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This is another fine mess you've gotten yourself into, Rodney. Just another fine mess you now have to explain to the press and your agent. Where are the lights?

Rodney Ginger had been searching for the lights to his own living room for a few minutes now, feeling on the wall methodically as he tried his best to find the light switch, but for some reason he couldn't find it anywhere. He wished it wasn't so dark in here; it must've been midnight outside or something because surely he would have some light coming in from the windows that lined the front of the living room. Which side was that again; here in the pitch black, Rodney couldn't tell.

After a few more minutes, the room began to feel claustrophobic, even for star athlete Rodney, who was never afraid of anything or so the press said. He was a boxer, one of the last few his agent had decided to take under his wing before "official" retirement back in June. The only one that his agent had kept around this long, Rodney was built up by the press as this unstoppable lone wolf, a powerful bear of a man, and above all he was supposed to be fearless. But in the pitch black room, he couldn't see anything, and he wished he could.

Suddenly the room went pure white, and for a moment Rodney didn't realize he had gotten his wish granted; the lights were on. He blinked and stumbled away from the wall, trying his hardest to get adjusted to the light that was new to the room. When he had finally done that, the blur and fuzzies in his eyes cleared away for better vision, he was still dumbfounded. He'd read about this on the Internet once a few weeks ago, but he hadn't thought he would ever actually see something like this.

The room appeared to be an infinite white space, similar to some buildings that were being designed in Europe now to achieve such an effect. The infinite rooms, they were called, were supposed to be the newest fashion for thrill-seekers, nothing more, or so Rodney would have thought until now. The secret was all about the walls and how they were built; they smoothly curved into the floor and the ceiling, giving a rounded square shape to this particular room instead of the cube it should have been. And the light source was the other half of the problem: it was soft light, which cast no shadows and because of the seemingly seamless room's curves made it so that there was no way to tell when the floor ended and the wall began. There was, however, one tiny oval in the far wall that stood out from the rest of the room. It was a hole, a frameless window built into what Rodney assumed was concrete.

He walked over to the window and peered out of it finding the answer to his next question of where the hell he was. The window only displayed a commanding view of an ocean far beneath the window's view. Most of the view was black; indeed it had to be close to midnight, and the waves were only faintly visible because of the light from the room Rodney suspected. Despite the fact that he could see the lit waves, however, he could not hear them. He had no way of knowing the glass was soundproofed, and he banged on the window screaming for help without this knowledge.

After a brief attempt to get help by shouting at the window, which was only maybe six inches wide between its longest points, which Rodney was increasingly finding harder and harder to find (had the window actually been a perfect circle this whole time? And since when did glass blend so easily into concrete?), he finally decided to look for a door. He struggled to not bang his face against the wall as he tried to feel around for the nearby wall, unable to find it until his head smacked the side of it by accident. The room was quickly becoming disorienting, its shape and the lighting making him feel like he was in infinity when the room was slowly becoming smaller in his head. Maybe only a couple of feet by a couple of feet, but it was a square... or a circle. Shit, who builds spherical rooms, he thought to himself as he tried to find the crack in the room that would have to be the door. He couldn't find it. The lighting prevented it from being easily visible, and he spent what felt like hours searching the room for it. There was nothing in the room for furniture either. It was just Rodney and his small window with its reflection-less glass and its soundproofed nature.

Rodney tried to reach into his pocket for his cell phone but to his amazement he was naked. How had he not noticed this sooner, he wondered in panic as he started to search for his clothes. Of course they weren't there. But something else was starting to bother him. Something else had bothered Rodney since the beginning of his memory of this place what felt like ages ago. He didn't feel right physically. Something about his body just tingled and pulled at the base of his brain, telling him it wasn't right.

He scratched his head with a claw and then looked at the paw that was his right hand with a strange curiosity for a minute before it dawned on him, making his eyes widen with sudden horror. He had a paw for a hand, complete with claws and thick black pads on the underside. And the grey fur that covered it thickly extended up his arm, up to the shoulder, down the chest and his back, until Rodney realized with dumbfounded suddenness that he was covered in the grey fur. Had he been covered this whole time?

As he sat down on the floor he felt his brain pulsing inside his skull and it hurt him like a migraine. A million thoughts rushed through his brain simultaneously and he couldn't hear them all let alone make sense of what he was trying to think about. He looked over himself once again and scratched at his stocky frame, his solid gut not having much give or jiggle to it, but there was a softness that he liked and soon the millions of thoughts faded away in the back of his mind as he murred dumbly to the belly rubs he was giving himself.

Jacques. That was his name.

What the hell, Rodney thought to himself suddenly as he opened his eyes and looked down at his paw again. It seemed an odd thing for him to say to himself, and he whined a bit as he tried to think about why he had thought anything in the first place. Jacques, sounded like some French name or something. He was pure-blooded American, he wasn't any parts French that he was aware of. He'd never even been to Paris, let alone France.

He was Jacques, a farmer from just outside of Toulouse. No, wait, he had to be Rodney the all-American boxer. Things were so confusing. Rodney tried to think again and he couldn't; those millions of thoughts returned like angry swarms of bees all at once and he couldn't think clearly. For a minute he thought he might have things under control. These thoughts just had to be a sign he was going insane inside this infinity room, and he had to find the doorway out.

