Chapter 2: Chapter 2: The Girl at the Bottom of the Mountain

“The most important thing to remember, children, is that if you want to be part of society, you have to contribute to it.”

Leir was eight years old, sitting in a school room that was attached to the Children’s Home. He was antsy, as were a lot of the other six-to-nine-year-old children in the room. The older kids were outside doing physical activities and Leir was stuck inside learning the tenets of good citizenship, again.

The Children’s Home was a communal home for kids without families, run by the federal government. Every state had some and every home had a few hundred kids, unified by above-average test scores for both intelligence and behavior that children in the foster system couldn’t match. The school room wasn’t actually used for education, and Leir still had to attend a private school; rather, the room was used, time and again, to instruct the kids how to be productive members of society.

“Sometimes,” the instructor was saying, “there are more people than good jobs. That’s why it’s important that you apply yourself as hard as you can in school, so that you have the skills necessary to be selected over other people who want the same career.”

In the cafeteria, kids who did better in school got to sit at the tables on the far right of the room, closest to the kitchen. They were served hotter, higher-quality food than the tables in the middle, which in turn ate better than the tables on the far left. Leir’s assigned seat was in the middle, but close enough to the right to smell the gravy and roasted meat at every meal.

“Why do some kids get better food?!” he demanded of the matron in charge. “I want to sit on the right, too!”

“Leir, children who perform well get extra privileges,” the matron explained. “They are doing well in school and are well-behaved, unlike someone I could mention, young man. They get better food and nicer clothes and a more comfortable bed because they apply themselves harder. You could get all of those, too, if you put in the same amount of work that they have.”

“But then someone can do better than me and take it all away!” he cried.

The matron replied, “If you don’t want that to happen, then you have to be the best.”

When Leir turned eighteen and moved to university, he was a shoo-in for the honors dorm. From day one, he was in competition with every other student: for scholarships, for honors credit, for grant money. He wasn’t going to lose the respect that he’d worked so hard to earn; Leir had come from nothing and was going to pull himself up by the bootstraps until he was on top of the world.

Nothing about his attitude changed when Leir finally entered the business world. He’d presented the best of himself on his application and in his interview, and the connections his professors had given him paid off. Still, every day was a struggle for relevance. Every time he rose one rung on the corporate ladder, it was a bitter battle with others who wanted the same prize, and there was always someone above him afraid of losing their success to his ambition.

It took a long time, but Leir had made it to the top of his field, with his own business and the public reputation of a beloved inventor. They said that he was going to save the world, or at least change it beyond recognition. There was no one left to compete against, but every day Leir came in and continued to prove that he deserved to be there.

Today, Leir was slowly munching on a salad at his desk, staring off into the middle distance. Speaking with Marielle had gotten him thinking about his time at university and contemplative of his past. Leir considered himself luckier than most people: if he hadn’t been born into a situation where he had to prove himself constantly, if he’d been coddled instead like a lot of other people, he might never have made it to the top.

Leir finished his salad and threw the container away. He’d earned this: Leir wore the nicest clothes and ate the nicest food. His was the biggest office in the biggest building of the biggest company in the city. If he needed to, he’d be able to do it all over again from scratch, just to prove that he could.

Why did it even matter, then, that some people didn’t like him? Leir shouldn’t care about that, and probably wouldn’t if Mayweather hadn’t made it his problem. Leir had done more than enough to earn everyone’s respect; that was what he’d been promised, growing up, so when was that promise going to pay off?

There was a knock on the door and Leir hit a button on his desk to unlock it. Mayweather stepped inside, holding a small sealed container in his hands. Leir sat up straight as Mayweather approached and placed the box on the desk.

“Here it is,” Mayweather said. “Should I have it sent to your lab?”

“No, actually, I’ll take it myself,” Leir said, standing and placing his hand on the case. “You’re free to go, Mayweather.”

Leir made his way to the elevator and hit the button for his lab; his real lab, not the one that he filmed in. This one was smaller than the filming lab, but with a lot more equipment and less claustrophobic without the camera. Turning on the lights, Leir sat the container down on a table before grabbing a pair of goggles and a lab coat. He went from cabinet to cabinet collecting tools that he thought might be useful. Leir finally sat down at the table and unlocked the box with a code that Marielle had given him.

