A Patreon Poll Story!

(Women to Various)

The four models regarded one another dubiously. Helen was a rather slender girl, her long neck suited for the necklace modeling she’d done for a living. Abigail was a plus-sized woman and her longtime friend. In fact, she was the one who’d recommended Helen for this job. Paula happened to also be a bit on the healthier side for a swimsuit model, but her pale skin contrasted Abigail’s darker tone. Lastly, there was the Chinese girl, Ai. She stood alone in a corner of the room, rubbing her shoulder as if to ease her nerves.

Their photographer, Warren, smiled at them, his face kind and welcoming. He no doubt sensed the palpable tension, and had decided to intervene. “Ladies,” he began, “I’d like to thank you all for modeling for our agency. We’re here today to do a little bit of good for the environment, and help repopulate some endangered species.”

The three Americans nodded, but Ai’s eyes narrowed a little further in confusion. “Pardon me, but… I am not entirely certain how we will be helping endangered animals.”

“And yet you’re here.” Helen laughed, her face coloring as she realized that her words were a little harsher than she’d intended. “I mean, that’s a good thing. You care about the environment, same as the rest of us.”

“Which is precisely why you’re all so suited. The process doesn’t work as well on people who aren’t animal-minded.” Warren beamed. His hands worked at the camera, then it flashed with a blinding, almost actinic glare.

“Ah! What the hell? Are you trying to blind us, or something?” Paula waved her hands in front of her eyes, blinking the light from her gaze. Once the spots started to settle, she looked to the other women, planning on asking if they were alright.

Then she saw that none of them were moving. Well, their eyes were moving, but the rest of them were frozen. It looked like all of them were frozen, still as a photo. The swimsuit model’s heartrate picked up as she looked from them to the photographer, realizing she had gotten in a little over her head.

“Listen.” The woman tried to force a confident, strong aura, but a nervous hitch of her breath betrayed her. “I don’t want any trouble. All I want is to just have my photo shoot, go home, and have a nice, relaxing day. Does that sound good to everyone?”

Warren shrugged, clicking through the settings on his camera. “It does to me, but that’s not my job, sweetheart. Ah! There’s the setting.” He tapped at a button on the camera, then its flash stung Paula’s eyes once more.

The woman flinched, and as she waved spots from her eyes, she noticed that her hand looked a little… Different. Namely, her fingers looked like they were pulling into one another. The woman gawped in shock, only to scream as they began to merge together. “What the hell? Why do I have fins?”

“Well, swimsuit model, plus sized… Really, I thought you’d have been better off as a whale, but the powers that be would rather see a Hawaiian monk seal. Guess you’ll get to enjoy the tropics, huh?” The man grinned, clicking another photo of the woman. “At least, I’m assuming they live in Hawaii, and that this isn’t a Greenland-slash-Iceland type situation. You ever hear about that? I just found out last week.”

Paula couldn’t believe it. Her body was blimping up beneath her swimsuit, soft and thick blubber stretching the Lycra. And, in spite of this, the man was just making idle small-talk. She groaned, pressing her useless flippers against her portly belly, before another click of the camera’s shutter stole her legs.

The fall wasn’t as rough as she’d expected it to be, which she wasn’t sure was a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand… fin, it didn’t hurt. On the other, that meant that she was blubbery enough for her fat to lessen the impact of her body’s collapse.

That said, there was still an impact, one that sent ripples of motion through her body. The sudden vibration was enough to split her abused suit, exposing her blubbery body to the world. Her skin was gray now, and oddly sleek to boot.

“Plrghk. Oark! Ort!” Her head jerked as she barked, the sounds naturally slipping from her throat. It came to her as naturally as speech itself would, which flooded her blubbery heart with terror. She tried to beg for mercy, but only continued to bark as her legs pulled together.

The camera clicked again, and again, and again. Each snap stole more of her humanity, until only a pudgy seal remained. Her tubby eyes watered with distress, then a last click of the camera stole that too.

“Sorry, but your concerns come as a distant second to those of my employer.” He hummed, fiddling with the dial on his camera. A bright flash froze the new seal mid-bark, at the same time unfreezing Helen and Abigail at the same time.

