FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Storm Caller

By Dragonien

_ _

Have you ever been struck by lightning? Honestly, it's not as bad as most people think. Don't misunderstand, it's absolutely awful and no one should ever experience it if they can avoid it. But the searing agony and pain one might expect from being struck with something hot enough to turn sand into glass and powerful enough to split a tree in half never actually came. Instead, all there was to feel was an numbing tingle going through every part of the body; kind of like when you sit on the toilet too long and your legs go to sleep only to have them get that pin-pricking tingle that makes them feel like they're made of lead when you stand and the blood rushes back to them. That and the ache. Oh god does it leave you aching. It's like that muscle soreness that you get after an intense workout but through your entire body, twice as bad, and without the pleasant flood of endorphins that comes with it.

These were the thoughts that rolled through Stormy's mind as she lay sprawled out in the bed of her little wooden cottage. That and, of course, the irony of someone her parents had named Stormy being struck by lightning. Even after a night's rest and a borderline-overdose of over-the-counter pain killers her body still ached like she'd gone a dozen rounds with a meat tenderizer and lost every single one. The gray-furred wolfess wanted nothing more than to lay in bed for the rest of the day; hoping she could use sheer force of willpower to force herself to sleep until she didn't hurt anymore. She'd already succeeded in sleeping through a good portion of the day if the position of the sun outside was any indication. Unfortunately, the insistent grumble of her hungry belly told her that her body had no intention of letting her do so until she fed it something.

Groaning in a very unladylike volume and tone of voice, she forced herself up from the bed and ambled her way over towards the kitchen with all the grace of someone with two peg legs whose breathalyzer test would have shown she had somehow gotten blood in her alcohol-stream. She didn't have much food left since she was nearing the end of her little vacation to the mountains; but she was still able to scrounge up a few hot dogs she lazily grilled on a pan hastily heated on the little gas stove in the corner. In the process of turning on the grill, though, she must have pulled too hard at the little knob as it snapped clean off as soon as she had pulled on it. Thankfully she had a pair of needle-nose pliers handy in the multitool on her backpack and, with more care and precision than she was awake enough to be happy about expending, she was able to get the stove on then off again to cook her food. By then, she was so fed up with the day already she didn't even bother with condiments; instead popping the slabs of processed meat in plain buns and scarfing them down with abandon. Once the grumble of her stomach had been sated she was perfectly happy to stumble her way back over towards the bed. She was eager for a few more hours of rest in hopes of sleeping off the worst of last night's events. As she walked past the little mirror hanging above the keyring beside the door, Stormy paused as she caught sight of her reflection. It wasn't the look of her fur still being frazzled that caught her attention, though. That much was a given considering what had happened to her. Hell, if anything she was surprised she didn't look more like a giant walking afro from the way she'd been electrocuted. It was something else about her fur, specifically that on her face, that caught her attention.

"Whoa. That's weird." She said aloud, only then realizing how dry her throat was.

After retrieving a glass of water to parch her previously unrecognized thirst, Stormy returned to the mirror to examine the strange fur markings on her face. She'd heard plenty of stories about people being struck by lighting and it doing all kinds of weird stuff to people; from giving them lisps to curing mental disorders to simply turning their hair white. What was odd about her, though, wasn't that her fur had turned white. Instead, underneath both of her eyes she now sported a pair of dark blue chevron-like V-shapes almost like makeup marks or tattoos colored into her fur. They stood out clearly against the dark-gray fur of her cheeks and the lighter streak of gray that went down the bridge of her muzzle and over her head. As she looked them over, fingers brushing against the discolored fur as if expecting to feel an unfamiliar texture, she thought back to the events of the night before.

She had spent the last week exploring every inch of the mountains that she could get solid footing on without resorting to actual rock-climbing. The day had been getting late and a thick carpet of ominous, black clouds had been swarming their way in from the distance to cover the skyline. In her desperation to find somewhere to shelter from the rain she had squeezed herself into a narrow crevice that looked to lead into a deep cavern in the side of the mountain. Upon getting inside, though, she had found a large cavern mostly open to the evening sky. Right in the center of it was a n absolutely massive stalagmite jutting straight through the open ceiling and sticking out a good dozen or so feet up into the open air above. Thankfully for her there was enough of a lip to the cavern's open roof that when the rain started she could hug the wall and stay comfortably dry even as the storm outside began to whip itself up into a violent frenzy. Rain poured down in thick sheets dense enough that the cavern began to flood slightly. Thankfully, though, the room she was in seemed to dip inwards and it all began to pool in the center around the stalagmite; leaving her easily a foot or more of water-level before she had to worry about getting wet.

It was around then that things started to get hazy. She had remembered dropping something and had scrambled into the water towards the stalagmite to retrieve it. That was when the lightning had struck. It crackled through the sky then shot down like an arrow straight down into the cavern. It was as if the stone stalagmite had drawn the lighting straight too it despite being made of non-conductive stone. She thought she remembered parts of the rock lighting up like it had some kind of LED lights inside of it, but she ended up being a bit too distracted by having roughly the same amount of electricity suddenly coursing through her as would be needed to make a DeLorean travel through time. Her entire body had seized up, electricity coursing through every last cell and seeming to burn out her nerve endings to where she didn't even really feel any pain. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the sensation was gone and she had collapsed on the cave floor. It had still been dark when she had come too and thankfully the storm seemed to have vanished without a trace. The stalagmite was simply gone from the center of the cave; nothing but a pile of rubble left in its wake after the lightning strike as if the impact of the bolt had reduced it to powder. She vaguely remembered thanking whatever flying spaghetti monster in the sky that played at being a god that the rock had taken the brunt of that lightning strike. If it hadn't, she was pretty certain she wouldn't be alive right now.

With a sigh, Stormy flopped herself back down onto the bed. Another loud protesting groan of discomfort, pain, and irritation rolled up from her throat out of sheer, childish petulance at a volume that certainly would have had neighbors banging on the walls telling her to shut up if she hadn't been in a wooden cabin dozens of miles from the nearest living person. At least now she had filed her stomach enough that it shouldn't bother her for a while and she could sleep through the rest of the day; hopefully being well enough to make the hike back down the mountain tomorrow. She was starting to regret leaving her car down at the foot of the mountain and opting to hike her way up it instead.

"It'll be more green, they said. Plus, its great exercise, they said. Get to see the sights and experience the fresh air." She grumbled under her breath; well aware they were all the arguments she had made to herself about the decision but perfectly content in her misery to indulge in the immaturity of blaming her own decisions on some non-existent other person.

Finally she calmed down her miniature temper tantrum and sluggishly rolled her way fully onto the bed, wincing as the soreness in her muscles made each movement an anatomy lesson of what muscle groups moved which body parts by way of aches and stabs of discomfort. After a good fifteen minutes of tossing and turning to find a position she could at least reasonably call comfortable, she reached for the wireless earphones laying on the little beside table and clipped them around her ears. The cabin itself didn't have electricity but she had been smart enough to bring several portable battery packs to charge her little gadgets. One of such battery packs she left the headphones plugged in to so that they would continue charging while she was asleep and be ready for use in the morning when she had to head back down the trail. With a sign of, if not contentment, at least relief that she would soon be asleep and unable to feel her aching body the wolfess slowly drifted off to the hum of music in her ears.