The crystal inside was large for an energy crystal, almost as wide as Leir’s finger. It was tabular and octagonal, more closely resembling a large chip rather than a gemstone, and black with specks of gold. The exact identification didn’t matter to Leir, but he was curious exactly what kind of stone it was.

He worked alone, without even robots to help him. Leir did his most impressive work when he was allowed to isolate and get really invested in his projects. It had not done him any favors when he was younger and expected to be part of a team, but paid off in the long run when he wanted to really make a name for himself.

Placing the crystal in a small holding clasp, Leir fired a few lasers at it in hopes of getting a reading. As Marielle had suggested, the results were faint and inconsistent, but it provided a baseline record to compare later results to. Leir wondered what the practical use of such an obstinate energy crystal could be; perhaps this was the insulating counterpart to the more conductive energy crystals they were familiar with.

No matter how finely Leir tuned his instruments, though, he couldn’t get useful results. Leir cursed to himself and started toying with programmable matter, creating little circuitries around the crystal to more finely read what was going on inside. All he needed to do was isolate the core energy signature to blow this whole mystery wide open.

There was an endless number of scientists elsewhere in the building. Leir wasn’t going to lower himself to asking for help from any of them. It had been years since he’d deigned to actually work alongside another scientist as his equal. It had also been years since he’d worked on a problem this resilient.

A few days ago, Leir had accepted Mayweather’s suggestion to get into this mess. It had felt like a moment of weakness at the time, one that had squatted on his brain for days and refused to give him a moment of rest. He was not going to let his sense of pride take any more of a beating by asking for help from people who simply weren’t as good as him!

Leir disabled the safety protocols on his equipment; it’s what Honora McFee would have done, wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t he? People who let themselves be bound by rules never accomplished anything meaningful in their lives. He was going to finish this on his own and get all the accolades for it.

The machines started to buzz and vibrate as more energy was poured into the crystal. Leir continued fiddling with the devices until the crystal started to glow from the amount of energy it was absorbing. Leir was getting nonsense readings that he couldn’t make heads or tails of.

Bombarding energy crystals with multiple forms of radiation was dangerous, but Leir set up a microwave and ultraviolet emitter around the crystal, activating both at once. The gold flecks on the crystal started to glow brightly in different colors of the rainbow. Leir adjusted the outputs, and the crystal started to hum loudly in a high pitch. The entire table was vibrating. He was close to—!

Everything went dark and Leir hit the ground hard, his ears ringing. All the sound of the lab had ceased at once, and when Leir opened his eyes he was lying in dirt. Had he blacked out? Leir didn’t remember anything past working on the crystal in his lab and getting close to hitting a breakthrough. But that memory was too fresh to have happened more than a few moments before.

With a soft, delicate grunt, Leir pulled himself into a sitting position. This was a forest, and not even a coniferous forest: a deciduous forest that was far too warm to be the Pacific Northwest at this time of the year. Leir must have been missing a very large chunk of his memory to have gotten this far away from the city.

He looked down at his body. Leir screamed, then covered his mouth as soon as he heard the high-pitched wail. This wasn’t him! This wasn’t his body! He sprang to his feet—not his feet; this body’s feet; someone else’s feet. Why was he barefoot? His feet looked so small.

Leir felt around his face, finding it round and smooth and lacking any wrinkles whatsoever. This body—distinctly not his body—was young, probably no older than twenty if he was being generous, and female. The outfit was a plain brown, consisting of a loose shirt with short but wide sleeves and baggy cloth pants that pinched shut around the knee. He was wearing a blue sash around his waist for some reason.

There were two other really big changes that Leir could feel. He reached up, feeling a pair of big pointed animal ears sticking out of his head that twitched when he touched them. He groaned and they flattened, blocking out a lot of the sounds of the forest. Behind him, a fluffy orange tail speckled in black flickered back and forth with anxiety.

This wasn’t simply a blackout, nor was it much of anything that Leir could put into words. His mind had been completely flung from his body—no telling how far—into a creature that Leir was absolutely certain did not really exist in his world. One way or another, his understanding of reality was completely unraveling, so there was only one thing to do.

Leir screamed and started running in circles, pulling at the ears and long blond hair that was cascading down from his head. It was a dream. That was the only logical explanation! A very realistic dream where everything behaved normally except that Leir was someone he wasn’t supposed to be! The only other alternative was that it was all real. That couldn’t be true. Nothing like this could possibly be true! It wasn’t in the realm of possibility, so Leir discarded that idea.

