Beware The Wolf - Pt9: Test That Stumped Them All

Steven and Brutus decide to see just how repeatable their monstrous transformations are as they turn their attention to their bartender landlord.

---

Despite the events of the previous night, both Brutus and Steven quickly fell asleep owing to the late after-closing hour and the exhaustion from witnessing and experiencing a gruesome transformation.

Brutus woke up well into the day, surprised to find that Brad was expectedly present while Steven was also nowhere to be found. There was no note of any kind, no post-it stuck somewhere Brutus could find, no text message on his phone, and of course no reluctant bartender to interrogate.

He was also surprised to find that he felt absolutely terrible. Not physically; he felt as virile and antsy as he had felt ever since becoming a wolf. The first week of reckless bestial anti-everything lupinity was now over, and Brutus was left with the chest-compressing reality of being what he was. I’m a freak. I’m a wolf monster. I’m the real thing that a lot of people pretend to be and I don’t know if they’d wanna do that if they knew what it was like. I don’t have a fucking way to cover my dick up because I lost my codpiece while fucking some human who’s had god knows what happen to them by now. I turned my best friend into a monster and he probably hates me. I can’t go to the store to get some fucking food by myself. Steven’s gonna lose his job because he’s a fucking bird.

Brutus decided to try and jog his brain into a different state, and went up to the third and most grandiose floor of the weird old building that housed The Underworld. The cavernous ‘meeting hall’ which was more chapel than anything else, with all markings of affiliation removed by some previous owner or occupant.

At night, the meeting hall was suitably gothic, though what made for glorious moonlight during a full moon made for searing sunlight during the day. Brutus wandered around the space, then sat down on the edge of a small stage platform to one side where the morning sunlight beamed in. The warmth was nice, although being covered mostly in fur, he wasn’t as cold as being naked would have promised in the old days.

We could make a werewolf sex dungeon!, I fucking said that the other day, didn’t I? Yeah, I could fuck people and make them into werewolves and then they’d be stuck just like me. What a life.

Brutus could hear someone moving around downstairs - the bang of the stairwell door, boots up the steps, more walking about, then closer and closer stairs. It’s probably just Steven. Or Brad’s coming to shoot me. He’ll get a big surprise if he tries that.

“Aha! Attempting a werewolf confessional, are we?” Steven strode through the door. “Hmm. That sounds like some sort of double entendre.”

With much rotten attitude and as little filter as he’d had recently, Brutus turned and gave him a deadpan look. “I gave your mom a werewolf confessional last night.”

“Tch, I hope you don’t do anything like that, ever. I’d prefer to never ever see hear smell or think of my mom ever again.”

“What about taste?”

Steven tilted his head back and let out a squawk. “Of course you think about tasting everything. I bet I could find wolf drool all over everything in this room. What are you doing up here? Aside from basking, which doesn’t seem very wolfy.”

“I dunno, I was kinda cold, and it’s sunny up here from that thing,” Brutus pointed a black claw-nail up to the cupola. “And you weren’t around to annoy. Where’d you go, anyway?”

“Probably wherever normal humans do when they have normal human lives,” Steven said.

“You don’t seem that… different. I mean. You’re a bird. But you’re still a bitch.”

Steven sighed and walked about. He wore a pair of industrial-chic tanker boots, black loose dress pants tucked in, a black suit jacket, and then a cowl hood that looked roughly hewn from some other piece of similar fabric. “Despite how absolutely terrible last night was, I woke up feeling… well, not as bad as I anticipated. I guess despite how much of a complete mess this makes everything, my life is already a complete mess as of you turning into that already, and really, did I think I would somehow escape from this situation unscathed?”

“I always thought you were a bird-brain,” Brutus said, and as Steven opened his beak to complain, “Hey, you didn’t answer my question. It’s daytime. You told me not to go outside or anything.”

