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Life Hack 1
tags: transformation, tf, rubber, raptor, vader-san synth, cozy, male, willing, male, gay (eventually), happy end (eventually), sfw (for now)
by donedonedone
Just a guy becoming a rubber synth. Seriously, that’s the whole story.
Part 1 (You are here)
Part 2 (nsfw)
Part 3 (nsfw)
Part 4 (nsfw)
Part 5: New Calling (sfw)
Life is expensive, but I have a solution. This may sound crazy, but I’m talking about those “rubber raptor drone” pills they sell on the darknet. Sure, the name “rubber raptor drone” sounds a bit scary and the pills do turn you into what’s basically an animate rubber raptor, but what “they” don’t want you to know is that the pills also make it so you don’t have to eat, you don’t have to sleep, you don’t have to do any of the other inconvenient and expensive things most people need.
Just think, seriously think, about how great that would be. If you didn’t need to sleep or eat you would have an unbelievable amount of free time to do literally anything. No more random interruptions of your day to go to the bathroom. You could just get your work done in one long stretch, then with the remaining 16 hours of the day you could read or play games or write that novel.
Before you say “staying up 24/7 sounds tiring,” try to realize that a rubber body doesn’t get tired. And don’t get me started on “missing the taste of food” or whatever. This might be controversial, but I think the truth is that we’re all in a Stockholm Syndrome relationship with food. When you don’t have to eat anymore I’m sure you don’t miss it. And besides, the pill doesn’t remove your sense of taste, just your need to eat.
But let’s address the elephants in the room.
First of all, yes, the pill does come at the cost of turning you into a raptor made entirely out of rubber. Doesn’t matter if you’re a human, fur, whatever, you always end up the same way. The end result is kind of like something from Jurassic Park, but monochromatic, rubber, and… cuter, I guess? More upright-standing too. You can look up images on the internet of people who have taken the pills if you want to see, plenty of them have modded themselves to become more unique. Why a raptor? I don’t know, but there are worse things to be, right? Like, for instance, a human like me who struggles to meet rent and has to spend a bunch of money on groceries every week. Raptor life doesn’t sound like much of a loss from my perspective, and I know I can’t be the only one!
Second elephant in the room: the “drone” part of “rubber raptor drone.” It’s a complete misnomer. From what I read there are no mental changes associated with the pills, that’s all a myth perpetuated by mainstream media to stop us from taking them. They want to keep us shelling out money to Big Food! If all the struggling people in the world knew about how huge of a life hack these pills are, capitalism would collapse. And “they” can’t have that.
Well… everything I’ve said so far might sound hypothetical to you, but I actually managed to buy a rubberization pill myself! It wasn’t easy to find, and it did cost quite a bit up front, but I got it. Before I take it I have a few things I need to prepare for, like finding some pants with a tail hole, but trust me, I can’t wait to break free from The System as soon as I can.
—
On the night I planned to take the pill I set up a livestream to document the experience. As much as my favorite free-thinking podcasters talked about how they’d rubberize themselves one day and live on the cheap, videos of people actually taking the pills are hard to find. I’m sure the lack of videos contributes to the climate of fear around this innovation. Censorship by Big Tech was clearly to blame, but that wouldn’t stop me! I chose the alternative streaming service with the most hands-off, anti-censorship reputation and started a local recording as well. No matter what happened, I would get my video out there so people could make their own decisions!
I turned on my webcam. While I waited for viewers to arrive, I took the rubberization pill out from the little plastic case it came in. The pill was capsule-shaped and pure white, barely a centimeter long. I held it up for the camera to see. Of course this would work (despite the skepticism of some uninformed individuals in chat) but I was still a little anxious. Maybe it was that I was unused to being watched.
I just wanted to get it over with. “Well, here goes nothing,” I semi-mumbled. Breathing deep to overcome my nerves, I swallowed the pill dry. I couldn’t help thinking about how it went down like any other pill, like I had just swallowed an aspirin. I sat in my chair for what my stream timer said was thirty seconds, but what was subjectively ten minutes. C’mon. Work dammit…
My breath caught in my throat. I tried unclogging it with a cough, but I found I couldn’t do that either! Despite my advance knowledge of the change, my body panicked, protesting that it wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Adrenaline flooded my system. I fell forward out of my computer chair and onto the floor, trying to dry heave.
My rational side tried to remind me that this was expected. I had probably just breathed my final breath, as anticipated! Still, in the moment it was difficult to keep calm as phlegm crept up the back of my throat and closed off my nasal passage.
My panicked attempts at breathing caused me to drool. I wiped my mouth with the back of my arm only to discover that my saliva had turned pure white. Instinctively I tried to rub the goop off onto my other arm, but the sticky liquid just smeared over my exposed skin. Somehow, no matter how thin I spread the liquid, it remained perfectly opaque.
I looked over at the image of myself on my computer screen. My mouth and the area around it was covered with my thick white drool. It dripped past my chin and down my neck. I looked like I had just messily swallowed a bucket of white paint.
