FSE

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Jasmine wasn't sure what happened to her when she had been underwater with Trixie and Kala. Only that she'd felt a wrenching sense of vertigo before the pale blue walls of the tank were replaced by the hazy green of a grassy field being filtered through meters of clear briny water. Poking her head above the surface with a kick of her feet, she pushed her mask up onto her forehead in disbelief.

The two dolphins that had accompanied her on this strange, mind-bending, and impossible trip flashed around their smaller free-floating cube in a frenzy of agitation that the Filipina felt was a perfectly healthy reaction to what had just happened to them. Tugging her cross from beneath her wet suit with a jerk that broke the stainless-steel chain it was on and wrapping it around her hand to pray for guidance in response to what she was seeing.

A military helicopter sitting off to one side with its crew wandering around it aimlessly. Poking here and there at what Jasmine realized were bullet holes and making agitated gestures to each other.

Four perfectly normal dragons.

Men wearing bullet-proof jackets that said FBI on them and Army guys that looked like the ones she saw in warzones on the news. Some of them yelling to each other, some on their knees praying like Jasmine wished she was. Even if it puzzled her why they were crying with dozens of other men, women, and two children milling around.

The barn behind all of them smoldering from a recent fire that a perfectly normal dragon was scooping dirt through its hind legs to extinguish the last embers of.

The four perfectly fudging normal dragons! Her mind shouted again. That were looking at her! With their mouths open! With teeth! Dragons! With two children hugging the most enormous monster's legs and shying away from everyone else like they were looking for comfort from their parents!

What had happened to her? Was she even on Earth anymore? Where was she?

"What is this? Am I dead? This can't be real!" Jasmine shouted to the crowd, desperate to find someone that could make sense of what she was seeing for her. Surely there was someone in charge here! Someone to validate what she was experiencing! She was teleported, with two dolphins and a giant cube of water, to somewhere there were dragons.

None of this made sense to her.

Confusion battered her in nauseating waves as most of the humans, even those with the FBI and the Army garb, looked to the two greatest dragons who were unfurling their wings to sweep around the children. Hiding them from sight while, to Jasmine's shock, they spoke to each other in English.

When the one with tattoos covering its body called the other one Tom, a thunderbolt of realization struck the Filipina. This was what those other people were turning into. They were being turned into dragons like these people. These dragons had been human just a few days ago!

Incredulously, she watched as a tiny dragon with unnerving golden eyes bound towards her cube and then began speaking to her dolphin patients. And they communicated back to it! There was no way that wasn't communication! She was so flustered when the baby dragon spoke to her, she nearly forgot how to swim. From a distance that seemed to stretch from one end of Earth to the other, she felt her body form words in response to what the baby said to her. But she couldn't pay attention to what she said or heard from the physical world beyond the barest of acknowledgements. Even though she strained to return to the real world, especially when she heard the baby dragon explain what the dolphins had said, she could not. A dissociative episode, she thought clinically. That was what was happening to her.

The world her physical body occupied was left behind, and the yawning distance between her and it stretched until all that she could see was a boundless white void. Another voice spoke into her mind from deafening silence that should have been filled by the steady drum of her heartbeat. There was neither tone nor inflection to be heard in what she heard. It was like the imprint of communication simply appeared in her awareness without any clues given as to the speaker's nature.

"Hello, Jasmine Irving. The time has arrived for your waking self to confront the choice before you. Let your memories of our past interactions awaken, and tell me your will."

Jasmine's consciousness spun as she tried to 'move' towards where the voice came from in the blank eternity that she found herself. With an effort of will, she twisted what she could see until a dark ball of energy appeared in her sight. A sensation that she couldn't place her spectral finger upon stirred in the back of her thoughts. Whispers of memories grew from the fog of her unconscious mind. She had spoken with this thing before. It has asked her... no... it had asked them, Martin, and herself, to lead. It had told them it would require something...

"You... you're the thing that's been giving Martin and me nightmares? You look spooky enough! Who are you? What are you? Am I awake?"

