FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

So You've Been Transmogrified:

Replacement Clause

Laue was an expert in Asian culture, was fluent in mandarin, and a handful of other regional languages, could read ancient Chinese texts as easy as English in a dollar store magazine. She was well traveled, well educated, and well tempered in both mind and body. However wiping the sweat from her head she could only really feel a growing anger at those members of the museum staff absent today. It was the job of them not her to lug expensive, and heavy things around with the equipment, not hers. She had not even come to work knowing how to use the piece of machinery she now used to move a statue around the floor of the receiving area.

The only boon that she could see right now was that statue, a large piece about the size of her body. It depicted an eastern type dragon and was carved from jade. Seemingly from a single large piece of the green rock. It was detailed to a level that elevated it from other such works of the same material. She was infatuated with it, stealing as many glances as she could as she moved it off the truck it had come in on, and then over to a storage area.

However as she rolled down the hallway she found that her interest in the object could be held back no more. She stopped under one of the lights in the hallway, and came around it looking at it, admiring it. The face the dragon held was impassive looking outward seemingly at nothing content to endlessly gaze upon some vista it had long since been removed from. She reached out a hand and touched it, feeling the smooth green stone under her delicate touch.

It was cool to the touch and the smooth green stone had no defects that she could see. No chips, no dents, no cracks. It was perfectly preserved. Seemingly untouched by the march of time and manipulation of man. Her eyes wandered down looking to the base of the statue and seeing that it was also jade. It was nothing to look at however. The true work was the statue, the base it sat on would only have been ignored anyway she thought. So it made sense that it was plain looking.

However there was something there, a string of ancient characters likely put into place by whoever had carved the work in the first place. They too looked striking and clear, unfaded by years of simply existing. She ran her hand across them feeling the ridges and valleys of words and trying to translate them.

"Those who break will replace." she said out loud and making a face as she looked at them closer.

No name, no ancient Chinese wisdom, no appeal to a deity. Just the simple affirmation that whoever should break this finely crafted work of sculpture would be the one to replace it. Short and to the point. She shrugged and stood back up admiring the thing again. To be sure if anyone broke this and she had carved it she would look for compensation.

She stood back up fully and stretched her gaze still firmly locked on the statue. She broke it off knowing that she had a job to do, not her job but a job nonetheless. She could complain to Doctor Hendley about it later. For now all she needed to do was push this thing a little further down the hallway.

Laue gripped onto the handles of the electric jack and twisted the throttle forward. She turned it just a bit too far however. The jack and the statue jumped forward faster than she had thought they would. She yelped and then went wide eyed watching as the jack hit the wall at and angle and the statue fell off of it falling to the floor.

It was as if the whole thing happened in slow motion. Laue could swear she saw the cracks forming along the whole statue as it hit the floor and began to fall apart. She reached a hand out forward as her face cringed, she started to move around and come closer to the mess she had made. It was over in seconds. There before her was the finely crafted piece of jade she had been admiring all morning in a few dozen pieces on the ground.

She held her hand up behind her head looking at them and wondering what to do. She was in deep shit, maybe not fire-able deep, this was in a sense not completely her fault. But she knew there would be repercussions on deck for her. It was instinctual what came next, she reached down and picked up a piece of the broken statue. However what came after that was anything but normal.

The piece of jade seemed to lose its shape in her hand deforming into an amorphous blob as it seemingly melted in and over her hand. Laue tried to shake the green gooey substance from her hand but found that whatever the jade had turned into was clinging to her. She gripped her wrist with the other hand and pulled up trying to scrape it off with her free hand. It just remained firmly clung to her, she felt something odd and looked down to see the broken pieces forming into a singular mass. The mass was also now covering her feet.

She tried to jump out of it but only managed to fall over. Her feet and lower legs playing host to the goo as it climbed her legs. She tried to pull herself from it grabbing onto the pedestal and pulling herself forward. It seemed to work as she felt herself moving forward, however should could also feel the goo coming with her still climbing up her body. She gritted her teeth and pulled herself up even further dragging her body onto the pedestal trying to find an object high up so she could pull herself back to her feet.

Laue tried to move again but found that she was stuck, she looked down to her goo covered hand and immediately noticed two things, first that no matter how hard she pulled on it it would not move. Second that her hand was no longer a hand. She noticed three distinct clawed fingers on what had been her hand, smooth and carved solid and without seems. Save for were the goo ended and her skin began. She reached over with her other hand and pulled at it trying to free herself from it but only found herself stuck.

She leaned in closer and felt a pit opened up in her gut seeing that there was no gap between her hand and the pedestal, there was only a solid block of jade. She instantly knew she had fused with it, that her hand was now fused to the platform, it was crazy and yet, it was happening to her right before her eyes. Then she realized something, she couldn't feel her hand, she could but at the same time she couldn't. There was an absence of any real input form it. Hot or cold, pain or pleasure. She couldn't even really call it numbness just a lack of feeling. She also noted that her legs felt the same way.

