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Boris closed the dormitory door, sauntering over to the haphazard stack of spell books piled on the dining room table, before plopping his half-empty coffee cup on one of the bare spots of wood remaining. The alligator skimmed quickly over the mess of notes, before pulling two dusty, aged volumes out of his backpack. It had taken an awful lot of wrangling to get the librarian to lend them to him, but putting off studying for this exam practical was coming back to kick his tail, and he was going to need all the help he could get. It was a practical, which was problematic, considering that Boris just hadn't been able to get the hang of casting either verbally or through writing. For whatever reason, spellcasting with a wand or other focus object seemed to come much more naturally to him, and certainly were less troublesome for him at least to practice. It was certainly safer to everyone else, he mused.

Still, it was getting to the point in the semester where he'd fallen enough behind that he was having to severely cut corners, something his flatmates didn't tend to enjoy. He shuddered simply thinking of the last multiplication spell that had backfired, how they wouldn't shut up about how the shared hallways still reeked a bit like old, burnt popcorn. If anything, he was hoping these ancient old tomes had at least some sort of shortcuts he could take from them. Provided he could make it past the handwriting, he thought, wrinkling his eyes at the ornate, wavy calligraphy as he flipped the first book open.

The gator stretched out as he settled into the heavy wooden chair, offhandedly scratching at the base of his neck as he slouched forward. His scaled, dark green form, rather lean for an alligator, glinted occasionally in the flickering light, one of the bulbs in the overhead lamp getting to that irritating stage of dying, making every shadow on his desk an annoying distraction. As he paused to recall if they had any spare bulbs lying around, a badger poked his head in from the other room.

"Boris, I'm ordering out, what do you want?" Tarquin took in a long, heavy yawn, the badger's headfur disheveled as if he had just been napping, which Boris figured he had. Tarquin was passing all his classes, after all, so it wasn't as if he couldn't.

The gator looked up from the book stack. "Kebabs sound good. I just don't want pizza, I've had enough pizza in just this past month to last me the next five years."

"Yeah, Greek sounds good. Doner or shish?"

"Doner's fine," Boris replied. He didn't need to order pop; they had enough cola and energy drinks in the fridge to last about that same amount of time. "Don't get drinks, we've got enough here, and, um, get me a double order of tzatziki, too."

"Roger that," the badger said, before he turned and disappeared back into his room.

Greek food was always such a good comfort food, Boris mused to himself, turning back to the spell books. He flipped through the book to what seemed like the right spell chapter, before unfastening one of his binders and dumping his notes over the table. He had to be doing something right, he thought to himself. The written runes all seemed to match so far, the gator thought, brow furrowing as he compared the faded, quill-penned handwriting in the spell book to his ballpoint-scribbled notes on college-ruled loose leaf. The contrast was nearly as ridiculous as he felt sitting in this ornate old dormitory, full of hand-crafted hardwood and stained glass, dressed as if he'd just walked out of a Gap commercial.

Eh, his runes were close enough, he thought, reaching into his bag for some casting parchment, ripping a sheet from the pad and laying it down in front of him. It was a simple practice spell in theory, nothing more complicated than liquefying the paper he was writing it on. As he began to trace out each of the individual runes on the parchment, the thoughts of his impending meal drifted to the front of his mind. He could already taste that juicy kebab meat, the crunch of the onions and tomatoes, the creaminess of the tzatziki sauce and pita. A sudden, audible drip snapped him out of the daydream, before Boris looked down, seeing that one, he'd started drooling, and two, he'd dripped on the spell he'd been writing. The runes started to smear together, and the gator hurriedly tried to correct them, frantically looking back and forth to the spell book, before laying his pen down, the spell looking fixed enough, and letting out a sigh of relief.

Yawning, Boris picked his hand up, and the parchment suddenly stuck to his hand, hanging there for a moment before detaching and settling to the desk with a damp handprint upon it. As the runes on the paper slowly faded away, Boris blinked, dumbly, and hesitantly brought his hand up to his face.

"Aw, crap."

Before his eyes, his heavy, rigid scaling seemed to merge together, into a lighter, more fluid mass, his claws rounding off, softening into opaque, shimmering ooze, before the tips began to drip down. The gator looked all around him and groaned. He already knew what had happened, and there wasn't much at all he could do about it, other than hoping that the eventual disspell wasn't that overly painful. He tried to stand up, to at least not make a total mess of his notes, but the first step backwards was like a drunkard learning to walk. His legs felt like jelly underneath him, and already he could feel his tail sloughing across the cold tile beneath him, slowly merging into a goopy pile, soaking into the fabric of his khaki shorts.

He'd thought that it was a progressive effect at first, but it became more and more obvious it was affecting the gator all over, all at once. Boris brought an arm in front of him to reveal a melting, oozy stub, as beneath the dripping surface, his bones lost their integrity and mixed together with the surrounding tissue, slowly mushing together into that same gelatinous, greenish goop. He slowly looked down, seeing the stripes of his polo darkening with wetness as his torso underneath changed, as he realized the desk in front of him was growing higher and higher with each second.

A slight hint of panic hit him as his eyesight began to blur over. Boris soon realized he couldn't raise his head back up, feeling the uncanny sensation as his vertebrae and ribs began to fuse and mingle with his internal organs. His frantic breathing became stifled with gurgles, Boris coughing as his lungs began to convert; wet coughs, like the worst kind of thick, heavy chest congestion. His vision melted into a universal dull green, the height of his ever-slumping form only distinguishable by the subtle changes in light and darkness he could still detect. His last breath ended in a garble, feeling the sudden loss of distinction as his teeth, his tongue, his muzzle all suddenly sloughed off in a gooey clump, the gator feeling a disorienting dissociation of sensation as his physical form completely lost all solidity.

What had been his torso continued to gush out of the sleeves of his drenched polo, pooling down the desk and chair in a slimy green stream, the resultant puddle spreading out beneath the table. Soon the last of him dripped off the chair and onto the hardwood floor, gelling into a thick, viscous goop, vaguely the same dark green as his scales had been.

Kebabs didn't sound that appetizing anymore. Boris wasn't really sure where his conscience actually was right now, but the one thing he did know was that the wooden floor was freezing cold, and that he was spread over much of it. Really, the only sensations he felt he could rely on right now, were temperature and touch. Smell was dominated by a sort of odd, waxy aroma that he wasn't sure was him or was the floor. He could still hear the ambience of the television in Tarquin's room, though it came to him much more muted, not unlike what one would hear at the bottom of a swimming pool. He paused, things feeling entirely too still, as he realized he didn't have to breathe. The slime wondered just how he'd managed to botch the spell so badly, before thanking the gods that he'd at least managed to keep his sentience, though depending on how long it took to reverse the spell, he wasn't sure if that was the better alternative. He wanted to swear, he wanted to sigh, but all that happened were a handful of bubbles rising from the puddle.

Tarquin wandered out from his bedroom, blinked confusedly, then walked over to the table, glancing down at the slime puddle, then over at Boris's notes, then back to the puddle. The badger leaned down to peer at the runes Boris had been practicing, cringed, then squatted down next to the slime.

"Don't go anywhere, I'm gonna go get a mop."

A few more bubbles popped at the puddle's surface.