underFlorence

CW for body horror in this one! Feel free to skip this chapter if that isn’t something you wanna read. I promise that this is the only instance of that in this story, and you’ll be able to jump right back in with Chapter 6.

Over the next few days, Grace made steady progress in her research. It wasn’t easy, but step by step, she managed to decode more and more of what made up the familiar spell. After only a week, she’d managed to completely reverse-engineer the spell and find out what restricted it to the one-time use.

With all that work she’d been able to remove that restriction and create a new spell out of it. It would still reform her body to its most comfortable form, but it was usable as often as she’d want. She was so ecstatic to try it out! Finally, she could be herself.

Of course, the spell once again required an animal to fuse with. As soon as she’d finished the spell, she headed to her parents to ask if there were any sheep that would be suitable.

“Hey, Mom, hey, Dad, are there any sheep that are likely to pass away soon? I need them for some magic thing,” she asked, putting on her most honest smile. This was the deciding moment. If they couldn’t find a suitable animal, all this work was for nothing. She hoped she was only imagining the beads of sweat running down her forehead.

Her mom got up from the table she was eating breakfast at and went to ruffle Grace’s hair. “Actually, yeah, sweetie. You see, old Batsy got some nasty cuts during shearing and it looks like they got infected. We were planning to call a doctor, but if you can use her, then feel free to do so!”

Grace only nodded in understanding of the sheep’s pain. She’d had a similar accident not too long ago, although she decided it would be wise not to mention that to her mom.

With the good news in tow, Grace went up to her room to tell Fionna, only to find her friend sleeping on the bed in her room. Not wanting to wait for her to wake up, Grace approached the bed and slowly shook her awake.

“Mmmmm…” her friend mumbled as she was slowly coming to. Grace was enamored by how adorable that noise was. She just wanted to hug her friend at that moment.

Excitedly bouncing up and down her mattress, Grace retold what her mom had told her about Batsy. “Can you believe it? I managed to recreate the spell and now I’ll finally be in a body I’m comfy with! And we can share this with the world!”

Fionna just yawned in response, stretching her body on the bed. After rubbing her eyes a little bit, she smiled up at Grace. “That’s great! Do you wanna do it now, or?”

Grace nodded enthusiastically. “Absolutely! I just can't wait to do this!” Without even waiting for her friend to get ready, she already dashed down the stairs and towards the sheep.

Of course, Grace realized soon after that that if she wanted to go with her friend, she actually had to wait for her, so she went back up to her room. After half an hour, Fionna returned from the shower, dressed in a very comfortable-looking wool sweater.

“Look at that, and here I thought you’d be doing this all without me!” she exclaimed as she saw Grace awkwardly standing in front of her. Looking at the sheepgirl’s body, the way she looked incredibly content with just being who she was, Grace couldn’t help but feel jealous. She shook her head intently, trying to get these thoughts out of there. She’d be the same soon.

As they headed towards their goal, the way being only illuminated by moonlight, Grace spoke up to dispel the awkward silence. “So, if us sneaking in to find Betsy was like a cool spy movie, what would this be? Just the sequel?”

Fionna shrugged. “In the end, that’s up to what happens. Maybe it’ll be more of what happened last time, maybe it’ll change genres! Who knows, it could become a horror movie!” She made an “ooooo” sound to accentuate that, but considering how cute she now was it didn’t really get the point across. “Or even a romance!” she added, and Grace felt herself blushing at that statement.

After once again sneaking over the straw covering the ground of the sheep’s resting place, they could immediately tell which sheep was Batsy. It was completely naked, its skin being covered with red spots and cuts, awful blemishes that showed the person shearing the sheep had been doing a horrible job. They should take better care of the skin.

Going back to the task at hand, Grace couldn’t help but grin as she had an ingenious idea. She looked at the space between the planks on the wall, moved them aside slightly and dropped an object down the opening.

Fionna rolled her eyes. “So, did you drop your phone down there again?”

Grace whistled inconspicuously. “Dropped something? Whatever could you be talking about?” she asked her friend while sticking out her tongue.

After exiting the building, they went around the other side to complete the spell without scaring off any sheep. As they turned the last corner, Fionna was already getting out her phone. “So, lemme guess, I have to call your phone now?”

Grace just grinned. “Nope, watch this! Hadzan ruya hazeban belan!” On cue, a dim but still noticeable light began shimmering from the grass along the wall. “Long-distance spell activation,” she boasted as she went past her friend who actually looked surprised for once.

Picking up her wand, she went through the procedure. “Alright, so, Batsy is across from that wall right now, so she’s the closest living being from where I’m at right now,” she explained as she began to sit down against the wall.

Fionna began to speak up, but Grace interrupted her before she could say anything. “Yeah, I know, small insects and stuff, but those don’t matter to the spell. They’re specifically blocked out or something, remember?” Fionna closed her mouth and nodded.

