I had barely gotten into sprinting range of a pronghorn so monumentally oblivious to everything that might eat him that I could probably walk right up to him and snap his neck when I heard a loud skree. It grated on my ears and made me wince. Damn eagles, I thought to myself, growling softly. Present company excluded, of course. But such things really weren't of a concern to me, so I went on stalking the stupid pronghorn. It didn't exactly feel right, but I was so confuzzled as to my new instincts that I suppose hunting like a leopard was the least of my problems. Just because I wasn't immediately sprinting after prey didn't mark me for future, permanent insanity. I hoped. After all, I couldn't contact my other side any more, lending credit to the possibility that I had imagined it. And if I had imagined something like that, why not, as we had unamiously dubbed it, the Inducer Sphere and some parts of the meeting? Hell, what if I had imagined pretty much everything after the Change? I could even now be in a dream, brought on by Change complications. It didn't always work perfectly, after all, and I'd read about a very, very few (about two hundred cases) in which the process of the Change caused brain damage.

I pushed the fretting out of my head at the same exact moment that a raven, which appeared to be trying to commit suicide or ignorant and in denial of gravity, let out a loud croak. My head instinctively snapped towards the little black comet, which was being pursued by a golden eagle- no, it had already been captured- which I somehow knew to be not a natural golden eagle. And it wasn't Tobias, he was far too civilized to be chasing after ravens- my friend hadn't been visibly affected by the Inducer Sphere. There was something off about that raven, though.

And then my body suddenly went out of my control. It wasn't an Inducer Sphere, I was still awake. But something had taken over my body, and I crouched, leaped into the air, and slapped the eagle away. Idiot, I heard a very familiar voice say. You run off and then your friend nearly gets killed. After you do, I might add. Twice. That raven is Nikki, you idiot!

I didn't have time to interrogate my other side. I'd have to do that later. Get out of my damn head, I sent back, and then I moved so that I was between Nikki and her assailent. There was a shimmer as the eagle turned into a morphic form, but one with few eagle traits- only a set of wings and an odd nose. And my vision snapped suddenly. Time froze. Living beings were outlined with a strange shimmering light. Colors were sharper. And a little translucent circle formed on his mid-left, and then a curved line extended from it. The curved line was connected to a box, which had a picture of DNA. As I stood there, thoroughly amazed, the DNA strand quickly moved downwards, so that I saw the entire thing in a few seconds. And somehow, I could read it.

The damn thing had, according to his DNA, never suffered from the Plague. Somehow I knew that the transformation had been partially reversed, and the gene markers removed.

My vision snapped back to normal. I stood there for a minute. The eagle-human-thingy stood there. "Look, I'm sure you would love to eat my friend here, and maybe you didn't know she was sentient, but she is and I'd really prefer you didn't." He continued to stand there, and didn't say anything. "So you can go away." He didn't move. "Like, now." He still didn't move. "Or you'll find out that you aren't the biggest link on the food chain around here." I snarled at him, revealing my teeth. Would have worked better if I had a toothpick, but it still looked scary.

A fireball aimed at my head told me that might not have been the smartest choice, even if it was the most fun and satisfying. Somehow, however, despite the point-blank range, the fireball seemed to have little effect besides a blast of hot air in the face. Eagle-Man's eyes widened. I looked back at my neck. All my fur was a silvery mass of needles, with jet-black needles where my spots had been. I looked like a kitty porcupine. Weird as heck. I turned my gaze back towards Eagle-Man, but he had vanished. Of course he's gone, I said to myself. Probably off to go try to eat something else. Mentally shrugging- I didn't think he'd make the same mistake again- I made my fur go back to normal.

Well, that's what I thought until I felt some very large talons close around my head. In an instant I had been lifted up ten feet in the air. I slid my eyes up so I could get a better look at my attacker. Same guy as before. "The laws of physics and biology forbid you from doing that without dislocating your leg bones," I said lamely. "Put me down or I shall write you a ticket."

"Your laws of physics do. Ours don't," the eagle spat back. Presumably this would be the part where he would go into a long monologue. Sure enough, I was right. This person had not read 1001 Things to Never Do as a Supervillian. Not monologuing was Number 2 (Number 1 was not making a big bright red self-destruct button). "Eighty years ago our masters tried to absolutely exterminate us all so they could colonize. You petty idiots were so busy fighting the Nazis you didn't realize that there was no way they had the kind of technology to perform destruction like that. They had almost won- and then you all managed to find the one known specimen of the one plant that can properly program the nanovirus not to kill you all. But you never guessed." I looked up at him and smirked.