As she slept, her mind drifted away into turbulent dreams. At first the dreams were grounded firmly in her own reality; the discomfort of her aching body keeping her subconscious from asserting itself enough to take full control as each time she shifted in her sleep a new ache nearly woke her once more. She dreamt of the cavern, of the bolt of lightning crackling around her. She saw vivid recreations of the imagined shapes and lines across the stalagmite glowing a brilliant neon-blue color. Unlike in reality, though, the lightning strike in her dream didn't shatter the pillar. Instead, the stone acted like a grounding rod and sucked up the electricity like a sponge soaking up water. When it did, Stormy felt her whole body shudder violently. A flush of pure, unfiltered bliss surged through her; a sensation she struggled to even put conscious thought too. It was like that sense of true, profound satisfaction when you eat something absolutely delicious but felt through her entire body by all five of her senses all at once.

When the sensation died down she felt... great! all of the aches and pains were gone, or at least that's what it felt like in her dream. An excitement born from nowhere filled her and she began to excitedly run around the large, circular chamber as if celebrating her newly healed body with the physical exertion. It was only when she looked up, though, that she slowed her run to a stop. her eyes locked on the dark opening above the cavern where the afternoon sky should have been. There was no blue of the horizon, no white wisps of clouds, nor even the darkness of night lined with stars as if she had slept too long. Instead, there was a crisscross of lights, ones she couldn't quite make out almost like the entire sky were filled with the arcs of lightning meshed into some ever-changing fractal. As she stared up at the strange series of lights in place of the sky she saw a few of them begin to brighten as if they were coming closer. Suddenly new cords of electricity shot down from the sky and latched on to the stalagmite in the middle of the room. It wasn't the same as the lightning strike; the electrical discharge was much smaller and weaker, but lasted far longer. If the lightning bolt had been a sudden tidal wave this was the slow, steady trickle from a bathroom faucet only halfway turned on. As the electricity tickled along the stalagmite, though, she felt that same sensation of full-sensory satisfaction if on a much smaller scale. The sensation had her eyes lidded half-closed and a pleased hum escaping from her lips right up until a sudden sparking POP sounded in her ears and she abruptly woke.

She jerked bolt upright, eyes wide and darting around the room wildly. Her hackles were raised and fur bristling in warning as her fight or flight response screamed danger in response to the sudden noise. For a few moments the room was totally silent save for the suddenly labored breathing of the wolfess in her bed. Then, slowly, her heartbeat began to slow and her senses realigned; less focus on her eyesight and hearing trying to pick out movement eventually letting her notice the strange, faintly burnt smell filling the air. It only took her a moment to track down the source. She reached up to the earphones and unclipped them from her head, raising them up to inspect them in the dim early-morning moonlight peeking in through the windows. She could see the tiniest lingering bit of smoke still wafting off of them and smell the sharp, metallic scent of burnt electronics coming from inside the little devices. They must have short-circuited. She guessed that the sharp sound that had awoken her had been a burst of static caused by whatever overloaded them. Grumbling to herself, Stormy started to lay back down in hopes of giving her aching body a few more hours of rest only to find...

The ache was gone.

For a moment she thought she might have still been dreaming. Experimentally she lifted one arm, then the other and tested their range of motion. Where she expected to feel sharp pulls and tugs of sore, swollen muscles screaming in protest to any kind of effort she found nothing. Hell, if anything she felt a bit energized! It only dawned on her now that her heartbeat had returned to normal and the panic of abruptly being awoken had faded that she was wide awake. Not wide awake as in that groggy, sluggish adrenaline-fueled forced consciousness that happens when you wake in the middle of a nightmare but rather a strong, well rested wakefulness like she had just gotten the most restful twelve hours of sleep she'd ever had.

Now, most people might start worrying they were experiencing some kind of side effect of a major injury. Shock, perhaps, dampening their sense of pain and discomfort to protect them from the constant agony of their wounds or something similar. Those people probably had never actually been struck by lightning or felt anything similar and had no place to judge her when Stormy decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Seeing as she wasn't going to be going back to sleep anytime soon with how rested she felt the wolfess instead decided to climb herself out of bed and get to work packing up her things; she did still have to hike her way back down the mountain today, after all. As she scampered her way back and forth across the cabin sweeping up various tools, food wrappers, clothes and trash to either pack away or discard she found herself starting to hum happily under her breath. The longer she was up and about moving the more the ease of movement and rested sense of self she felt improved her mood. She hadn't felt this great in years! Not since she was that invincible teenager that had never known the aches and pains of an aging body had she felt this good. It wasn't until she had nearly finished her packing and the sun was just starting to peek up over the horizon outside that she realized the entire time she had been moving around the cabin she had done so without any of the lights on.

"... Huh." She muttered aloud to herself in mild surprise.

Brushing off the oddity she turned back to her packing. once she was sure that she had everything else stowed away in her hiking pack she finally turned her attention to her ruined earphones and the power back they were plugged into. Upon inspection, she found that there was a visible scorch mark where the USB plug connected into the power back. She could only guess, somehow, the power pack had overloaded and fried the headphones in the process. Small miracle that she hadn't been electrocuted when it had! Then again, for all she knew maybe there had been some lingering static charge around her or something after her incident up in the mountains and it had been her fault it shorted in the first place. At the end of the day the only thing she really knew was that this meant that she wasn't going to have her music to listen to on her way back down the trail.

Sighing to herself, Stormy tossed both of the damaged pieces of electronics in the small plastic sack with the rest of her trash. Unplugging her phone from the other power pack, she slipped her phone back into her pocket and stowed the now mostly-empty second battery pack in her backpack with everything else. With one final sweep around the cabin to ensure she hadn't forgotten anything, Stormy hefted the pack onto her back and made for the door.

As she made her way down the trail the sky had begun to brighten into the full glow of mid-morning. small wisps of clouds flitted across the otherwise clear sky as the sun beamed down happily across the landscape. Thankfully it was still early spring and the air was cool and refreshing rather than the more punishing heat of approaching summer. It was just cold enough it would have chilled her had the exercise not kept her body temperature up. In other words: it was the perfect morning for a long hike.

Time seemed to drag on longer than she expected it too; the lack of music or other audible entertainment to help her mind distract itself from the plod of endless walking making minutes stretch on into hours. She had been a bit worried about making the full walk in her current condition; expecting any minute to feel the ache of sore muscles begin to well up and hamper her pace. To her surprise, it never came. If anything, she felt more energized than normal. By the time she had made it down the side of the mountain and onto the main road leading into town she expected to have at least been a little winded, injury or no, but there was no sign of fatigue whatsoever. Hell, she felt like she probably could just start jogging if she wanted too just to cut down the time it took to get home and it still wouldn't exhaust her.

Even more surprising was how good of time she made. Normally it would have taken her at least half of a day to hike down the side of the mountain then the other half just to make it into the city limits. By the time she had ended up on the side of the main road, tough, the sun was still high above in the sky. She reached for her phone to check the time only to wince and jerk her hand back as she felt a small tingle of static electricity when she tried to touch it. Concern welled up in her as she feared for the safety of her phone; afraid that it, too, would end up like her earphones. Tentatively she reached back in and pulled the device out, only to sigh in relief when it turned on like normal. She was so relieved that it still worked and surprised that the clock did confirm it was barely past noon that she didn't even notice the battery indicator visibly ticking down a percentage point every second that she held the phone.

Slipping the device back into her pocket, Stormy decided she was going to treat herself. she still had the whole afternoon to make it back home and already her stomach was beginning to grumble its demands that she stop somewhere for lunch. Thankfully, Stormy knew the perfect place to stop both to kill some time and get something good to eat.

Katy's Diner was most likely Stormy's favorite place in the whole world to eat. It was a classic, rustic bar and tavern that did everything it could to sell itself on that brand. The whole building was made of locally cut wood and logs, all of the furniture was hand carved by local woodcutters, and all of the food was cooked on a classic wood-burning stove top. If there was anywhere else that had as good of steak sandwiches or sausage and bacon platters as Katy's then Stormy had yet to hear of it. Upon entering, Stormy immediately heard the all-too cheerful leonine voice of the owner herself: Katy.