She started to breath heavily seeing that her legs and lower body had seemingly reconstructed them selves without her knowledge, her legs were fused to the platform and were similar to her hand now. Covered in hardened jade. She even had a tail, locked in a position similar to the statue.

Laue blinked once realizing that she was fulfilling the inscription, she was replacing the statue. She tried to reach something, anything with her sole unchanged limb as she felt the growing lack of sensation creep up her body. She found the act of moving harder and harder as the goo crept up from her rear, covering her skin in the green goo and hardening into her new scales.

It took mere moments but she found the goo already covering her chest, she felt as it shrank and her body lengthened, her human form stretching out into the body of dragon of eastern origin. She looked at her body as best she could, feeling it rearranging to match the pose the statue had held before. She felt her face shifting position her own movements now translating to nothing as the goo took over her hand and the rest of her muscles.

She was a slave to the goo now, to the jade. She felt her body still moving empty and devoid of feeling as it shifted and rearranged. She found her now long and spindly body facing a wall, her legs all four of them planted firmly on the base. Her body long and spindly arched up and down, her tail curled around almost to her face. She was the statue now, the only thing left was her face and she now felt the goo encroaching on that. She winced as the last bit of sensation she could feel was covered up by the goo, she expected to be met with emptiness and nothingness, the void, as it covered her face.

Instead she blinked her eyes open and that was that, they stayed there open and gazing fixed in a simple position. She tried to move her eyes but Laue found them fixed on a singular spot on the wall. Their unmoving firmly cemented in jade. She tried to scream out of her open mouth, but nothing came. Her mouth was for show, all of her was. She was just a mind trapped in a body that could do nothing but act as decoration. She panicked, she tried everything she could think of, to move any part of her body. All to no avail.

She waited, and waited, and waited until she was found. She should briefly caught a glimpse of one, heard his words but could not cry out for help, warn him of the curse. She was moved to the place Laue had been told to put it, put herself she thought. She was still herself, but she was also the statue, but she was also herself.. She found another view against another wall, then the lights went out, darkness fell and Laue stewed.

She tried to sleep but found her mind untiring as time lingered on, and on and on. All she could see was the wall, and after a sizable amount of time had passed she saw light. She felt movement, and felt elation at finally seeing something other than the wall she had been placed to face for a while, for how long she wondered.

Laue found herself being cataloged, being studied. She heard idle talk, times and dates and found that she had been in storage for a week, a whole week. She wanted to do something, say something, anything at all, but was static. Her mind wanted desperately for an outlet to present itself to her, but she found no such luck as she sat in the lab being studied and analyzed.

She felt a new surge of elation when one of the researchers left a news paper on a table she could see. She looked over the words with glee trying to soak up as much information as she could. She read it over and over again over the course of the day. It talked about things she would have otherwise not cared about, a string of break ins up town, a few things carried over from other parts of the paper she didn't have context for and even a comic strip.

However after a few hours the janitor came in took it and tossed it leaving her with nothing to look at. A few more days after that she was moved again, this time to the floor, to a place in the main hall. She felt better, seeing people again not just the researchers, she sat there watching, and watching.

Laue tried not to think about the future too much, she knew that sooner or later she would probably be put back into storage, back into the dark basement, for more than a week. Months, years, forgotten about. An object to be looked at by a few people a few times every so often. She dreaded it, feared it, but tried to block it out. She failed once the lights went out and everyone went home though, failed to keep her mind wandering to dark places.

The days started to blend together, time became meaningless to her after a while. Then something happened she was not ready for.

"Hey, anyone in their?" a voice asked.

Laue could not turn to see the voice, could not call out to it, but she knew it was not for her. She had heard a number of things she had thought were people talking to her only for her heart to sink even further.

"Nope, just a statue." she thought to herself.

"Holy shit." the voice said coming around to face her face.

It was a woman, long black hair, piercing red eyes, dressed in jeans and a nice shirt.

"Wait, can you hear me!" Laue yelled mentally.

"Yes yes relax dear let me get a look at you." She said in a calming voice.

Laue saw her drop out of sight.

"You got a name?" she asked. "Laue. How can you hear me?" She said and then asked.

"Magic, now please just let me see what I'm dealing with." The woman said casually.

"Wait, magic?" Laue said questioningly, and then remembered she was now made of solid jade.

"Yup, now Laue, let me see if there anythings I can do about. Ah ok try and move your eyes." she said coming back into view.

Laue faltered for a second, and then felt joy as her eyes moved around the room moving from their fixed position for the first time since she had transformed.

"Thank you thank you thank you." she cried waving her eye around the room before settling on the woman.

"Your welcome. Now you stepped into some weird and strong magic, I think I can get you out but it's gonna take me some time ok. But don't worry your gonna be fine." the woman said leaning down to eye level with Laue.

"Sure fine take your time just um, can you stay for a while. I haven't talked with anyone in a while." Laue said, her jade eyes seeming to soften to the woman.

"Sure thing honey, I'm Gwen." she said sitting on the floor and looking up at Laue.