“What the hell was that?” Abigail was the first to speak, her dark features contorted into a look of panic. She turned slightly, lifting her hands into fists and assuming a casual boxer’s stance. She’d taken enough self-defense classes to know how to put her weight behind her punches, and with her weight… Warren wouldn’t stand a chance.

Helen, on the other hand, was more concerned with their fallen coworker. “Paula!” She cried, falling atop the frozen seal and giving it a close cuddle. She looked into the still eyes of the animal and saw nothing, not even a trace of the woman it had once been.

“Yeah, Paula’s not really here right now.” Warren chuckled. “Guess that explains if you can see things when you’re frozen; I’ll need to keep that in mind.”

“Yeah, screw you, buddy.” Abigail glowered. “Just keep your freaky ass right there, and let us go.”

“An interesting offer. Here’s my counteroffer.” The man clicked his camera, and the two women found their perspectives distinctly different.

Helen let out a choking groan as her neck stretched away from her shoulders, her hands pressing to it in time to feel it lengthen. Dark spots settled along her body in time with this change, and the girl scratched at them like they were chicken pox.

“Oh HELL no!” Abigail groaned, feeling her clothes tighten around her body. She knew that well enough from before she was a plus-sized model, and was simply plus-sized. She was getting bulkier, from head to toe. Still, it wasn’t entirely familiar: there was an odd numbness to her growth, the tightness of her waistband diminishing in spite of her growth.

A look down told her why: her chocolate skin was being replaced by a dull gray hide. The woman gawped down to it, angrily looking up to the photographer. Her mouth opened to unleash a verbal tirade on him, but a click of his camera cut her off.

“URGHOOR!” She bellowed, her throat aching as her vocal chords devolved. Her ears flared out into wide sails, and her nose stretched away from her face. That in particular was an awkward, awful feeling. Her sinuses ached madly as they enlarged, and she huffed in distress.

“You’ve got a trunk!” Helen flailed from beside Abigail. This shutter of the camera had changed her arms and legs, lengthening them as though someone had stretched them in a photo editor. Their humanity soon faded as her hands and feet balled into hooves, and the girl kicked herself onto them with a grunt of distress. “Well, guess that explains why the roof’s so high in here.”

Abigail tried to shout Helen down and get her to stop stating the obvious, but only managed a loud trumpet in anger. Her eyes narrowed on her gray face, and her trunk lifted, aggravated. The motion startled her, and the plus-sized woman fell onto her hefty backside with a thump. It was a perfect pose for the next photo, a successive bright flash stealing away more of their humanity.

Abigail’s limbs flailed as her hands and feet ballooned out into stumps, thumping at the ground. She felt a tail extend from past the gray hide of her rump, and her ears flopped with every shake of her head. The woman was having a hard time dealing with her new body’s clumsiness, especially with how much her ears, trunk, and tail were moving.

Helen, meanwhile, seemed to be mostly shell-shocked, frozen by fear. Her longer giraffe limbs kicked under her, sending her to a wobbling stance. Her head loomed over the others in the room, and she grimaced as her face distended. A dark tongue flopped past lips that were thicker than a horse’s, and she gagged with the growth of her new muzzle. Perhaps the strangest feeling was the pair of stubby horns that grew from her forehead.

Both of their chests barreled out at the same time, though Abigail’s elephant frame was a good deal larger. The elephant-to-be was a bit upset by the fact that Helen seemed to be reacting to her changes worse than she had, distressed giraffe bellow filling the air. Apparently Warren was bothered by them too, because he snapped his camera twice in quick succession, once for each of them.

Helen was the first photographed, so her mind was the first to dwindle. Her round eyes glazed, hair shortening into short and stubby fur. More fur grew from the rest of her body, covering her in a uniform coat of gold hair and brown spots. Her new tail swayed idly behind herself as she began to absently chew, only to shudder to a halt as her body froze much as Paula’s had.