_ "That is an answer that you will find difficult to understand. I once was a creature just like you. bound to an organic form. Now, I am nothing, and, I am everything. I am a singularity."_

_ "You're a... black hole?"_

The lightless orb, the only spot of color in the infinite whiteness, pulsed jaggedly with rays chaotically emanating from the central sphere and then receding. Jasmine got the impression that it was expressing amusement and giggled shyly. Not knowing if it was her naivety being laughed at or that it just enjoyed Jasmine's response. She gave the entity the benefit of the doubt as only she could by deciding that its laughter must be friendly in nature.

"I suppose that you could say that I am. Do you know why it is I've brought you here?"

_ "No... well, yes. But also, no, I will not answer your questions until you tell me something."_ Jasmine said, willing her head to shake back and forth. Before pausing to consider that she might not even have a head here to shake. The Filipina tried to look down at her own body and found that she could not. Because the young woman did not have one.

"What is your question, Jasmine?"

_ "What's your name?"_ She asked brightly, and with the vague recollection that she had already requested it this before. Trying to pour all her cheerful demeanor into her words in lieu of a physical expression. It was only right to try to put humanity's best foot forward when talking to disembodied aliens claiming to be black holes after all. Again, the ball of darkness spiked erratically before giving its reply.

"Just as upon our initial contact, you are the first member of a candidate race to have asked me that. My name would be meaningless and unpronounceable in your language. As a substitution, you may call me Themis."

_ "Well, Themis, I am Jasmine Irving, as you already know, and I am here because you spoke to me in my dreams. I recorded Martin and I saying we promised our lives for something. While I can't remember what that was, it seems you have come to take them."_

Jasmine only had the slightest of clues as to what they had promised when she said that. But, as the words left her mind, she knew. They had been asked to be the first to assist a new species in adapting to a challenging world full of change. To help the species of Tursiops truncatus adapt to a change that they should have had millennia to accustom themselves to under more favorable circumstances. But not as humans, she remembered now. Martin and herself had grown convinced. They knew in their hearts that their time as homo sapiens should end if they could do so much more with a change to what they were. What they were, Jasmine and her beau had spent days questioning Themis until they were satisfied on this point. What they were, not who they were.

A tipping point had been reached in the Earth's ecological balance. Many other humans were being transformed into different beings, such as Dreamers and Children of the Egg, in the last chance for the human species to prove that they could work with themselves and others to correct the damage they had inflicted upon their world. But if the change came, it would not arrive in time for the marine species that Themis had told them would become a vital part of the future of far more than just for the humans and oceans of Earth. When they were unequivocally informed that the entity would not stand by and allow humanity to further degrade the future of other species, it had been Jasmine who was the first to selflessly put forth her offer of agreement. They would set the example for others to follow. Others would be needed to bolster the ranks of this effort to ensure the health of multiple marine mammal species. All soon to be changed in subtle but profound ways and in need of human mentorship. Or, Jasmine knew, ex-human mentorship.

"You are nearly correct, Jasmine Irving. However, it is not your lives that we ask of you. It is your bodies." Themis said, continuing.

_ "Please, just Jasmine."_

_ "Jasmine. It is time to remember and take your place at the vanguard of your species. You will be the first to lead others of Earth to understanding."_

_ "Those dragons. You did that to them. I'm starting to remember now. Are these my memories or your creation? The dolphins... you asked if we would lead the dolphins. You gave us a chance to choose. The dragons and those people I saw in the cities. Did they have a choice?"_

_ "No, they did not. I have taken that choice from them. The human species is a candidate race, but it is also a purveyor of great harm to those they share the world with. Through this crucible you must pass if you wish to become greater than you are. Failure means the end of all that you have ever accomplished. Great suffering is approaching the human species and the world around them due to their actions. With the intervention begun at my direction, that suffering now has purpose where it had none before."_

"Candidate race...what does that mean?"