A chill tingled the back of my skull. Crick. Aaa! Some part of my spine had disconnected! I reached up to hold my head, because otherwise it felt like it was going to flop all over the place. Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed my urge to breathe had completely subsided. I struggled to sit back up on my knees.
The white liquid crept along my jawline up into my hair and around my neck. Somehow none of it got on my shirt or carpet. The rivulets of liquid rubber stuck to my skin and nothing else.
The feeling of looseness in my neck was by far the scariest thing. At first I held my head up, but then I was inclined to hold it down as it shifted upwards in my grip. Woooah! My neck stretched, defying whatever muscle structure used to be there.
I would have kept watching my computer screen if the rubber didn’t cover my eyes just then. I closed them in time to not learn what molten rubber felt like on my eyeballs, but having my sight taken from me was a new level of terrifying.
It’s ok, I told myself in darkness. Don’t panic. This is all planned. Don’t panic. The rubber invaded my ears with a squelch. Aaah!
I had a moment of complete disorientation. Without being able to see it was practically impossible to match what I was feeling to what was actually happening. The fact that my neck length was untrustworthy definitely did not help me understand where the rest of my body was in relation.
All I knew for certain was that rubber was getting everywhere. I shivered as it covered my nether regions. It’s hard not to flinch when something’s moving over your privates and around your inner thighs, but I did my best. The goop encased my butt and went down the back of my legs all the way to my feet. Pretty soon I had no exposed skin left. All I could feel was rubber. For a brief period it was like I was in some sensory deprivation chamber.
One thing I felt with clarity was my tail growing in. I flipped onto my front, still clutching my head out of the irrational fear it’d roll away otherwise. I raised my butt into the air and it felt like my rear just kept going higher and higher. Something prodded me in the back of my head—terrifying me that someone was in the room with me while I was blind, deaf, and unable to speak—before I realized it was my own tail bumping into me from behind. I wiggled it out of the way.
The sensation of rubber on my skin faded so slowly I hardly noticed. I don’t know about anyone else, but usually when I’m wearing clothes I’m not super conscious about how the cloth feels touching my skin. This time I did notice the fabric sliding against my skin more smoothly than usual, before realizing it was weird that I could feel my clothes at all overtop the rubber. The texture of the planks of hardwood beneath my rubber-covered elbows and knees was as clear to me as if I was touching them directly.
My hearing returned with a pop! Never had I been more grateful to hear the grinding of my ancient window-mounted A/C unit. Forgetting why I was holding my neck still, I let go so I could shake my head and clear my ears. Ho boy. My elongated neck had a concerningly large range of motion, enough to spin my head completely behind me as I shook. I was happy to find that the flexibility wasn’t limitless, though. I could turn about 90 degrees more than usual in every direction before I started feeling a little stiff.
I had my head experimentally tilted as far up as it could go when my sight returned. I didn’t feel my eyes open (in fact, I could no longer feel my eyes at all), my vision just flicked on like a light. I knew what had happened: my physical eyes had been replaced by a visor, underneath which was a pixelated screen that would be displaying my expression from then on. I always wondered what seeing out of one of those visors would be like, but being on the inside answered none of my questions about how it actually worked. Were there cameras under my visor that I was seeing out of? I practiced blinking, but it was more like my vision shut off and on rather than closing eyelids.
The changes were slowing down. The last thing I noticed was my mouth reforming out of the goop. I rotated my jaw to try it out, finding it much longer and snout-like than I was used to. My tongue was back under my control, and it felt a lot larger than it did before. I ran it along the edges of my mouth. Huh, I guess I didn’t really have teeth anymore? My mouth was almost like a beak. I had two fang-like protrusions on the outside of my mouth but, being made out of not-particularly-firm rubber, the fangs seemed more aesthetic than they did useful.
And just like that, everything was still. I lay there on my front a little while longer to see if anything else would shift. When nothing did, I sat up and looked myself over.
From my perspective my legs and arms looked so weird all white and squeaky and strangely proportioned. Then I looked over at the recorded image of myself on my computer and was surprised by how “normal” I looked, in a way. The image on the screen didn’t register as “me” right away, but it did look very naturally proportioned for one of the rubber lizards. Compared to a human, the raptor on the screen had digitigrade, proportionally larger legs, a much longer neck, and a tail that extended out behind him. His hands and feet were three-fingered. His black visor-screen displayed a pair of simplistic light-up green eyes that peered towards the camera curiously.
The weird thing about the image was that the raptor was in my room, wearing my clothes. …That was me! Holy shit, that raptor was me! The raptor’s digital eyes widened, his jaw fell open, and an exclamation mark appeared near the center of his visor. It was so cartoonish that it further distanced me from the reality I thought I would’ve been prepared to accept.
I will say, looking at the whole ordeal in retrospect, I may have slightly underestimated the mental shock that comes from changing forms that drastically. You may think that preparing ahead of time should completely mitigate the surprise, but you’d be wrong. Being a free-thinker I clearly have above-average mental fortitude, yet when confronted with the bizarre image on my computer screen I still tried to jump up and look for a “real” mirror that couldn’t be hacked.