Steven looked immediately flustered, and his quick movements made the hood fall down around his shoulders. “I, well, I… I… I needed to get out, and I thought I’d try an experiment. You happen to have the head of a wolf, which is kind of hard to hide in a useful way. I have a head of a raven, which isn’t any easier, except I also have a plague doctor mask that I made for a halloween costume when everyone was getting that disease a couple of years ago. It turns out that roaming around Treetown on a Saturday morning dressed like some steampunk weirdo only gets you a small amount of unwanted attention.”

Brutus held two fingers on each hand up. “Unwanted.” His ears swiveled around as Steven wandered about in the cavernous space. “Hey, you’re making an awful lot of noise. What’d you do, empty your change jar out to go buy bread like this is a fucking poor country or something?”

“Do you have to spew offensive drivel every time you open your mouth?” Steven said, and then looked embarrassed. “Wait, you can hear stuff rattling around in my pockets?”

“I can hear mice fucking in the next building over. So what is it, huh?”

Steven cocked his beak up, just like he tended to turn his nose up before. “It’s nothing. I just figured while I was out, I could see if there’s anything interesting around I could use for some jewelry projects. Plus, my aunt got me that rock tumbler, thinking I would use it for something crafty. Do I look like I tumble rocks? I’m not one of those rock people. Hey!”

Brutus took advantage of Steven’s rambling to stand up, come around behind him, and dig into his pockets. He pulled out a handful of small stones. “What the hell?” He looked into his hand, then walked over and dumped them out onto the lectern, where they scuttled down the angle and formed a line along the book ledge. “Rocks?”

“Ahh, yes, well there are some quite interesting ones in the gravel mixes the city buys for parking lots, I suppose, this being the great lakes and all that glacial upturn and stuff,” Steven said, voice rising in his worried tone. “They might make for good insets for necklaces, or large rings.” Steven’s hobby-hustle was making gothic jewelry, either as one-offs or bespoke commission.

“They’re all the same size. Lemme see what’s in your other pocket.” The wolf rushed back over and struggled with Steven, and while he tried to get his hand in and remove the contents of the other inside pocket of the raven’s coat, the tussle sent the contents scattering loudly on the floor. Brutus then huffed and went after them, rounding it up. “The hell? These are all weird little metal bits of stuff.” He squinted. “And they’re all the same size.”

“It’s for industrial stuff. You know, gothy shit with metal found things and, and…”

“Fucking shit, you really are a bird now! If you show up here with the fucking squeegee things from car wipers, I’m gonna slap your pussy with them.”

“Stop making fun of my vagina!” Steven cawed. “This is embarrassing on every level. I just, I don’t know, I had to go out.”

“You said I couldn’t go out and you go wandering all over town dressed like it’s a halloween party! You’re an ass. You know what you oughta do? You oughta go to work like that. Everyone expects a fucking sex shop to have weirdo employees. I went to one of those regular people sex shops, you know, where you get edible panties and fuzzy handcuffs, and the only car in the parking lot was this crazy thing with fucking anime cat ears and an enormous entire car vinyl sticker wrap thing with some aheago bitch making her cumming face! On a car! You can go to work like a cute little birdy.”

Steven sulked. “That is a terrible idea.”

“That is an awesome idea. Everyone here’s weird! It’s either college kids or gentrified pissy boomers or obscure townies or mentally-ill and drug-addicted veterans or whatever. There are fairy doors! There’s that alleyway! The newspaper guy! The burn victim that goes to the porn store every Thursday! There’s a store that sells panties and bongs! If I was a fucking raven with a prissy attitude, I would intentionally work at a goth-punk leather and fetish shop! I wouldn’t have fucked around with that box if I’d still been living where I grew up. That was just white privilege and luxury SUVs.” Brutus was lying about that last part, though only he would ever know. “Here? I mean, this wolf shit beats pushing buttons in software and trying to remember my fucking calculus while watching my student debt principal get bigger instead of smaller.”

“I’d like to point out that all it took to completely turn me into an avian monster was one single blowjob.”

Brutus shrugged. “Coulda been worse. AIDS just kills you.”

