Drummer Boy: Bat Out of Hell II: Back to Hell
Hello again, ladies and gents, Lady D here! I'd hoped to get this a bit earlier, but you know, holidays. Nevertheless, let's cap this year with the next part of the tale. Enjoy!
* * * * *
Jason found, to his surprise, that he wasn't falling. Or rather, if he was falling, he was doing a rather poor job of it. Instead, he was floating gently toward the ground, as if he'd somehow forgotten how falling worked and just couldn't seem to get the hang of it at the moment.
Confusion, and then relief as Jason realized what must have happened. He chuckled, albeit a bit nervously.
"Ha! Ha ha!" he said aloud. "Granny musta done some spell on the way out. Sorry I ever doubted you, G!" he shouted in the general direction of Granny.
Right then, Jason noticed an odd sensation, spreading all over his body. Warm, tingly electric vibrations, at first only on the surface of his skin, then gradually penetrating deeper, into his muscles and bones.
"I take it back," Jason said. "What in the name of Ziggy Stardust is this shit?"
Still gently descending, Jason felt his body begin to change. Specifically, his ass was tingling.
He reached around and placed his hands on his butt, and could feel the expansion happening right underneath his palms. His gluteus was definitely getting more maximus. Wider, to start with, and then filling out in the back.
"The hell, Granny?" Jason said. "This a weird side-effect or something?"
That was when he saw, as well as felt, his chest swelling underneath his t-shirt.
"Uh...What..." was all that Jason could say, mesmerized as he was by the sight before him.
He was growing boobs. Honest to god boobs, and
lot
of them. His newly-acquired bosom expanded, the new flesh tingling pleasingly as it filled out the top of his t-shirt. In no time at all, he could no longer see his feet, and the hem of his shirt had lifted several inches, exposing his belly to the whipping wind.
"Are you freaking kidding me?!" Jason exclaimed, looking down his front, dumbfounded to discover cleavage where before there'd been a comfortable lack of cleavage. "If this is a joke, Granny, it's not fucking ... funny ...?"
Jason's words trailed off on the last part, because he'd apparently hit puberty. Again. Only this time in reverse.
"My name is Jason Sturmer," he said. "Keep Austin Weird. Timberlake sucks, Coltrane rules. Holy shit."
Even with the wind rushing around his ears, he could hear the marked change in his voice. He still sounded like himself, but at a higher pitch and with an unmistakable feminine lilt.
"Holy shit," Jason said again, trying to get the feel of this new voice. "Okay, keep it together, Jason. Granny doesn't do shit without a good reason, right?"
Jason's mind started racing. "Unless she made a mistake," he said. "Or forgot some detail about humans. Or... what if this isn't Granny at all? Shit, what if it's someone else's magic spell? Gonna rule that one out. Why would someone do all this if they were just gonna kill me? Still, why would
Granny
wanna-"
That was when Jason discovered something new about himself. It wasn't a huge revelation, or a thing that was likely to affect his relations with others, or how he interacted with the world. It was a small understanding, one that he'd previously never had the opportunity to express, and now having expressed it, it was just there for his further perusal.
What Jason discovered was simply this: If panicking, then upon the realization that there was a simple explanation for whatever was causing the panicking, and one that he should have figured out before all the panicking started, Jason was the kind of person who smacked himself on the forehead when he finally figured it out.
Jason smacked himself on the forehead when he finally figured it out.
"Oh, I get it," Jason said, addressing his new boobs. "If I'm gonna be around other Wings, things'll go a lot smoother if I look like everyone else. Totally makes sense. Except that I don't have..."
Agonizing pain suddenly wracked Jason's body. He felt it everywhere: an enormous amount of energy, like hot lava flowing over his skin, coursing through the marrow in his bones, and having a great time shooting back and forth amidst all points in between.
Conscious thought fled from Jason's mind, and he voiced his displeasure with long, woeful screams, in a voice that he still didn't fully recognize.
He felt like he was going to explode or melt or
something
. With the small part of his mind not occupied by ceaseless pain, he desperately wished that whatever could bring this to a stop would just get on with it.
After a few seconds that seemed to have been artisanally-crafted by Swiss watchmakers to feel much longer, he did feel an explosion, or rather an eruption. The lava in his bones seemed to gather in spots just beneath his shoulder blades. Then, with a mighty push, the lava burst out, eliciting from Jason a bonus round of anguished howling.
He must have blacked out for a bit, because the next thing he knew, his sneakers were touching solid ground again. His knees buckled, and his legs, apparently having decided they wanted nothing to do with whatever recent nonsense was going on elsewhere, immediately gave way, and he sat down hard on the rocky surface of Tarterus, legs splayed out before him.