Yes, it wasn’t my calmest moment, but I can only imagine how someone with less smarts than I would have reacted. More weak-minded individuals would be at risk for mental breakdowns of the kind I surely did not have. I definitely did not panic, that would have been stupid. I was merely excited, which is easily confused for panic when all you have is the video.
The other thing to know is that I am normally an exceptionally coordinated person, so keep that in mind when I say I tumbled my way across the room in a mass of rubbery white limbs. Really the fact that I actually made it to my closet mirror at all should be considered impressive, despite how many things I knocked over along the way.
The mirror displayed exactly the same thing as my computer screen: a rubber raptor who seemed to be having trouble standing. I grabbed the edges of the mirror with my three-fingered paws and pulled myself up. I tried to put my eye right up against the glass a little too zealously and bonked right into it. “Beep!” Ow. I rubbed my nose with my hand. Did I just beep?
Oh yeah, I hadn’t tried speaking yet! I opened my mouth, but unsure what to say I just went “aaaaaaaaaa.” Ok, that wasn’t a good test of my ability to form words. The raptor in the mirror had opened his mouth as well and I got distracted looking at his tongue. I tried to angle myself so I could see into the raptor’s throat, but I bumped into the mirror again.
Ok, ok! I had to think of something else to say. “Hello.” Ok, that sounded almost exactly like my voice but through a different mouth’s acoustics. Wait… I’m not breathing! How was I talking without breathing? This would be a lot easier if I wasn’t constantly distracted by how my reflection’s movements matched up with my own. “My name is…” I trailed off, remembering that I probably shouldn’t dox myself.
The stream! Shit, had I done anything embarrassing on camera? I spun around and whapped my tail against the closet painfully. “BEEP!” Ow! I grabbed my sensitive new appendage, forgetting that I needed it for balance. Clutching my tail tightly for emotional support, I fell forward onto the carpet with a whump.
It was a bit undignified, but the floor really wasn’t that uncomfortable. I took some time to collect myself. My head and neck were able to lie flat on the floor kind of like a snake’s, and I couldn’t help swivelling my ear fins experimentally. I looked up to see if I could view my strangely responsive ears (I couldn’t), then glanced back at the computer screen.
The chat window was scrolling by at a decent clip, but I couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. I tried squinting to see better but instead my eyes zoomed in. Visor cameras: confirmed.
Chat was divided into a few camps. One third were commenting on my “performance art” and how the “CG” could be improved, another third was chatting about something completely unrelated to what was happening on-stream, and the final group was sending inane things like “hot 🥵!!”, “what a cutie”, and “i’d pet him”. Not a single person was taking this seriously. Did nobody appreciate the significance of what they had just seen?? I thought they would be clamoring to ask me questions about what it was like, or how I got the pill!
I moped on the floor, ear fins drooping. Well, at least the video was out there for someone else to find. I guess I wouldn’t be the catalyst for a proletariat uprising the way I had privately dreamed about. Seriously, this was supposed to be huge! If everyone could just get past how… “cute”… I looked, maybe they’d consider the utility of being rubberized and what it means for society. We don’t need to keep wasting natural resources on food, or time on sleep! …But if I didn’t look the way I did, would anyone even pay attention to me? It was a catch-22. I tried to sigh, but it's kind of hard to do that without breathing.
——
Eventually I shut off the stream. I had a bunch of followers now, but I doubted any of them followed for the right reasons. They all just wanted to see the raptor make a fool of himself. I probably wouldn’t be steaming for them again anytime soon.
Instead, I’d just focus on myself for a while. I was still not over my new body. It’s one thing to think about being made out of rubber and another to actually experience it.
Even the things I knew about ahead of time managed to surprise me! After the transformation habit told me I should have been tired, but of course I wasn’t. I sat awkwardly on the ground next to my computer because I wasn’t sure how to sit in a chair comfortably with a tail.
I’d done it. I looked down at my unnaturally white arms and practiced clenching my three-fingered paws. Now what?
Turns out, “now what” consists of spending a whole night learning how to walk again. The best way to describe having digitigrade legs is that it’s like walking on your toes… only your toes are now bird-like three-toed feet. To an outsider it might look like I have two sets of knees, one set that bends normally and another set that bends backwards, but really, in my mind, I think of the lower set of “knees” as my ankles and my “feet” as my toes.
I don’t know why there are different kinds of legs on different animals or what advantages they offer, but if I had to hazard a guess, digitigrade legs exist to be ten times harder to balance on. It’s true! Luckily, although I feel pain I don’t seem to get bruises or visible wear or anything, which is cool because I definitely would have received some of both that night.
As I paced around my room, holding onto walls for support, I kept thinking about how crazy it was to not be human anymore. Literally every time I passed by something reflective I flinched, thinking that my own reflection was a stranger in the room with me. Ok, so I seriously underestimated how difficult it would be to make the mental adjustment to my new body.