“Didn’t you say something about some guy? Or did I dream that?”

Brutus looked guilty and hunched his shoulders, then growled. “Nothing probably happened. I mean, I used a condom. I didn’t wanna get some stranger’s shit all over my dick. I might have drooled on him, but do you really think drool’s gonna turn someone into a monster? You swallowed.” Brutus again relied on the fact that Steven would have no idea he was lying.

Steven walked about with his wrists clasped behind his back. “Obviously, the ritual wasn’t entirely necessary. You didn’t cut me with anything, and that feather in my necklace was just touching me. You also didn’t bleed on me. Yet, I am become bird.” He spread his arms out. “Honestly, it would be somewhat cooler if I had wings, though that would preclude fingers, wouldn’t it? I like having fingers.”

“Don’t ravens hang out with wolves? Maybe it’s just some kinda… thing. Like it was inevitable.”

“Honestly, I’d like to know more about how this whole thing works. I did a little research when I was helping you translate the instructions from that box, and it was a dead-end. There just isn’t any sort of historical legend or myth or precedent for ‘Irish people making werewolf transformation kits’. And that antique store is still there, and the guy who owns it had no idea what was in the box. I went back and talked to him.” Steven continued walking about. “So there’s no strange mystical thing, no empty grass lot, no ‘oh there’s never been a store there’, just ‘well, I don’t know, I didn’t want to open it because sometimes a mystery is why it’s antique’.”

Brutus started to feel an itch inside. Hungry? Not really. Horny? Not really. Too much? Maybe. “I mean, I opened the stuff in the box so I bet that blood is bad, plus it kinda got chucked out when they threw out all my stuff and it’ll be harder to find than my bike was. That was a fucking great coincidence. I dunno about the deer thing, though. I mean I kinda want to do it again, but do I really wanna go do it again? I’ll find some other way to get my deer fix.”

“The best way to figure out what happened is to try doing it again. Is this a bad discussion? Whenever something traumatic happens to me, I go into intellectual mode.”

“And now you’re like, the smartest fucking bird. So it’s gonna be worse. But you went out collecting pebbles.”

Steven made a sound that was very close to a chainsaw being started. “I’m the raven, you’re the wolf, I’m supposed to be picking on you. Anyway, since I swallowed your semen and was just touching a bird feather and I turned into this, I suppose we just need to have someone else swallow some more semen and touch something else, and see if they turn into that.”

“Yeah, that’s easy, we’ll just put up a flyer on a telephone pole. I’m sure everyone’ll pick off the tags. Do you know what’s gonna happen if you do that? You’ll get the completely fucked up dregs of humanity, and a bunch of giggling stoner shitfucks. And if you turn either one of those into anything, you’ll just have even bigger problems.”

“Well how do you suggest we find someone? Didn’t that guy want to fuck you? He just found out. There obviously is some rumbling about there being a wolf guy in town.”

After a short pause, both Brutus and Steven looked at each other and said, mostly together, “No.” Steven added: “Really? No. No, no no no. As it is, I don’t think I can work and I only have so much money. Or if I try to work, what will happen if we expose ourselves? I don’t know what to do there. However, I’m also off until Tuesday.”

“No what? What do you think I’m thinking of? What are you thinking of, huh?” Brutus curled his lips back in a vicious lupine smile.

“What do you think I think you’re thinking of? You just said that you don’t think you can go eat another deer, but you’ll figure out the ‘need to hunt a deer’ thing some other way. Well, there’s only one other way to go about that, and no. You’re not going to go and turn Brad into a deer person.”

“I wasn’t gonna just sneak up on him! I was gonna ask him! He’s a furry. He probably masturbates to it all the time.”

“I think he’s asexual. And by ‘I think’, I mean, he specifically said so.”