"Well shave my pelt and call me a sphynx, if it ain't Stormy!" Katy's voice all but boomed through the diner. "Pull yourself up a chair you're just in time for the lunch special!"

Katy was on the plumper side; thickening up into a heavier-set, but not pudgy, proportion in her older age. It gave her a motherly quality to her that, mixed with her strong southern brogue made her feel to everyone that met her like that old distant auntie that never thought you were eating enough and made it her life's goal to cook for you till she was satisfied you had enough meat on your bones. She was the kind of woman that made everyone feel like family and that you couldn't help but find comforting to be around.

"Hey Katy" Stormy greeted with a smile. "Don't suppose today's special is one of those steak sandwiches you know I love so much."

"Sweetheart, what else would you consider special enough for me to call my special of the day?" Katy quipped back with a knowing grin. "I know what keeps all y'all comin back and it ain't my womanly curves."

Chuckling to herself, Stormy slid her backpack down to rest against the bar surrounding the open kitchen area and hopped up onto one of the stools. Despite her lack of fatigue, it felt good to sit down and take a load off after being on her feet for the past few hours. A quick word had Katy happily setting a huge glass of sweet tea in front of Stormy, which the wolf greedily guzzled down within seconds. Only after she'd finished the first and patiently waited for the lioness to finish stoking the fire under the stove did she ask for another and order a couple of steak sandwiches.

"So. Y'all enjoy that little trip of yours into the wilderness? was half wondering if that nasty storm woulda blown ya all the way back down the mountain." Katy asked conversationally as she cooked.

"Yea..." Stormy replied noncommittally, not quite wanting to get into the details of her ordeal. "It was a bit exciting. But no harm done from what I can tell. Probably should have checked the weather before heading up there, though. Live and learn, right?"

This caused the lioness to scoff and roll her eyes, though her tone stayed good-natured.

"Yea, cause them tv weathermen always know what's goin on. I could hang a rock outside from a rope and it'd tell me more about the coming weather than them fools that get paid to pretend like they know what's goin on."

Their conversation trailed off as Katy became more invested in the food preparation. She may have only had Stormy and a couple of other patrons back in the corners to deal with but that didn't mean she skimped out on ensuring that her food was prepared to the best of her ability. As she waited, Stormy checked her phone again. A few flicks of her finger showed that the weather would continue to be pleasant cool and clear for most of the day, but that the night and following day would bring more thunderstorms. She was about to check her social media accounts, maybe message a friend or two to see if they wanted to hang out tomorrow, when she saw the battery icon on her phone starting to flash the 'below 15%' warning.

"The hell?" She cursed under her breath.

She had sworn that her phone had been fully charged before she left the cabin. Especially without her having used it for listening to music on her way down the mountain it shouldn't have been under 80% much less being nearly dead. looking around, Stormy quickly spotted a plugin at the bottom of the bar. Hoping that Katy wouldn't mind her bumming a bit of electricity off of her, the wolfess dug into the side pocket of her backpack for a charging cable and leaned down to plug the device in. As her hand neared the plugin, though, the lights in the room flickered briefly and a small arc of visible, blue electricity shot out from the plug and danced across Stormy's fingers just as she pushed the plug into the wall outlet. In shock, she jerked her hand backwards hard enough that she nearly fell back off of her chair! Like any rational person she had expected a visible surge of electricity to come with a jolt of pain and discomfort, reacting to it before she actually felt it.

When she sat back up, she worried glanced around the room wondering if anyone else had seen what happened. To her relief neither of the other patrons had looked up from the tablets and phones they had their own faces buried in and Katy was still too absorbed in working on her meal to have noticed either. Doing her best to act casual, Stormy placed her now-charging phone on top of the bar beside her and simply stared ahead in an attempt not to draw attention to herself as she thought about her ruined battery pack and headset from earlier once more. As she waited she started wondering to herself if maybe she should call a doctor, unsure if persistent static charge was an actual medical condition and if so could a doctor even do anything about it.

Thankfully it only took a few more minutes for Katy to finish her food. The delicious smell of cooked and seasoned meat was the perfect distraction Stormy needed from the strangeness occurring around her. The moment the plump lioness had placed the plate down in front of her, Stormy was tearing into the steak sandwiches like she hadn't eaten in weeks. As she ate, Katy looked the wolfess up and down with an appraising eye. Finally, as she refilled Stormy's glass from a large pitcher, she spoke up.

"Ya know, I think all that hiking's finally doin ya some good." Katy drawled, grinning proudly at the wolfess. "Finally looks like you're getting a bit of meat on them bones. Keep it up and you'll be bustin out of them shirts soon. Then you'll be beatin them boys off with a stick."

Confused, Stormy looked down at herself trying to figure out what Katy was talking about. She didn't look different, did she? She felt the same as always. Or at least, that's what Stormy wanted to think. As she sat there though and took stock of herself, she realized that wasn't quite true. There was the weirdness that had been going on since the lighting strike, that much was true. Beyond that, though, she thought back to how easy the hike down the mountain had been compared to previous trips. As she focused more attention on herself she also noticed that her clothes did seem to be tugging and pulling at her from certain angles when she moved more than they usually did. Looking closer, she started to notice that, in fact, her clothes did both look and feel just a tiny bit tighter than they used to be. her chest pulled the front of her shirt out a bit more than it normally did; blocking just a fraction more of her lap than she remembered it used too when she looked down. Her arms filled the sleeves of her shirt and her legs did the same with her pants legs enough that the fabric was noticeably snug when she stretched either. When she curled one of her hands into a fist to flex her arm, she even noticed that there was just a tiny bit more definition to her bicep and forearm than there usually was. She wasn't going to be winning any bodybuilder contests or anything but she definitely looked like she had been doing some kind of working out. She had been trying to do at least a little bit of running each week on top of her yearly hiking trip up the mountain but that shouldn't have explained this much of a change. Even if it somehow did explain it, she didn't understand how she hadn't noticed the changes until now.

"I uh..." Stormy stammered, trying to think up an explanation. "I've been working out?"

That seemed to be all the lioness needed to hear from the way she nodded and smiled approvingly down at the wolfess. For Stormy, though, the explanation was far from satisfactory. Thankfully it was around that time that the lunch rush started. The sparse smattering of customers rapidly ballooned into a packed house that left Katy little time to socialize more with her. Finding herself increasingly uncomfortable in the growing crowd of people with the strangeness she was dealing with, Stormy quickly scarfed down the remainders of her lunch and made for the door.

The rest of her hike home was little more than a constant effort to try to keep her mind off of what seem to be happening to her. Silently she swore to herself that she was never going to walk anywhere again when she could take a car instead, constantly reminded of her abnormalities every time she moves in her seemingly too tight clothes. It's hard not to think about something when every time you take a step it feels like the seams of your pants are struggling to stay together. Despite the strangeness of it although, she still couldn't find the effort to be quite willing to complain about it other than me concerned of what it meant brought. She still felt great, better than great even. Before long she found herself starting to jog lightly both in an effort to get home quicker, and simply as a way to burn off some of the excess energy that she felt. It was barely past six o'clock in the afternoon by the time her house was finally in sight out on the suburbian edge of the city.

The moment she had the door unlocked and was inside her backpack hit the ground and she was making a b-line for the bathroom. Again, she felt a spark of static electricity tickle along her fingers when she flipped the bathroom lights on, but barely even registered it as she rushed in front of the mirror to examine herself. For a few moments she didn't notice anything different, head-turning back and forth along with her upper body as she looked herself up and down as if she were expecting to find a third arm or some weird tumor growing out of her somewhere. Instead, all she saw was herself. The same visit she saw every morning when she looked in the mirror.