I was shocked when it got brighter outside my window. That couldn’t possibly be the sun, right? Oh, but it was. I must’ve been pacing in my room for at least six hours and I hadn’t even noticed the time flying by. My remarkable level of focus on learning to walk was uncanny, but I must admit that it had results. Walking was a lot easier when I didn’t fixate on every movement of my “ankles”. To demonstrate my improvement to myself I walked from one end of the room to the other without holding on to a single thing for support. Of course, I immediately ruined the moment by knocking over a lamp with my tail, but still, success!
Next order of business: making faces in the mirror. Yet again I just had to say wow, that reflection was me! I tilted my head and the raptor in the mirror did the same thing, his long tail swishing behind him. Weirded out by how my tail seemed to have a mind of its own, I stilled it.
Wait, was I breathing? My synthetic white chest rose and fell as if I was, but no air passed through my mouth and I don’t think my nose was actually functional that way. I was evidently pretending to breathe without thinking about it, probably some built-in feature to make me less eerie.
As weird as it felt to do, I let my chest fall still. Now the raptor in the mirror was impressively motionless, from his bird-feet to his green LED eyes. Now that was a pretty neat trick. Intellectually I was a little antsy about being kind of, like, “lifeless” looking, but physically there was no discomfort associated with holding still for several minutes. I could be a surgeon with that level of steadiness, or maybe a part-time statue. I unfroze myself and my body went right back to doing little superfluous movements, just like a flesh-and-blood beast.
The next thing I wanted to test was my visor. Despite being just a pixelated LED screen, my visor was surprisingly expressive. Too expressive if you asked me. At that thought, some pixelated anger eyebrows popped up on screen to represent my consternation. Stop that! I thought at my own face. The anger eyebrows intensified. Sure, it wasn’t exactly inaccurate, but it concerned me that I couldn’t feel what expression was showing on my visor the same way I could with my face as a human. Hell, there could be a movie playing on my face and I wouldn’t even know it unless I had a mirror around.
My digitized expression shifted to one of worry. See, that was just too transparent. I would never play poker again at that rate. I “squinted” and my eyes changed to a literal “> <“ representation of squinting. My ear fins also moved back accordingly. You’re next, I thought at my fins.
I spent a while trying to get my visor to display the little exclamation-point warning sign I got from bumping into things the night before, but no luck. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get the screen to show any emotions I wasn’t actively experiencing. The most progress I made was getting my eyes to change into literal question marks, but that was just because I was seriously confused.
And would my ear fins please stop swivelling around?! I get it, I could see how those ear movements might be seen as endearing or whatever to someone else, but “endearing” wasn’t the vibe I was going for. “Serious” would have been nice, or maybe “cool” or “confident”. I wasn’t completely opposed to how my ears looked… I was just miffed that I didn’t have control! I had three new body parts—visor, ears, tail—that all seemed eager to betray me at a moment’s notice.
Ok, ok, there was one more thing bothering me. I was smaller than before. It wasn’t simply that my new gait made me look shorter. I think some of my mass was redistributed to form my tail, knocking three or four inches off my height. My clothing was a little loose, and if my pants weren’t held up by my tail going through the hole in the back they would’ve fallen off my waist.
I guess I could find some solace in other aspects of my appearance. My rubber limbs had the appearance of being more muscular—or at least less flabby—than my old arms and legs. I put a paw to the front of my shirt and noted that I could feel the definition of my chest. But… I was rubber all the way through, right? What’s the point of muscles?
It was time to test my strength. I looked for something to lift, but my mattress lying on the floor was pretty much the only option. With a little effort I flipped it up on its side, but it was hard to say if the lifting was definitively easier or harder than it would have been as a human. I let the mattress fall back down with a whump.
Hm. I clenched and unclenched my paws. My rubbery form was firm enough to sustain my own weight and the weight of my mattress. But what if… I put a paw against the wall and leaned against it. Then I let my arm go slack.
I beeped in surprise as my slack arm bent backwards painlessly, like a rubber noodle. Eep. I tensed and my arm firmed up again. Oookay, so if I needed any visual confirmation I wasn’t just my old self in a suit, I had it now.
All of that testing felt like a lot emotionally, but I still wasn’t tired! I was a little antsy about having such a long, unbroken string of memory stretching all the way from the morning the day before until then. It was nothing I couldn’t get used to but… could I sleep if I wanted to?
I clumsily sat down on my bed. I guess even if I wanted to I couldn’t be much of a back sleeper anymore, what with a giant protrusion coming out of my backside right above my butt. I turned onto my side. It was surprisingly natural to curl up with my tail, and my arm beneath me had no chance of falling asleep due to lack of blood flow. I didn’t feel the slightest bit sleepy, but I tried closing my eyes and letting myself go still like before.
As it turned out, I really couldn’t sleep. I could wait, but never lose consciousness. Still, it was comfortable. I ended up spending half an hour curled up there on my bed, processing what I’d experienced, and wondering what I’d do next.
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Thanks for reading! If you liked this particularly directionless story I appreciate favs and comments.
tags: transformation, tf, rubber, raptor, vader-san synth, cozy, male, willing, male, gay (eventually), happy end (eventually), sfw (for now)
by donedonedone
Just a guy becoming a rubber synth. Seriously, that’s the whole story.