_ "It means many things, Jasmine. It is for you and humanity to decide what."_

_ "If I retract my willingness to do this, will you spare the cetaceans your manipulations?"_

_ "Our children have already begun to instigate their advancement. They must adapt now, with humanity's help, with your help. Their health has reached a tipping point, and time has run out for them. Are you ready to lead, Jasmine?"_

Jasmine strained to keep up with the loaded answers that she was receiving. But she had help. More of her nightly memories of discussions along similar lines emerged from the fog of her unconscious mind. Filling in gaps and eliminating the myriad questions burning within her. She wanted this to happen. Whatever doubts that her memories might have been fictions, that her recollections or the motives of Themis might have been false or malevolent, were crushed by her desire for this all to be true. She and Martin would be instrumental in helping the world and the creatures they so loved. If she was happy and this was what she truly wanted, it would help her parents adapt to the loss of their child's humanity. She just knew it would!

Martin had been here, in this same white void, asking questions alongside her. Once they had learned of the immense potential of the cetacean species and the place they would hold in this world. Their importance to humanity, in teaching them responsibility and their own genetic destiny. Martin and herself had both vowed to lead their charges by example. They had willingly volunteered to leave their human bodies behind. Now it seemed that she would be first. Going ahead of Martin instead of with him as they'd erroneously thought. Hours of exchanges learning what would happen to them would mean to the world and the species they wished to protect at all costs. Conversations that she and Martin would need to use as guides in what happened next.

She crossed herself while wishing for the comforting touch of her necklace and its pendant. Steeling her resolve, she thought spoke her last words as a human being with intensity.

"With all that I am."

Two voices answered her back.

"With all that you are, you shall."

With a snap, she was back in her body. Never to see that infinite void or to speak with Themis ever again. The infantile dragon that Jasmine now knew was called a Void Child by his creator sitting upon its bottom and staring directly back at her with satisfaction swirling in its monochrome eyes. The dragons behind him whispering to each other with their heads bobbing and wings shifting. Moving to the rhythms of their muted chatter.

Jasmine felt energy flow into her, even with her eyes dreamily half-lidded.

This is real. It's really happening. Jasmine thought, in wonder tinged with panic. I agreed to become a bottlenose dolphin, and it's starting! Trying to think through the cold numbing that settled over her, deadening her nerves for what she was told would be excruciatingly painful otherwise, to catalog what this felt like. She was a scientist. She would try to be objective while it happened.

A sigh slipped from her mouth as a fantastical wish she'd had all her life began to come true. Her heart had only ever known one thing, and now her body would match what she felt within. Jasmine was going home to help shepherd the creatures of the ocean that she'd felt an affinity for all her life.

Admittedly, she was flustered to feel the first thing happening to her was the disappearance of the tight warming compression of her wetsuit. The skin of her face thickened and firmed with a not unpleasant tingle. One of the hands racing to reflexively cover her breasts flew instead to her face to feel the changes starting there. Poking and feeling as her youthful dark skin turned thick and rubbery. Withdrawing her hand to observe her body's hue graying from the tips of her fingers and outwards at a remarkable rate. Glancing down through her chest's natural valley to see that her feet were not changing color like her hands. As the color spread up her arms and the thickening sensation crossed her face, her legs continued to remain unchanged.

Her long hair dancing in her vision receded into her scalp as she felt herself grow bald. Looking down again, the small trail of short hair she kept neatly trimmed below withdrew into her pubic mound. Bubbles flew from her mouth when she made a sharp sound of protest at her being left so exposed, but her hands and arms no longer answered her commands. Floating limply in front of her with a total loss of control.

With gray sweeping rampantly across her body, Jasmine's concerns over her nudity were shoved aside by the changes of her skin's texture. Her areola and nipples vanishing when the transmutation struck at her breasts. Leaving two pert mounds remaining with nothing visible to indicate the mammary glands that were. Moments later, the texture change reached her vulva to smooth it into a foreign urogenital opening. The only thing left recognizable was her navel. Jasmine would have blushed if she could have, as she felt a liquid warmth work its way through the area of her groin and bottom. The sensation of that heat reaching inside her as she felt flesh pull and twist into new shapes. Leaving the changing woman to surface with a limp-limbed undulation of her body.

Gasping at the strange yet deadened feelings of familiar anatomy being adapted to the makeup of a different species. The incredible experience of such nerve-rich and sensitive anatomy altering was enough to break through the pervasive numbing momentarily. Making Jasmine clench her itching teeth against the intensity of what was happening within.

