Becoming Monsters 1: Ch. 01

It was enough to make her drool a little, the saliva dripping down her chin snapping her out of the fantasies, forcing her to finish up with her panties and pat them dry with paper towels. Placing them in a handy ziploc from her bag, she felt ready to face the workplace again - only one more thing to do before she got back to work.

"Status," Honoka said with conviction, the effort to pull up the blue screen a mental one as the System responded like it always did.

There it was, her unchanging screen for five years, Honoka's future sure to remain unobtainable and bland. There existed massive databases and forums dedicated to cataloging every Race, Class, Status variation - every Status layout in existence - yet more than a few things about Honoka's were unique.

As far as the rest of the world cataloged, she was the only known Ymirian and the only person to have a Race numbering less than a thousand. There might be others, but according to common knowledge, she was the only one who was the only one. And it terrified her. Five people knew what her Race was and she swore them all to absolute secrecy. Honoka did not want to end up as some government's science experiment or - even worse - locked in some pervert's basement. She would figure it out on her own. However, multiple anonymous accounts on Change support forums remained the only way she garnered what little knowledge she possessed and it wasn't much.

"Yipee, nothing's changed," Honoka grumbled, grabbing her canvas companion and stepping out. The disappointment got shoved violently back by anxiety when she noticed there was another occupant, Mary Sue. A withering mass of slimy, green tentacles with two eyes on stalks, Mary was the perfect example of how It Could Always Be Worse and Different Races Have Different Needs. Honoka froze in place, letting the other woman slither past.

"ssOUndSs llliKEs sssOMEeoNE haaaAds aa GOOoodS tIMEss." Mary Sue didn't speak so much as she made bubbling and hissing noises mimicking words. "HhIghliGHTss ooofs MYs DAaay."

Honoka tried to decipher the words, the other woman giving off what sounded like either laughter or a Model T engine, opening the main door leading out of the restroom. When Honoka understood the garble, she also noticed the datapad and a screenshot of a news program with a lady and a birdman. Mary Sue left and the door swung closed, but Honoka collapsed in a crouch, hyperventilating in embarrassment and trying her best to keep her breathing under control. The only thing holding her together was the knowledge that Mary Sue wasn't a gossip.

Honoka tried not being Racist; she was a Ymirian, who was she to gripe? Yet Mary Sue creeped her out. Racism was the civil rights movement of the modern era. One day, there were only humans and ethnicity was something that mattered. The next, the world divided into humans and thousands of other Races, some as milquetoast as aelfs and dwarfs, others as strange as dragons, pixies, girtablilu, slimes, apis, undead and djinn. It was confusing to the world but it eventually normalized. People realized ghosts and goblins were still people and there wasn't much difference between two hands and a mess of tentacles.

The whole thing brought a reformation of the word Race. Race no longer meant ethnicity or culture; it meant magical subtype. And people tried to call all these transformed humans other species but everyone's Status clearly stated Race. It was a nonstarter, the god-like finality of the Status forced the world to adapt.

The harder part to accept was that all these different Races were still, no matter how bizarre or exotic, genetically Homo Sapien. Race DNA wasn't evolved, the world just flooded with an unusual form of energy: thaumian energy. It was like nothing shifted, except some people wore metaphorical costumes that made them look different and manipulated alien types of previously undiscovered transmorphic energy. The proof of it all was anyone still conceived viable children with anyone else and that child would be any number of the thousands of different Races regardless of its parents' Races. In the end, the whole world became Sneetches on beaches, though there were plenty of people who remained bigots because that's what humanity does.

And humanity, no matter what label or veneer they put on top, hates anything different. Although Honoka looked like a small, mixed ethnicity human girl, her driver's license said she was a different Race and so for liability, her cubical sat next to other Races and her supervisor was the only troll in the company. Honoka suspected companies would give them separate drinking fountains if they thought they could get away with it. The world still consisted of them and us, it just no longer was about skin but rather the reality of how many heads you possessed. Honoka shuddered, realizing she was daydreaming because she didn't want to go back to work.

"Come on, Honoka, you can't hide in here forever, Steve will only come and grab you and take you under his bridge or...file TPS reports or something." The joke wasn't funny, but life needed sarcasm, so Honoka picked herself up and returned to her cubicle. Because, joy of all joys, she had a Gremlin Bank to finish.