“He also said he doesn’t like having sex with people. Look, I bet if we asked him, I mean, look how much he whines about problems with this bar. Do you think I really, really really care about problems like ‘how am I gonna get food’? I could just go steal it. I could just go scare someone into giving me a burger. I’m sure if I went to The Back Alley they’d serve me. They’d serve a burger to undead vampire Hitler. Where could I live? I’m covered in fur! I could just go live in a fucking cave like a regular wolf. Brad’s miserable and it’s about stupid stuff that no one should be miserable about. Why not make him miserable about something cool, like growing antlers every year? Also, he’s about as big as me, so I could steal his pants.”

“Oh for god’s sake, you can order pants off the internet. We’ll do that later.”

—

Later that evening, specifically well into early morning, they waited for Brad to air-horn the club closed and for the remaining drunk few patrons to wander away. Then, both Brutus and Steven went down to the bar.

Brad hadn’t a chance to get enmeshed in his fitful planning, and his eyes went wide when both showed up. “Shit. Shit, I forgot, I thought maybe it was just, I mean I didn’t see you guys after you, oh. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Steven said, and sat down at the bar. “Do you happen to have any bar nuts, by the way?”

Brad reached under the counter and pulled up a dish that had a few peanuts left. “I don’t like the sound of that ‘nothing’. Especially with you both looking at me like that.”

Brutus was back to wearing his leather outfit, although he did have a codpiece solution, by way of a pair of spandex briefs that were intended for Steven and technically stretched to fit. “I’m not looking at you like anything,” he said, while staring.

Steven, with no inhibition, dipped his head down, picked up a whole peanut in his beak, crushed it and snatched the nut inside. He then made several hollow clucking sounds. “On the first try! Impressive.” He then slid the bowl over to Brutus. “Do you want to ask, Mister Wolf?”

Brutus sniffed at the peanuts and did the same thing, except when he slurped one out of the bowl with his tongue, he just crunched the entire thing up and snarfed it down. Then he picked up another and tossed it towards Steven, who plucked it out of the air with the tip of his beak and repeated the shell-and-crunch. “Even more impressive! Brad, how much do you want to be a deer.”

Brad immediately stepped back from the bar rail and bumped against the back counter. “No.”

“Hey, hey, I’m just curious. You’re a furry, right? Steven says you’ve been a furry for a long time.”

“Why do I tell people anything? I knew if I started talking about that, it’d come back to haunt me somehow,” Brad groaned. “I mean, it’d be interesting, I guess.”

“We’re really interested in finding out just where this rabbit hole we seem to have fallen down, will actually go. At first, it seemed just Brutus had his head stuck in it, looking for the rabbit. I went to peck at his tail, and now I’m stuck in there, too. Perhaps there’s actually some vast, interesting underground cavern to be uncovered, if only we had someone else to… hmm. This metaphor seemed more cohesive when I first thought of it,” Steven picked up a peanut and made as if to toss it up for himself, and instead pelted Brutus in the nosepad with it. The wolf snapped and caught it, then hurled it back at Steven’s beak, where it pinged off the hard surface and landed several feet away on the floor.

“I can’t run a bar as a deer. I mean, first off, how do I even know I’m not hallucinating you guys? Second, you keep having arguments about going out and being seen by people, and having antlers seems like it’d make it really hard to… not be noticeable.”

“True, true,” Steven said, beak tucked down in conspiratorial thought. “I actually had a very easy time of it earlier today, thanks to some Plague Doctor cosplay. Brutus, I suppose, would just have to rely on getting angry at people until they backed off. A deer? I just don’t think anyone would ever expect a deer. They’d probably just be a bit confused, or think it’s interesting, or take a selfie.”

“Why do you have to run a regular bar? No one gives a shit about regular leather bars. Leather bars are for porn. If you wanna suck someone’s ass, you just go on an app and get blocked when you send a dick pick that doesn’t measure up. You could run a special bar. You could run a private club, for only people who are interested in this sort of thing, in any way you wanna think - they could be into it, Into It, or into it like me and Steven are into it.”

While Brutus talked, Steven took another peanut, then scarcely opened his beak. Instead of speaking, he made the exact sound of the wolf’s messaging notification on his phone. Brutus ducked his head down and took his phone out, and Steven pelted him in the forehead with another peanut. “What the fuck?”