But then it hit him all at once like a wall. He had once been Jacques Whittier, a poor farmer that had been born and raised in Toulouse and had moved to start his own farm a few years back trying to make a living for himself. Jacques was a human farmer... a human...

Rodney the stocky wolf looked down at himself and took in a hard dose of reality. He had changed something about himself somehow; something that was supposed to be impossible and yet here was the evidence all over him. There had to be a reason he did this to himself. What had made him want to do this? He tried to ask himself the right questions, to find the right answers in his mind, as his tail wagged gently behind him in a slightly aggravated series of jerks back and forth. He was aggravated, he didn't understand what the hell was going on.

The more that he tried to think about it, tried to understand the situation, the more it slowly came back to him. The reason he had come into this building was because it was where they were doing experimental testing on humans (it felt weird to call them that, but then again it was even weirder to admit he wasn't one) to see... well he couldn't remember the promises that had drawn him in exactly, but he was lured in with advertisements promising a large sum of money for his time and feedback on the experiments.

Rodney remembered that he had sat in an office with the man that had personally done the experiments: Dr. Change, an American, and his assistant Leo, whose face he never saw the whole time he was in the office. Dr. Change had been smooth like butter with his words and easy with promises of that money that Jacques so clearly had needed.

But that didn't explain how he got this belly, or this tail, or this fur... Rodney scratched again at his furry gut and looked down at the canine foot-paws that had once been human feet, but were now underscored by thick black pads and tipped with sharp claws. He was a wolf, all right, a thickly built wolf that was clearly what some of the guys in the bar (back in Toulouse) would have called a bear, except he wasn't gay like most "bears" typically were. Or was he? Had they changed that about him too?

He didn't even want to think about that. Rodney just wanted to get out of here. But as he rubbed his belly the thoughts of the change filled his head once again. He slowly remembered how it had felt exhilarating when the fur had crawled from his pores that covered his body, then thickened and spread to cover every part of his body. It had been refreshing, exciting, almost arousing even. The feeling of those claws erupting from where his fingernails and toenails had been was more painful than the fur, but he had thoroughly enjoyed it as well. In fact, he had fully enjoyed the change laying on the operating table as Dr. Change had given him the series of serums that had gradually changed him. How long ago had that been, hours or days? He still didn't remember.

All that he was concerned with now was getting out of here. Jacques was trying to come back, and he recalled hearing Dr. Change say something about if this happened that the change was a failure and he would be reversed to normal with his pay. But things were not so cut and dry; Rodney was still there. He remembered growing up in Austin, Texas and training hard and long for most of his life to be as big as he could, and his icy blue eyes had learned how to perfectly intimidate his opponents in the ring with their cold stare (his agent loved that one feature about Rodney above all else). Rodney had a life, that was something that he was sure of. There were no holes in his memory, only Jacques' memories parallel to his own. What did that mean? Did it still mean a failure?

Jacques wanted to go home, but Rodney wanted to go back to America to fight his next match. Who was right? He screamed and howled again as he threw his massive weight against the walls in systematic fashion, trying to break through a weak spot. At nearly two and a half meters tall and roughly three hundred kilograms, he figured he was big enough to break through the door if he could find it. No matter who was right, he had to get out of this blinding white room with the small window in it.

He heard the near-silent whoosh of a door opening suddenly and he turned around to see that a large rectangular hole had opened in the bright white room, leading into what looked like a long, dim corridor. The stocky wolf hurried over to it and trotted through the opening in the wall (of which there was another whoosh sound when he had exited the room, sealing that room behind him). He let his eyes adjust a bit more, it was easier now that he had recognizable features and the fact that his canine eyes could see in the dark with those features in his field of vision. He hurried down the corridor, but as he did he felt an odd feeling pulling at his brain again.

The more he ran down the corridor, the more Jacques' life faded from his mind, and at first it was a scary thought because Rodney realized that this was the real him fading from existence. But Rodney was also becoming more assertive and dominant, a real lone wolf like his agent said he was all the time. Jacques' memories faded away, the reasons for him coming to see Dr. Change, the reason for the experiment, even the reason he was in France at the moment; all gone by the time he reached the other door at the end of the hallway. Rodney was all that remained, and he would never know that there had been anything different.

The doorway to the outside world opened at Rodney's command, turning the handle with his wolf's paw, and then he burst into the outside world and trotted off down the hill to his violent red Mustang that was still in the parking lot. Why had he even come up to this lighthouse this late at night? He hated the ocean, he told himself. And he was sure that his agent was freaking out with this trip to France being so unannounced and unplanned for. He had a fight he had to make in less than twelve hours in New York, he couldn't be travelling across the Atlantic just to visit some stupid lighthouse.

Rodney got into his Mustang and smiled a wolfish smile at himself in the rearview mirror. He had to admit, his icy blue eyes did have an intimidating stare, but the grey fur was something special and different altogether. He felt like he was seeing his face for the first time as he looked into the mirror and he loved what he saw. He adjusted the seat a bit for his stocky gut, which he lovingly caressed with a paw before starting the Mustang up and pulling out of the parking lot.

He had a fight to catch.