“Holy… holy shit!” she cursed. She ran one of her hands over her hair. “Dr. Howle, you just…” she panted. “You called on the power. I saw you do it.”

I nodded. “Yes, I did,” I said, softly.

Her expression contorted. “Did you—”

I shook my head. “—When we first met, I was… well, you could say I was in denial, I guess,” I explained. “I’m trying to be more proactive now. It’s character growth, I guess.”

We stared at each other in silence.

“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked.

The elevator came to a stop, the bell rang, and the doors opened. To me, it felt like her words had just ground the elevator to a halt.

I reached out to her, and she reached back. Instead of pulling, however, I pushed, raising her to her feet with the help of a psychokinetic scoop applied to her backside.

“It’s…” I sighed, “it’s complicated,” I said. I led her out into the hallway on the second floor.

“You say that to me a lot, Mr. Genneth,” Andalon said.

“Yes, Andalon,” I said, turning to face her, “yes I do.”

Nina stared in shock, mystified. Her head phased through the hyperphantasized cowl. “Who… who’s Andalon?” she asked. “Who are you talking to?”

I dared to smile at her. “It’s complicated.”

I saw some (much-justified) back-sass ready to leap out of her mouth, but I cut her off preëmptively.

“For now,” I said, “let me just say that, while you and I both have powers, they’re not quite the same. In fact, it’s probably best to say that you and I are in two very different boats, though we’re both headed in the same general direction: the salvation of souls.”

“What?” Nina asked.

“It’s a lot, I know,” I said. “You’ll understand a little more when you see your brother.”

“Why are we going all this way?” she asked.

“Because it’s where your brother is.”

Eventually, we arrived at Room 268.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. Andalon certainly was—though that was more my fault than anything else.

I wondered what Nina would have thought if she could see what I was making myself see. My anxiety was twisting the woodland I’d hyperphantasized within the halls. Tree leaves that had glowed like emeralds as shafts of sunlight ran over them like dew had dimmed as everything fell into shadow. Gnarled roots growing from the walls looked like limbs of the dead sprawling across the floor. The birdsong fell silent, and everything was rotten and decayed. I could see clumps of NFP-20 growing among fallen logs in the imaginary distance. Andalon clung to me like the frightened child she was.

“Make it go away, Mr. Genneth,” she said. “Please…”

Leave it to my psyche to darken my fantasies.

I dismissed the hyperphantasia with a well-placed thought. Nina’s cowl was gone, as were the trees and the fungus and the shadows. Only the clean, checkered vinyl floor and the corridor’s pasty walls and old, cord-dangled lights remained.

And, of course the quarantine seal in the doorway.

Nina stared quietly at the thick slab of metal obstructing the entrance to Room 268. Taking a step closer, she peered through the plastic viewing port in the middle of the slab, seeing the broken wood and shattered glass scattered across the antique room’s foyer, as well as the second quarantine seal that stood in the inner doorway several feet in front of the first.

I walked up to the wall-mounted console by the door and activated it with a scan of my chip. A couple gentle taps on the console’s touchscreen activated the intercom.

Though I’d brought Nina here for her own sake—and, I hoped, for her brother’s—I also had a reason of my own to pay Room 268 a visit.

“Kurt,” I said, speaking into the intercom.

“Dr. Howle?” he replied, a moment later. “What is it?”

The transformee’s words were high and low, resonant and astringent, and tinged with an otherworldly drawl. They sliced through Nina’s mental fog like a red-hot cutlass.

She staggered back, eyelids fluttering. “W-What was that?” she said.

I turned to face her.

“You wanted to know why I was giving you such a hard time about something as simple as seeing your brother?” I asked. “Well, you’re about to find out.” I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Please, whatever you do, don’t scream.” I glanced at Andalon. “And don’t run away, either,’ I added, thinking of my own mistakes. “That will only make things worse for everyone.”

Nina stiffened. “Wh—Why would I scream?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

“You might want to take a seat,” I said, pointing at the floor, near the quarantine seal.

For a moment, she hesitated, staring at me like I was up to something, but then she nodded and sat down in front of the quarantine seal, resting on her knees.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“I trust you,” she said.

Andalon sat down beside her. The little spirit girl reached out to try and comfort Nina by holding her hand, but she just phased through, and Nina didn’t notice a thing.

I turned back to the intercom.

“Kurt… did they feed you breakfast yet?” I asked.

With Director Hobwell now dead and ALICE running the show, I’d been worried that the deal I’d brokered with the Director and his superiors wouldn’t be upheld. The deal was between the two of us, and applied to all transformees under “treatment” in the hospital.

Also, I figured drawing things out a little might give Nina more time to wrap her head around what was about to happen.

“Yes,” Kurt said, answering glumly.

I sighed in relief. “I guess ALICE is upholding her end of the bargain,” I said.

“What?” another voice asked—it sounded like Maryon.

“Director Hobwell is dead. ALICE is the acting Director of West Elpeck Medical,” I said.

“What agreement?” Nina asked.

“That the transformees be fed,” I said. “This had the advantage of keeping them from eating the hospital’s personnel, though it also advances their changes.”

“Uh,” Kurt said, “I’m gonna have to correct you on that, Dr. Howle. They,” he paused, “they’ve been feeding us bodies.”

I inhaled sharply.

“By the Angel…” I muttered.

“If it’s any consolation, Doc, they taste just fine.”

I shuddered.

“B-Bodies?” Nina stuttered, looking up at me in terror.

“It gets worse,” I muttered, lowering my head without turning to face her.

It’s now or never, I thought.

“L—… Paul,” I said, “could you please come to the doors?” I glanced at Nina, who winced at the sound of her young brother’s “born again” name. I turned back to the intercom, adding, “There’s someone here to see you.”