Something was glinting in the light, and when Leir realized that it was the accursed energy crystal he scrambled over to pick it up. He clutched it close to his chest, his… very feminine chest. Again, a whine escaped him and Leir held up the crystal to the light as if it were going to give him some answers.

“Hello?!” he cried out, spinning around. “This isn’t funny!”

The only possible explanation was that he’d snapped and gone completely insane. Leir couldn’t explain this except as a complete psychotic break in reality. Obviously, he wasn’t really in a forest thousands or more miles away looking like a teenage animal girl.

He felt nauseous; the thought of being a teenager again was too much to bear.

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Looking around, though, Leir couldn’t bring himself to believe that this wasn’t really happening. Every part of his body, including the extra appendages, felt too real, as did him standing barefoot in the dirt. The forest around him was vibrant and alive with the sound and movement of trees and small insects. This was hard to explain away as him being stuck in a psych ward somewhere.

This had to be the crystal’s doing.

“Send me back!” he demanded, sounding impotent and petulant with a girl’s voice. “I demand that you send me back to my lab!”

What did Leir think he was doing, shouting at an inanimate object like it was going to respond to him? It wasn’t alive and didn’t have any willpower of its own. He had done this, whatever this was, when he accidentally activated the crystal. Leir had always scoffed at people who talked to computers and pleaded with machines to work properly.

“Please,” Leir croaked, falling to his knees as tears welled up in his eyes. “You have to send me home. I don’t know what happened, but this is all wrong. I’m not supposed to be here.”

Nothing happened.

He waited for a few minutes more and still nothing happened.

Half an hour passed, but nothing happened.

Leir screamed and threw the crystal as hard as he could, unleashing a volley of profanity after it. He jumped up and down, stamping the ground with his feet and kicking up chunks of grass. He cursed the forest and everything in it. He slammed his fist into a tree, biting back tears at how much it hurt.

When Leir went to kick at a rock with his bare feet, he missed and overshot, falling backward. With a squeak, his entire body suddenly inverted and he hit the ground on his back before rolling over. Leir was standing on four legs. Something had transformed him into a giant red fox!

Shrieking like a dying man, Leir started running in circles around where the energy crystal had fallen. What was happening?! How did he fix this?! Could he fix this?! Was this permanent?! What was he supposed to do?! Answers did not come, no matter how dizzy he made himself.

The shift back into a teenage girl was sudden and all at once, sending him sprawling into the dirt. Leir lay still, determined to simply wait out whatever was going on if it spared him any more embarrassment. The scent of earth filled his nostrils and a bug crawled through the grass just a few inches away from his face.

Leir closed his eyes and buried them in his hands, curling up into a ball. He started to sob while around him, birds sang and animals pranced in the underbrush. Why was it his fate to be the most miserable, unfortunate person in the world? His story was already over—he’d won at business and at life—so why wasn’t this happening to someone else?!

He sniffed and bit his tongue as he wiped away the tears. What was he doing? Despite how he currently looked, Leir was a man in his forties and he was going to act like it! Leir had not grown up in a Children’s Home and spent decades climbing the corporate ladder in order to lose his spine at something that he couldn’t predict!

With a deep breath, Leir forced himself into a sitting position, stretching. The only good thing about this situation was that his body didn’t protest as much when he wanted to move anymore; he felt young, at least physically. Aside from that, he was covered in dirt and had nothing but the clothes on his back. Leir wanted to tell himself that he’d come back from bigger upsets, but he’d already established that he wasn’t delusional.

He reached forward and plucked the crystal from the grass, clutching it loosely in his hand. The crystal was connected to whatever was going on and Leir did not intend to lose it. Lacking any pockets, he shamefully tucked it into the length of fabric that was keeping his breasts—the word made him shiver—in check.

Leir also had no money with him; a bill would at least have given him an idea of what country he was in, since nobody in the United States wore clothes like these or wandered barefoot through the woods. Would Leir be able to speak the language? He only knew three! His stomach churned at the thought that he might be too far away from civilization for it to matter one way or the other.

Despite himself, Leir started to tear up a little.

