I stood outside the door of the machine, biting my lip. The circles swirled about on the door as I contemplated my options.

There are a lot of things that can fly. And between an exhausting week of work and the insistence of a colleague, I had finally caved to the allure of transformation. On this fine Saturday morning, I had driven twenty kilometres north to a popular hiking destination that had, somehow, been deemed, by whatever mysterious forces are at play, an ideal site to drop one of these venn-machines.

Supposedly, they were placed in spots with very high foot traffic.

I looked over my shoulder at the parking lot. Absolutely nobody. Perhaps nine in the morning was a little too early for a life changing experience.

You see, these machines require another person to run the controls. You need to depend on them to set everything just right. It's some sort of trust machine, or something.

At around that moment, a single car rolled into sight over the lead up to the lot. The driver of the sedan skidded to a halt in the gravel nearest the large booth. He hopped out, wearing a denim jacket and aviators. A familiar, and increasingly common smell wafted out of the open door and greeted me moments before he did.

"Bonjour!" He greeted, giving me a wave.

"Hi, uh, can you use the machine?" I asked, needlessly gesturing towards the large box.

"Pardon?" He followed my direction. "Oh. Umm... sorry, uh... Je ne parle pas anglais."

"Oh, uh..." I scratched my head. "I want to use the booth," I asked slowly, pointing. I'm pretty sure that didn't help, but for making me look like an idiot.

"Okay, uh, I.. Je peux, um, I can... I can... do that, yes." He looked at the box and grinned. "Quelle chose?"

With the benefit of hindsight, I would have turned down the kind gentleman then and there. However, I had already been waiting for half an hour in the cool morning mist, and I wasn't going to pass on this opportunity. "Uh... a bird of some sort?"

"Une... quelle?"

I rubbed my forehead. "Uh.. une... Uh... A bird..." what is a bird in French? "Une... uh, with feathers. Avec les plumes?”

He nodded cautiously. "Ah, uh, okay?"

"Un... a big bird of some sort... a raptor? Une raptore?

His face lit up with recognition. "Ah, une raptore, okay. Sure." He strode confidently towards the booth. "Can do."

"Awesome, thank you!"

"Est-ce que c'est possible que... uh... do me a, uh... loup?"

I had forgotten that I might have an end of the bargain. "Oh, uh, loup... a wolf?"

He nodded. "Oui."

I shrugged. "Sure!" After fishing a coin from my pocket, I stepped up to the transformation box and dropped it into the provided slot.

As I stepped in, he remembered one critical detail of his fantasy, "Oh, uh... et... une femme?"

Those words I recognized. I poked my head back out to look at him. He was blushing, and peering at the forest around us. "Sure."

He wore a sheepish grin when I found him staring at the alien interface on the inside of the box. He seemed to have used one of these before, and the symbolic bubbles flew around his quicker than I could understand, granting me the most strange feeling of unease. I started peering about, and poking at the bubbles that looked about right for his plan.

My exploration of the interface was broken by a worried "Ahem," from the other side of the glass.

I looked up, eyebrow raised.

He asked something. "Combien de temps?

"What?"

"Duration?"

"Duration? Eight hours? Uh... huit heures?"

He nodded confidently, then glanced down at the controls, and found them to already have been set that way. He gave me a thumbs up, and resumed staring at his controls.

Meanwhile, I looked at the duration settings. A third of the Earth was highlighted in what I hoped was the correct place.

This left the centre of the screen before me showing a wolf, with the pictograph of "female", and "1/3 day" dancing nearby.

I looked up and over at the Quebeccer across from me. He looked pretty satisfied, and looked over at me about the same time.

"Toi en premiere!" He declared, gesturing for the big green button to my side.

I laughed, took a deep breath, and hit the button.

 

Before me, the man disappeared. Just, poof. Gone. Zapped. I stood on my toes to look down into the other side of the booth. A grey wolf, just like I had set, was standing on all fours, looking herself over.

I decided, immediately, that she would look nicer with any of the other fur patterns that were still enshrined about her image on the screen. So I poked one, and had to blink a few times to get her new look to stick in my head. It was a marked improvement.

