Giant Mouse
 | [[:Category:Xanadu|Xanadu]] story universe |
[[Setting::Xanadu| ]]
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There were furry costumes galore in the Orlando convention center, all manner of beast both realistic and fictional. It had surprised Max greatly - previous years hadn't had nearly this many, they were swarming in from all over the country this time - and made his own costume seem somewhat ordinary. He'd started with a plain gray mouse mascot purchased off of eBay and had made a couple of strange additions that for some reason people seemed to keep overlooking as normal. Fortunately Max was the sort who liked a challenge, and he decided to take it as such. He'd made a game out of keeping count of who figured it out.
"Hey Max!" His buddy Iain waved from down the hall, managing to catch his attention through the twin veils of mouse mask and crowd after many failed attempts.
"Hey!" Max waved back and headed to rejoin him. The two of them had split up a while back, Max forging into the heart of the costumed swarm to register for one of the contests and Iain heading off to the dealer's rooms to look for the old action figures he was particularly fond of. Iain had come in a costume too but it was just something he'd thrown together from stuff he'd had already; he wore a black leather jacket with metal studs, boots, and carried a motorcycle helmet under his arm.
"I've had three different IDs now," Iain told him as soon as they were within normal speaking range. Iain had the look of someone who had dressed as someone specific, so he'd decided to make a game of it too; he was keeping track of how many different characters people identified him as. In reality he wasn't meant to be anyone in particular, just himself in biker gear.
Max chuckled. "Only two people have got me yet." Their games had completely different methods of scoring so there wasn't really any comparison but Max still hoped to get the larger score by the end of the day. He rested a hand on the hard plastic dome mounted on his midsection, originally cut from a large spherical water tank and painted matte gray. "Maybe I should have made myself optical. People keep assuming I've just got a potbelly or something."
"Dude! Nobody notices the buttpads?"
"Hah!" Max turned and gave one of the two plastic pieces mounted on either side of his tail a slap. "You'd think. But I guess they only notice when I'm already walking away. I swear, if someone were to try double-clicking I'd give them the win."
The shortest distance between two straight lines, Max had always said, was a pun. When he'd read that there'd be a category in this year's costume contests specifically for the best pun-based costume he'd decided it was finally time to take a shot. His budget had been very limited but he was pretty proud of what he'd done with it. It helped to have access to all sorts of odd pieces of scrap from work. He'd fashioned the two large "buttons" on his buttocks from a pair of foot rests from some sort of medical examination chair that had been shaped just right, and the big round data connector on the tip of his tail had been taken from a wrecked television studio camera. It was freakishly complex, with dozens of pins and a coaxial connector down the center, and Max considered it the spiffiest part of his costume even though it was least noticeable at a glance. It seemed only appropriate that a mouse of his size should have more than just a PS/2 or USB connector.
"Hey, have you seen the over-18 hall?" Iain asked after a moment's thought, breaking into a grin. "I bet if you wandered around in there a bit you'd get clicked like crazy."
Definitely not Max's cup of tea, the people down there were strange. "Let's hit the cafeteria instead. I'm getting a bit hungry." He patted his faux mouse ball, the hollow sound emphasizing his statement.
It was crowded and Max's mask was a bit restrictive of his vision so despite the destination being his idea he let Iain take the lead. The hall could almost have been a street fair, complete with hucksters peddling cheap wares from tiny stands and buskers giving shows - though without putting out hats, in accordance with convention policy. Max grinned at a troup of mimes, wondering if they were heading over to have it out with the woman doing a mannequin act he'd passed a short distance back. Whoever moves first loses.
Max suddenly felt a bit odd, stumbling to a halt as a strange heavy sensation settled in his belly. "Urp. Uh..." He'd managed to avoid the heatstroke that had laid low several of the furries he'd seen sitting in corners with their costumes partly off, red-faced and sweating, so he wasn't sure what could have triggered this. He put his hands on the plastic dome mounted over the disturbance. Perhaps it was the heat. The paint's smooth texture had changed, he could somehow feel it right through his gloves. It was tackier... rubberier? Max gave a light shove to gague just how badly affected the paint had become.
The dome shifted. It rolled. Max yanked his hands away and let out a frightened squeal like none he had ever made before; he had felt the mass rotate inside him, a solid sphere somehow filling a huge cavity in his abdomen where his guts were supposed to be.
The crowd around him was starting to react with similar degrees of alarm but Max didn't realize at first that they were reacting to anything other than his own distress. "Iain!" He screeched in a panic, looking around frantically for his friend. The mask wasn't obscuring his vision nearly as much now - far less than it should have been - but during the moment that he'd stopped moving and the people around him had started moving faster they'd got quite thoroughly separated. Max could just see him in the commotion ahead, waving his helmet around either to draw attention or simply to drive back people pressing in on him, and he tried to advance forward again.
Max staggered, his legs cramping up the moment he'd tried using them and refusing to bend properly. His arms, too, started cramping and he pulled them in close to his chest to relieve the strain. "Aack! I... Iain!" Looking down at himself was difficult, his neck felt a bit stiff now too, and the view he got was strangely distorted. There was a fuzzy mass filling the center of his field of view and it seemed to be spreading wider than it should have been to compensate, as if his eyes were being pushed apart. It made it hard to tell at first how much of his own body's distortion was an optical illusion and how much was real.