This was it, Grace thought. Her moment. Finally she could get what Fionna had gotten. She repeated her homemade incantation to herself, making sure to remember it properly. Since this one hadn’t been compressed yet, it was considerably wordier.

With resolve in her eyes, she pointed the wand at herself and recited the incantation. She could feel the energy building up and, sure enough, a beam came out, aimed right at her.

She could feel the energy flowing through herself, seeking the other target. She had expected it to flow behind her and seek out Batsy, but something went wrong. The flow didn’t move much at all, it stayed close and what movement she could feel was entirely in the wrong direction. It was seeking out something closer.

Something smaller.

She panicked. How did she repurpose the spell again? Which of the restrictions did she lift again? How did she change the incantations again? In this crucial moment, that information just wasn’t coming to her, no matter how much she was racking her brain. It was like all the time of working on it was just gone from her memories.

Grace was ripped out of her thoughts by a searing pain. She had always felt uncomfortable in her body, specifically so after her realization, but now she was feeling a physical recoil from how wrong her body was feeling.

She could feel limbs growing where they had no business to, bones and muscles and nerves forming out of thin air and immediately transmitting nothing but pain and more pain and the wrongness of it all.

Her skin was melting off, drooping down her body before being replaced by something hard growing in its place. She could feel its stiffness, its coldness, and she hated it. She also hated the pain it brought, of course, but she had so awaited becoming a sheep, being soft and fluffy and cuddly, and now this?

Without time to think, her head immediately began being ripped apart and reformed, setting in an entirely unfamiliar shape. New muscles had been formed, she could tell her eyes now worked differently even though she couldn’t open them from the pain.

How could she even feel this? Wasn’t she supposed to be unconscious during this? Wasn’t this all supposed to happen in an instant? Wasn’t this meant to deform the entire body before reforming it? So how was she feeling this pain? Did she mess something up?

As if to add insult to injury, after her body had already become so utterly unfamiliar to her, it now continued to grow in size, all four of her arms and her two legs stretching out as tissue was ripped apart before immediately regrowing. She could feel her shoulders growing wider before, finally, the pain stopped and she was left to herself.

Well, the physical pain had stopped. The mental pain hurt even more now that her mind wasn’t preoccupied with her terrifying transformation. This was supposed to be her ideal body! Even when combined with some insect, it shouldn’t have given her these broad shoulders, it should have made her figure more comfortable! She wouldn’t even have minded becoming a bug girl. But this… her body felt wrong in the same ways before, as well as in a million other ways.

Slowly, Grace tried opening her eyes before becoming blinded by way too many images of the world before her. Almost immediately, instincts she didn’t know she had kicked in and the images morphed into one.

Using her four arms for balance in a way she didn’t really understand, she’d just done it, she slowly propped herself up. Standing up, she could immediately tell how much she’d grown. She must have stood almost seven feet tall now, her torso just being practically a giant rectangle. Just a few minutes ago, she would’ve thought her body back then had been the worst it could get for her, but she had now been proven wrong. This whole body felt so viscerally wrong, she could feel that with every fiber of her being.

She felt like puking, but couldn’t even figure out what was going on with her stomach and how that would work right now.

Looking down, she could see Fionna lying on her back a good bit away, looking up at her with fear. Grace tried to defuse this whole situation. “Listen, Fionna, it’s okay, we can fix this—I can fix this,” she said. Well, she tried to say that, but as soon as those words left her mouth she could tell that wasn’t the case. It sounded all wrong. It sounded to her ears like the cacophony of dial-up internet mixed with the most raspy male voice she could think of. If she hadn’t known what she was trying to say, she probably couldn’t even have realized that what was coming out was a coherent sentence—by itself, it just sounded like incoherent noise.

Fionna scuttled away from her. “What the fuck? Weren’t you saying that this spell would give you your ideal form?”

Grace just shook her head. No, no, no, this was probably the furthest she could imagine from her ideal form. She began sobbing, although even that sounded unrecognizable.

Fionna started sobbing, too. “Didn’t you say you were like me?” she shouted through her tears. “I thought you understood me! I was even starting to develop a cru—nevermind that. Look at this form! That’s as male as it gets!”

“You horrible freak. I should’ve known it was just a fetish,” she spat out before turning around and slowly walking away. Grace wanted to run after her, clear this up, but she couldn’t. She fell onto her knees, punching the ground with her two left hands. She wanted to cry, but she knew her eyes couldn’t do that anymore.

Fionna’s last words rang through her head. Just a fetish. Just a fetish. She felt so gross. She’d violated their friendship by lying about being trans, when this form just disproved that entirely. She was disgusting. Not just on the outside, but on the inside, too. And now she’d lost her closest friend. She wanted the tears to come out, to at least offer some relief, but they wouldn’t come. Dry, static, rough, masculine sobs rang out through the night.

And then Grace woke up on her mattress in a dry sweat.