But that wasn't quite right. The longer she looked the more she started to notice tiny, subtle differences. There was still the strange coloration of the bits of fur underneath her eyes and she swore the coloration was a little bit brighter than it was before and covered a bit more surface area. Experimentally she hooked her finger in the edge of her jawline and pulled her lips down, exposing the sharp, predatory fangs that were symbolic of her species and was positive her fangs were a little bit longer, a little bit sharper. Letting that go, she turned her attention to her upper body instead. Experimentally she raised one arm up and flexed it, then followed up with the other. Even without looking in the mirror she could feel the tension and pull of muscle mass, tendons that normally were too small and subtle to be easily felt pulling tight like steel springs winding up at her command. She wasn't ripped or anything, but she definitely looks like she had spent way more time in a gym than she ever actually had.

As she sucked in a deep breath trying to maximize the expansion of her pectoral muscles, she felt a brief twinge of pain as something dug into her back before, with a quiet pop, there was a sudden relief of pressure around her torso and chest. She just snapped her bra strap! Blushing a bit at her own solitary embarrassment, Stormy reached down to carefully cradle her chest in her hands and gave them an experimental heft. Oh yeah, these were definitely bigger too. It wasn't much, it wasn't like she had suddenly turned into some busty bimbo bombshell but when you spend your whole adult life in a modest B cup it's pretty easy to tell when they swell up into the C range. That plus the added girth of her torso seem to have been too much for her bra strap and she was forced to tenderly reach under her shirt and pull the broken undergarment off of her.

It was about that time that something else registered to her. There was a picture hanging on the wall opposite of her mirror that one of her friends had bought for her as a gag gift, commenting on how every bathroom you ever saw in a sitcom always had a picture of a little sailboat in it. She had thought the joke was funny and had gladly hung the picture up in her own bathroom. After having had it there for over two years she was used to seeing it in the background from mirror where it hung just above the top of her head. As she stood up straight and looked in the mirror though, in the same position she had been in for years every time she went to the bathroom, she saw the top of her head was now blocking her view of half of the picture.

"Holy crap... Am I taller?" she asked aloud to the empty room.

The idea definitely would explain why her shirt didn't quite cover her all the way to her waist anymore and why her pants had ridden up to expose her ankle socks. She must have been at least two or three inches taller than she normally was. Honestly, she had always wanted to be a little taller, having always been less than five and a half feet tall, and she found herself more happy than concerned about the outcome. If it wasn't for the unusualness of her whole situation, she probably would be jumping in joy right now.

Reining her excitement in, she knew that these changes had to have happened recently, somewhere in the time span between when she had woken up this morning and now but she wasn't sure what it caused it. She definitely hadn't been this different when she had looked at herself in the mirror in the cabin that morning. Wanting to try to document her changes in case she needed to compare later, Stormy reached into her pocket for her smartphone to take a picture of herself. The moment that she had the phone out, pointed towards the mirror, and her finger thumbed the power button to turn the screen on there was another spark of electricity and the screen turned on for only a split second. In that time frame she watched has the battery indicator which was currently at 42% shoot downwards a percentage point every fraction of an instant until, in the span of only a second it hit zero and the phone shut off.

Despite not having felt the tendril of blue electricity that had jumped from the phone to her hand she still dropped the phone like it had shocked her out of surprise. Her eyes were wide as she took a half step backwards, arm reaching out for the wall beside her for support. When her hand brushed over the light switch, she felt another tingle and another surge of electricity seem to shoot through the room this time strong enough to burn out one of the LED light bulbs hanging above the bathroom mirror. Her hand jerked away from the light switch again like it had been burned despite being perfectly fine and she made an effort to stand directly in the middle of the room without touching anything. Stormy wasn't stupid by any means and despite the unusualness and impossibility of the situation she was smart enough to start putting pieces together.

Ever since she had been struck by lightning electrical things had been acting strange around her; sparking, shorting out, or draining any time she got near them. It wasn't hard to see the pattern. Hoping to grasp onto the mechanics of whatever was happening to her rather than panic over the impossibility of it, Stormy decided to try to figure out exactly what was happening to her. Doing her best not to touch any of the light switches or get near the outlets, Stormy made her way back towards the living room where she had left her backpack. Digging around in it, she pulled out the other battery pack she had taken with her on her trip. Plopping herself down on the couch she raised the device up towards her face and stared into the USB port as if expecting it to offer insight of its own accord. Sadly, the inanimate object did not deign to speak its secrets to her and she was forced to find them out herself. Carefully, Stormy lifted a claw tip up and extended it out tenderly towards the USB charging port. As it neared, she swore she felt a kind of tug coming from the device. It was almost imperceptible; like that tiny bit of pull that you feel when two magnets are just close enough together to start affecting one another. Then, just as her finger was only a couple of inches away from the charging port she saw it. A tiny arc of electricity, a single little crackle of blue light leapt from the charging port and tickled across her claw tip like she had it pressed against the glass exterior of one of those tesla ball toys. When she moved her finger closer, she saw a second tendril attach itself to the end of her claw while the first thickened ever so slightly. The indicator light on the power supply flashed on and she watched the charge meter rapidly start to dwindle downwards much like her phone had when she'd held it. As it discharged into her finger Stormy felt a strange rush surging through her; a pleasant tingle that sent a shiver down her spine and left her smiling uncontrollably. It was only when the battery pack was nearly depleted that she heard the sudden, if quiet, tearing sound of seams bursting open.

Abruptly she dropped the now nearly-drained device and jumped to her feet. As she did the seams along her pants legs tore further open and the sleeves of her shirt rolled up to more fully expose her upper arms. Looking down at herself she immediately recognized the faint sense of vertigo and disorientation for what it was: she was taller! It was hard to tell in the dimly lit living room with nothing to compare to but with the way that her shirt was now even tighter across her torso, exposing her stomach up past her belly button, and how her pants were ripping open at the seams as their hems rose up towards her calves she had to have grown at least another couple of inches. That was all the evidence she needed to put two and two together. The how and why were still mysteries, but the what was pretty obvious. Somehow, she was absorbing electricity and it was changing her: making her bigger and stronger. Maybe it was the little kid in her, that petulant part of her inner child that rebelled against the rules of any kind especially those instigated by parents, but Stormy suddenly had an overwhelming desire to do something that on any other day would be considered incredibly stupid.

She started to make her way towards the kitchen only to stumble and nearly fall over from the combined vertigo of her new height and the unfamiliar restriction of her too tight clothing. Catching herself on the wall and barely noticing her longer than normal claws digging quarter-inch-deep gouges into the drywall, she righted herself and made for the drawer where she kept her kitchen utensils. A minute later she was back in the living room, down on all fours in front of one of the walls with a fork held in her hand. As she prepared to do something incredibly insane, a voice in her head silently prayed that all of this was real and she wasn't about to kill herself over some kind of hallucination. Steeling her resolve, Stormy pulled her arm back and then probably shoved it forward to jam the fork straight into the electrical socket.

When most people think of being electrocuted, they imagine all those cartoons where sparks fly everywhere and you can hear the zapping sound like a bug zapper going on indefinitely. In reality there was none of that. The only sound that came from the socket was a brief pop of the circuit abruptly being completed as electricity begin flowing up the metal fork and straight into Stormy's arm. Any other person would have their arm locked in place: the muscles tensed involuntarily by the electrical current as it burned through them. But not her. Small licks of electricity flickered out of the socket and along her wrists in brief flashes of light again reminiscent of the tendrils of electricity coming off of a Tesla ball. It seemed to roll up her arm as if being conducted by her fur before it was eventually absorbed by whatever part of her was sucking down the electricity. This time she was ready for the feeling though and didn't let herself get distracted by the sudden wave of euphoria that came over her; instead forcing herself to watch what was happening and take stock of the anticipated changes.

