Another Way

Chapter 1: Duress

Ow...

Each strained breath pushed Sue closer to awareness. More and more senses began chiming in, letting her piece together her immediate surroundings. The picture being painted, however, only piled fuel for the fire of growing anxiety.

The smell of wet grass and dirt from up close, inner ear telling her she was lying down, cold wetness against one side of her body. She must've been knocked out in the forest by... something, leaving her lying unconscious on some grassy mud. Trying to remember what happened before all this yielded nothing, not helping any.

Making her way through a hiking trail, looking around for a place to sit down and eat lunch. There was a loud bang some distance away, and then...

...this.

There was always a risk of unexploded ordnance in the area, but she didn't remember getting knocked out by any blast. Though, if she'd been close enough to an old bomb to get blacked out from the shockwave alone, she was close enough to have taken a bodyful of shrapnel and not wake up ever again.

Pleasant mental imagery right there.

Regardless of what exactly had happened, Sue was awake now. Birds were chirping and leaves were rustling, so she had to still have been in the forest. Which just left getting up, checking for injuries, walking through the rest of the trail, and reporting this whole... blast event to some authorities.

And getting a bath. God, could she use a bath right now.

Well, no time like the present.

With a painful grunt, Sue took in a deep breath and reached her right hand in front of where she was lying on the ground for leverage, before slowly rolling onto her stomach and pulling in her legs-

"AGH!"

An intense shock went through her, like she had gotten cold water splashed on her back, but from her front instead. It forced Sue to finally open her eyes-

And scream at what she saw.

There was a massive, red spike jutting out of her chest, fresh mud now staining its tip. It made Sue briefly think back to the idea of having her body filled with shrapnel. She attempted to push herself onto her back and get a better view of the grotesque spike- only to feel the same cold shock from behind, yelping involuntarily.

After craning her head to see what was going on between her shoulder blades yielded no results, Sue tried to reach back with her free arm, probe what was happening in there-

And instead froze at the sight that awaited her.

This was not a human arm. It was... green, a muted shade of green, the forearm wide and much thicker than the unnervingly thin upper arm. It had three short, currently mud-coated, fingernail-less fingers, the middle one sticking further than the other two.

With more than a bit of fear at what she might see, Sue attempted to clench her right hand, and the unnatural limb in front of her obeyed. Rightmost finger bent at an angle, akin to a thumb. The sensations of her thumb, index, and middle fingers rubbing against mud and each other brought on a horrifying realization that she was attempting to fight off.

A glance down revealed that this spike and these monstrous hands weren't the only things that were utterly wrong. The body she was looking at was not human, and definitely not hers. Breasts being gone was the least of her worries at that moment, the sight below her waist particularly hard to wrap her head around.

There were... flaps?

Sue was too aghast to come up with any other word. Several flaps of the same white and sometimes green skin, most smeared with mud, long enough to cover the bottom half of her body and originating at the waist. Surrounded by said flaps were thin, white legs, feet tiny and hard to make out, with no distinguishable toes.