She turned about for a moment, then pushed herself up onto the display. I watched, curiously, as she lined herself up with the button, tail wagging behind her. My breath caught in my throat as I remembered what that button did, but she had already touched it before I could express my misgivings.

 

The view of the other chamber disappeared instantly, replaced with the featureless grey void. For a moment, I feared that something had gone wrong, or, far more likely, that bastard Frenchman had decided that I would enjoy the day far more as a piece of skimpy clothing, or a rodent for him to chase. But the grey, blurry wedge in the centre of my vision proved that things had gone according to plan.

Since the wolf and I could no longer see each other, nor could we easily reach the controls, the doors sprang back into existence, flooding the void with mottled daylight.

Carefully, I ambled out of the box. The sun lit up the patterns along my body, revealing just how curious and alien they were. Glancing over my orange-feathered shoulder showed my brown and red tail stretching about a metre behind me. The patterns along my body and my surprisingly stubby wings were totally unfamiliar to me, though the overall shape was very much indicative of "bird". Regrettably, I very clearly was not an eagle as I had hoped, but to be fair to the now-wolf, my instructions had been pretty vague, and my French was rather poor, bordering on non-existent.

I hopped away from the booth, trying to figure out how I should proceed. Novel sensations inundated me - I was still on two feet, but my head was half a metre ahead of my feet - the tail sticking from behind me twitched violently to counteract my dumb loping. The creature I was sharing a brain with was disappointed with the inelegance I was forcing upon it. He was chomping at the bit to take to the woods that surrounded us. I would let it happen eventually, I was sure, but for now I had too many questions to let this mystery creature loose.

I stopped on the gravel and took another try at seeing what I had been turned into. The leathery snout before me was very un-birdlike, but I suppose it shared some similarities with... maybe an emu? I reached a wing up to my face to feel at it. The four-inch curved claws, nestled in mottled feathers, suggested that I was probably not an emu.

Turning the claws over before me, I came to a realization: Birds don't have claws on their wings. But raptors are not exclusively birds.

I pulled my wings up in front of me, claws aside. They were too small to fly. Much too small. And, turning my head further back, my tail wouldn’t do anything for stability in air, although it’s quick twitches were keeping me rock-steady on the ground, despite my confused movement.

I turned around, facing the machine. If I could get so much as a pebble into the chute, I could hop back in and turn back. Fearing that that may not be the case, I reached down and grabbed at a chunk of pea gravel on the parking lot. However, it merely slid throw my claws.

As exasperation sunk in, a chilling growl crept through the air, sending me leaping backwards. No more sound came, but for my own now-hurried breathing.

Had…. Had I done that? That was an awfully frightening sigh.

It sounded almost like I was a… dinosaur. But that would be silly, the venn machines cannot turn people into dinosaurs… right?

Indeed, the creature’s mind was having trouble with the forest around us. It wasn’t interested in the vegetation for food, directly, but for knowing what hid in what leaves. Maple leaves were leaving it bewildered, and oak bark, perplexed.

I had not known that the machines could do that.

My claws scraped the rocks, ringing out in a knife-like tone – ka-shing! – that pierced the air.

The sound brought memories racing to mind. In my head, I saw a kitchen door slam open. Timmy, I could hear, what is it?

I squeaked joyfully at the realization, although it came as more of a shriek of delight, and perhaps more just as a shriek.
 

My first profound conclusion from this morning of self discovery was that velociraptors are very cute.

I could not figure out what to do as a velociraptor, though. So, after ensuring that nobody else was around, I sighed, producing a sound not unlike a bird’s squawk, and handed the reigns to the Cretaceous murder-chicken.

My second profound conclusion was that velociraptors are fast. Though, with the benefit of hindsight, that was not a particularly profound conclusion.

But, try as he might, the dinosaur - and, just to double check... yes, holy crap, I’m a dinosaur - couldn’t piece together the world around it. After initial burst into the woods, it paused, taking in the world around it again.

The creature took to the trees immediately, rocketing off into the underbrush, looking for any signs of friend, foe, or food.

This was the coolest mistake I had ever made.