It started at her arm. The muscles along her entire right arm flexed and strained against the skin containing them only to flex harder a split second later without ever relaxing their tension. She actually watched as the muscles along her forearm and bicep thickened and swelled with newfound mass; not growing bulky or swollen but definitely thickening and tightening into more powerful and efficient muscle mass. Her whole arm then seemed to lengthen outwards, her elbow being forced to bend slightly as it became longer than the distance between her torso and the electrical socket. She watched the already tight fabric of her shirt sleeve riding up over what it still covered of her bicep until it was bunched up against her shoulder as both the lengthening and thickening of her arm as well as the increase in muscle mass overrode the width of her shirt sleeve.

She felt her chest expand outwards in sync with her sucking in a sharp breath, yet when she stopped inhaling her chest seemed to continue expanding slightly. Both the muscle of her pectorals and the softer feminine flesh of her breasts thickened and swelled with newfound mass as well, pulling her shirt up even higher until it became a little more than a glorified sports bra for all it was covering and containing. Her pants fared far worse, the denim of her jeans being much less forgiving to the extra mass and splitting the rest of the way down the seams as her waistline thickened enough to pop the button and fly of her pants open. Her underwear rode up uncomfortably into her butt crack until, a split second later, the extra girth of her hips, thighs, and overall size caused the waistband of them to snap much the same way her bra strap had. All the while for the entire experience she watched the whole room seem to suck in on her, everything around her seemed to pull in just a little bit closer as her whole body experienced a visible growth spurt in every direction. She was so shocked, metaphorically speaking at least, by the whole situation that she seemed to lose track of the fact that she still had the fork inside the socket. Thankfully her arm only had so much space to bend between her and the wall before it was at such an angle that the fork prongs broke off and finally disconnected the circuit between her and the power grid of the house.

For several long seconds she just sat there, still down on all fours, panting heavily. It was only now that she was coming down from it that she realized how amazing the entire sensation had felt. She hadn't even realized how big she was getting her how long she had been connected to the power grid, so engrossed in the pleasurable full-body bliss that had left her panting and drooling that she probably would have kept going forever if she could have. In that split second between rational thought and self-indulgent desire she was almost wild with a thought of having more of that sensation. She felt so powerful. She felt like she could lift a pickup truck over her head and toss it across the street or punch her way through a solid brick wall. It was intoxicating. It took all the willpower she could muster to stop herself from just plunging the other end of the fork into the opposite socket and keep going.

Thankfully she was able to regain control of herself, instead choosing to stand herself up and take stock of what had happened. The moment she stood, though, she nearly fell back over from the most dramatic sense of vertigo yet. She hadn't just grown a paltry couple of inches this time. When she stood up straight she found her eyes were level with the frame of her front door; meaning she had to be at least seven feet tall! If she hadn't been so absorbed in the feelings of power and euphoria she probably would have been embarrassed when she looked down and found that she was all-but naked, the tattered remains of her clothing hanging off of her in strips. Instead, all she could do was grin. Even that sent a shiver of delight through her as she felt the extra thickness of the teeth in her mouth: feeling how several of her fangs hung over the edge of her lips even when her mouth was closed. She could only imagine how terrifying that must look to people even if she wasn't a seven-foot-tall monster.

As she thought about that though, she found the idea much more enthralling than she expected it to be. Not necessarily people being afraid of her specifically but their reactions in general. Something inside of her, something that she didn't really recognize, squirmed in glee at the thought of people staring up at her with wide eyes. Their imaginary looks of fear, of awe, of reverence sent an almost sexual thrill through her. If she had been more in her right mind she would have recognized that whatever was happening to her was clearly affecting her way of thinking as well as her body. In her current state though, all she could think about was how much she wanted to see those faces in reality. An idea flickered through her mind that all but split her head in half with the wicked grin that it manifested on her face. She knew exactly what she had to do if she wanted to get people in town to look at her that way.

She needed to get bigger.

She all but tore her way into the basement, completely oblivious to how effortlessly she ripped the basement door off of its hinges and tossed it aside. Even considering her prodigious height and powerful new musculature that kind of strength was clearly disproportionate with her actual size. But that didn't matter to her. All that mattered was lumbering her way down the stairs and making her way towards the far wall where her prize was: the fuse box.

For a moment, she was tempted to simply smash her claws into the metal container like she had done with the fork and the outlet. But something inside told her there was a better way, that she didn't need to resort to such analog methods of taking what it was that she wanted, that she needed: what was hers to take. She tried to follow those thoughts as best she could, realizing that she could feel... something in the air that she had never felt before. It was hard to put words to, like that feeling of the hair rising on the back of your neck to some unseen threat except focused on something wholly intangible. It took her a few moments of effort to get ahold of the correct feeling, like trying to manipulate and flex muscles you didn't know you had. Somehow, in some way that she couldn't quite put words to, she could feel the electricity coursing through the house. She could feel the wires running through the walls like arteries and smell the delicious electrical energy vibrating through them. She tried to reach out for it's with that strange extrasensory perception of hers, but her mental fingers seem to go right through the power running through the walls. It was like trying to scoop up water in your palm with your fingers spread. The power was wild, uncontrolled, and refuse to be grabbed onto like some physical object.

that's when she remembered her dream. The dream she had just after she had been struck by lightning, when she was pretty sure was the first time she had absorbed electricity from her headphones. The mental image popped into her mind's eye far easier than she expected, then it probably should have been able to. Dimly she recognized that the cavern and the massive stone stalagmite in the center were more than just some mental image she had conjured. It represented something about her now, a mental manifestation of whatever it was that was allowing her to do what she was doing. With the analog of the cave in mind the solution came easy to her. She didn't need to grab the power and pull it towards her, scooping it up like liquid. She just needed to call it to her, give it a path to where it wanted to be, to where she wanted it to be. She needed to become a lightning rod.

Inside her mental construct she reached out with her thoughts towards the lights flickering in the unnatural sky, only now recognizing the crisscrossing lights as sources of electricity, not burning balls of plasma millions of light-years away. It was her way of seeing all the power in the world around her, her way of interacting with it. It was her way of commanding it. She found the thread of power that was closest to her and tugged on it, drawing it like a vacuum towards the stalagmite in the center of her mind. Her thoughts acted like a conductor and suddenly a thick bolt of electricity burst forth from the fuse box, sending a shower of sparks across the concrete floor as the electrical discharge attached itself to Stormy's outstretched arm. Everything she has felt and absorbed up to this point suddenly felt like little more than the trickle from a leaky faucet. Arcs of electricity licked up along her fingers, wrist, and arm and her whole body burgeoned and expanded in response to the sudden surge of electricity. Lights throughout not just the house but the entire neighborhood began to flicker on and off has the entire local grid began to short circuit in its attempts to feed the seemingly endless void of hunger that had spawned itself within Stormy.

She barely even registered her head smacked against the ceiling, ducking down only to have her shoulders pressing up against it a split second later as her body swelled and expanded in every direction. Her toes spread across the concrete floor, claw tips tearing gouges into the concrete every time her toes clenched during a particularly pleasurable surge of power. Sparks rained down around her as stray volts of electricity jerked out and smacked against exposed water pipes or the washer in the corner only to be sucked back in to the monstrous wolfess like a stray bit of lint being vacuumed up. Her body grew more monstrous as well as oveall larger; her spine bending forward slightly to give her a more hunched-over posture as her upper body seemed expand just a little bit larger in proportion to the rest of her body. Her claws grew into wicked sickles that each looked like a small knife in of themselves. Her fur became thicker, wilder and more ragged. It was still a soft and luscious as ever but the extra, untended thickness gave it a wild appearance and made her look that much more like a wild animal. But, despite all the changes that made her seem more and more like a monster, the look of sharp intelligence and recognition never left her eyes even as they began to glow the faintest hint of neon blue to match the color of the electricity crackling across her body.

