I felt as if I’d just come back from a long walk. I imagined my heart would have been racing, maybe even some sweat piling on my brow, had my body still been capable of doing either of those things. But, most importantly: I was hungry.

I suppose I deserved the fierce “I told you so” that Nurse Costran gave me when I finally took up her offer of food.

“What about your commitment to dragging out your transformation for as long as you can?” she asked.

“I’m still committing to it,” I said, “I just didn’t anticipate getting giddy about being able to fly.”

“You weren’t flying, Dr. Howle,” Larry said, “you were just floating.”

“A man can dream, can’t he?” I said.

Yuth rolled her eyes at me and crossed her arms.

“I just need enough to tide me over,” I said.

“No,” Yuth replied, “you’ll get a full ration.”

“What?” I asked.

With a wave of claw, she floated a couple bags of snacks over to me. I grabbed them as graciously as I could.

“There are rules, Genneth,” she said. “We ration what food we have, and everyone makes sure to eat their fair share. As you know, the more you put off the hunger, the harder it hits you once you finally surrender to it.”

“He’s probably going to want more,” Dr. Rathpalla said.

“Then he can come back in five hours,” Yuth replied, directing a glare at me. “Maybe that will teach you to do a better job of taking care of yourself.”

The snack-bags’ plastic packaging crinkled in my grip.

“Still… thank you,” I said, bowing slightly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me… actually, uh,” I looked around, “where’s the restroom?”

Larry told me where. It turned out there were several of them. Most importantly, this ward had a single-person restroom.

I bowed again, and then walked off.

“Where are you going?” Dr. Rathpalla asked.

“To eat, and then assess the damage,” I said.

Into the single-person restroom I went, and there, I ate, sitting on the toilet, facing backward—lid closed, of course. The blue flames came and flowed into Andalon as I sat, waiting for the flesh-crawling feeling to fade from my body. Andalon sat at the edge of the sink, though I kept my eyes away; the mirror was behind her, and I wasn’t exactly interested in watching my humanity drain away, nor was there much point in assessing the damage, as it were, while my changes were still ongoing. Honestly, they weren’t very intense, just a feeling of things lengthening or shortening.

That didn’t make it any more comfortable, however.

Finally, I felt myself settle. Then, begrudgingly, I got up, took off the upper half of my green hazmat suit, set it down on the metal handlebars abutting the porcelain throne, and tugged down on the lower suit’s lower half before confronting the mirror, to behold what I was becoming.

I was less human than I remembered. The man I’d once been was slipping through my fingers. My tail was the worst part. It had swelled to the point where nearly two-thirds of my backside had merged with the darn thing. The awkwardness of having to pull it out of the empty oxygen-tank pocket in the back of the hazmat suit quickly turned to shock and panic as I realized just how big it had gotten. It coiled in on itself, swelling the back of my hazmat suit into a freakish hunchback of strained plastic. I had to contort myself—huffing and puffing with effort‚ to bend forward far enough to slip it out. It was like pulling a preserved snake out of a jar, only without the formaldehyde. Seeing its length and thickness made my panic bottom out into dread. I didn’t have to strain myself at all to look over my shoulder to see it splayed out on the floor behind me. It flopped onto the floor like a dead tuna, pulling me down with its sheer weight. The cold touch of the tiled floor against the tip of my tail sent a jolt up my spine. Fudge, the thing was big. Just thinking about its size in comparison to my legs made me shudder. I’d been able to forget about how big it was because I’d gotten used to walking around with it stuffed into the back of the hazmat suit.

My legs were approaching a sub-skeletal existence. A person shouldn’t be able to wrap a single hand all the way around the thickest part of their thigh. I could hardly feel them, in contrast to my tail, which now had full feeling. Every inch of it was a living, moving part of my body. It felt more like me than my rotting human body. It felt like I had three legs now, two of which felt like stubs with long, numb extensions sticking out from them.

My tail was as long as I was tall.

