Another perspective, in another place...

Hell. She was in Hell. There was no other explanation. No surprise that she died, either. She’d made the fantastic decision to drive through the night in the middle of a snowstorm. Her car was probably wrapped around a tree somewhere off that highway in the middle of nowhere, and it’d be weeks before anyone came across her frozen corpse.

But all of that felt so distant in the face of what she was currently experiencing. She was nearly blind, only able to make out the vaguest shapes and blurry smears of color in the world around her. She didn’t need to see, however, to know that she had been transformed into… something else. Something cold, and soft, and… gooey. She tried to stand, only for crippling pain to radiate from the back of her head. She nearly passed out again, crying out with an inhuman, hissing whine.

“You must not move too suddenly, you are still healing.” A somehow familiar chittering noise came from nearby, registering as words in her mind, clear as day. She got the strangest sense of deja-vu, almost as if…

“Do I… know you?” She hissed, making sounds not with any sort of vocal cords, but by letting air out of her lungs like a deflating balloon.

“I can only hope." There was a deep sadness in their tone, almost mourning. "Your Gift has been fleeting for the better part of five days now. This is the first time you have been coherent enough to speak with me, though. I am happy to see that you are improving.” The sounds she was hearing as words were… animalistic, but deliberate. Kind, too. Whatever was speaking to her wasn’t human either, but they were far from monstrous in intent. They seemed to genuinely care. Perhaps this wasn’t Hell after all? “I am sure you wish to know what has happened to you, but I am afraid that I do not know. Please just rest for now.”

“Sure, I could use a little more…” She drifted off once again, unable to hold herself together any longer…

----------------------------------------

She awoke to the sounds of a shouting match.

"You can't keep me here! I'm a human being, not some specimen to be studied!" The first speaker's voice consisted of high pitch screeches and clicks, and held nothing but contempt for whoever they were speaking to.

"I do not even know what that is!" The second voice was calmer and more firm. She immediately recognized it as the one who had been speaking to her in her scattered memories of the last few days. "Furthermore, you are not being held here for study. You are being held here for quarantine and treatment. Besides, I am being kept here just as much as you are. If you must complain, at least direct it at the College!"

"At least they could get me a different room! Mucus Master over there absolutely reeks."

"Its name is Stream-Drifter!"

"If they're anything like me, it isn't anymore. Doesn't change the fact that they're covered in slime and smell like death, either."

"The scent is just a feral stress response, meant to deter predators. Once it wakes up it can wash itself in the bath and control itself better."

"Again, controlling that is less likely than you think. Speaking from experience as one of these 'afflicted.'"

"Are all members of your 'former species' so pessimistic?"

"Stop it." She let out a high pitched whine, immediately causing the two arguing people to fall silent. "I can't think straight with all this noise." She tried to stand, only fall as her right arm failed to move, her bizarrely long body slapping on the stone floor with a wet thud. Her mind was far too foggy to put together what any of this meant. "Why is everything so... heavy?"

"So, who wants to break the news to them?"

"Stream-Drifter!" the more familiar of the two voices chattered, and rapid pattering footsteps approached. "Here, let me help you with that." Something damp and sticky was lifted away from her face, revealing... just a bunch of blurry shapes. One stood in front of her, a vague smear of grays and blacks. A second shape was hanging farther back, much smaller and a colored a sandy brown. "Apologies, a wet blanket was the best way to keep you moist. We were instructed not to put you in the bath unconscious, as we wouldn't be able to pull you back out."

"Moist? What are you..." It all came back to her at once. Waking up in deep water. Panicking, trying not to drown. Flailing about, her right arm getting stuck, and slamming her head against something hard. She kept flailing still, only for something to painfully tear and crunch. There was the taste of blood in the water, and then nothing. She tried to put a hand in front of her face to see it, only to find her left arm too short to reach, and her right arm... missing. Lost during those first few moments. "Oh god. What am I?"

"So you really do not remember..." The larger of the two blurry creatures stood aside, dejected.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"Hate to say I told you so, but..." The smaller one crawled forward awkwardly, moving as if its legs were different sizes. "You, my friend, would appear to be a giant salamander of some sort, unless you know of any other four foot long slimy not-lizards. Apologies on winning the shitty body lottery. Well, at least salamanders can regrow limbs, I think?"

The smaller creature, another human, explained the basics of the situation from their point of view. How they'd both been plopped into the bodies of these intelligent animals in a society made up entirely of them, how strange it was to talk without talking, and how horrible it was that they were being kept prisoner here.

"Try to understand it from our perspectives," the other creature explained. "You have not simply 'become' something else, all of your thoughts and memories have replaced those belonging to others. They had lives and... others who cared about them." It was plain as day that they were referring to themselves in that statement. "No one has any idea what may have caused this, and a disease of some kind is a possibility. We are all being kept here until it can be confirmed that your affliction is not contagious."

