TAWOG: Instinct

The Intervention

The Intervention 

The next day Gumball was laying in the forest, face down in the dirt, breathing steadily as he slept. Eventually, he roused, groaning groggily as he lifted his head, his eyes bloodshot. The first thing he noticed was that he wasn't waking up in his bedroom. The next thing he noticed was the empty eye sockets of the naked skull lying in front of him. He let out a scream, recoiling onto his back and scrambling backwards. He impacted something that felt rigidity and sectioned, like bars. Looking over his shoulder, Gumball discovered it was the bars of a massive ribcage.

He screamed again, jolted to his feet and backed up against the trunk of a nearby tree. Massive bones littered the area around him, the complete skeleton of some massive animal. Several of the larger ones were even splintered open. Gumball knew it was the skeleton of a bear, but not because he could identify the skeleton, no, this wasn't like the discarded bones he'd arranged into a message for Penny out in the desert.

He was responsible for this.

The events were clear in Gumball's mind, how he'd stalked the bear in the night, chased it down, overwhelmed it, tore its throat out with his teeth, then proceeded to feed on the carcass. Gumball vividly remembers tearing into the flesh with gusto, then, once he had picked the bones clean, snapping them open to get at the marrow. Just as described in the book. The whole ordeal had been unfathomably gorey and bloody, and Gumball knew this should be making him sick, that he should be absolutely revolted and appalled by what he had done.

But he wasn't.

As much as Gumball wished he could regret what he did to this bear, he couldn't get himself to recall the whole bloody affair with anything other than the equivalent of recalling eating a burger or some other food stuff. Gumball saw no difference between them. Green had done what he said he was going to do. Gumball had become his ancestor. The ferocious, horrific, ravenous abyssalis cat. And Gumball recalled everything that had transpired after he'd transformed. Looking down, Gumball was grateful to find he was still clothed. In every werewolf movie he'd seen the person who became a werewolf was always naked upon changing back. 

For a brief second Gumball pondered why Green was even doing this. He hadn't thought about it in the beginning, mainly because he was too preoccupied with what was happening with Penny, but now he wondered what Green's actual.purpose was. He'd said his goal was to make Gumball into something people would fear, but why? What was the point of turning him into that…savage beast? 

But that quickly ceased to matter when Gumball finally fully recalled “all” that had happened when he'd first transformed, not just animalistically devouring a bear.

He had attacked Tina upon transforming, and then attacked her father. And he'd won. The experience was both terrifying to recall and mesmerizing too. Horrifying because, after his transformation, everything that made him “him” had just seemed to vanish. His memories, his feelings, his sense of self had no presence in the mind of the abyssalis cat. He had his memories back now, now that he was himself again, but along with all the memories of what had transpired last night as the abyssalis cat. It was as if, for that night, he'd ceased to exist, leaving that savage monster in his place, and now he was back to being himself again. 

It was horrifying, as well as a bit confusing.

And yet, Gumball could also remember what it felt like being the abyssalis cat. He felt strong. He felt powerful. Tina, the toughest girl in school, he'd defeated her with relative ease. Not only that, he'd also fought her father, and prevailed. Mr. Rex, one of the toughest guys in Elmore, Gumball had defeated him. That was something no one else in Elmore could boast.