A wave of lightheadedness struck me, making me swoon; the ghost of my departed panic attacks, perhaps? I steadied myself by digging my claws into the sink beside me. I winced at the screech of my claw-tips scraping against the white porcelain, fighting with gravity and the weight of my tail to keep myself upright.

But, even more than disturbed, I was hungry. Above all else, I was still hungry.

“Darn it, Yuth,” I muttered.

Just as she and Ibrahim had predicted, having fed it, the hunger was up and back with a vengeance.

From my seat, I got a sideways view of my reflection in the mirror. Without the hazmat suit’s visor distracting my eyes, it was harder for me to keep from matching the sensations I felt to signs of physical deformation.

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Who was I kidding? I looked—and felt—like a lizard-man in a discount human suit.

My shoulders had sunken in, a little bit along the vertical, but mostly on the horizontal. My torso—sternum, clavicle, and ribs—were like a beaver-gnawed trunk, scrunched up and slightly narrowed. My neck was longer than it had any business being. It was only after I’d pulled it free from the hazmat suit’s headpiece that I realized just how much I’d been bending my neck in order to keep hidden from wandering eyes.

In a monstrously kind twist, my face was still almost completely unchanged. The only noticeable changes to my head were some clumps coming loose at the back. “Fudge…” I groaned. The sound bounced off the walls, echoing like waves seeping into sand.

Anything else? I wondered.

Well… did the fact that I looked like snirt count as a change? ‘Cause, if it did, then I’d definitely changed in that respect, too. Day after day of non-stop hardships had taken their toll on me, not to mention everyone else, and not just the staff. Even the building seemed to be suffering.

Even the bathroom. The familiar scent of antiseptic was nowhere to be found. Instead, the air in the bathroom was heavy with the fungus’ pungent sweetness, accented with the stench of pus, dried vomit, and decomposing urea. Bodily fluids speckled on and around the sink and toilet covered the tile and porcelain in a foul lacquer, predominantly of the spore-sprinkled black ooze variety. It was anyone’s guess as to whether the janitors had given up, or simply died.

Probably both, I thought, bitterly.

I wasn’t sure if I even had a stomach—the organ—anymore, but that didn’t stop my hunger from trying to have its way with me. It was getting really bad now.

Suddenly, a plan inserted itself into my head. I did not like it, but I couldn’t not do it.

It was that kind of impulse.

Also, I suppose this is what I deserved for being a hypocrite.

Walking over to the toilet, I knelt down onto the tile. I didn’t feel anything against my knees, though I did hear a discomforting crack as I did so.

I couldn’t help but flinch at that.

Even though all modern toilets had built-in bidets, toilet paper still hadn’t gone out of fashion.

Thank you, DAISHU!

Grabbing sheets from the roll in the dispenser in the wall, one by one, I dipped their edges in the bowl’s clean water and wiped down the collage of bodily fluids spattered on the floor.

“Mr. Genneth,” Andalon asked, “what are you doing?”

“Look away,” I said. “You don’t want to see this,” by which I meant, I didn’t want to see it.

Ugh.

All my human instincts were screaming at me to toss the filthy things into a waste receptacle, but—to my eternal dismay—I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

They smelled too good.

I closed my eyes as I plopped them into my mouth and swallowed, shuddering in horror.

Angel, it was delicious. Like skins of cotton candy bursting on my tongue and throat. Contact with my tongue instantly dissolved the wet toilet paper as my transforming body digested and absorbed the drek. I kept on cleaning and eating until my hunger lost its edge. I was still famished, but not enough to make me drool uncontrollably.

Surprise surprise, toilet paper wasn’t very filling.

Behind me, Andalon applauded. “It’s so clean now!”

That almost made me laugh. Instead, though, I sighed.

I really was fighting against the inevitable, but what else could I do?

I wouldn’t be of much use to anyone if I got locked up like my transformee patients, not even to those patients themselves. I worried they’d only have anger and resentment for me. I’d be more alone in the truth than I would be in the precarious fiction I was currently playing at.