Brad squinted at the conniving pair. “I’m pretty sure every idea you two are ever going to have for the rest of your lives, will be a terrible idea.” Then he looked around. “Are you serious, though? I mean, do you really think… there’s no way that’d work. Something has to happen. You’d have to advertise yourselves, and that’d attract attention.”

“Lemme ask you a question, venison,” Brutus said, and went to grab Brad by the vest lapel. That required that he climb onto the top of the bar, then hop off behind the bar, both actions happening as seamless as a dog jumping out a door after seeing a squirrel. Brad flung his arms up to protect himself and knocked several bottles over, which only stayed whole as his back gave them a slow roll before clanking onto the counter. “Oooh. That made you scared, didn’t it? It’s not illegal to be a wolf, is it? Or a bird? Or a deer? Or a fucking fish person, whatever, it’s not illegal.”

“I… I don’t know? There aren’t any?” Brad whimpered.

“It’s certainly not impossible, and it’s not illegal, and you wanna know something? I don’t regret this for a second.” Brutus, despite how he had felt when he’d awakened, was not lying this time. “Steven, what do you think?”

“I certainly didn’t ask for it, and I already explained my frustration at not shaking off my AFAB roots, but… I never thought I’d say this, but it’s actually quite fun being a bird.” He then threw another peanut at Brutus, which hit him right in the ear and stayed put.

“Gaah! You fucking ass!” The wolf smacked at his ear and dislodged the nut, which clicked about on the floor. “Look at us. We’re making lemonade out of our fucking lemons and you’re just over here cutting your wrist with your bar license bills and squeezing the fucking lemon on it.”

“Much better application of metaphor. Absolutely unexpected for a stupid wolf,” Steven said, and clapped.

Brutus let go of Brad and snarled.

“I… look. You guys are obviously under a lot of weird stress and pressure, but, I mean… I just… I have my own shit I’m trying to do with my own life. Also, I’m really fucking tired right now.”

“Hmmf. Well, I suppose it was worth asking anyway,” Steven shrugged, and went back upstairs with Brutus.

—

Brutus had little to do, except for browsing the internet on Steven’s old laptop. After about an hour, even further into the wee hours of the morning, Brad came upstairs and appeared in his doorway.

“Hey, uh, you’re probably not expecting me up here, are you,” he said, voice low as if to avoid disturbing Steven.

“Nope,” Brutus said, and closed the lid on his porn searching.

“I don’t think I can… I don’t think I can unsee what I saw yesterday. With Steven. I mean, this is stuff that’s not supposed to happen. How could you turn into a wolf? How could he turn into a bird? It obviously happened, but I’m pretty sure science wouldn’t have an answer. And… I’m not a religious person, and I don’t think that would, either.”

“Me neither. God isn’t even dead; he was never alive. I dunno about Steven, he grew up some weird Christian thing, but he also hates it so who knows what he really believes.”

“Anyway, I just had a really long, hard think about what you were asking me down there. And… if I’d never seen you two, and someone said, ‘I could turn you into a real deer hybrid, right now’, I wouldn’t believe them and I’d say no. If you ask me now? Well. I. Yes.”

Brutus stood up and Brad cowered. “Huh?” was the wolf’s reaction.

“Not now! Not now! I mean not right now! It’s late! I’m tired! I just… I wanted to tell you. Did it hurt?”

“It really fucking hurt. It hurt so much I passed out. Or I died, and then came back to life, I dunno which.”

Brad winced. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

—

The next day, being Sunday, was a no-work day for all three. Brad never opened the bar on Sunday nights; Steven was off work; and Brutus hadn’t even considered trying to get a job.

“So, you’re absolutely positively sure you want to do this?” Steven asked, and paced about on top of a large blue hardware store tarp with a repetitive crinkle. He was wearing a leather vest, satin pants, and his tanker boots.

