved the white pants, shirt, and underwear from the backpack. Walker denied Egor to help him dress by telling him to buzz off. He was able to get the underwear on, but after a couple of minutes of fumbling with the shirt he acquisition Egor’s aid. Two all-business minutes later, Walker, dressed like a cult member, limped alongside Egor to a dingy twin-sized cot that sat beneath the stairs. He all but collapsed on the cot.

As a wave of drowsiness overtook him, it occurred to him that he really didn’t know Egor all that well. It also didn’t escape his notice that since his clothes were burned and he was practically naked on the table Egor, and possibly others, saw his dick.