Lost World

You need to understand, I was not a SCAB. Yes, I was a humanoid housecat, but I was born that way; my parents were the SCABS, not me. Second generation animorphs are uncommon, but we do exist. I had a childhood, just like everybody else, and I went to school, just like everybody else. Sure, my classmates made fun of me but that got old after bit once they got used to me. I graduated from high school and got a job at a bakery. Fast forward several years and I was happy, healthy, and well liked by my coworkers and friends. While not wealthy by any standard, I could meet my needs and was able to keep some cash stored away for a rainy day.

Then I got sick.

I didn’t think it was the Flu, most people don’t. The doctors at the local hospital were familiar with my history, but since no one expected a person with feline physiology to get the Flu, there wasn’t any medication I could safely take. Ironically, it was after thanking the physicians for their time and resigning myself to a period of bed rest that things got worse. I had just stepped out of the doctor’s office when I began to feel dizzy. My vision blurred and my head felt like my brain was on fire, and then I passed out.

I woke up in a hospital bed, and the first thing I remember feeling was the cold; pure, unadulterated cold air assaulting my body. It was when I rubbed my arms to try and warm up that I realized what was wrong: I didn’t have any fur. Panic surged through me, and I quickly checked over my body. My fur had indeed vanished, only pale skin remained, and my legs had lengthened while my feet and claws had shrunk. Examining my paws, I found them to have slightly increased in size, each finger longer and separate. My tail was simply gone, filling me with feelings of weakness and disability at the thought of the loss of such a useful appendage. Finally, I raised a hand to my face and examined it. I winced as the cold skin met cold skin and I cried a little inside as my hand felt the flat face, whiskerless nose, and the immobile, rounded ears at the side of my head. I didn’t need the doctor coming in to tell me why I had passed out for two days; I didn’t need the mirror he offered, because I already knew what had happened.

I contracted SCABS. I had become human.

It didn’t take long for me to adjust to walking plantigrade and I was able to go home within a week. My boss and co-workers were glad to have me back at the bakery, and my friends were eager to take me out to bars and clubs to demonstrate the ‘finer aspects of the species’. While on the outside I smiled and nodded along as they told me how better my life would be, on the inside I felt hollow, dead to the world. The worst part was that I had no one to confide in; every time I tried to open up to one of my friends I would be silenced by their offended looks. Eventually I stopped trying, and as far as anyone knew I had accepted my change.

I tried to adjust, I really did, but at every turn I was reminded of what I had lost. Each time I walked outside I longed for the paws which let me feel the ground rather than the dull silence of socks and shoes, each night I missed my old eyes as I was forced to use streetlamps to find my way, and each winter I mourned the loss of my fur as the cold assaulted my frail skin no matter how hard I tried to bundle up. I began to hate the people around me, hate how the other SCABS lamented their lives when I would have given anything to be in their place, hate how the norms could be content with the deadened world they lived in. No one ever knew my feelings of course; to them I was still the same person I always was.

Nowadays, I still work at the bakery, but it has become a monotonous job rather than something I could enjoy, and I still see my friends though it is more out of courtesy than any desire to be with them. I go through the same motions of my life that I did before the change, but they are nothing but dull, repetitive acts for a single purpose, because whenever I can, I go out at night and find a polymorph. I pay whatever they ask because it means that for a few short hours I can enjoy the world that I’ve lost. led a bit to myself at how foolish I had been to look up airport directions before even deciding where I wanted to go.