Brutus was lingering around in his leather pants and boots, and Brad kept staring at him. “Yes. If I think about it any more, I’ll change my mind. Also, I, I don’t want to have sex with him. Do I have to have sex with him?”

“Aww, my widdle feewings,” Brutus mocked. “I dunno. I mean, are we gonna fucking science this? Cuz if we’re gonna science it we need to come up with a, uh, what’s that called, a truth table?”

Steven made a wood-bonking sound. “I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. I went to art school. Sort of. Community College art school, at that. So far, I ate cum, and Brutus used some alarmingly old vial of blood that presumably came from someone similar. I swallowed it, and he put the blood on a cut.”

“Wait a minute, I had a scrap of wolf stuff, and Steven had a raven feather. You’re a deer. What kinda deer stuff are you gonna do?”

Brad was seated on a folding chair on the tarp, wearing only a pair of boxer briefs and incongruously, a pair of cowboyish yellow leather gloves. He held his hands up, and they were trembling. “Deerskin. I checked like fifteen times. They’re real all natural unlined North American whitetail deer.”

“Look. If you wanna do the cum thing, I can just do it into a cup or something and you can drink it. Or we could dribble it on a cut. Or I could bleed in your mouth, or we could be blood brothers with a little pinky pinky shit. There are a lot of combinations, but there’s only one Brad. And why am I the one doing this?”

“I’m not going to put squirt on him. That’s rude. And I don’t intend to cut myself, either,” Steven up-beaked.

Brad took one of his gloves off, and looked at his bare, freckled hand. “Uh. Maybe the finger thing. Then I could put my glove back on, I mean it sounds like you’re supposed to put the whatever on top of the uh, cut? You didn’t do that, Steven, but maybe let’s kinda stick to the original thing for now. I don’t want it to… not work.”

Brutus shrugged, then looked around. “Knife please,” he said, and held his hand out.

Steven gave him a blank look. “Why do you think I have a knife?” He then clicked. “Fine.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a traditional butterfly pocketknife and handed it over.

“Figured. You probably have to protect yourself.”

“Rude, again!” Steven then croaked. “One of these days, you’re going to wake up without a penis.”

“Finger,” Brutus said to Brad, and then opened the knife. Brad held his hand out and Brutus stabbed his index fingertip. Brad yelped and a bead of blood welled up. Brutus took the knife and wiped it on his arm fur, then pricked his own finger with it. “Alright, just like you said yourself, put your glove back on after,” he said, grabbed Brad’s bleeding hand, and dripped his own blood onto the wound.

Brad snatched his hand back and pulled his glove on, then winced as he flexed his fingers into it. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“Funny to say that after doing it,” the wolf laughed.

“So what’s going to happen?” Brad sat back in the folding chair.

“For me, I started to feel really sick, and my skin burned where I’d done the thing on my chest. Then I started to get nauseated and just, threw up everywhere. And it just got worse and worse.”

Steven nodded along. “I’d agree with that statement. I just thought I had a terrible stomach virus or something, and then… well, it got worse. So if you don’t like throwing up, you have probably made a terrible mistake.”

Brad already did not look well. He’d started to sweat, and he held his pricked and gloved hand in the other. “So are you two gonna watch?”

“It seems like the best thing to do, in case you start to flail around. I don’t know if you can exactly hurt yourself while undergoing an infernal transformation, but you could hurt us, or damage the building, or who knows?” Steven shrugged.

Brad’s pallor increased and he swallowed several times, then nervously removed his gloves. “Oooh, you’re right about being nauseated. God damn,” he breathed. Not two seconds later, he lurched forward and threw up all over the tarp. He spat and lifted his head to speak, but lurched forward again.

Steven, despite having explained that he would watch, looked away. Then he covered his ears. “Oooh, I don’t want to throw up,” he said.

“I think it’s fun,” Brutus said, although his gorge rose and he too, turned away, choosing to look at Steven instead, whose tongue waggled in the classic “la la la, can’t hear you” expression, understandable even when done by an inhuman-faced bird.