Part 1 (You are here)
Part 2 (nsfw)
Part 3 (nsfw)
Part 4 (nsfw)
Part 5: New Calling (sfw)
Life is expensive, but I have a solution. This may sound crazy, but I’m talking about those “rubber raptor drone” pills they sell on the darknet. Sure, the name “rubber raptor drone” sounds a bit scary and the pills do turn you into what’s basically an animate rubber raptor, but what “they” don’t want you to know is that the pills also make it so you don’t have to eat, you don’t have to sleep, you don’t have to do any of the other inconvenient and expensive things most people need.
Just think, seriously think, about how great that would be. If you didn’t need to sleep or eat you would have an unbelievable amount of free time to do literally anything. No more random interruptions of your day to go to the bathroom. You could just get your work done in one long stretch, then with the remaining 16 hours of the day you could read or play games or write that novel.
Before you say “staying up 24/7 sounds tiring,” try to realize that a rubber body doesn’t get tired. And don’t get me started on “missing the taste of food” or whatever. This might be controversial, but I think the truth is that we’re all in a Stockholm Syndrome relationship with food. When you don’t have to eat anymore I’m sure you don’t miss it. And besides, the pill doesn’t remove your sense of taste, just your need to eat.
But let’s address the elephants in the room.
First of all, yes, the pill does come at the cost of turning you into a raptor made entirely out of rubber. Doesn’t matter if you’re a human, fur, whatever, you always end up the same way. The end result is kind of like something from Jurassic Park, but monochromatic, rubber, and… cuter, I guess? More upright-standing too. You can look up images on the internet of people who have taken the pills if you want to see, plenty of them have modded themselves to become more unique. Why a raptor? I don’t know, but there are worse things to be, right? Like, for instance, a human like me who struggles to meet rent and has to spend a bunch of money on groceries every week. Raptor life doesn’t sound like much of a loss from my perspective, and I know I can’t be the only one!
Second elephant in the room: the “drone” part of “rubber raptor drone.” It’s a complete misnomer. From what I read there are no mental changes associated with the pills, that’s all a myth perpetuated by mainstream media to stop us from taking them. They want to keep us shelling out money to Big Food! If all the struggling people in the world knew about how huge of a life hack these pills are, capitalism would collapse. And “they” can’t have that.
Well… everything I’ve said so far might sound hypothetical to you, but I actually managed to buy a rubberization pill myself! It wasn’t easy to find, and it did cost quite a bit up front, but I got it. Before I take it I have a few things I need to prepare for, like finding some pants with a tail hole, but trust me, I can’t wait to break free from The System as soon as I can.
—
On the night I planned to take the pill I set up a livestream to document the experience. As much as my favorite free-thinking podcasters talked about how they’d rubberize themselves one day and live on the cheap, videos of people actually taking the pills are hard to find. I’m sure the lack of videos contributes to the climate of fear around this innovation. Censorship by Big Tech was clearly to blame, but that wouldn’t stop me! I chose the alternative streaming service with the most hands-off, anti-censorship reputation and started a local recording as well. No matter what happened, I would get my video out there so people could make their own decisions!
I turned on my webcam. While I waited for viewers to arrive, I took the rubberization pill out from the little plastic case it came in. The pill was capsule-shaped and pure white, barely a centimeter long. I held it up for the camera to see. Of course this would work (despite the skepticism of some uninformed individuals in chat) but I was still a little anxious. Maybe it was that I was unused to being watched.
I just wanted to get it over with. “Well, here goes nothing,” I semi-mumbled. Breathing deep to overcome my nerves, I swallowed the pill dry. I couldn’t help thinking about how it went down like any other pill, like I had just swallowed an aspirin. I sat in my chair for what my stream timer said was thirty seconds, but what was subjectively ten minutes. C’mon. Work dammit…
My breath caught in my throat. I tried unclogging it with a cough, but I found I couldn’t do that either! Despite my advance knowledge of the change, my body panicked, protesting that it wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Adrenaline flooded my system. I fell forward out of my computer chair and onto the floor, trying to dry heave.
My rational side tried to remind me that this was expected. I had probably just breathed my final breath, as anticipated! Still, in the moment it was difficult to keep calm as phlegm crept up the back of my throat and closed off my nasal passage.
My panicked attempts at breathing caused me to drool. I wiped my mouth with the back of my arm only to discover that my saliva had turned pure white. Instinctively I tried to rub the goop off onto my other arm, but the sticky liquid just smeared over my exposed skin. Somehow, no matter how thin I spread the liquid, it remained perfectly opaque.
I looked over at the image of myself on my computer screen. My mouth and the area around it was covered with my thick white drool. It dripped past my chin and down my neck. I looked like I had just messily swallowed a bucket of white paint.
A chill tingled the back of my skull. Crick. Aaa! Some part of my spine had disconnected! I reached up to hold my head, because otherwise it felt like it was going to flop all over the place. Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed my urge to breathe had completely subsided. I struggled to sit back up on my knees.
