Alex grabbed his bathrobe from his bed, wrapped it around him, and rushed to the door.
"One large deluxe pizza fourteen dollars thank you," the pimple faced pizza guy said unceremoniously as he held the pizza in one hand and checked his text messages with the other.
Alex leaned over to grab his wallet from the small stand next to the door. He pulled out a twenty.
Then, agony.
A sharp stab at the base of his spine. It felt like a knife, digging into his skin. And it kept digging. He yelled out in pain. In a matter of seconds the sharp digging reached his spinal cord. Alex went limp, momentarily paralyzed, and fell to the floor taking the stand and keys with him in a crash.
The pizza guy looked up from his cellphone, perplexed. "Uh, are you okay, sir." He then noticed the brown and white tail peaking out from under Alex's bathrobe. He took a small step back.
Alex had blacked out for a moment but he was back. Dazed. His vision went from blurry to clear. He saw the twenty on the ground in front of him. Shit! The pizza guy.
"I'm okay." He pulled himself up, holding his sore lower back with one hand, and turned.
"Sorry about that. I'm not sure..."
"Fourteen dollars." The pizza guy shoved the pizza at him. He wanted to get out of there.
Alex was blushing and embarrassed. He was sweating. A fever was coming over him. He grabbed the pizza desperately and shoved the twenty at the pizza guy.
"Just keep the change." At that moment Alex felt another shooting pain dig through the wrist of his outstretched hand. "OWWW!" He dropped the pizza box in the entryway the apartment.
As Alex pulled his hand towards his chest with his other hand the pizza guy, snatched the money and ran. He looked behind him. Alex was doubled over in the door. The tail of the suit arched up suddenly at its base pushing a dent in the middle of his bathrobe.
"Crazy-ass furries," the pizza guy said under his breath.
Alex pushed the door closed and brought his wrist slowly to his eyes. He peaked under the cuff. What looked to be a small, white thread from the lining was connected to the base of his wrist. It appeared to be organic, almost like a tendon. He touched it with his other hand. "Ow." It hurt. It was definitely attached to him tightly. He fingered the odd thread delicately. Then he felt a similar shooting pain in his other wrist. He looked under that cuff. Three white threads pushed from the suit into his flesh, criss-crossed like a web. He felt them pulling the suit taut against him. His shifted his tail in curiosity.
Tail? He turned to look over his right shoulder, instinctively arching his tail to his right side from under his bathrobe.
Wait...not his tail, the suit's tail!
He looked on mesmerized, as it shifted in concert with the muscles he flexed in his pelvis.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Swish swish. He lifted his tail higher and the bathrobe cascaded around each side of it, sending a draft between his legs and over his balls. He swung the tail around and grabbed it with his hands. The pressure of his hands around his tail and the fur between his fingers snapped him out of his trance.
He could feel it, as if he were grasping his arm or leg or any other part of him. He tightened his grip in confused frustration and gave a quick tug, which reverberated smartly at the base of his spine.
He let go in shock. "No...this doesn't make sense..."
He flexed his new muscles, twisting his tail to his other side. The fur was a soft cream color, dotted with a few spots, leading to a tuft of dark brown hair at its end. It was all too surreal. Unfathomable. Ridiculous. No, this wasn't what it seemed at all. "I've obviously had way too much to drink tonight." He laughed to himself. "Silly fucking suit."
He reached for the tuft of hair, grabbing a few hairs, and yanked them out forcefully. "Ow!"
Curiosity instantly dissolved into panic. Alex lost it. He had to cut the suit off. He started for the kitchen to get a knife, tripping over the pizza box on the floor. His heart raced. Adrenaline coursed through his body, down his newly formed nerve endings of his tail and into the suit itself. His run to the kitchen was interrupted in just a few steps. Primed with the raw energy of fight-or-flight, the suit came to life. A million painful pinpricks electrified his entire body as the suit shot out assault of microscopic tendrils into his skin. He fell to the floor. The tendrils did their work quickly and efficiently, penetrating his flesh, fusing suit to nerves, pulling it tightly against him and meshing skin to hide until there was no suit, no division or separation, only Alex's soft, furry body writhing on the cool wooden floor of his apartment.
Long underutilized from TV and video games, the cells of his body kicked into overdrive. His tail swept back and forth defiantly.
