User:LurkingWolf/A Day at the Pond

Author's Comments

Looking over this again, I think there are some things I could have done better. Expect an edit sometime in about a week

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This was the life! Sitting out on the pier, listening to the sounds of the world around me, completely cut off from all other humans. Not a care in the world, no problems, no work... That's why I'd come here. I'd never been much interested in work. The only work I really did was anything that was absolutely necessary for survival. That usually just consisted of fishing, which was something that I liked doing anyway.

People called me anything from lazy to an absolute no account criminal. I guess they figured that it was impossible to do as little work as I did and survive. I just think they lack any imagination. If you're smart, you can live doing basically anything. For me, that was basically nothing.

I sighed. This was the life! It couldn't get much better than this.

Actually, the more I thought about it, the more I felt that something was missing. There had to be something that wasn't fitting with my life, but I couldn't nail it down. I sighed heavily. Would I ever figure it out?

Well, for the time being, a swim sounded like just the thing. I stood up, walked to the beginning of the pier, turned, and ran at full speed towards the water. As I reached the end of the pier, I jumped off and landed in the water, creating quite a splash.

I surfaced, blowing the water out of my mouth and nose before settling back into a calm floating position on my back. I slowly maneuvered myself through the waters. I loved the feeling of the water, it was just so relaxing. If it were humanly possible, I would live in the water. There were some basic problems with that. First, I prune horribly. Second, breathing water isn't usually my strong suite.

I swam around in a tight circle, making sure I kept it as slow as possible, preserving the laziness that I was here to enjoy. I loved slow days, and tried to make sure to have at least seven predominantly lazy days a week.

For the next hour or so, I floated serenely on the surface of the water, admiring the scenery around me. I then swam to the edge of the lake, climbing out on the opposite shore.

If there was anything I enjoyed more than wasting a day being lazy, it was messing around, finding new ways to have fun by myself. After all, no one else wanted to have anything to do with me ever since I had been on my own. It had something to d with my trying to get everyone to join me in my antics. I still persisted in trying to convince others to join me, but they would almost always refuse, leaving me to shrug and tell them, "Suite yourself." I wished so much that I could find someone who liked the simple life as much as I did, but that was highly unlikely.

Once more I had let my mind wander. For the time being, I trekked the short distance between my exit point and the muddy bank that I had set up earlier. The mud was now just right for my intended purpose. Smiling, I sat down just above the start of the narrow runway. Taking a deep breath, I pushed myself forward and slid down the improvised water slide.

It was a blast! I felt the wind whipping past my face, through my long hair, the slick mud basically eliminating the friction that would normally keep me from doing this. I hooted and hollered like some crazed idiot all the way down into the water, then surfaced, sputtering and spitting out the water that had gotten into my mouth while I was yelling. What a ride! I HAD to do that again!

And I did. Eight more times I shot myself down the sloping bank, screaming for all I was worth, having a general all around awesome time of it. After the ninth time, I just stayed at the bottom of the bank for a while, still yelling about what a ride it was.

Finally I stopped yelling and just floated there for a few moments while I recovered from the latest ride. Suddenly, though, I felt something that seemed to be nibbling at my toes. That was weird, there had never been anything in here that would bite before. Being who I am, I thought this without making a move to get away. It takes a bit of doing to get my adrenaline flowing, but what happened next easily accomplished this.

Out of nowhere, I felt a rather painful bite right on the heel of my right foot. If I thought that I had screamed loud before, I went about five decibels over loud this time. I was on the pier in seconds, so fast that I didn't know whether I had used the ladder or just jumped out of the water. Either way, I found myself sitting on the pier, looking at my foot. Now that I saw it, I could see that it wasn't quite as horrible as I had thought when I felt it. There was some blood, but not enough to elicit the reaction that I gave it.

So I was a baby. Still, there was something in the water that had drawn blood. This in and of itself was enough to get me moving. I had never before thought that there might be something in the water that could hurt me without my having to drink the water. It freaked me out!

As I looked at the little wounds that the mystery creature had dished out, I could see about eight clearly defined individual injuries. Whatever it was, I couldn't identify it clearly as anything I knew to be in these waters. Then again, I didn't know of anything that was supposedly in these waters. I could rule a shark out conclusively, though. The fact that my leg was still attached was testimony to this fact.

As I inspected the wounds, I noticed that they seemed to be healing already. Huh! How convenient, there must have been something in the water was the only thing I could think of. I wiped away the blood from the cuts, and none came to replace it. That was good. At least, to the view of my severely limited medical knowledge it was. All of a sudden, though, I began to feel rather odd. There was a sort of inexplicable heat that encompassed my entire body. The sun was behind one of the few clouds in the sky, so that couldn't be it.

A few moments after beginning to feel hot, I also began to itch badly. It came out of nowhere, one moment, I was feeling just fine, the next, I was scratching uncontrollably. Combined with the heat, this situation made a respectable effort at making my life unbearable. The itching became slowly less irritating, but by the time I was able to ignore it, some other, more concerning things were happening to me. Take, for example, the light brown hair that now grew rather thickly all over my body. It didn't look natural. For one thing, I'm a natural blonde, for another, the hair was far thicker than it ought to have been on any human. I mean, I've know some hairy people, but this was ridiculous!