Before long the basement simply wasn't enough to contain her anymore. Even when she hunched down onto three limbs, one arm still extended towards the fuse box, she soon felt her back pressing up against the ceiling. Something primal within her rebelled against the idea of being constrained, of being contained in any space much less one so small. She wanted, needed, space to stretch out and grow uninhibited. With a final mental tug she ripped the last bits of electricity she could from the power box in one final surge that shorted out transformers within three blocks in any direction and left the entire suburb dark in the waning evening light. Then, even as she felt that last surge of power continuing to build upon her already massive frame, she began to stand.

It was almost laughable how little resistance she felt from the interior walls of the building as she stood up. The support beams and plywood floor of the basement ceiling gave way under her rising form with about as much resistance as she would have expected a sandcastle to give, with the second floor of her house fairing no better. Wood, drywall, pipes and other bits of debris rained around her as a growing cloud of debris spread out from the crumbling building. With most of the support structure being snapped apart like toothpicks the entire house quickly found itself collapsing around her even as her head and shoulders rose up above where the roofline would have been moments ago. When the dust had settled enough that she could see her surroundings Stormy couldn't help but give a feral grin at the sight of her neighborhood; the view sending another thrill of raw power lust through her that she'd never experienced until today.

Everything was so tiny!

She was standing at least eight feet below the ground with her feet still in the now tiny, rubble-filled remains of her basement and even then the other two-story houses surrounding her didn't even come up to her chest. That realization, and the sense of overwhelming physical power that came with being so large, caused her tail to begin to wag behind her. Considering that the fluffy appendage was now nearly the size of a bus it only took two sweeps of her tail before it had blown away the majority of the cloud of rubble. There was something primal, feral in the sense of overwhelming power that she now felt. A sense of glee that she never would have expected from something so simple left a constant grin on her face as she surveyed her surroundings; everything reminding her of how incredibly BIG she was.

As she took her first steps out of the ruined remains of her house she looked around the neighborhood and saw exactly what she had been wanting. Faces peeking out from windows or, in the case of a few either brave or stupid souls, the faces of people that stood out on their porch staring up at the monstrosity before them. Most of them were terrified, a few were confused, and a couple had expressions on their faces that she couldn't quite put words to but definitely seemed happier about the situation than they probably should have been. If she wasn't so intoxicated with power coursing through her Stormy probably would have realized she was buck naked and giving quite the peep show to anyone nearby. Not that she would have cared. After all what would she have to be embarrassed or ashamed about when she had hips that could hip check buildings and she could crush cars with her breasts? Hell, if anything she probably would have been posing for them just taunt the little toy-sized people with the sight of what was quite literally too much woman for them to handle.

The first football she made stepping up out of the basement seem to shake through the entire neighborhood, audibly rattling the glass globes on the lamp posts across the entire block. The second step was just as heavy as the first and landed in the center of her lawn rather than on the driveway. The feeling of her foot sinking down over a foot deep into the dirt sent a shiver of delight down her spine. Just imagining how massive that footprint would look once she took her foot out of it, imagining some little person stumbling down into it, only helped to feed her now out-of-control ego.

By the time her third step had landed in the middle of the street the neighbors had finally started reacting. Many of them hid inside their homes, somehow thinking that the flimsy brick and wood would offer more protection to them then it had offered resistance against her emerging from her own home. Others took the smarter option and either tried to run or tried to get in their cars and drive away. She didn't mind. Let them run. They wouldn't have anywhere to run to for much longer.

As she started walking her way down the street, she couldn't help but add some extra weight to each of her footsteps. She didn't need to, as each footstep cracked the pavement and left a visible indention of her foot into the street. But she did anyway, purely for the fun of it. With the extra force that she put into the footsteps that indention became a foot-crater comparable to the one she left in her front yard. She reveled in the idea of leaving a trail behind her, showing her path through the city for people to follow. She was actually starting to have fun with just the act of walking when so huge, more than once purposely stepping a little too far to the left or right to let her foot land on top of a car only to pancake it into the ground as if it had been made of tinfoil. Eventually she started making a game out of it, purposefully lengthening and shortening her stride trying to get a vehicle underneath each footstep she took, all the while laughing to herself in the booming thunder her voice had become.

"Fee Fi Fo Fum, little guys!" She taunted down to those below, drunk on her own power.

Before long, though, she arrived at her destination and her playfulness was replaced with the eager anticipation of another meal. She had finally arrived on the outskirts of the city, where the power hadn't gone out yet. Casually she reached towards one of the Towering power lines that, to her nearly fifty-foot-tall self, barely came up to her stomach. Ripping the reinforced electrical wires out of there settings, she spun her wrist a couple of times to wrap the cord around her knuckles and then, with the supernatural equivalent of hungrily sucking on a straw, she pulled power from the lines.

Electricity surged through her once again, causing her to release a stifled moan that she wasn't able to quite fully suppress by biting on her lower lip. Her body began to thicken and expand larger once more, rising up higher into the evening sky has her feet spread out wider across the street leading into town. Unfortunately, before she gained more than ten feet, there was a sharp crack and a transformer a half a block away exploded in a shower of sparks. The electrical current suddenly cut off and she was left dissatisfied and ravenous for more. Somehow, through her strange new ability, she intuitively understood that these power lines just couldn't handle that much electricity all at once. She would never be able to pull enough from them to satisfy her before blowing out the nearest transformer. Which meant that her only option was to go towards the source just like she had at home.

By now the local police and firefighters had responded to all the emergency calls, even if they didn't quite believe the calls they were getting. The ones that had either believed or at least been willing to follow orders of those that did, had set up a barricade with four of their cars in the middle of the street leading into town. As Stormy rounded the corner, rising up over the five-story buildings to either side of the street the police officers suddenly realized how utterly, hilariously out of their depth they were. Most of them sat there with looks like a deer in the headlights as her rumbling footsteps shook the ground beneath them with their approach. A few of the cops, either desperate or brave enough to continue acting, began firing their pistols up at her. Unfortunately for them their bullets did absolutely nothing. Either they couldn't get through the thick pelt of her fur or when they finally hit her skin they couldn't even leave a mark on hide that was now the equivalent of solid steel. It was hard to tell for the poor police officers what was more humiliating: that at least two of them had wet themselves and were running away in fear, or that their attempts to stop the giantess were so laughably ineffective does she honestly didn't even notice they were there nor that they were shooting at her. The last thing many of them saw was a single massive lupine paw raising up over them, it's owner not even looking at them as she instead scanned across the city for some other point of interest, just before slamming down on top of them all and leaving nothing but a footprint with the crust remains of police cruisers in its wake. It was only after their little barricade had been decimated that she finally noticed. That only made her grin that much wider; the wolfess reveling in being so powerful she could quite literally ignore the authorities attempts to stop her.

Eventually Stormy found what she was looking for, drawn to it by the non-corporeal tug of power around her. She could feel the electricity pulling her towards it like a beacon, and after only a couple more minutes of squeezing between buildings she found herself directly in front of one of the city's main power substations.

