I woke up on day seven, a little sleep deprived after having been kept awake for much of the night by the strange sensations bubbling beneath my skin, but thankfully feeling a little better. Inspecting myself to survey the damage brought no comfort; I now had red pin pricks along significant swaths of my arms, dry and cracked skin covered more than half of my legs, there was a bump on my forehead, and I was sprouting short blue fur over patches of my chest. The fur must be the same thing as on my back, which had now spread significantly and covered half of it.

With a sigh, I climbed out of bed to grab my breakfast, blowing hair out of my mouth as it swung around and landed in there.

...Wait, I have my hair in a pixie cut. It isn't anywhere near long enough to reach my mouth. I felt around, only to find that my hair was double the length that it should be. I pulled a clump forward, trying to get a look at it, and found that while the bottom length of my hair was my normal shade of brown, the new growth was the same pale blue as my new fur.

"I don't suppose I could have a mirror and some scissors?" I asked the empty air. "Might as well keep a consistent colour scheme."

Speaking made my throat feel scratchy. I suppose at one sentence every couple of days, I was probably getting out of practice. And frankly, I couldn't care less about my hair colour; I wanted a mirror to get a better picture of what was happening to me, and scissors were a weapon. For precisely that reason, I doubted I'd get any, but it was worth a try.

I continued the inspection of my body after breakfast. It didn't seem to just be my hair that had grown explosively; my nails had too. If they did give me scissors, they would need a trim. The oldest of the quills on my arms were starting to develop a small amount of fluff near the tips, which was not a feature of any hedgehog I'd seen. Could they be feathers? Was I growing feathers on my arms?

Why would they do that? What use were feathers to a human? Reluctant to try exercising again, after yesterday made it clear that it just made things worse, I sat back again to read. I'd barely managed a page before the noise of the delivery shelf moving out caught my attention. It was a long time until lunch, so what was it now? It turned out that there was, indeed, a pair of scissors. Also, a note that they must be returned before lunch would be delivered, so they wouldn't let me keep them. A pity, but it had been a long shot to start with.

In that case, where was the mirror? I'd barely had a chance to think that before I heard another grinding sound behind me, on the opposite wall. One panel moved out very slightly, and from behind it, a full-length mirror slid out by a metre. I ran over to peer behind the exposed panel, but there was nothing there but solid steel. That wasn't useful...

Keeping up appearances, I gave my hair a trim. It wasn't easy, being unable to see my own back, and the end result wasn't pretty, but it would get the hair out of my face. I eventually managed my nails too, but the scissors could barely cut them, so it took far longer than it should have. They looked sharp enough, so that hadn't been a problem I was expecting, but I suppose it was no surprise that they'd actually given me blunted ones.

Personal care done, I stopped to inspect myself properly. My face looked fine, although my eyes seemed a little lighter in colour than I remembered. In fact, everything looked fine, other than my mutated patches of skin and my new colour scheme. The colours actually looked familiar, although I couldn't place them.

I noted just how far the mutated patches had spread, and couldn't help feeling a bit like a frog boiling in a pot. I was sitting around doing nothing while my symptoms got gradually worse, telling myself that things weren't bad enough yet to require drastic action and I should continue to feign cooperation until I saw an opportunity for escape, yet never noticing just how hot the metaphorical water was getting.

By the time I woke up on day eight, it was clear that the things growing from my arms really were feathers. Furthermore, the leathery skin on my legs had grown hard and chitinous, looking almost like... No... My heartbeat sped out of control as realisation finally dawned; almost like scales. I felt at the bumps in my head. A second one had appeared, its position a mirror of the first. Doubtless they would grow into horns. The pastel colour scheme, designed to blend in with the sky, to support their hunting strategy of diving out of the sky and grasping their target with their feet. The armoured legs to defend against a target trying to fight back.

I was turning into a harpy! No, they were turning me into a harpy! I can take a bit of disfigurement, but I don't want to be a monster! Why would they even do something like this? "Why?" I screamed. "Why do you want to turn me into a monster?"

I was hyperventilating, and I could already feel my skin starting to tingle again as my heart beat faster than from any workout. I tried to get my breathing back under control, telling myself I wasn't really turning into a monster; I still had arms, and not a harpy's wings. I didn't have the claws. It was rubbish, and I knew it; I was only on day eight of something that was supposed to take a month. From my workout two days ago, I knew I was getting the ridiculous strength of a monster. My voice when I had screamed just now was wrong. Not to the point of being inhuman, yet, but now I knew that my scratchy throat yesterday was nothing to do with disuse.

This explained the over-engineered cell I was in. The steel walls that were far in excess of what was required to hold a random school-girl were instead supposed to contain a monster. I'd heard monster claws could slice straight through steel, so maybe I was wrong about what type of metal it was. Or maybe it could be electrified or something. Regardless, I didn't doubt that this room would be able to contain a harpy.

I didn't know much about monsters. I knew some of the different types, and that they seemingly sprung into existence in this country about fifteen years ago, but I had no idea where they originally came from, or why our country was the worst affected. They were no more intelligent than animals, but had unnatural physical strength, and were universally hostile to humans. There were religious groups that claimed they were sent as a punishment from God for humanity's depravities. There were conspiracy theories that they were created by governments as weapon of war, that escaped their leashes. There were fantastical theories that they were immigrants from another world, that had escaped into our own when our two universes brushed against each other somewhere in a larger multiverse. Which one was true, I had no idea, although my own first-hand experience was starting to point at option two.

I did my best to calm back down. I'd already expected that the reason they didn't tell me what they were doing to me was because knowing the answer would only stress me more, and frankly, turning into a harpy was a better option than some of the horrors I'd been imagining in the pit of night. Harpies were actually kinda cute, and it wasn't as if I was planning to go on a murderous rampage or anything.

A bit more panic slipped in as I realised that my intentions meant nothing. If they wanted to wield me as a weapon, there were plenty of ways to do so, regardless of what I wanted. Taking my family hostage would certainly work, but would probably be unnecessary; if they could do this to my body, who knew what they could do to my mind?

Now what? I'd worked out what was happening to me, but I still didn't know why, or what my captors' goals were. I also wanted to know why they kept me conscious; if they wanted me to stay 'relaxed', they could have kept me sedated and fed me intravenously. Should I try to stay as relaxed as possible, to slow down my transformation and hope for a rescue? Or should I do my best to accelerate it, and hope that a sudden boost in my strength would somehow lead to an opportunity for escape?

What would I even do if I did escape? I might be okay today, but a few days more and I'd probably look monstrous enough that running to the police was as likely to get me shot as it was to get me rescued. Would my transformation stop if I escaped? Was I being continuously dosed, or am I suffering continuous effects from something they filled me with when I was first captured? If I was being continuously dosed, would I even survive going cold turkey?

In the end, my decision wasn't based on which route I thought would get me out of here, simply because I didn't think either option would help. I'd already been here over a week; if a rescue was coming, it should have come by now. Neither did I really believe that I'd be able to escape this room, monster or not. Rather, my decision was based on impatience; I had no desire to sit here for another three weeks, doing nothing, watching my humanity slowly drain away while I could do nothing to prevent it. If they wanted to turn me into a monster, then a monster they would get.

I managed two hundred push-ups before breakfast without even breaking a sweat.