The white liquid crept along my jawline up into my hair and around my neck. Somehow none of it got on my shirt or carpet. The rivulets of liquid rubber stuck to my skin and nothing else.
The feeling of looseness in my neck was by far the scariest thing. At first I held my head up, but then I was inclined to hold it down as it shifted upwards in my grip. Woooah! My neck stretched, defying whatever muscle structure used to be there.
I would have kept watching my computer screen if the rubber didn’t cover my eyes just then. I closed them in time to not learn what molten rubber felt like on my eyeballs, but having my sight taken from me was a new level of terrifying.
It’s ok, I told myself in darkness. Don’t panic. This is all planned. Don’t panic. The rubber invaded my ears with a squelch. Aaah!
I had a moment of complete disorientation. Without being able to see it was practically impossible to match what I was feeling to what was actually happening. The fact that my neck length was untrustworthy definitely did not help me understand where the rest of my body was in relation.
All I knew for certain was that rubber was getting everywhere. I shivered as it covered my nether regions. It’s hard not to flinch when something’s moving over your privates and around your inner thighs, but I did my best. The goop encased my butt and went down the back of my legs all the way to my feet. Pretty soon I had no exposed skin left. All I could feel was rubber. For a brief period it was like I was in some sensory deprivation chamber.
One thing I felt with clarity was my tail growing in. I flipped onto my front, still clutching my head out of the irrational fear it’d roll away otherwise. I raised my butt into the air and it felt like my rear just kept going higher and higher. Something prodded me in the back of my head—terrifying me that someone was in the room with me while I was blind, deaf, and unable to speak—before I realized it was my own tail bumping into me from behind. I wiggled it out of the way.
The sensation of rubber on my skin faded so slowly I hardly noticed. I don’t know about anyone else, but usually when I’m wearing clothes I’m not super conscious about how the cloth feels touching my skin. This time I did notice the fabric sliding against my skin more smoothly than usual, before realizing it was weird that I could feel my clothes at all overtop the rubber. The texture of the planks of hardwood beneath my rubber-covered elbows and knees was as clear to me as if I was touching them directly.
My hearing returned with a pop! Never had I been more grateful to hear the grinding of my ancient window-mounted A/C unit. Forgetting why I was holding my neck still, I let go so I could shake my head and clear my ears. Ho boy. My elongated neck had a concerningly large range of motion, enough to spin my head completely behind me as I shook. I was happy to find that the flexibility wasn’t limitless, though. I could turn about 90 degrees more than usual in every direction before I started feeling a little stiff.
I had my head experimentally tilted as far up as it could go when my sight returned. I didn’t feel my eyes open (in fact, I could no longer feel my eyes at all), my vision just flicked on like a light. I knew what had happened: my physical eyes had been replaced by a visor, underneath which was a pixelated screen that would be displaying my expression from then on. I always wondered what seeing out of one of those visors would be like, but being on the inside answered none of my questions about how it actually worked. Were there cameras under my visor that I was seeing out of? I practiced blinking, but it was more like my vision shut off and on rather than closing eyelids.
The changes were slowing down. The last thing I noticed was my mouth reforming out of the goop. I rotated my jaw to try it out, finding it much longer and snout-like than I was used to. My tongue was back under my control, and it felt a lot larger than it did before. I ran it along the edges of my mouth. Huh, I guess I didn’t really have teeth anymore? My mouth was almost like a beak. I had two fang-like protrusions on the outside of my mouth but, being made out of not-particularly-firm rubber, the fangs seemed more aesthetic than they did useful.
And just like that, everything was still. I lay there on my front a little while longer to see if anything else would shift. When nothing did, I sat up and looked myself over.
From my perspective my legs and arms looked so weird all white and squeaky and strangely proportioned. Then I looked over at the recorded image of myself on my computer and was surprised by how “normal” I looked, in a way. The image on the screen didn’t register as “me” right away, but it did look very naturally proportioned for one of the rubber lizards. Compared to a human, the raptor on the screen had digitigrade, proportionally larger legs, a much longer neck, and a tail that extended out behind him. His hands and feet were three-fingered. His black visor-screen displayed a pair of simplistic light-up green eyes that peered towards the camera curiously.
The weird thing about the image was that the raptor was in my room, wearing my clothes. …That was me! Holy shit, that raptor was me! The raptor’s digital eyes widened, his jaw fell open, and an exclamation mark appeared near the center of his visor. It was so cartoonish that it further distanced me from the reality I thought I would’ve been prepared to accept.
I will say, looking at the whole ordeal in retrospect, I may have slightly underestimated the mental shock that comes from changing forms that drastically. You may think that preparing ahead of time should completely mitigate the surprise, but you’d be wrong. Being a free-thinker I clearly have above-average mental fortitude, yet when confronted with the bizarre image on my computer screen I still tried to jump up and look for a “real” mirror that couldn’t be hacked.