I felt like an inverted pendulum. I seemed stable enough at the moment, but, despite the progress I’d made—making myself useful, mastering my powers—I feared I could lose it all with just a single misstep.

I didn’t know what I’d do if things fell apart, other than drown in despair.

Again, I sighed.

Glancing at the toilet roll, I briefly pondered eating it before deciding against it.

The more I ate, the more I changed; the less human I became. That was how the transformation worked. My time at playing doctor would come to an end rather quickly unless I took steps to try and slow it down as much as I could, which was what I’d been doing—spreading out my meals, minimizing them into the lightest grazes, rationing what humanity I had left to spare—but, darn it, it was getting difficult to keep stringing myself along like this.

Surrounded by the fluorescent lights’ buzz, I looked up to the icon of the Angel mounted on the wall, beside the mirror. The things were everywhere; God needed to watch you poop, I guess. Most of the time, I ignored them. They brought up painful memories of broken promises and rejected prayers. As I stared at the icon—at the angles of His Wings and the arcs of the Sword—I realized my relationship with the Angel had changed. My faith itself had changed, and for the better. As horrors weighed down on me from every side, I’d finally found something greater to believe in: Andalon.

I believed in her. I genuinely wanted to help her. Dare I say it, I had even grown fond of her. Andalon was my new faith. I had a growing conviction that Lassedicy’s teachings were distorted, perhaps more so than even the most strident atheists would have thought. Andalon, though… she was the genuine article. We’d gotten it wrong—wronger than we could possibly imagine. But, at least now, with Andalon, I stood a chance of learning the truth.

Andalon was my connection to the Truth.

Admitting that to myself was as liberating as it was frightening. I still had only the vaguest inkling as to what Andalon truly was. Even so, I was certain that I was now a part of events whose true scope boggled the mind, and despite the horrors in my midst, I couldn’t deny that, for the first time in a long time, I was excited to find out more. Would it be terrifying and overwhelming? Probably. But I wasn’t the same person as I was when I’d started this journey—literally and figuratively. I wasn’t helpless anymore.

I was still afraid of demons, but, at least now, I knew how to fight them.

And it was all thanks to Andalon.

“Talk about a mixed bag,” I muttered.

At that moment—as she was wont to do—Andalon spoke up in that innocent, inconsequential way of hers. “Mr. Genneth…” she said, tilting her head to the side.

I turned to her. As soon as our eyes met, she stepped to my left and pointed at the icon of the Angel up on the wall by the mirror.

“Why is one of the Shiny Guys up there?” she asked. “He’s so small.”

Shiny Guys…? I thought. A shiver tickled all the way down my spine.

I couldn’t have known that what I was about to hear was going to turn my world on its head.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“That Shiny Guy over there.” She pointed at the statuette again.

The blood ran cold in my veins, plummeting to ten-thousand below absolute zero, and I didn’t even know if I still had blood.

The next words on my tongue made my tail seem as light as a feather.

“Andalon,” I said, with a shudder and a gulp, “what’s…” I inhaled sharply, “…what’s a Shiny Guy?”

“That!” she said, pointing at the icon yet again. “They don’t always look like that. Sometimes they look weird or silly, but they’re always pretty, and they’re always really really shiny.” She nodded happily. “That’s why I call them Shiny Guys!”

I took several deep breaths to calm myself—not that I actually needed them. I didn’t think clearly when I was flustered.

I can’t begin to explain how uncanny this was.

The S. That fudging S. She wasn’t saying, “Shiny Guy.” She was saying, “Shiny Guys.”

Plural!

The Angel was not plural. That’s why He was the Angel. God came in three Persons, yes, but only one of them was the Angel.

“Andalon, why are you saying Shiny Guys?” I asked. “There’s only one Angel.”

She shook her head. “Nuh-uh, Mr. Genneth, there are lots of Shiny Guys.”

This did not help calm me down.