Brad’s vomit turned from ostensibly food, to just bile, to red clots of blood, to black chunks. “Oh god, oh god this is real, this is real!” He hollered, in between heaves. He stood up, turned around several times, before collapsing forward to his knees for a round of vomiting that was less to expel things and more a side effect of a massive convulsion. His ashen pale skin began to look unpleasantly waxy, and his hair fell off in scalped, gory clumps.

Steven and Brutus looked at each other, the initial reflexive disgust replaced with horror. “I think, perhaps, we are in over our heads with this,” the raven said.

Brad screamed, the sound tangled and phlegmatic, and grabbed at various parts of himself, pulling off skin in the process. The attempt to rend flesh lasted only a few more seconds before he convulsed again and fell sideways onto the wet tarp, motionless even of breath. Steven had just opened his beak to speak again when Brad flopped and seized again, and then the true transformation began. His skin crawled and shifted, splitting and welling up like volcanic tectonics, while his jaw stretched out through the skin just as Steven’s had the other night. Minute by minute, his skin grew tawny deer pelt, his muzzle tip blackened, and his ears migrated to the top of his head. Eventually, he remained on the tarp, messy but complete.

“Uh. Where’s his antlers?” Brutus asked, dumbfounded as he stared at the dazed-unconscious anthropomorphic deer.

“Hmm, don’t deer grow them every year? I suppose they’ll have to come in. That probably means you’ll shed, and I’ll… what is it birds do? Molt?” Steven held one forearm across his chest while he tapped at his beak with his other index talon.

After a few more moments, Brad groaned and rolled onto all fours, then haltingly kneeled up. “Wha haffunh,” he said, eyes bleary. He crossed his eyes, then reached up and smacked himself in the muzzle. “Ungh whysisolahh,” he mumbled, then looked around, and made a ululating bleat. Then he perked his eyes wide open and his ears flicked up straight. “Nnnn,” and then he snorted with a sound like someone setting off a fire extinguisher indoors and reached down to punch the tarp. He sprang up to his feet and aimlessly ran about, then hurtled towards the door and down the stairs.

“Aww shit,” Brutus growled, and started after him, with Steven in close tow. Once down in the unifinished zone, Brad ran about aimlessly before finally stopping in Steven’s area. He stood in front of the full-length mirror, gawking wide-eyed at himself.

Brutus approached and Brad panicked, ran into a corner, then turned around. “Hey, hey, it’s me, Brutus. You know. The friendly wolf guy who uh, you know, just turned you into a deer.”

“You wannah eeh meh!”

Brutus sighed. “No, I don’t fucking want to eat you. I just keep saying that because it’s fun.”

Brad’s terror subsided with each heartbeat. “Ihh haah tahkkin,” he said, and then stuck his tongue out.

“You get over that pretty fast, plus I wasn’t any good at it before I grew a snout anyway,” the wolf sneered. “Steven’s got an excuse ‘cuz he’s a bird that can imitate stuff.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Steven up-beaked, and then squinted. Outside, someone accidentally set off their car alarm for a few honks; Steven bird-looked and then emitted a faithful reproduction, complete with the urban echo.

“Besides, you’re cute when you can’t talk right,” Brutus shrugged.

“Do not hit on the asexual!” Steven pecked him on the ear.

“Whehh mah annluhz?” Brad patted the top of his head and looked in the mirror again.

“You don’t have any. You’re a doe,” Brutus slapped him on the shoulder.

“Nuh-uh,” Brad said, and waggled his cock.

“Well!” Steven lifted his arms like he was doing a lateral raise at the gym and smacked the sides of his hips. “Clearly we’ve all learned something today. Brutus can indeed turn random people into furry monsters using his bodily fluids, Brad turned into a deer because he was touching deer stuff - I was honestly worried that being covered in bacteria and such would cause some sort of terror-gore transformation but it didn’t seem to - and I can imitate annoying things. Now, how about we figure out how the fuck we’re going to live in a regular boring human world as three fucking monsters, hmm?”