I woke up and immediately curled into the smallest ball I could manage. The sensory overload felt like the worst migraine I’d ever had, crossed with my most epic hangover and-

I hastily uncurled and shoved myself up onto hands and knees before retching bile. Vomiting is a full-body experience, but it doesn’t exactly take up much mental space. Even while I emptied my guts, I could still register the way my fingers pushed into the ground, the arch of my back, and the way my spine seemed somehow longer. It all felt…different.

Hacking and spitting up the last of the nastiness, I pushed back and into a crouch.

The whole time I had kept my eyes squeezed tightly shut.

“Take it one step at a time. The important thing is not to panic,” I muttered.

One more deep breath and I would start cataloguing the differences between my new self and my old self. Okay…maybe two more deep breaths. I had some ‘variable gains’ to go over.

I opened my eyes.

My hands were now tipped in claws. They were the same translucent off-white color I’d seen on big cats in the zoo, and looked quite sharp. My palms were a little smaller than I was used to, my fingers a little shorter, and the joints on each finger looked thicker – maybe stronger? I curled my hands and watched in shock as the claws extended a full inch past the ends of my fingers. Retracting them was instinctive, and thankfully they pulled in enough that I wouldn’t necessarily stab anyone I poked.

But still.

“Oh god, I’m gonna poke my own eye out.”

My skin had shifted to a tawny gold color but my freckles had been replaced by irregular splotches of color up and down the outsides of my arms. They reminded me of a fawn’s spots, but they were multiple shades of dark green. I looked down and-

Huh.

I-

404 Error, Cognitive Function Not Found

“One step at a time,” I wheezed out. “Don’t panic.”

I was naked.

My legs were now digitigrade.

I had a tail.

“I PICKED ELF! WHAT THE FUCK.”

The sound rebounded off my surroundings and I flinched because I felt my ears twitch in response. I tabled that for the moment in favor of looking around. There were walls of dark blue-gray stone surrounding me on all sides, but the roof of the structure was nonexistent. Judging by the scorch marks on the floor and the crumbled top of the wall, I guessed there had been an explosion of some sort. A quick glance around told me I should probably be glad that there had been an explosion.

This place looked like a mad scientist’s laboratory. There was a near-fully enclosed stone alcove outlined with runes and dotted with empty manacles and chains just beyond where I had puked. The far left wall was lined with bookcases, some of which were even intact, and strange tools. To my right were gurneys with more manacles and chains, and a few four-foot stone posts with, oh look, even more manacles and chains.

A glance behind had me clutching at my stomach and gagging. Vat after vat of some unidentifiable liquid, and each held beings in all shapes and sizes. I saw every race I’d been given as an option and countless more I didn’t recognize. Every one of them was dead, every one of them looked like they’d died in pain. Directly behind me was yet another vat, but this one looked like it had been sliced open in some manner. It had clearly once been filled with the same goop as the rest of the vats, and it was still mostly full below the slice in the side, but there was no goop spilled on the ground or on me.

Which made the most obvious option: that I had come from that vat, seem unlikely.

I rose up and marveled at my new sense of balance. My feet were long, what had once been my heels now rose a good eight inches off the ground. Claws, thicker and a little blunter than the ones on my hands, tipped every toe and dug into the ground for stability. Mottled green and gray fur covered my feet before thinning gradually into something more like peach fuzz at my knees. Even standing straight, my knees remained slightly bent. My tail clearly wasn’t meant as a counterweight for my new posture and a little experimentation proved that it was at least four feet long and prehensile. The tip of my tail had a tuft like a lion’s, but the rest of it had a covering of short, dense fur.

I spared a moment to be grateful that I wasn’t completely covered in fur, and then carefully reached up towards my ears. They were pointy, yes, and both bigger and set higher on my head than they had been before. But! They were not cat ears. I had elf ears. Perfectly normal elf ears and I was going to stop thinking about this now.

I padded back to the broken vat and reached in to touch the liquid.

Because I’m a curious moron.

The liquid absorbed into my skin, making my fingers tingle and twitch.

I immediately removed my hand from the vat.

I waited for a moment, expecting a screen to pop up saying I was poisoned or something. Nope.

“Status?”

Greetings, Traveler! Status screen is locked until Level 10.

“…no way. Come on! Um. Stats? Spells? Uh, charm? Skill List?”

Status screen is locked until Level 10. Please explore and grow!

My chest vibrated with an honest-to-god growl.

“Okay, okay, think. Maslow’s hierarchy. I need food, water, shelter, sleep…clothing, please and thank you.”

I searched the broken laboratory from top to bottom, taking my time (take a 20!) and found:

Two elven corpses, clearly experiments judging by the fact they’d been sewn together. A shitload more experiments, all in varying levels of decay. One dead member of the horned species, female. One dead member of the elf species, male. One leather satchel full of dried plants. A shitload of books I couldn’t read. A shitload of tools that looked arcane and…weird. Two maps that were useless to me because they didn’t have handy ‘You are here!’ stickers. Three empty vats that looked like they’d been ‘opened’ the same way mine had been.

Frisking a ripe corpse for valuables would have made me puke if the whole place didn’t already smell overwhelmingly of scorched stone and something briny that I assumed came from the vats. I ended up stripping the male elf’s clothes instead of the horny lady. Her natural endowments made her shirt useless to me, and the stiff corset she’d been using was too big and too complicated for me to contemplate.

In short order I was dressed in a dead man’s shirt, vest and trousers (I drew the line at underoos), using a dead woman’s belt and honestly feeling a lot better about life now that I wasn’t starkers. “Clothing is covered – hah! This place could technically – yeah, nah, not sheltering here with the dead people,” I decided.

There were no obvious doors I could use to leave, no windows either, just four walls and a nonexistent roof through which I could make out sunlight. It was either early morning or late night judging by the sky, and I hadn’t really been paying enough attention to tell which.

“Well, fuck,” I said, flexing my fingers and watching my claws extend and retract. “Guess I’m climbing.”