Lance felt the needling grow more pronounced, and groaned as his back's movements grew vaguely painful. He realized that whatever had burned him had dissolved his shirt. Without warning, Lance felt both his legs snap, near his ankle. It wasn't painful, but he could feel where the bone had broken. His back arched again, and then similarly snapped, and though this wasn't painful either, it had had scary implications. Lance couldn't feel his legs or any thing below his chest. Then, abruptly, Lance felt all of his skeleton shift. It was as if his whole inner anatomy was a lurk of cockroaches, suddenly alive and moving over, under, around, and sometimes through itself. He laid there, paralyzed physically, but even if he wasn't fear of what was happening to him would have done the job.
'Tamrlaine........' Lance mentally squeezed out of his head. There was a pause before;
'If you wish..... to survive....... do not disturb...... concentrating.' said Tamrlaine in broken words. It gave Lance a little hope, however, that there was a chance he would survive.
The needling suddenly became less pronounced and more shouted, and Lance realized that is was coming form inside him, as if a thousand needles were trying to escape. Forcing his hand to flop pathetically onto his chest, Lance inspected it. Navy blue fur, instead of his normal brown hair was sprouting from his arms, and Lance suspected every other place that was needling him. He gulped, and sucked in a huge breath, and his chest expanded, and then continued to expand past it's normal parameters, his shoulders broadening with it, until, shoulder to shoulder, he stood about two meters. His torso tapered down though, his hips were less broad than they were before, about twenty five centimeters wide. Lance felt, in crystal clarity, his spine, perfectly shaped, reconnect to all his nerves and muscles, the disks sliding into their new place. His jaw dislocated, and he felt that, but it was hardly even a stubbed toe compared to the rest of his night. Lance never understood that phrase, since his toes were the most pain-prone part of him back on earth, when he had seemed invincible.
'Welcome to level two of life, master Wayne,' Lance heard Alfred say in the back of his head. He had said the line when Bruce Wayne first took up the role of batman and wasn't coping well with the sleepless nights. It seemed Lance, too, had had found level two. Although to Lance, it felt about level eight.
New teeth pierced Lance's gums, shoving the older, out-dated set out. Lance grinned, and felt the canininity of his smile. He felt his skull re-mold itself, his nose flattening but his face lengthening into a snout. Lance looked down at his body and almost forgave whoever had burnt him then and there. The best six pack he had ever seen was now spilling out of his fur, in a way that strangely both grotesque and normal. It had alway been a sore point of Lance's that his abs had never fully given up on their life-long game of hide-and-seek, but now, looking at himself, he took another breath and looked appreciatively as the muscles swam beneath the fine down that covered his front.
Lance stood, stumbled, and caught himself on a tree branch. When the world had stopped spinning, he let go of the branch, and looked around. Hard-skin-easy-climb-trees were all around him, as well as ripper-thorn-hedges, toothsome-blackberry-shrubs and rustle-in-the-dark-leaves.
He shook his head slowly, growing in speed until his whole body was shaking, and Lance realized that if he had been wet he would have dried himself this way. It was the best way of drying himself, Lance realized, towels were ineffective and less than useless. He looked at his legs, and realized he had four knees and two ankles. Flexing one left and then the other, Lance tested his new joints, and found that walking with four knees wasn't that hard, it was just more complicated. Like turning manual on for the first time in a driving game. Then Lance laughed at how fitting his analogy was. His laugh came out as deep waves of barks, and he jumped in the air. He didn't know why, but he marveled at the four meters that he achieved. He jumped laterally, clearing more than seven meters, almost knocking into the trees on the opposite side of the clearing.