"Oh. I'm so sorry," she said, swishing her long, heavy tail side to side in an attempt to better express herself. Doing so finally gave her a sense of scale with her body. She was massive compared to the two other creatures in the room, despite her eyes being more or less level with them. From nose to tail, she was maybe three or four times longer than the larger of the two animals, who was themselves at least twice as large as the smaller one. "I'm also sorry that I've hurt your friend. If there's anything I can do to make it up to you-"

"Why are you apologizing?" the other human screeched, flaring out what appeared to be broad wings. "We didn't do anything wrong! If anything, these animals must have done something to trap us here! They should be trying to make it up to us! Do you have any idea how long bats live? I don't, but I'm sure it's way less than the sixty-plus years I'd have had left in my actual body! And I'm going to have to live them out without hands! How can you be so calm about this?"

"I... don't know." The bat was right, if overly aggressive. She wasn't at fault for any of this. But she still wanted to help. It was the right thing to do. However, by all rights, she should not be taking this so well. Even her last coherent memory was of her panicking. But right now, something was keeping that instinct in check. Some vague feeling that things were going to be okay, that she wasn't as lost as she really should be. When she lifted her head, shifted her body, curled her tail, as alien as it all was, it didn't feel wrong, either. "You mentioned something about a bath earlier, right, Swift-Paw? I could really use one to clear my head. Could you help me with that?" Her question was met with only stunned silence as both other animals froze. "Did I say something wrong?"

"Stream-Drifter!" The gray animal leapt at her, wrapping their forelegs around her head in an awkward embrace, heedless of her slimy skin. "You remembered my name! You are still in there somewhere!" The raccoon let out an overjoyed purr, their species having finally become obvious at this distance.

All the salamander could do was sit there dumbfounded.

Where did that come from? That felt so... natural. Is this... 'Stream-Drifter' in here with me? Am I both of us? I still feel like 'myself,' though. I know that's not my name. My name is...

"Wait! No! Get off of me!" The salamander squirmed, nearly throwing Swift-Paw all of the way to a nearby wall with her bulk. A sudden pang of guilt and panic rang through her mind as she tried to crawl over to the raccoon, unable to make it very far with a missing leg. "Sorry! Sorry! Are you okay?"

"Yikes, remind me to stay out of your reach," the bat chirped flippantly, making a show of shuffling backwards a few steps.

"Now is not the time!" the salamander squeaked back. The other human's attitude was finally starting to get on her nerves.

"I am fine, do not worry." Swift-Paw stood up and shook themselves off. "I apologize for reacting the way I did. I'm just happy Stream-Drifter is still here."

"I'd prefer if you didn't call me by their name, though. It will only complicate things."

"Right. Of course. Of course you aren't them. Not entirely." The blurry shape of the raccoon shifted and faced to the left. Despite the lack of detail, the salamander could tell that they had broken eye contact and was looking away in disappointment. "What should I call you?"

"Call me... Song. That's what my name meant."

"Oh, so you get to have a name?" The bat grumbled to themselves. "Lucky."

"That is... odd, but it will do." Swift-Paw nodded. "Did you still wish to-"

"Excuse me!" A nervous canine bark rang out from somewhere in the blurry distance, seemingly muffled from behind a door of some sort. "Is everything alright in there? You have been rather loud."

"Nobody is dying," the bat chirped, practically seething. "I'm just a little annoyed at the circumstances, is all!" As they shouted, they managed to flap their wings hard enough to tumble backwards, which did little to help their sour mood.

"That is... fair, given your predicament! Regardless, I was instructed to deliver a message for you all!"

"Do not mind the bat," Swift-Paw said. "It is rather... irritable."

"I'm not an 'it!'"

"As you can see. It is not making much sense, either."

Certainly an interesting quirk of the translation, Song mused, somehow less bothered by this than the bat was. I don't think any of us are actually using pronouns, or even any words at all. So when you get references to a person, do we interpret that as "it" because we still see them as animals first, or is it because they view themselves that way? Or is it just a matter of being as direct as possible?

"Regardless, I have important news for you!" the messenger continued. "Another group of three afflicted is arriving today! Please be prepared to accommodate them! Farewell!" The faint patter of paws on stone reached the group's ears as the messenger left.

"Well, they were certainly excitable," Song said.

"Indeed," Swift-Paw nodded. "Though I wonder if it is like that all of the time, or if it is just nervous because of you two."

"I don't really care. Just having more actual people to talk to will be nice." The bat crawled away, moving up against the far wall and blending in with the rest of the blurry shapes on the far side of the room.

Song almost said something, but remained silent. Starting a fight about the personhood of the animals around them would just make things worse. Swift-Paw wouldn't want to be a source of tension like that.

...Why do I know that? Song shuddered, hoping that this would be the worst it got. Ending up in such a strange body was bad enough. She didn't want to be questioning her identity on top of that.

She knew she would be anyway.