It was time for deep breaths; he was probably panicking over nothing. There was no reason to believe that he was alone for miles without any source of food or that this was even a permanent condition. It was entirely possible that Leir would simply be able to wait it out. The smart thing to do would be to wait where he had appeared in case whatever happened fixed itself.

“Please,” he begged the crystal, his voice weak. “I need to go home. I have a life to get back to. I have to protect what I’ve earned. I can’t just abandon my entire life and live in the woods as a teenage girl of all things!”

He waited for what must have been an hour or two, sometimes sitting, sometimes pacing, sometimes lying on his back. Eventually, though, the sky started to turn the faintest hint of orange. It was going to be dark soon and Leir was stuck in the same place that he’d started. Doing nothing wasn’t working, and if he went full-on sunk-cost fallacy, he could very well be out there all night with nothing to protect him.

The sun was heading down over some mountains in the distance, bringing Leir’s attention to the gentle slope he was on. These were the foothills of some mountain range in the world; he wasn’t in the middle of nowhere. If there was a river nearby, there might be a town, and they would have food and a bed for him. Leir just needed to get to a higher elevation in order to scan for signs of human civilization.

Leir started walking, noting how strange it was both that he was out in the forest in bare feet and how natural it felt; he effortlessly sidestepped small rocks and twigs that would have been painful to step on. His tail flickered back and forth on its own while his ears swiveled at every sound in the underbrush, keeping him alert to his surroundings. Briefly, Leir considered trying to climb a tree, but it became clear quickly that this body did not have the experience necessary to pull it off when he fell right on his tail and let out a yelp.

Finding a town was only the first problem: Leir still had to get to it and he had neither a light source nor a compass. Moreover, how did he know that they’d be friendly to him? Whoever this girl was, he had no evidence that she had much contact with humans aside from the fact that she was wearing clothes. Perhaps they would simply kill him on sight for looking like a freak! Fear bubbled up, and Leir gulped in an attempt to keep it from rising too far.

He stopped as soon as he heard it: something big was walking around nearby. Leir turned and had to cover his mouth to avoid crying out! There was a mountain lion not fifteen feet away from him! His legs were frozen stiff and Leir’s breathing was ragged. Maybe it would walk away on its own!

The cougar turned its head and perked up, finally taking notice of Leir. In his head, he pleaded with it to just leave and find food somewhere else. But then it lowered its head and slowly started walking toward him.

Leir bolted.

His heart was pounding too fast for him to hear anything else. He screamed, hoping that anybody would hear him. A roar from behind answered his call. Leir was knocked off his feet. The ground rushed up as he slammed into it, his nose breaking with a snap just before a sharp pain erupted in his right shoulder. He screamed as the animal dug its claws into him and started tearing Leir to ribbons. All Leir could see was red. He was foaming at the mouth from pain.

Then all the weight was gone. Leir heard movement, but he couldn’t focus on anything over the blood pooling beneath him and the struggle to breathe. Something pressed down on his wounds and Leir sputtered in agony. A soothing sensation passed over him as his body grew numb, and Leir stopped shaking.

“You poor thing,” came a man’s voice.

Leir forced himself to turn his head, smearing his face with blood as he did so. There was a man in his fifties kneeling over him, frowning. He had no animal features but rather long, pointed ears, and his clothes were no more impressive than Leir’s. The man continued to press down on Leir’s back, though Leir could only faintly feel it through how numb he was. Was this shock? Leir had never gone into shock before?

“Let me get your nose,” the man said, placing a hand on Leir’s nose and causing him to wince in pain.

Again, a soothing sensation ran through Leir and the muscles in his face relaxed as they went numb.

“You’re still in pretty bad shape. I’m going to bring you back with me and we’ll put a proper bandage on you.”

Leir tried to stammer out a response, but words escaped him. The stranger grabbed onto Leir, who continued to babble, and then hoisted him up off the ground. Leir screamed again as the pain came rushing back from his injuries. Everything was spinning. His savior threw Leir over his shoulder and started walking.

“Where are we going?” Leir managed to whisper.

“I’m taking you back to the village. We have medical supplies there, as well as enough food to keep you comfortable until you finish healing. Don’t talk, though. You need to conserve your strength.”

Leir opened his mouth to say more, but between all the questions he had nothing specific came to mind. He closed his eyes, figuring that it wouldn’t hurt to get a nap in; he was awfully tired, all of a sudden. It wasn’t like he was going anywhere, after all.