His torso was swelling under the short gray fur of his costume. The huge rubber ball that was impossibly embedded in his abdomen had grown somewhat larger, but that wasn't the only cause. His legs seemed to be getting shorter, body mass pulling inward and making him plumper in the process. His arms too, he noticed. He squealed again and tried to totter toward the nearest wall for support. His limbs were nearly completely crippled, however, and after just a few laborious steps he felt his spine starting to stiffen too. Spasming neck muscles pulled his head back until he could only look straight up at the ceiling. Max wobbled for a moment, barely managing to balance, and then toppled forward flat onto the carpet.
If his head hadn't been forced into its current orientation he would have done a faceplant and probably hurt himself grievously, but instead the blow of the carpeted floor landed on his chin and merely left him dazed. There was a stampede of legs around him, not all of the legs recognizably human, and Max made one last desperate effort to scramble out of the way.
He could barely feel his arms and legs and they wouldn't budge from where they were curled up tight against his body, but the urgent need to move himself brought up a strange reflex in his guts that somehow caused him to surge forward without them. His chest dragged along the ground, the fur being pulled on painfully by friction with the carpet, and he barely managed to turn to the side to avert the worst of the impact with the wall. The glancing angle of the blow flipped him over onto his back instead and this time he cracked the top of his head against the floor instead of the bottom.
Now nestled out of the way of the worst of the pounding feet but with a pounding in his brain that more than matched what he'd avoided, Max slumped and allowed his panic to fade away into unconsciousness.
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"Dude... Max... Max?"
It felt like just a moment had passed but by the time the insistent voice managed to rouse Max again the stampede seemed to be over.
He blinked blearily, trying to focus around the fuzzy mass affixed to his face and unable to comprehend the upside-down view he was getting. His arms didn't move when he tried to reach up and brush the mass away so he could only shake his head and then wince at the throbbing the motion exacerbated. He tried to call out for help but he could only manage a high-pitched squeal. His ears flicked in alarm at the sound, and at the other disturbing noises that were filtering in from elsewhere, and he tried vainly to clear his throat. There was something seriously awry with his mouth; his jaw stretched out way too long and his tongue found distorted and misplaced teeth.
"Max! Are you awake, man? Are you... you?"
Max's ears twisted toward the source of the voice beside him and he tried to lift his head to see, but his neck didn't want to bend very far that way any more; he was stuck with the disorienting upside-down view. He caught a glipse of the lower half of a man standing nearby, though, with biker boots and torn jeans. Iain? Max came more fully awake and he tried to turn himself back over onto his belly.
Neither his limbs nor his body responded, not even managing a twitch. Panic came back to full strength; was he paralyzed? All he could move was his head, neck bent back at this strange angle... But no, he felt things moving. Things he'd never felt before. Something long and flexible whipped at the base of his spine and something round and solid surged in his gut. The motions sent a shudder through his otherwise rigid body.
Iain took a step back in alarm. "Dude! Chill! You're spinning your... uh, wheel!"
Chill? Max let out another squeal, more indignant than panicked this time. Ironically it had the intended effect and Max ceased his unfamiliar thrashing to try glaring at Iain instead.
"Okay... okay." Iain sighed, evidently quite badly shaken himself. "You owe me so much for stickin' around here, the police won't even come... anyway. Are you really Max? I've gotta know."
Max nodded, moving his head carefully. His neck didn't hurt, this odd angle was actually strangely comfortable, and he wasn't quite so sure about the paralysis diagnosis any more. He could feel the rest of his body, it just felt odd.
"Oh, man. This is so weird. Look what's happened to you."
Max managed to turn the pitch of his inarticulate squeal up at the end, making it sound like an impatient question.
"You're a mouse, man! I mean... a big freakin' mouse, huge. Both the computer type and the rodent type, like your costume, but way better and for real. Like what happened to everyone else wearing a costume."
Max closed his eyes and tried to absorb that. It made no sense, of course, but on the other hand neither did what he was feeling or seeing. The heavy round weight in the center of his gut, that must be the mouse ball he'd simulated with the plastic dome. It was real now, he could feel it, and he could make it roll. The long sinuous thing, that was his tail... but he had no arms and legs at all, it seemed. His body was just a big solid ergonomic lump, as helpless as a turtle flipped on its back.
He had to get back on his front. Quashing the rising panic once again and trying to think of what he could do, Max focused on that weight in his gut. He felt muscles flex and rocked slightly as the ball spun over. It wasn't nearly enough to budge him but it gave Iain the prompting he needed. "Oh! Uh, hang on, man..." He glanced around and settled on a table that had had its legs knocked off, dragging it over and sliding it between Max and the wall to use as a lever. Max blinked in surprise; judging by the effort Iain was putting into it he was bigger than he'd thought.
Rock, rock, rock... Max rolled over and landed on his front with a whump, but he was ready for it this time and avoided bashing his chin again. The giant mouse ball embedded in his abdomen bore the full weight of the landing instead and he let out a surprised grunt at how easily it managed.
It wasn't easy balancing on it, though. Max spent the next few minutes wobbling around and wildly flicking his tail while trying to get steady. The ball protruded out of him a bit farther than a real mouse's and once he finally gained his equilibrium he found himself suspended a few inches off the floor on the thing. It was positioned exactly under his center of mass.
He twisted his head to look up at Iain, not feeling steady enough yet to rotate his body as well, and gave another interrogative squeal. His throat felt too tight to produce any more meaningful sounds than that so he hoped Iain would be able to figure out his intent.
"I don't know, man. It's been like an hour-" Iain checked his watch- "over an hour now. Everybody that could run ran, and nobody's coming back in here yet."