The intercom clicked as I shut it off, but then I got nervous and turned it back on again with yet another click.

“Kurt,” I said, “if anybody tries anything, would you mind—”

“—No problem,” he said.

A second later, there was a soft, tinny knock from behind the seal.

I turned on the intercom. “Is that him?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Kurt said. He sounded like a sighing whale.

Then I opened the inner quarantine door.

It isn’t easy to describe what happened next. Descriptions work best for big moments, filled with pomp and circumstance, or lots of drama. The most challenging of all are the small, quiet times where a year’s worth of substance passes through a couple humble moments—which was what happened here.

Though there was certainly drama in the way Lopé… slithered out of Room 268 and into its foyer, the heart of the moment was in the subtleties of his body language, and of Nina’s, as she reacted to him. The best comparison I have for what it was like would be the sound of an orchestra warming up as the audience walked into an auditorium right before the start of the show, when the conductor walked out onto the stage and everyone turned in attention.

Through the viewing port, as Lopé slithered into the foyer, we could see a couple of the transformees sequestered in 268 clustered around the open inner doorway. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what they wanted: they wanted to be seen, and to speak and be heard.

And speak they did.

They were a gaggle of choristers, filled with questions and demands that they raised with their unearthly voices, though the sound was slightly muted by the sheer thickness of the outer quarantine seal.

“What’s going on?”

“Is he being let out?”

“Can I go home now?”

“I hope they brought wooden chairs this time. I don’t like the metal ones.”

Checking my wyrmsight, I saw a figure looming behind them, with what looked to be arms crossed in disapproval.

That was probably Kurt, keeping them in line.

I turned on the intercom once again. “Settle down, everyone,” I said. “Everything will be explained soon enough.”

Kurt used his powers to drag the others away from the door right as Lopé had pulled the rest of his body into the foyer. I used the wall-mounted console to raise the quarantine seal behind him, much to the disappointment of the transformees on the other side.

Nina watched in near total stillness, weeping silently. She covered her mouth with her hands, completely forgetting the mask on her face. With a trembling arm, she brought her hand up to the viewport in the middle of the reinforced steel, and as she did so, on the other side of the plastic, a three-fingered wyrm hand—dark red and tipped in wicked claws—did the same.

I’d last seen Nina’s younger brother yesterday afternoon, when my body was going on my rounds while my mind roved through the Plotskies’ memories. I’d been expecting for Lopé’s appearance to have changed in the interim, but I hadn’t anticipated just how drastic those changes would be.

I couldn’t begin to imagine Nina’s shock, nor did I need to. It was written all over her face. Her body language spoke of loss, terror, and disbelief.

When I’d last seen Lopé, his most notable change had been his transformation robbing him of his ability to speak. His lips had dissolved into wyrmhide that had sealed his mouth shut as the front part of his face swelled out in the shape of a snout, only for what was closed to open again as muscular holes appeared on his face in a symmetric arrangement.

The Lopé we saw now had gone even further beyond that. He was like a bobble-head doll, only with the head of a fungal dragon in between his shoulders, enlarged, elongated, and tapered. It was a lot like what Cassius’ head had become, only smaller and somewhat less grotesque—but not by much.

Swollen, tumorous growths crested from the back of his head, resembling the clustered fruiting bodies of fungi or slime molds, only arranged in the shape of horns. A mane of gray, lichenous fur grew in between them, from the top of his head, and continued down his neck onto his back, where they disappeared down and pushed against his hospital gown.

If there was any human skin left on his head, I couldn’t see it.

His snout-holes contracted and flexed, like lips ready to speak. His ears were totally gone, and he had five out of the six of the eyes he’d have once fully changed, two on the left and three on the right. The front-left eye, though… it was still human: half human, half golden wyrm-globe.

Lopé’s torso still seemed mostly human, and if it wasn’t, his hospital gown prevented me from noticing. One of his legs stuck out from underneath his hospital gown, where it trailed off to the side at an impossible angle. The limb was rotten and crumbly, ready to slough off at any moment. Further down—and behind—Lopé’s tail had grown. It was like a second, taper-ended torso trailing behind him, and he “sat” on it. He’d used what remained of his other leg to push off the floor, like an oar, to help propel himself as he’d slithered forward.

Nina shivered. Her head trembled. If she’d been made of glass, she would have shattered right before my eyes.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t keep my promise,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I sighed. “I don’t know if it’s any consolation, Nina, but… he’s still in there, exactly the same brother that you knew, ‘Demptist and all.”

In between her coughs and pants and gasps, Nina dared to whisper at the creature on the other side of the seal. “Lo…?”

Unable to voice his discontent—he preferred to be called by his born-again ‘Demptist name—he could only cross his arms in disapproval, a deeply human gesture for his deeply inhuman body.

In a strange way, I was actually feeling reassured by this upsetting turn of events. I didn’t want it to be, and the fact that it was reassuring only made me ache for Nina that much more. The transformees in 268 were no different from the ones in the Self-Help Group, or anywhere else. Despite being transformed in body and soul, Lopé’s mind was unchanged. The stupid, frustrating, unfair Irredemptist “transformation” that had remade him long before Andalon did hadn’t lost any of its hold on him. He was still the stubborn, blinder-wearing adolescent who couldn’t see how or why his wholehearted rejection of his family and his former self was so painful for them. If foibles like that could survive the wyrm transformation unscathed, there was no reason for me to fear losing my own sense of self. If my own experiences were any indication, at worst, it was now just a little bit fractured.

But none of this helped Nina.

“You stopped being my brother,” she said, “and now, you’ve stopped being human.” She laughed. “It’s almost funny.”

She cried.

Then, withdrawing her hand from the plastic viewport, she keeled over and sobbed, while Lopé’s half-human eye watched as it wept along with her.