"Huh...huh...huh..." Jason wheezed, "Jesus."
Jason took a few moments to calm himself down, and get his breathing under control. Whatever had been happening seemed to have finished happening, so that was good. He didn't feel the lava in his body anymore, but the painful echoes of it remained strong in his memory.
"Okay," Jason said. "I'm okay. I'm a girl, but that's okay. At least I'm not falling anymore. Solid ground is okay."
And, he discovered, everything seemed to be okay. There was no one else around who wanted to fight or fuck him, so that was okay. He didn't feel any shooting pains in his body, nary a tingle, so that was okay. He was reassuringly on solid ground again, and that was very okay with Jason.
The only thing that gave him pause, that troubled him and made him feel like everything was a bit less okay than it might have been, was the rock sitting next to his right foot.
Unlike the other rocks strewn about on the ground around him, this rock was smiling at him.
Normally, a smile aimed Jason's direction wasn't a bad thing. If he was feeling receptive, he'd smile back, making sure to put his eyes and teeth into the effort. Even if he was in a bad mood, he could usually manage a bit of a noncommittal grimace in return.
But that was for smiles from people. Jason had no protocols for how to respond to a two-foot-long smiling rock, and this bothered him.
Jason didn't need a smack on the forehead to make him realize that this must not be a rock.
In fact, upon further inspection of the smiling rock, he could make out scales, six short, stout legs, a thick stubby tail in back, and two glittering compound eyes up front.
If some stoner you barely knew and didn't trust at all began a story with "You know I have a pet iguana, right? Well, last night it got out. I looked around for Stussy (that's my guana's name, Stussy), but after a while I just said fuckit, if you love something set it free, right? So I blazed it up and watched 'Eat Pray Love' cause I couldn't find the remote. I opened up that box of wine that I got from somewhere, I think it was a joke gift or something. It seemed like the right kinda movie for it, y'know? But the movie sucked and the wine extra-sucked, and I ended up lugging the whole box out to the dumpster outside my apartment, the one that always has flies and other buggy shit buzzing around it. I didn't wanna make a big racket throwing that heavy thing inside, so I pushed the little spigot thingy to empty out the box into the dumpster. Then, outta respect for my dead homey Stussy (I mean, he
had
to be dead), and since I was pourin' out liquor, I started singin' 'Tha Crossroads'. Someone started yellin' at me to shut up, and I started yellin' back, and they said something about callin' the cops, and I got spooked cause I was super high and singin' Bone Thugs-N-Harmony outside a dumpster with my jeans all soaked with urine (somewhere along the way I'd pissed myself, I forgot to mention that), so I dropped the box in the dumpster and went back into my apartment. That fucking movie was still on, so I started browsing Amazon on my phone looking for a new lizard and fell asleep. I had this dream that I was eating hot wings and when I woke up I was chewing on the remote and 'Notting Hill' was on TV. That point, man, I decided I was smoking too much weed, so I took all my shit out to the dumpster to get rid of it. I heard some noises and thought the cops might still be out there, but it was just my man Stussy, drunk and crawling outta the dumpster looking like he'd just been fucked by a bunch of flies," and ended with "I still smoke too much weed but that was how I found out Stussy was a
girl
lizard," you can bet that this unreliable friend would try, at some point, to convince you that something like the smiling rock before Jason was the end result of his ridiculous tale.
"Uh, nice ... rock-thing," Jason said, smiling awkwardly at the rock-thing, "I'm just gonna..."
Jason started to pull his legs in. The rock stopped smiling at him, and then it made some sort of hiss-buzz sound. And then it bit his foot.
It really clamped down on it, too. Got the whole top of his shoe all the way in its mouth, and then Jason could feel some sort of ... machinery going on in there. Teeth like gears, or gears with teeth, maybe.
It hurt, of course. It hurt a lot. It got really painful, though, when the thing brought its clawed little legs into it, shredding the parts of his shoe that it couldn't fit into its mouth.
Jason yowled, and kicked his leg out. This managed to dislodge the creature, and, even better, sent it flying, to land a good hundred feet away.
Jason stood up quickly, and looked down at his feet. He was reassured to find that he still had all of his toes, even the big toe, which had so recently been earmarked for dinner. He was dismayed to see, though, that his big toe was now very red.
He was further dismayed to see that it wasn't just that toe. All of his toes were now red. Along with his whole foot. And his legs, and, come to think of it, he was red all over.
"Oh," was Jason's reaction. He was finally beginning to twig onto the idea that this was all part of the new normal.