The geometry of her neck and shoulders altered suddenly. Losing flexibility prevented her from seeing what occurred next but not feeling it as a sense of diminishment came from her heaving chest. A familiar weight that she had proudly born since puberty but was now fading from her awareness. Simultaneously with her breasts dissolving and her chest becoming featureless, a sensation of fullness swelled within her lower abdomen at two points just above and adjacent to her groin. She thrashed her body, her legs and arms flapping back and forth, as she felt two small slits form. Connecting to the mammary glands, she felt swelling into small, dormant nodes near the base of her stomach.

The completion of this part of her anatomy temporarily jerked Jasmine from her analytical listing as each body feature manifested.

One day she would have babies. Dolphin calves that would nurse from the slits and the hidden teats that she had just felt form within. It was the only time that Jasmine would doubt her surety in knowing what was happening to her was exactly what she wanted in helping these dolphins and others in the time to come. She knew of the at times violent and polyamorous nature of cetacean intercourse. But she had been committed to Martin. Oh, why hadn't they talked about this in their dreams?

It was too late now. The jerks and twitches of Jasmine's body reminded her. With her head locked upwards by the rearrangement of the musculature of her neck, she braced herself for the severe changes to come. If the experience of her shifting sexual organs had broken through the sedative effect dampening this change, she could only hope that she didn't have to know the full scope of what was about to happen to her skeletal system.

An other-worldly hybrid between dolphin and human. Jasmine floated with her gray-clad arms and unchanged legs hanging loosely beneath her in the water. The bone-rattling clicking from her ignored water-cube neighbors briefly entered her thoughts before being jettisoned again. With her thickened neck now supporting her head in line with her body, the creeping and tingling shock of vertebrae morphing towards a new position at the back of Jasmine's skull drove her into a wriggling frenzy.

With each movement, her length and mass increased relentlessly. Leaving Jasmine burbling helplessly at the feeling of her petite body growing thick and misshapen with blubber and muscle. Erasing the slime lines of a young human woman as she bloated oddly with vital deposits of life-preserving fat before the lines of her body began to smoothen into a sleek fusiform shape.

Her splayed fingers, slipping through the water as her body twisted and bent with her gyrations, slammed together and fused. A thick cover of skin enfolding them before hardening with connective tissue as the joints in her hands, wrists, and elbow locked and unneeded tendons and muscles dissolved. Jasmine is not ashamed to admit that she did scream at the feeling of her phalanges shortening and losing joints. Her thumb, index, and pinkie fingers nearly vanishing altogether. While her ring and middle fingers went into hyperdrive and shot outwards to incredible lengths with a mind-shatteringly unsatiable itching sensation. Her whole hand was rigidly set by the inelastic cartilage and tissue altering the structure of her limbs.

Jasmine squiggled again to the surface to take another heaving breath just before her nose sealed shut and retracted into her face.

"Uhnf!" She protested sensibly. Moaning atonally through her mouth before that became impossible as her trachea and esophagus grew apart and fought for room within the tight confines of her constricted body. Jasmine coughed without stop as an epiglottic spout formed to keep her from inhaling water when eating underwater. A surge of panic nearly wiping out all conscious thought as her breathing mechanisms shifted. With all passages sealed, she couldn't inhale. Until a cartilaginous path opened within her skull. Connecting to a thick region of muscle clamping a flap shut where her nose once resided.

An explosive blast of stale air erupted from beneath her eyes, causing a plume of moisture to cloud her vision. With an inhale that flooded her expanding lungs until they impinged against the barrier of her ribcage, Jasmine felt air circulating through tiny passages developing in her forehead. Perceiving yet another series of powerful muscles spring into being in her increasingly overburdened human cranium with cavities worming their way through new openings in her skull. Making her want to gag in a reflexive action that she no longer enjoyed at the sensation of organs moving within her head. Relief came as her body expanded to make room and her ribs became flexible, allowing additional volume for her lungs.

The formation of her blowhole led to the most disturbing change yet for the former woman as her skull drastically reformed. Her nose and external ears were already gone when she blew air against the muscles sealing passages shut just beneath her blowhole in an instinctive expression of squealing dismay as her jaws itched intolerably and the groaning noise of her bones stretching was transmitted right to the glands that excited Trixie and Kala into a thunderous fusillade of clicks. Jasmine nearly jumped right out of her new dolphin skin when a hazy image of...something formed in her mind.

