He awoke to sensory overload. Even with his eyes closed, he was assaulted by unfamiliar scents, sounds, and sensations with absurd detail and intensity. The scents, rather than mixing into a single amalgam of various smells, were each clearly distinguishable, while the pained cries of an extremely distressed bird rang in his ears with the intensity of a fire alarm, somehow communicating the exact location of the poor animal. He needed to shut it out. Focus on one thing. Ground himself, or else start to panic.

Touch. Just focus on touch. Immediately he got the sense that things were wrong. Very wrong. But he hoped he could handle wrong, so long as he took it one thing at a time. The sounds and scents faded into the background, the world giving way to practiced mindfulness.

Breathe in, breathe out. What do you feel? He was lying on his side, cushioned by thick grasses. The contours of his body, however, were bizarre. His arms and legs were outstretched, but felt disproportionately short compared to his torso. And that was to say nothing of what felt like a long, heavy extension of his spine, curving outwards.

No pain. No broken bones. No numbness. But I’m... misshapen? With a… tail? His heart began to race. Fast. Faster than the human heart could beat. It could only mean one thing, and that only made it worse. Rather than accept the clear truth he’d already put together, he withdrew again. Started from square one with a different sense.

Focus. Breathe. Just listen. Pick one sound and listen. The most immediate and obvious sound was the rapid thrumming of an inhuman heart in his ears, so he latched onto the only other thing he could hear: the panicked cries of a bird. It was more than just distressed and angry, like injured or trapped wild animals he’d encountered before. No, these were cries of confusion, terror, despair, and denial. So much emotion and meaning wrapped up in what were obviously the sounds of an animal. It was almost as if…

“No no no no no! This isn’t real! This isn’t happening! Wake up wake up wake up!” Like tuning into a radio station, the unintelligible caws and screeches suddenly became crystal clear. Not audibly, the sounds were the same as they had been, but he understood them. They formed sentences and expressed emotions to him, despite not containing any actual language he recognized. “I’m not an animal! Not a bird! I’m me! Just let me wake up!”

Once more, panic nearly overtook the man as the reality he’d been avoiding washed over him, but this time something else kept him grounded. He was not alone. Someone else was here, experiencing the exact same impossible thing. Someone who was lost in the terror and disbelief he had only narrowly avoided because their presence had drawn him out of it. Knowing nothing else, one thing became clear: He needed to help them, because he refused to entertain the idea of going through this alone. Not for him, nor for anyone else.

So he finally opened his eyes.

He was prepared for his sense of sight to be wildly different in this body. But what greeted him when he opened his eyes was still bizarre and almost impossible to parse. It was only when he tried closing one eye that he got a better grasp on what he was seeing. His eyes were on the sides of his head, facing outward more than they faced forward. Rather than looking straight ahead with both eyes, he could see most of his surroundings at once, with even the peripheries of his vision coming in crisp and clear. Even grasping that, it was nearly as overwhelming as all of his other senses combined, but after a moment the strain of it all seemed to fade. Even the gray, furry muzzle taking up a sliver in the center of his view felt unobtrusive, as if it didn’t exist if he didn’t focus on it. A sudden rush of movement through the grass to his left caught his eye, and his attention snapped to it reflexively.

Am I wired to notice movement and pay less attention to stationary things? He wondered, though the source of that movement reminded him that now wasn’t the time for experimentation. The other person, who seemed to be a crow of some sort, was thrashing about in the dirt a short distance away. He took his first steps forward, trying to push past the bizarre clashing of his human muscle memory and quadrupedal body. He was less than successful, however, immediately stumbling as he moved limbs in the wrong order. Maybe if I… pretend I’m crawling? That did the trick. One paw at a time, alternating sides between front and hind limbs. The gait and posture were natural, so it was far less strenuous than crawling on his former hands and knees would have been, but it was still slow. He’d need to figure out that sort of scampering movement small animals did if he wanted to move any faster.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Having made it past the grass, he could see more of where they were, along with the crow in their entirety. They were situated in a forest clearing of some sort. It certainly seemed huge, but given the apparent size of the trees, which stretched upwards like skyscrapers, he could only assume that their small size was the reason for that. The crow was a fair bit larger than he was, but not enough to make approaching him particularly daunting. By this point their cries had died down to the avian equivalent of sobs and incoherent muttering, so he just needed to figure out how to grab their attention.