To her surprise the substation was still manned. A single tiger in a bright orange safety vest and matching hard hat stood at the top of the catwalk leaning towards the small control booth on the side of the large metallic structure. Something about his presence amused her, almost like she could feel something calling to her from him. The feeling only grew when she saw the expression on his face wasn't one of terror or fear like she expected but one of awe. Oh, he was absolutely terrified, alright. She didn't even need an enhanced sense of smell to smell the fear coming off of him. But whatever sense of wonder had him rooted in place was strong enough to overwhelm the animal part of his brains screaming at him to run for his life from the apex predator staring him down.

Carefully the wolfess crouched down in front of the substation, raised upon the balls of her feet and knees bent to tower over the little tiger. A hand reached out; fingers as thick as telephone poles coming together with surprising dexterity to hook her claws into the back of his shirt and vest and raise him up into the air. The tiger's look of wide-eyed amazement broke slightly, a bit more of the primal fear leaking to the surface when he felt the ground give way beneath him and be replaced by thirty feet of open air as Stormy dangled him in front of her muzzle. Unfortunately, even if the animal part of his brain overwhelmed his awe at this point it was far too late to run. Words rolled from her mouth of their own accord, spawned from that same place in her mind that told her to gather power. That newfound piece of her that had been growing along with her body giving itself voice, each word resonating through the air like the revving of heavy industrial equipment engines from the sheer size of the vocal cords creating them.

"The first witness to my true Ascension. You should be honored, little one. You shall always be remembered as my first sacrifice." Then, Stormy paused. The cognitive dissonance of that separate part of her consciousness asserting itself before melting back into the rest of her thoughts confusing her for a moment. Recovering a moment later she added with a far more playful and less imperious tone of voice. " I would ask your name, but I think I like it better just thinking of you as my cute little snackrifice."

The tiger didn't even have a chance to respond to the strange pet name. The moment she had finished speaking her maw opened wide and she's simply tossed the full-grown man inside her mouth like he were nothing more than a chicken nugget. Saliva instantly soaked the tiger through his clothes and fur has he found himself wrestling with a tongue as big as he was. For a Split Second he found himself pinned against the roof of her mouth by her tongue, suckled on like nothing more that a piece of candy as she tasted him. Then she tilted her head back and swallowed.

A contented sigh escaped her lips after the thick bulge of the still squirming tiger was forced down her throat. She didn't have time to dwell on what she had just done, however, before a rumble in the distance snapped her attention back to her task at hand. The sound like the cooing of a lover magnified to deafening volume and sending a shiver of anticipation and delight through her entire body.

Thunder.

She could feel the build-up of power in the air approaching, the thunderstorm the news had been warning about rapidly making its way towards the city. She needed to be ready when it got here. Turning her attention back to the power substation she reached her hands towards it with a hungry gleam on her face. Her fingers didn't even need to make contact with the metallic structure before arcs of electricity were already snapping out from it and attaching like ethereal tethers and once more feeding electricity into her. Once the contact was made she was able to stand back up, extending those ropes of power as she extended her arms straight out in either direction, arcs of electricity twisting and writhing like living things between her outstretched arms and the power substation. She raised her head towards the sky, watching the darkening clouds rapidly stretching towards her. Only then, as she was facing the oncoming storm as if challenging it to approach her, did she begin to truly drink in the power she had connected to herself...

The small chevron of discolored fur underneath her eyes began to glow with an electric blue light, the markings seeming to stretch and grow slightly larger across her face into more pronounced markings has her body devoured the power from the substation. All the while her body began to stretch upwards and outwards in every direction. Her feet float across the parking lot she was standing in like a tidal wave of flesh; toes and heels bulldozing cars out of the way or outright crushing the ones that were unlucky enough to get caught beneath them. The thick fluff of her tail switched gleefully behind her, growing into a mass of flesh and fur the size of a boat heavy enough to uproot a tree unlucky enough to be behind her as that wagged in it's growing show of exultation. The entire city seemed to be shrinking down beneath her, buildings that only minutes before she just barely saw over the top of suddenly were lowering below her bust line, then her waistline. It only took a moment for her height to break into the triple digits, showing no sign of stopping as she swelled past a hundred feet... a hundred and fifty... two hundred! All the while alarms began to blare from inside the substation, warning lights glaring red and yellow while explosions of sparks blasted out from the various transformers and coils being robbed of his much power as the substation could generate at any given moment.

By the time the sky had been fully darkened by the thick thunderclouds rolling in the substation finally blew out, most of the machinery having become little more than metallic slag as the overload of electricity melted the machinery. The titaness of a wolf seemed content with what she had gotten, though. Towering over five hundred feet tall across the surrounding landscape, she was bigger than anything for miles save for a few skyscrapers in the middle of town that dared to still loom above her. For a moment, when she turned her massive head to look over at them she found that realization for more displeasing than she expected. She had come to love looming over everything, having to look down at things that had once surrounded and loomed above her. The idea of something still being bigger than her was almost as infuriating as the idea of outgrowing those objects too was thrilling. She was just about to move to correct that concern, preparing to look for another source of nearby power, before another roll of thunder rumbling through the air drew her attention back upwards.

Then she heard another group of roars. At first, she was confused, the sound clearly not thunder and yet she couldn't quite place what it was. It wasn't until she felt the impact on her back that sent her stumbling forward, a massive foot slamming down on top of a pair of houses and crushing them into splinters, that she recognized the military jets for what they were. It was hard to tell if she was more amused or surprised by the fact that, despite having made her stubble, she didn't actually feel much pain from the impact points on her back. She could smell the burning residue of explosives and the tiniest hint of singed fur so it wasn't hard to figure out they just blasted her with a pair of missiles. What was more surprising, and far more arousing than she expected it to be, was the realization that they had done almost nothing.

Catching sight of the jets as they zoomed past, she tracked their trajectory as they came around for another pass. Abruptly the sky was illuminated by bright lines of orange gunfire: tracer rounds from the heavy machine guns built into the jets pelting her with impacts that would have torn through concrete and steel with ease. Reflexively, Stormy raised one of her arms to shield her face from the onslaught. She felt each impact slam against her stomach, chest, and upraised arm and was surprised when she felt no pain whatsoever. The bullets made it through her fur but seemed unable to penetrate her skin, each one feeling to her like a little more than someone shooting little Airsoft pellets at her. She lowered her arm and opened her mouth to taunt the military jets, only to have her words cut off before they began by another pair of impacts of slamming into her stomach as they fired another string of missiles at her.

Unprepared for the kinetic force, even if there was a little actual pain, Stormy found herself knocked off balance and toppling backward! The last thing a half-dozen different buildings full of people saw out of their windows or from where they stood on the street was the curvaceous, sky-filling backside of the giant wolfess before it slammed down onto the city block with the force of a meteoric impact. Everything from concrete and steel beams to vehicles and even the ground itself crumbled beneath the impact of her prodigious backside. Dazed for a moment, Stormy shook her head to regain her senses only to find herself grinning in a mixture of amusement and embarrassment as she realized she had just crushed an entire city block beneath her ass. She may not have been hurt but, as she pushed herself back up to her full towering height, Stormy found herself oddly embarrassed when she looked back behind her and saw the clearly ass shaped imprint of where she had fallen.

She started to move towards the direction the jets were flying when an idea came to her. Raising one arm and extending her fingers towards the jets as they circled around to make another run at her, Stormy turned her attention inwards. Reaching out in the same way she had reached for the electricity in her home or in the power substation, she found the collection of energy that she had gathered so far. It burned in the core of her being like a miniature sun made of pure electricity rather than heat or plasma. Rather than adding to it this time, instead she plucked a tendril off the edge of it like someone pulling a stray thread off of a fraying sweater. Grasping that slip of power she tried to force it out of herself, attempting to reverse the sensation of pulling power into herself and directing it down the length of her arm.