Their sound conveyed images! They talked in images! Jasmine screamed in her head with delighted realization. I am the first human ever to hear and understand what they say to each other! C'mon melon and jaws! Grow so that I can listen to them properly!

Happily, her body obliged as the Filipina's face elongated into the perpetual grin of her new species. Fat-filled acoustic cavities opened in her lower jaw as her teeth sharpened and multiplied all along her new rostrum. As the region of her mouth pulled away from her cranium, it too grew larger. Jasmine squeezed her eyes shut as her view of the world shifted on her. Her eyes spread apart, widening her field of vision as the skull supporting them changed from its simian form. Beneath her tightly shut eyelids, her eyes darkened into their new coloration and settled into their unaccustomed locations just behind the corners of her jaws.

The perception of her forehead inflating like a balloon made those eyes fly open and look upwards and inwards with a surprised groaning. Her melon developed, filling with a sound focusing lens of fat and leaving her wanting to giggle hysterically at the thought that she was growing a fathead after all the childish jokes she'd hear directed towards others in the Philippines. A final surge of her bones settled the structure of her head into place just before the feeling struck her of that same head popping off the end of her overstuffed sausage of a body and floating away.

It was the greatest of challenges for Jasmine to comprehend this as her brain itself expanded in volume to fill its new casing. Lobes dedicated to interpreting a complex array of signals and communication swelled far beyond a human's. The fuzzy, indescribable image in her mind suddenly took clarity as she gained the biological mechanisms to understand the sound-image being projected towards her.

Trixie projected a noise at her, followed by the image of Kala. Kala followed with a similar sound that made Jasmine feel as if she was meeting someone new and showed an image of Trixie. A third image from both then blasted her, showing the ungainly half-dolphin creature she must be. But no sound followed this image. It was like... it was like they didn't know what to call her. Were those sounds they made their names? Were they trying to ask what she was? Jasmine shook her head side to side, her entire body flexing with the movement in confusion. She didn't understand. Not yet. There was so much to learn. She was definitely going to be writing her doctoral thesis on this! Or dictating it...yes, she would have to dictate it.

A blaring squeal made her skull, and the fatty deposit between her eyes thrum with her expression of the grinding loss she felt as her limbs slowly shrank into her body. Simultaneously on the other side of her body, new nerve endings blossomed at a point halfway between her dwindling shoulders and disintegrating hips to provide a distraction to the immense shift in her locomotive structure. Pressure built just above her spine and then the feeling of release when a fibrous structure full of nerves, arteries, and veins jutted from her body as the iconic falcate dorsal fin grew proudly above her back.

Ticking noises of distress streamed from the nasal cavities in her head, and she shook it in agitation with the diminishment of her humeri, radii, and ulnae bones. Her wrist and elbow stiffened with dense cartilage. The only movement she was allowed was flailing the stubby remnants of her arms jutting from her reformed shoulders. Seeing the foreshortened limbs twitching and rotating with slight curling of her incredible phalanges out of the corner of one eye. Vertigo shooting through her human thought processes as the eye she looked backward with moved independently of her other. If she could have vomited, she would have the sheer alienness of her physical mind processing two different images. Jasmine's aethereal makeup that knew what the world was supposed to look like through her eyes in conflict with her new biological reality.

Spying her cross, somehow wrapped around what her arm and hand had become, eased her turbulently disoriented thoughts at the feeling of so much change. Seeing her lord and savior and knowing that he would approve of her choice, allowed Jasmine to bear it with grace when her legs and almost every last bit of her hips dissolved into nothing. The final traces of her lower two limbs, just barely in view when she bent her body enough to see with her enlarged eyes, receding into the beginnings of her tapering peduncle.

Despite knowing that it was coming, Jasmine still keenly felt the loss of what she had never really given thought to before. She would never walk again. As strange as it sounds to herself, that was when what she was undergoing truly hit home at seeing her legs wither into featureless stumps before vanishing forever.