Well, the next thing that became obviously amiss was my fingernails. I KNOW I only clip them once a year, but my nervous ticks keep them in check every other time. I know for a fact, though, that my nails had never been this long or this sharp. I could almost break through my skin just dragging them over my skin. I quickly decided against further usage of this course of action after the first attempt.

The color of my nails was also off. I know I don't clean under them at all as much as I should, but seriously, they were completely grey. No wait, black! They darkened quickly, so they were grey just a minute ago!

Quickly I had other concerns. My body was now completely covered by the strange brown hair, which grew lighter along the chest and down the stomach. I realized suddenly that I seemed to be shrinking. It wasn't fast, but it was noticeable. My arms and legs especially seemed shorter, while my body became much longer in comparison to them. My legs also seemed to change even more drastically than the rest of my body. My kneecaps seemed to disappear, replaced by a smooth curve. My feet seemed to lengthen, making me start losing my balance. With what all was going on, I decided to let gravity win for now, and fell to the wooden platform below me.

As I did, I looked behind me to see my legs finish changing. Their nails were changed too, and strange black pads formed on their soles. The rest of the soles not included in the padding were also covered by the hair. My arms changed slightly as well, and my hands were padded in a way quite similar to my feet.

My head suddenly began to ache horribly. My ears seemed to become congested, but as I tried to pop them, I felt as though my jaw became disjointed. Panicked, I grabbed at my face to try and somehow pop it back into position, I felt my nose with my hands. The odd thing was that they weren't anywhere near where they should feel my nose. It was like my nose had come out to touch my hands. The really weird thing was that it didn't quite feel like my nose, or at least not like how I remembered it. I just somehow knew it was my nose. It had changed too.

Finally feeling that I could do nothing about my jaw, I crawled on all fours towards the water's edge to try to get a glance of the changes to my head. Oddly, all fours now meant on my hands and feet. It didn't feel comfortable on what had used to be my knees. As I reached the edge of the pier, I felt a distinct pop as my ears suddenly adjusted, then another stronger as my jaw found it's proper place, now a little farther from my eyes it seemed. In fact, now looking down, I could see my nose had also moved out, as well as moving down as I had felt before. It also was black at the end, and covered in the brown hair everywhere else.

I looked down into the water. What I saw was quite different from my expectation. My blonde hair was gone, and I now had no more hair other than the thick coat I now wore everywhere on my body. My eyes were black now. I could now see the short muzzle that had taken my mouth and nose away from my face. It was a strange feeling. Strangely... so right... I didn't have much time to think over it. Just as it seemed that all had settled as it was, I felt a great pain at the end of my spine. Looking back, I could see a bulge in the back of my shorts, a bulge that was causing me great pain. Reaching back, I tried to loose the lump from the fabric, but it beat me to the punch. My shorts were pushed quickly down by the growing tail.

At first I was surprised to see the tail, but looking at the rest of the ensemble, it was the perfect compliment. It was long, thick and covered in the same brown fur that covered the rest of my body. I briefly remembered that the shorts had been there for a purpose, but it was quickly lost to the other preoccupations of the moment.

I felt great! I knew that it was over now, though I couldn't fathom why. I just knew. Looking at myself, I couldn't find a trace of who I had been before. Instead, I saw what I should have always been. Looking at myself in the water, I saw the face of an animal, but I couldn't for the moment remember what it was, that was how caught up in the moment I was. It was the me I had always wanted, though, and it felt awesome!

As I started to calm down, I had one irresistible urge. I quickly jumped off into the water. It felt great just to swim around without having to worry about getting out. I was finally living the life of my dreams!

Suddenly, as I swam through the water happily, I saw something moving to my right through the water. I moved towards the object, and saw that it was an otter. I suddenly realized that that is what I had become. I was an otter. If I had know it would feel this great, I would have looked for a way to do it before!

I approached the otter, and we surfaced together. For the other otter, it seemed to be some instinct. For me, I was following it, hoping somehow to communicate with it.

As we breached the surface, I heard it speaking to me.

"Welcome to the lake!" it said. If it hadn't been obvious before, I now knew this otter to be female.

"H-Hi," was all I could muster.

"Hmm, you're not very talkative," she commented.

"Really? That is, I'm sorry. I mean I'm sorry for not..."

She clapped her paw over my muzzle. "Hush before you make a bigger fool of yourself. I gave you this form so that you could enjoy this lake to the fullest, since you already loved it so much. All I ask is that you enjoy this life, I do not need you to say anything."

A sudden thought hit me. "Wait, were you the one that bit me?"

She nodded. "I'm sorry about the pain, it was necessary."

"Oh no! No apologies for me! I would have gone through ten times worse for this!"

She giggled. "Glad you enjoy it so much! I thought you might..."

"So... Am I some sort of were otter or something?"

"Don’t be silly!" she said. "Were creatures don't exist!"

"Really? Wow, I thought it would be easy to have a were creature, considering what you

just did to me..."

She shook her head. "Kid, you've got a lot to learn."

I gave a mumbled, "Oh." That was all I could think of. I sat there for a while, trying to think of what I could say at a time like this. Finally, though, something fun came to mind. "Hey, you want to try out my slide?"