"Actually, I did." He was so surprised he nearly dropped me, and that was all the opening I needed. In a flash I had shifted to morph form, chosen a random limb of his six, and snapped it. Really quite easy, he had hollow bones. Since I had chosen the wing, we immediately plummeted to the ground. Then, while he was still in shock from the pain, I scratched long deep marks across his skin, which was bare of feathers everywhere but the wings. "I love you, claws," I said as I scored another set of claw marks across his beak-like nose. "You know," I said, addressing Eagle-Man, "eagles have some of the sharpest vision in the animal kingdom. I wonder how well you'd fly or hunt with only one?" He stopped struggling. "See," I continued, moving so that my muzzle was right in his face and so that he had ample view of all my teeth, "that's something you should have taken into account while making your Inducer Sphere. Because right now I'd be perfectly capable of killing you and feasting on your flesh without a tinge of regret. And that's what I'll do, unless you surrender." It was mostly a bluff, of course- I almost certainly wouldn't eat him. Well, probably. But killing him was a different matter. Personally, I didn't see much of a problem, intellectually, with eating a sentient you've killed for a reason other than eating them, assuming you cooked them first. They're dead, after all. Why should they care? But I knew enough to know that doing so would not endear me to the local police at all, and I still shied away from the idea.

"You're bluffing," he stated flatly. I shrugged.

"About eating you, probably, though it's theoretically possible that I might lose control- and I wouldn't regret it afterwards. But start moving again, and I'll either kill or disable you, depending on how threatening the movement is. Justifiable homicide, and you probably don't exist in the International DNA Database under a genuine identity. They're going to believe me when I say that you were serving an extradimensional being, especially when I show them that Inducer Sphere you hid near the Change Doctor's. Yes, I know about it. It should be neutralized by now, though." A sly look came over the eagle morph's face.

"You're smarter than we gave you credit for. I suppose that it would do no harm to say that you were our little experiment. That... Inducer Sphere, as you call it, was attuned specifically to your brain waves. It was also a prototype. Future ones will affect everybody- except for us, the only individuals of this corrupted generation to conquer most, if not all, of our foul, bestial traits." I suddenly felt sick. Finding humans more aesthically pleasing than morphs was perfectly acceptable, but this was thoroughly ridiculous. Few people now considered themselves to be somehow above the rest of the animal kingdom, but some did (and by extension, they considered themselves to be above higher-degree morphs- the people thinking such almost always were nearly completely human, or at least appeared to be so). And not everybody was thrilled with the Change, though they usually simply settled for moping around and having plastic surgery done.

"You can't change your brain, idiot," I shot back. "The Change doesn't just turn you furry or give you feathers. It gives you new instincts and alters the fundamental structure of your brain. You'd be better off wearing tin foil hats. Though I've heard that those actually do a decent job of blocking a few kinds of radiation besides visible light." The morph sneered.

"You style yourself as an expert on the Change, Spotty. Figure it out." And with that, there was a crack of sound like thunder, and a wiff of ozone. And just like that, he was gone. I stood up and brushed myself off, then went over to Nikki. She was on the ground, wing broken, but she was breathing. My vision snapped back to the information state, and I ran a quick scan. Yes, she was Nikki. No, she was not fatally wounded. Aside from norm-shifting, I detected about a thirty percent possibility of her developing something my vision called 'electrophytokinesis', which would probably somehow involve combining control over plants and control over electricity. Perhaps she would be able to create plants that delivered electric volts. I really didn't care right now.




As I walked back to Tobias' house, carrying Nikki in my hand, I pondered exactly what the eagle had said. The true, technological, nature of the Plague had been discovered five years ago, along with its role in the Change. Everybody had assumed, however, that it had simply been a secret government project that went out of control. Not too surprising, considering the semi-public discovery of Department Null. Officially, no one still knew about it. Unofficially, just about every single hacker was initiated into the secret, which was very well kept. Several citizen's groups also knew about it, and they had 'by chance' managed to be in the right place at the right time when dealing with the various groups Department Null tried to keep an eye on. Also, I think a large segment of the populace suspected the existence of the department. But nobody really wanted to attract their attention, so those who knew kept a low profile.

Forcing myself to abandon the tangent, I returned to my original question, and found an unpleasant answer: If extradimensional beings could create a nanovirus like the Plague, they could probably change brain structure, along with just about every other part of the body. They also probably had highly advanced weapons, which they would probably use to kill us all. In any event, I was going to have a hell of a story to tell the others when they got back.

Nikki woke up in my hand about halfway to the house, but didn't move or make any kind of sound. I could hardly blame her. She had very nearly been killed by another morph. And when one had just developed the new instincts a few hours ago, as Nikki had, she must have been absolutely terrified.


I wasn't terribly surprised to find Tobias waiting for me with a first aid kit when I arrived at his house, not since my other half was with him. "He told me everything he could get from your senses, which is apparently just about everything. Set her down on the table." I did.

"Not terribly surprising, since he's been inside my brain!" I said indignantly. My other half glared at me.

"Considering that I am an autonomous, sentient, quite-possibly-smarter-than-you manifestation of your subconscious, it is also my brain." I glanced over at Tobias.

"Am I this annoying?" I asked, rather concerned.

"Yes." Catching my worried look, he continued, "Don't worry about it. It's a nice kind of annoying."

"Lovely," I said under my breath, spreading out the first aid kit and preparing to bind Nikki's wounds.