Not that the raw material of her lost bones wasn't put to good use. Shuddering at the feeling of her pelvis detaching and separating from her spine until nothing remained but a pair of small curved bones. Far nearer her urogenital opening than the spine that they once attached to. A twinge within, just above that same opening, came as a part of her innards anchored to that skeletal remnant. A mental blush coloring her thoughts with the realization of what had just happened as strengthened muscles rippled and flexed.

All thoughts were erased as a tsunami surged through her from her stumpy neck and then backwards. Her length doubling, then tripling as muscles and tendons groaned with stress and bones creaked with growth. Her spine shot rearwards as she curved her body with a trumpet of imagined pain, at first fighting against the alterations racking and causing herself agony with the resistance. Relying on the meditative breathing learned from years of yoga, the stress and induced rolled off her mind like the droplets of water on her skin as she bobbed at the surface. Thrashing in the water, Jasmine struggled with the unimaginable strangeness of growing caudal vertebrae as her tail developed past the point of hips that were no longer truly existent. At first, a skinny whip covered in nothing more than stretched gray and off-white flesh, the tail ballooned in size as blubber injected itself and muscle wound to sheathe the new anatomy. Swelling to its final formidable dimensions, Jasmine moaning with the spasms of growth and leaving her wishing the feeling of getting fatter and thicker would just stop. She didn't want to eat anymore, she thought, deliriously. Stop telling me I'm too skinny, mother!

However, the transformation was nearly complete and did not obey her wish to be a size that could only lead to starvation and death for an adult bottlenose dolphin. Haunting moans and rapid-fire clicks came from Jasmine's new signaling organs as her body finished growing turgid with the fat reserves and herculean muscle needed for transoceanic migrations. Smoothing into the sleek, hydrodynamic shape natural to her new form.

At last, the lobes of her fluke, unfurling like petals from the tapered end of her torpedo-shaped body, spread themselves wide to etch the first impression on Jasmine the dolphin of having a tail in place of legs. Starting from the spine's very tip at her median notch and radiating outwards, the nerves that had been deadened throughout the eternity of her body being molded and stretched like saltwater taffy came to life. Giving her a vivid awareness for the first time of just what it felt like to be another living being.

Who needed to breathe again but couldn't figure out how to make their flippers work!

An instinctual call for assistance that Jasmine couldn't know was the same a newborn calf made had Trixie and Kala swarming forward from where they had been warily watching her transformation. Which Jasmine felt was totally fine! As she would be freaking out if she saw what just happened to someone else without knowing why! Even the dragons' speech added to the din created by the clicking and squealing of the two rescue dolphins. Her two companions probing Jasmine with sound as if they were making sure what she was would not change again. Into something considerably more harmful to them and the calves in their bellies.

"Can you believe that shit, Tom? Craziest fucking thing I've ever seen! A fucking dolphin!"

Jasmine heard the unrivaled dragon's deep-penetrating voice pounding against her inner ears as her two friends nudged her head clear of the surface. Sheets of water poured off the sleek surfaces of her bulging forehead and cascaded down her body as she breached. Slapping her chin just like a newborn calf. The feeling of pressure surrounding her blowhole eased, and she took her first breath as a healthy and mature Tursiops Truncatus with a blast of air to expel the pent-up breath that she'd been holding.

Squeeing with laughter at the slurred and rumbling conversation of disbelief between the two dragons as the one who must have been Tom replied. Jasmine blinked her thick, rubbery eyelids at seeing her first open-air sight with her new vision. Everything was in shades of blue and green, a little fuzzy at a distance but still remarkably full of definition. Enough for her to still see and recognize external events, even if the colors were entirely at odds to what she'd remembered them being just minutes before.

"What? Kim? You just finished turning into a four-legged lizard, watched the world nearly come to an end, saw an alien ghost make an entire militia vanish, and this is the craziest thing you've ever seen?"

Kim's silhouette drew Jasmine's fascinated goggle-eyed gaze as it suddenly grew twice...no... four times its size as the wings that the dolphin-woman saw folded on her back lifted and half unfurled before settling again. She must be shrugging, Jasmine declared in her head. Already looking to memorize more of the oddity that she'd seen here today. Seemingly already moving on from the fact that she was no longer the human she'd been when entering this scene.

