At the party, Fran unwillingly began to crouch down. Her legs lengthened and turned green, her arms transformed into frog limbs. She felt her skin growing damp and strangely sticky. Every attempt to resist was futile. Her muscles wouldn't obey her, as if she had become merely a passenger in her own body.

When she tried to stand again, she only managed to jump. Despair clenched her throat. "No, no! Help me!" she cried out, trying to push off the ground with her hands. Instead, she tumbled forward and hit her chin. Without the support of her hands, it was impossible. The crowd around her slowly parted—some screamed, others just stared in silent amazement.

Then her colleague Claire leaned in with a triumphant smirk. "You jumped ahead of me in the corporate hierarchy, so now you'll be jumping forever," she said coldly and turned on her heel.

Fran remained on the floor, trembling, trying to stand again. But she couldn't. Every attempt ended in another frog-like leap—she crashed into people, knocking them down, sobbing as she tried to apologize. That very morning, everything had been normal, and now she had frog limbs.

Fran was ambitious. Maybe too ambitious. She had only been at the company for two years, but her talent and hard work had earned her a promotion others could only dream of. Her colleague Claire, who had been with the company twice as long, felt it was unfair. "A girl who's barely started here, and now she’s ordering me around?" she fumed as she vented to her boyfriend.

But Claire was not just an ordinary woman. She had a secret. Her mother had once initiated her into ancient rituals passed down through generations. Claire hadn't wanted to use them—but deep inside, she was angry. And that anger led her to the bookshelf, where she found an old volume. "The Curse of Transformation..." she read softly, her eyes gleaming.

The night before the company party, she painted a complex symbol on a piece of paper. She wrote Latin words her mother had whispered to her when she was a little girl struggling to fall asleep. Then she folded the paper and placed it inside a small box with frog bones. "Tomorrow, we'll see, little jumper Fran," she murmured.

Fran suffered. Her body refused to obey her. Every movement became a jump. When she wanted to walk somewhere, she had to leap. At first, she couldn't control it—there were collisions, a lot of them. The first nights were the worst—she wanted to lie down in bed, but she couldn’t reach it without jumping. She overdid it, overshot the bed, and slammed hard into the wall. She couldn't sit normally in a chair, couldn't go to the kitchen for water without hopping.

Every attempt at normalcy ended in another failure. She tried going outside, but she launched herself too high. She toppled over a stair railing and landed painfully on the pavement. She lay there, her body aching, her eyes full of tears.

Wherever she leapt, people looked down on her—she couldn’t reach anything. The world was designed for those who walked, not for someone who had to stay close to the ground. When she tried using both hands to grab something, she immediately fell forward and hit her face. Her grip was clumsy—her fingers spread apart, objects slipped from her hands or stuck to them. Eating with utensils became impossible.

"This can't be real," she whispered to herself, sitting in the corner of her apartment, rocking back and forth, struggling to breathe. But it was real. And it was forever.

She had to adapt. She could no longer drive, so she learned to leap onto buses without crashing into people. Others recoiled from her, looked at her with disgust. When she tried to pay at the register, her trembling hands dropped the coins. All eyes turned to her—faces filled with amusement, disdain, or pity.

One evening, as she sat alone by the window, watching people outside, a terrible thought crossed her mind. "Will I live like this forever? Will I die like this?" Tears rolled down her cheeks.

But over time, she adapted. She learned to control her jumps, to manage things with one hand. She adjusted her apartment so she could reach everything from the ground. She learned to ignore the stares. But it never stopped hurting. She never accepted it. She longed to walk normally again. To see the world from above.

And Claire? Claire carried on with her life as if nothing had happened.