Abigail watched this all with a resentment that soon faded into a mindless oblivion. Thoughts of her old life vanished like sand slipping from one end of an hourglass into the other. She could feel herself getting dumber, a fogginess setting in over her mind, stripping her of anything close to human intellect. Soon there was only a dimwitted emptiness, and an assurance that there was nothing to be upset about at all. After all, she was the biggest thing in the room, and there weren’t any predators in sight.

Warren’s shutter snapped, keeping the elephant held fast in her oblivious stare forward. Then he hummed, turning towards the last model in the room. “And then… There was one.” He chuckled, and unfroze Ai.

The Asian gasped, but her eyes soon hardened. There wasn’t any real anger there, only a muted, angered resignation. “So… I assume that I am to transform as well?” She asked, unable to quell the rising panic in her chest despite her best efforts. She knew that there was no way to fight this, but that didn’t keep her from wanting to.

“Of course.” Warren grinned. “But for you, I’ve got something special. This client wanted a video, rather than some standalone images. It makes sense, you don’t often get to see a girl become…” He trailed off, as though he wasn’t willing to spoil the surprise.

“A panda, I assume? You seem to have changed the others based on their attributes.”

“Close!” He laughed, adjusting a setting on his camera and thumbing the record button. “You’ll see soon enough.”

Ai’s almond eyes narrowed in confusion, only to widen slightly as something tugged at them, remolding their shape. They took on a distinct round shape, one that better suited an animal than a human. Her cheeks bulged next, though not to the extent of the creature she’d imagined.

Her hands pressed against them, feeling soft fur starting to scratch out from her cheeks. She restlessly itched at them, imagining that the room was growing around herself. Then her tailbone extended, as though someone was tugging sharply on it. Thick fur sprouted from the tail, which grew and grew until it was half as long as she was tall.

She looked to her backside with a faint whimper, trying to identify the brown stripes along her fur. She flicked it idly with a faint whimper, feeling its long hairs swaying at the air. Her ears tugged into triangular tips just to express her confusion through a constant twitching.

Whiskers slipped from her pudgy cheeks, and she turned a darkening nose towards warren. “I… Do not understand. What sort of creature am I becoming?” Her smallish breasts sank back into her chest, and fur grew out to cover her nipples. She was a little surprised by the fact that her clothes didn’t feel stuffed with the thick hairs, which was finally tipped her off that her earlier suspicion was a bit more accurate than she’d thought.

The room actually was getting bigger around herself, and her clothing was getting larger to match. That could only leave one possibility, and she gasped in shock. “I am shrinking?” She didn’t mean for it to sound like a question, but it seemed too impossible to accept.

Her hands clutched at her top as if to keep her modesty, though her fingers soon lost their purchase. She watched dark fur creep across each digit in turn and felt her thumbs pull back in towards her palms. Ai gasped and pressed them against one another, feeling soft pads fluffing up on her hands.

“To answer that in a word: yes. To answer it in more than one: it’s a little more than just shrinking.” Warren laughed, sweeping his camera across her form. More and more fur extended from her pores, even as her shirt’s collar grew larger than her body. It slipped over her form, and she looked down to a body that looked more like a raccoon than a panda.

Finally, it clicked—just in time for her face to transform. Her teeth sharpened in her mouth, canines growing a bit longer to accompany her cute muzzle. She pawed at her new cheeks in contemplation, even as her limbs shortened. It wasn’t like she wanted to be an animal, but becoming a red panda was a good deal cuter than turning into a fat seal or an elephant…

Ai’s button nose twitched as more whiskers slipped from her cheeks, and she stretched her back in a distinctly catlike fashion. A warm, pillowy feeling started to grow within her head, and she lazily rolled onto her back. Some part of her knew that this was her mind ebbing away, but that part also knew there was no way to resist it.

With that in mind, the little mammal yawned idly, rolling onto her back and kicking her legs in the air. Thoughts were slipping faster from her head than she could hold onto them, so she didn’t even bother. Soon she was little more than a chittering raccoon-like animal, staring up innocently at the camera that had stolen her humanity.

“And that’s a wrap.” Warren hummed idly, stopping the recording and freezing the girl in place. With his other hand, he pulled out his phone and tapped at the screen, telling his client that there were four new animals ready for transport. “Saving the world, one animal at a time.”