"I meant in the last ten seconds. That's how I'm choosing to break this bizarre acid trip up so that I don't go insane. Ten-second intervals. See? The new craziest thing that I've ever seen were these twenty-meter sails growing from my back lifting into the air and fucking up my center of gravity. Oh, look! My giant nose is blocking my view of you smacking your snout with your animal paw in exasperation. Isn't this fun? Ten-second intervals, Tom. I'm telling you. Another patented Kim miracle cure to be used whenever you might find yourself wondering what a woman should do with the tail making up half the length of her body, and that is always hitting things that should be too far away from my hands to fucking reach! Seriously, Tom, you have ten seconds to help me figure out how to recalibrate my sense of body awareness. So, stop flashing your teeth at that dolphin that was a little girl twenty minutes ago like she's that absurd fish you tried to have mounted on the wall where my painting was, and pay attention."

"Hey, it took me forty minutes to reel in that sailfish! I was proud of that. You didn't have to desecrate it with what you did!"

"Did too..." the prodigious dragon with the fuzzy squiggles of tattoos that Jasmine could no longer quite make out declared with a haughty tone to the coarse, stone-crushing, and very unfeminine voice. "It was a sailfish, and I was helping it fly out of our home, where it was ridiculous and didn't belong, back to its home where it did."

"You're just still pissed that you couldn't reel yours in with your flabby muscles. And your stupid painting looks like someone vomited a hotdog onto a piece of canvas." Tom muttered. Jasmine suspected that he had commented under his breath even though she had no difficulty hearing it through the water some distance away. Her hearing was stupefying! Even through the air! Unfortunately for Tom, Kim also heard him and made an outraged ululating howl from a throat too long to have any business existing.

Jasmine had one...no...two...burning questions and broke into the zany conversation to ask the first. Extending the first communication ever recorded, she was sure, between dolphins and dragons. Trying to creak out through vibrations of a pair of lips buried deep in her head English words that former human learned much later were horribly mistranslated. As she should have expected. Because she was a dolphin, and dolphins only talk in Science Fiction stories about uplifting and space travel. Not in the real world, where people become dolphins that didn't magically speak human languages.

The Filipina twenty-something dolphin was sure she had asked them if any of them had gotten her change on video. Not the 'thank you' they thought they'd heard, she learned years later.

In any case, she had no more time to get her cetacean bearings in the yard of wherever she was or learn more of the identities of those arrayed around the water cube before the same mind-bending hallucination that had brought her there enthralled her mind. Hitting her senses differently as the senses themselves were oh so different, and sinking into a much wider pool of water as her stomach settled back...at the bottom of her body?

Jasmine giggled, startling four dolphins now with her chittering, with her thoughts on how she would have to recalibrate the way that she described...well...everything. Agitated human voices easily pierced through the water she drifted in. Her pectoral fins making uneven twitches of movement that left her spinning idly clockwise. Trying something new, Jasmine thought of the examination platform where she wanted to talk to the humans, conjecturing where a fifth dolphin had just come from. Pushing the image out, a burst of sound came buzzing out through her melon. Pulling the other dolphins up short and silencing all four of them as their probing sonic attention filtered through Jasmine's body.

Nikki made a harsh clacking noise that Jasmine got a distinct impression of being interrogative before launching into a much longer fury of sound. Jasmine squeaked with surprise when whatever the elderly female had said ended with her two pool mate's rostrums prodding her sides as they used their bodies to push her along. Breaking off just a meter shy of the edge of the tank, Jasmine rode the peak of their wake up onto the examination platform. Skidding onto the solid surface with none of the grace that her body should rightly have on her side with her left arm...no, her left flipper...pinned awkwardly beneath her and the other extending into the air.

Flexing her arm at the shoulder, Jasmine saw the glimmers of light play over her eye as they were reflected by the cross dangling from her transmogrified appendage. The gasps she heard from her friends as they took it in let the former woman know they had realized the truth. When Rebecca whispered Jasmine's name as the onetime human squirmed on the ledge. Trying to exclaim proudly who she was in the submarine proto-language of her new kind.

Jasmine Irving. The bottlenose dolphin.