Chapter Text
Her heart was beating so much faster than what she knew should’ve been normal for a 10 year old girl. She felt her bones and muscles suddenly shift and break and reform into entirely new shapes. She felt like she needed to constantly move, lest she die from the lack of motion, much like a shark needed to in order to live. Her newly changed body wasn’t built like a Humanoid, and that was all she knew. Her head was encased by a thick keratin shell-like helmet, which made her think of turtle shells and how those were made of bone. Was her helmet in this strange form embedded into her skull in the same manner, or was this thing more like hair?
As Gwen began to try and walk, she saw that her feet had become much like wheels being held by talons. Something that she compared to wearing shoes, but she wasn’t wearing shoes anymore. As she tried walking, she learned that such a feat was being resisted by her legs, and that each step she attempted was more like torture than walking. She soon tried thinking of her movements as less like walking and more like roller skating, and the pain in her legs swiftly calmed down as soon as she did so. The longer the pause between rolls meant the further she went. She learned that when she tried to reach the campsite from the crater and saw that she was already halfway there within seconds.
She felt like she was linked to the weather surrounding her as she existed in this form. As she ran, she felt even more like a shark, as she started becoming able to receive pulses of electricity emitting from her entire body, which echoed back into mind not unlike how bats use echolocation to keep track of where they were flying to and from. This sense was a mixture of shark electroreception and bat echolocation to Gwen’s mind, as each image surrounding her was a constant symphony of pulses and shocks. The trees and insects and grass and dirt and wind were all bursting with energies that the girl didn’t know if there were names for. Her vision became useless, given that she had honeybee-esque compound eyes that, while they could aid with her electric-echoing sense which allowed her to see the atmospheric pressures and gravity of everything that she was feeling, that were pointless in terms of what a Human would understand as vision, effectively making her blind by Human standards but very keen-sighted from the perspective of whatever she was now. Her sight was linked to her lateral line located in her spine and tail more than her eyes, anyways, and what she could see was someone trying to enter the tent. Somebody was trying to hurt her grandfather and cousin, and that wasn’t the kind of shit that Gwen was going to take in any form, be it Human or monster.
“Stay out of there!” She yelled as she rushed over towards the supposed attacker-to-be. She sharply rammed into him, forcing him to be moved back and far away from the tent.
Gwen briefly stopped to examine her work, automatically pulling her visor, which seemed to be meant as a parallel to an eyelid as well as a shield or veil for her face. Part of her compared it to a hijab and goggles were an equally valid comparison to make. The visor seemed to be a form of intimidation, meaning that if someone couldn’t see her face, they couldn’t know her intentions. As the pattern on her visor reminded Gwen of a large predator’s mouth, it was easy to draw the conclusion.
Returning to the act of defense, Gwen went back to the fight, which was cut short by the stranger using his own space watch to change into a weird ape/dog thing without eyes and gills on his neck and quickly tripped her up with one of his front paws.
Then there was a beeping sound coming from Gwen’s space watch, followed by a bright flash of pink light, leaving behind Gwen in her Human form.
“This night just keeps getting on weirder and weirder.” She said as she got back up, but what she didn’t know was just how much weirder the rest of her life had just become.