At first, nothing happened. Then, like the power was rolling up from the base of her chest, she watched as tendrils of electricity seem to roll their way up from her shoulder down the length of her arm and begin crackling between her fingers. She could feel the power just on the edge of her skin, ready and waiting for her will to give it direction. So, she did. Suddenly the energy shot out in a crackling, Jagged arc of bright blue light. The bolt of power smashed into the air between the two jets as if hitting an invisible physical object. Rather than dissipating, instead the bolt fractured into dozens of smaller tendrils of power that raked across the side of both of the jets. One of them detonated almost instantly, the electricity igniting the fuel tank in the vehicle. The other simply went dark, all of the electrical systems inside fried in an instant and leaving the jet to tumble helplessly from the sky and crashing into the side of a nearby building.

She tried to keep a stoic disposition as she turned her attention back towards the approaching thunderstorm. Despite her best efforts, she couldn't keep a giddy grin off of her face. She had just shot Lighting from her hand! It was strange that, despite all of the other insane unnatural things going on with her from her near indestructibility to her clearly superhuman strength to the fact that she was big enough that she could crush a city block by sitting on it, the thing that really blew her mind was shooting lightning bolts from her fingers like some kind of comic book superhero or fantasy wizard. The thought made he giggle excitedly and eager to try playing around with the ability more. Before she had a chance to try again, though, the sky rumbled another long peel of thunder as if calling her attention to it.

Hearing the call of the thunderstorm, she started walking towards the horizon, heading straight towards the buildup of power in the sky without a care in the world for the homes or vehicles or people that disappeared beneath her monstrous footsteps. As she got closer, she could feel the clouds literally calling to her. The power vibrating through the air not just something she could manipulate, something that she could take at her will but rather something that belongs with her. It wasn't a conscious longing, the thunderstorm wasn't sentient, she simply felt deep down in that part of herself that had only recently become a fundamental part of who, of what she was, that this power belongs with her as much as a fish belonged in the water.

Rain began to pour down in thick sheets around her, matting her fur down to her skin. With the sun setting behind her and the clouds blocking out what little light was left above, the only illumination came from the street lights of the city and the recently added spotlights but some city officials or military personnel had put out to keep track of her. None of it mattered to her anymore, though. As she approached the clouds and they approached her she raised her hand up towards the sky, fingers curling almost as if with the intention of taking the hand of someone else. She knew this was it. This is what the other part of herself had been driving her towards. Whatever that initial bolt of lightning in the cave had done to her it had changed her into something more. She knew on a fundamental level that she was different from other people now. But she also knew that it wasn't enough. That she was incomplete. She needed more power, more energy to finish whatever transformation had been started. And the only thing that could offer what she needed was Mother Nature herself.

The flash of lightning struck her outstretched fingers like a coiled serpent. Unlike normal lightning it didn't fade after the initial strike. It's stayed connected to her fingers, it's opposite end visibly branching out through the sky like a spider web of crackling blue white light. Then it began to pull in on itself, the clouds surrounding it seeming to visibly shrink and deflate as all of the stored electrical energy inside of it was funnel the way towards its new owner, its new home.

Her body began to change immediately. The marks underneath her eyes brighten to a brilliant hue of electric blue as similar markings begin to form on either of her shoulders, each one taking the shape of some unknown rune that anyone looking at it felt like they should recognize but couldn't quite place. The fur along the back quarter of her tail brightened into that same electric blue hue and began to glow along with the rest of her as other similar markings peppered themselves symmetrically across her arms, legs, and torso. Her muzzle began to subtly change, not really losing the sharp angular cut of her jawline but seeming to streamline it and firm up the edges. Individually the changes would have been near indistinguishable but when happening all at once one would be able to notice the changes even if they couldn't quite put words to them. It was like every minuscule imperfection in her visage was being ironed out. Every minor incorrectly healed injury smoothed out, every slight asymmetric variant corrected, even the length of her fur shifting an adjusting until it was perfectly even everywhere across her body. Her back straightened slightly, still keeping some of the inhuman hunched forward posture but straightening enough to walk the edge between monster and man. She can easily stand up straight and look as regal as any Queen from any Fairy Tale, or hunch forward and bear her fangs to be as monstrous as any demon ever spoken of. And, of course, she grew.

If her growth before had been in spurts this was an explosion of fur and flesh. She grew so quickly that the displaced are created by her moving body actually blasted a hole in the cloud cover above her even as she stretched towards it. A nearby news helicopter, bold enough to continue recording the monster attacking their city, was smashed out of the sky by her fur covered hip as it grew towards them faster than the helicopter could turn and flee. Her feet swelled across the landscape like a tidal wave of flesh, no longer bulldozing people and cars but rather entire buildings and city blocks. Her height measured over a thousand feet tall within the first second, only a few seconds after that was measured in miles rather than feet. Before long she had grown so massive that she stood above the cloud cover of the dwindling thunderstorm, her arm having to extend downwards rather than up to continue sucking up the power held within. When the thunderstorm was finally dry, the pitch-black angry clouds drained and reduced to little more than white wisps of mist in the air, the titaness of a wolf stood nearly ten miles tall.

As her great head swung back and forth with enough kinetic force and momentum to create air turbulence for a plane that was unlucky enough to be flying just a few dozen miles away, she surveyed the landscape beneath her. Eyes that now crackled with tiny sparks of electricity around her irises observe the land from a perspective she had only ever seen while looking out of the window of a plane. She no longer had to reach out and search for the power spread out across the world. She simply knew where all of it was as easily as she knew where her fingers were on her body. It was a strange sensation, being so aware of so much across the entire planet. Now when she focused she didn't feel the power, instead she became aware through it. She focused on a cluster of power in a major metropolis halfway across the world and suddenly could hear the sound of an angry manager berating his employees in a language she didn't know but still somehow understood as she briefly existed in the electrical charge in the manager's phone. Shifting her attention, she suddenly was watching the living room that had some panther guy snuggled up on the couch with a tigress nestled in his lap, the two of them watching a movie together. Another shift and she was zooming along down a highway, inhabiting the crackling electricity in an electric car listening to the same 80s rock music the driver was blaring through his speakers.

Abruptly she froze, her Consciousness pulled back to her massive self. Her eyes went slightly wide and her mind raced as a question posed itself to her now, the part of her that had guided her to this ascension, to this new version of herself suddenly having nothing more to say. Her frantic thoughts slowed into a more resigned, if confused, contemplation. Idly her eyes focused on the miniscule little gnat that she recognized as a plane flying itself across her field of vision. Much to the terror of those watching her literally mountainous muzzle through the windows of the plane, she grinned at the sight of the massive passenger jet now barely the size of an insect to her. It took less than no effort at all to peek through the electrical systems in the plane to listen to the dozen or so terrified conversations about her happening inside.

Somehow, through some twist of fate she had become something more than she had been before, become something more than mortal. The only word she could put to it was God... Or in her case, goddess. unable to produce an answer to the sudden burning question whose answer could radically change the rest of her life she did what she always did when she had a question she couldn't answer. She ignored it.

Instead, the living mountain of a wolfess slowly lowered herself down under her hands and knees over the city she had once called home. Hands big enough to scoop small towns out of the ground landed to either side of the still partially standing Metropolis she had once called home. Knees big enough to dig lake-sized craters in the ground straddled the half-crushed remains of her suburban neighborhood. A muzzle big enough to lick entire neighborhoods up off the ground filled the sky over the city. Then, she spoke. Her voice boomed like a roar of thunder itself as she posed a question to the tiny, certainly terrified people down below.

"I am Stormy, and I suppose I am your new goddess." Then she paused for a moment, before continuing as her lips twisted into a devious, near-lusty grin that held ominous tidings for those down below. "And you all? You all are my new playthings."