Yes, it wasn’t my calmest moment, but I can only imagine how someone with less smarts than I would have reacted. More weak-minded individuals would be at risk for mental breakdowns of the kind I surely did not have. I definitely did not panic, that would have been stupid. I was merely excited, which is easily confused for panic when all you have is the video.
The other thing to know is that I am normally an exceptionally coordinated person, so keep that in mind when I say I tumbled my way across the room in a mass of rubbery white limbs. Really the fact that I actually made it to my closet mirror at all should be considered impressive, despite how many things I knocked over along the way.
The mirror displayed exactly the same thing as my computer screen: a rubber raptor who seemed to be having trouble standing. I grabbed the edges of the mirror with my three-fingered paws and pulled myself up. I tried to put my eye right up against the glass a little too zealously and bonked right into it. “Beep!” Ow. I rubbed my nose with my hand. Did I just beep?
Oh yeah, I hadn’t tried speaking yet! I opened my mouth, but unsure what to say I just went “aaaaaaaaaa.” Ok, that wasn’t a good test of my ability to form words. The raptor in the mirror had opened his mouth as well and I got distracted looking at his tongue. I tried to angle myself so I could see into the raptor’s throat, but I bumped into the mirror again.
Ok, ok! I had to think of something else to say. “Hello.” Ok, that sounded almost exactly like my voice but through a different mouth’s acoustics. Wait… I’m not breathing! How was I talking without breathing? This would be a lot easier if I wasn’t constantly distracted by how my reflection’s movements matched up with my own. “My name is…” I trailed off, remembering that I probably shouldn’t dox myself.
The stream! Shit, had I done anything embarrassing on camera? I spun around and whapped my tail against the closet painfully. “BEEP!” Ow! I grabbed my sensitive new appendage, forgetting that I needed it for balance. Clutching my tail tightly for emotional support, I fell forward onto the carpet with a whump.
It was a bit undignified, but the floor really wasn’t that uncomfortable. I took some time to collect myself. My head and neck were able to lie flat on the floor kind of like a snake’s, and I couldn’t help swivelling my ear fins experimentally. I looked up to see if I could view my strangely responsive ears (I couldn’t), then glanced back at the computer screen.
The chat window was scrolling by at a decent clip, but I couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. I tried squinting to see better but instead my eyes zoomed in. Visor cameras: confirmed.
Chat was divided into a few camps. One third were commenting on my “performance art” and how the “CG” could be improved, another third was chatting about something completely unrelated to what was happening on-stream, and the final group was sending inane things like “hot 🥵!!”, “what a cutie”, and “i’d pet him”. Not a single person was taking this seriously. Did nobody appreciate the significance of what they had just seen?? I thought they would be clamoring to ask me questions about what it was like, or how I got the pill!
I moped on the floor, ear fins drooping. Well, at least the video was out there for someone else to find. I guess I wouldn’t be the catalyst for a proletariat uprising the way I had privately dreamed about. Seriously, this was supposed to be huge! If everyone could just get past how… “cute”… I looked, maybe they’d consider the utility of being rubberized and what it means for society. We don’t need to keep wasting natural resources on food, or time on sleep! …But if I didn’t look the way I did, would anyone even pay attention to me? It was a catch-22. I tried to sigh, but it's kind of hard to do that without breathing.
——
Eventually I shut off the stream. I had a bunch of followers now, but I doubted any of them followed for the right reasons. They all just wanted to see the raptor make a fool of himself. I probably wouldn’t be steaming for them again anytime soon.
Instead, I’d just focus on myself for a while. I was still not over my new body. It’s one thing to think about being made out of rubber and another to actually experience it.
Even the things I knew about ahead of time managed to surprise me! After the transformation habit told me I should have been tired, but of course I wasn’t. I sat awkwardly on the ground next to my computer because I wasn’t sure how to sit in a chair comfortably with a tail.
I’d done it. I looked down at my unnaturally white arms and practiced clenching my three-fingered paws. Now what?
Turns out, “now what” consists of spending a whole night learning how to walk again. The best way to describe having digitigrade legs is that it’s like walking on your toes… only your toes are now bird-like three-toed feet. To an outsider it might look like I have two sets of knees, one set that bends normally and another set that bends backwards, but really, in my mind, I think of the lower set of “knees” as my ankles and my “feet” as my toes.
I don’t know why there are different kinds of legs on different animals or what advantages they offer, but if I had to hazard a guess, digitigrade legs exist to be ten times harder to balance on. It’s true! Luckily, although I feel pain I don’t seem to get bruises or visible wear or anything, which is cool because I definitely would have received some of both that night.
As I paced around my room, holding onto walls for support, I kept thinking about how crazy it was to not be human anymore. Literally every time I passed by something reflective I flinched, thinking that my own reflection was a stranger in the room with me. Ok, so I seriously underestimated how difficult it would be to make the mental adjustment to my new body.
I was shocked when it got brighter outside my window. That couldn’t possibly be the sun, right? Oh, but it was. I must’ve been pacing in my room for at least six hours and I hadn’t even noticed the time flying by. My remarkable level of focus on learning to walk was uncanny, but I must admit that it had results. Walking was a lot easier when I didn’t fixate on every movement of my “ankles”. To demonstrate my improvement to myself I walked from one end of the room to the other without holding on to a single thing for support. Of course, I immediately ruined the moment by knocking over a lamp with my tail, but still, success!