“Hey-“ he squeaked, his “voice” catching in his throat as he heard what he sounded like for the first time. Small, rather cute in any other context, and very, very vulnerable. But it was what he had to work with right now, so he shoved that thought away, trying not to think about it. “Hey, can you hear me?” His chittering didn’t seem to phase the bird, however, and he remembered that he didn’t understand what the bird was saying until he tried to focus on the sounds. He needed to give them something more concrete to pay attention to. So he pounced, leaping at them with outstretched limbs.

“No! Let me go! Change me back!” The crow’s cries once again filled the air as he tried to wrap his forelegs around them in an impromptu embrace. Thankfully the crow was even less adept at moving their body as he was, and their attempts at struggling failed to dislodge him.

“Calm down. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay,” he said, his words forming out of an odd, cooing purr. He was lying, of course. None of this was okay, and he had no reason to believe that that would change any time soon, but he needed that lie as much as the bird did. “Stay calm and talk to me. Just make any sounds you can, I think we can understand each other.”

After a long and awkward silence, the crow finally spoke, softly cawing and clicking to create their words. “You’re a squirrel,” they stated flatly, still clearly lost.

“Oh.” The squirrel turned his head to confirm this, finally seeing the enormous fluffy tail that had been residing in the blind spot behind his head all this time. “I suppose I am.” He turned back to the crow, who just stared at him in disbelief. “But I’m also like you. Formerly human.”

“We’re not ’formerly’ human,” The bird snapped, finally managing to shake off the squirrel and pull themselves up onto their talons, towering over him as their eyes stared into his with a sudden clarity and conviction. “We are human! I won’t have my person-hood dictated by any of this… mystical nonsense!”

“No arguments there.” The squirrel nodded. “Glad to see you’ve pulled yourself out of that spiral, friend.”

The crow just stood there for a moment, all of that determination and anger quickly fading. “…What now?” They asked, looking around the clearing as fear began to creep back into their voice.

“Survival.” The squirrel looked up at the sky, which had begun to take on a lovely orange tint over the last few minutes. “If all that time I wasted as a scout in my teens taught me anything, it’s what your priorities are when you’re lost in the woods. We find shelter, we find food and water, and we find help.”

“Help?” The crow scoffed. “Who is going to help us like this?”

“Perhaps nobody, but making ourselves impossible to find isn’t going to do us any good on the off-chance that…” Something caught the squirrel’s attention as he spoke. Not a sight or sound, but a smell, suddenly highlighted by a shift in the evening breeze. It was a pair of smells, to be precise, clearly distinct from the scents of the two of them and the ambient odors of dirt and grass. They clung to his fur and seemed to leave a clear trail to follow, one clearly pointing out into the woods as he sniffed the air around him. “I think I’ve got a direction for us to go in. Can you walk?”

“…Maybe?” The crow took an awkward couple of steps forward, visibly cringing as they paid attention to the way the joints in their legs were oriented for the first time. “It feels like I'm walking backwards, but it doesn’t hurt. I think I can manage.” They flashed the squirrel an odd open-beaked expression that read as an uneasy attempt at a smile. “Sorry that our introductions started out so poorly.” They paused for a moment, that sentence having come out rather strange. “My name is-“ Another pause, this time with a distinct twinge of panic. “I’m… myself.”

A cold realization crept over both the squirrel and the crow. Their names were gone, replaced by the same translated meanings that had replaced all of their communication. Even within their own thoughts.

They were simply themselves, and that was all they could say.