Next order of business: making faces in the mirror. Yet again I just had to say wow, that reflection was me! I tilted my head and the raptor in the mirror did the same thing, his long tail swishing behind him. Weirded out by how my tail seemed to have a mind of its own, I stilled it.
Wait, was I breathing? My synthetic white chest rose and fell as if I was, but no air passed through my mouth and I don’t think my nose was actually functional that way. I was evidently pretending to breathe without thinking about it, probably some built-in feature to make me less eerie.
As weird as it felt to do, I let my chest fall still. Now the raptor in the mirror was impressively motionless, from his bird-feet to his green LED eyes. Now that was a pretty neat trick. Intellectually I was a little antsy about being kind of, like, “lifeless” looking, but physically there was no discomfort associated with holding still for several minutes. I could be a surgeon with that level of steadiness, or maybe a part-time statue. I unfroze myself and my body went right back to doing little superfluous movements, just like a flesh-and-blood beast.
The next thing I wanted to test was my visor. Despite being just a pixelated LED screen, my visor was surprisingly expressive. Too expressive if you asked me. At that thought, some pixelated anger eyebrows popped up on screen to represent my consternation. Stop that! I thought at my own face. The anger eyebrows intensified. Sure, it wasn’t exactly inaccurate, but it concerned me that I couldn’t feel what expression was showing on my visor the same way I could with my face as a human. Hell, there could be a movie playing on my face and I wouldn’t even know it unless I had a mirror around.
My digitized expression shifted to one of worry. See, that was just too transparent. I would never play poker again at that rate. I “squinted” and my eyes changed to a literal “> <“ representation of squinting. My ear fins also moved back accordingly. You’re next, I thought at my fins.
I spent a while trying to get my visor to display the little exclamation-point warning sign I got from bumping into things the night before, but no luck. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get the screen to show any emotions I wasn’t actively experiencing. The most progress I made was getting my eyes to change into literal question marks, but that was just because I was seriously confused.
And would my ear fins please stop swivelling around?! I get it, I could see how those ear movements might be seen as endearing or whatever to someone else, but “endearing” wasn’t the vibe I was going for. “Serious” would have been nice, or maybe “cool” or “confident”. I wasn’t completely opposed to how my ears looked… I was just miffed that I didn’t have control! I had three new body parts—visor, ears, tail—that all seemed eager to betray me at a moment’s notice.
Ok, ok, there was one more thing bothering me. I was smaller than before. It wasn’t simply that my new gait made me look shorter. I think some of my mass was redistributed to form my tail, knocking three or four inches off my height. My clothing was a little loose, and if my pants weren’t held up by my tail going through the hole in the back they would’ve fallen off my waist.
I guess I could find some solace in other aspects of my appearance. My rubber limbs had the appearance of being more muscular—or at least less flabby—than my old arms and legs. I put a paw to the front of my shirt and noted that I could feel the definition of my chest. But… I was rubber all the way through, right? What’s the point of muscles?
It was time to test my strength. I looked for something to lift, but my mattress lying on the floor was pretty much the only option. With a little effort I flipped it up on its side, but it was hard to say if the lifting was definitively easier or harder than it would have been as a human. I let the mattress fall back down with a whump.
Hm. I clenched and unclenched my paws. My rubbery form was firm enough to sustain my own weight and the weight of my mattress. But what if… I put a paw against the wall and leaned against it. Then I let my arm go slack.
I beeped in surprise as my slack arm bent backwards painlessly, like a rubber noodle. Eep. I tensed and my arm firmed up again. Oookay, so if I needed any visual confirmation I wasn’t just my old self in a suit, I had it now.
All of that testing felt like a lot emotionally, but I still wasn’t tired! I was a little antsy about having such a long, unbroken string of memory stretching all the way from the morning the day before until then. It was nothing I couldn’t get used to but… could I sleep if I wanted to?
I clumsily sat down on my bed. I guess even if I wanted to I couldn’t be much of a back sleeper anymore, what with a giant protrusion coming out of my backside right above my butt. I turned onto my side. It was surprisingly natural to curl up with my tail, and my arm beneath me had no chance of falling asleep due to lack of blood flow. I didn’t feel the slightest bit sleepy, but I tried closing my eyes and letting myself go still like before.
As it turned out, I really couldn’t sleep. I could wait, but never lose consciousness. Still, it was comfortable. I ended up spending half an hour curled up there on my bed, processing what I’d experienced, and wondering what I’d do next.
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Thanks for reading! If you liked this particularly directionless story I appreciate favs and comments.
Category Story / Transformation
Species Reptilian (Other)
Gender Male
Size 120 x 120px
Awesome story :) A pretty different take on it, and a hilariously pragmatic premise too!
Oh, so cute. And such an interesting take on a rubber TF, really exploring how a person would need to get used to it.
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