Chapter Text
Snorpy had saved the expedition team, if not the entire island, and he had the scars to prove it— or rather, the snakification to prove it, with the fur of his left leg giving way to the waxy surface of a candlestick beneath the knee. It might have just been the crowning moment of his life. It was also why he had spent days barely exchanging words with his best friend in the world. Not that Chandlo was the type of man to be cruel, but it was clear that he was still angry about Snorpy’s keeping the operation a secret. He’d left on a walk in the evening, something he often did when there was some agitation he was looking to calm. Snorpy had hoped to sit down with him and explain himself, at least as far as he could, but he was starting to nod off and Chandlo still wasn’t home. He settled onto his cot, feeling more than a little forlorn. Maybe he could catch him in the morning.
He couldn’t have been out for too long before he was struck by a surge of adrenaline as powerful as an electric shock. A wordless urge to go , no further information except that he was in the wrong place . A pang of bone-deep hunger that vanished as quickly as it hit and left a wave of nausea in its wake. Snorpy pulled himself up to sit on the side of his cot, paws shaking and sweat clinging to his fur. What in the world was happening now?
His left leg kicked the air involuntarily, spasming with the impotent panic of a smashed fly. Snorpy was just about decided to get back underneath the covers and deal with this in the morning when he felt his foot catching on the floor, the single claw digging into the wood. Now, the panic was all his. That was not the same leg it had been when he had gone to bed.
Snorpy got his glasses and bent his knee experimentally, and gasped at the sight of the candle wax creeping up his thigh. Still mutating, really..? That couldn’t be right. It had never taken so long or been so erratic before now and that giant cake monster wasn’t even the last thing he’d eaten. Snakification just didn’t work that way.
He put his paws on the point where his fur ended, as if he could push back against the change. For a few moments, there was no movement or change that he could feel. Then in a rush of motion, his knee buckled into the air as a new joint snapped into existence in his shin. Snorpy threw himself backwards with a yelp. Even without looking, he could feel that there was more wrong with him. His right foot, previously the rigid wood of a popsicle stick, was bending and deforming in the same way as the other. Even on his natural arm, his fur was shedding like dandelion fluff.
The panic hadn’t awaited one bit, but Snorpy wasn’t sure whether slipping away would do him any more good than waiting it out. Surely, this was something that Floofty would be eager to look at, and then… maybe the two of them could figure out how to reverse it without anyone else needed to know. Besides, he wasn’t even sure if he could walk like this. He took a deep breath and looked back at his legs as he tried to stand. The progression seemed to have slowed, with the left completely changed up until the hip, where it cut off like it really was a candle plunged into a cake. The other was only candle up to the knee, where it hit the pale flesh of the sliced banana that had previously taken his leg. Shakily, Snorpy got to his feet, but right as he got his balance, his right leg… split open. Like a bone popping out of skin, the new spindly limb tore its way from the previous flesh. As he hit the ground, he could hear his remaining thigh turning to mush from the impact — though blessedly, he couldn’t feel it.
Even the candles, which weren’t numb like the portions of liquefying snakmatter were, were free of pain. That didn’t mean the transformation felt like nothing, though. There was a sensation like shifting sinews in his legs as they stretched and twisted beyond recognition. More distressingly, he felt something tingling, almost crawling through his flesh, and the cool night air grazed the patches of skin that had lost their fur. Something else was moving, tensed up in his gut—
There was a gentle knock on the doorframe downstairs, making Snorpy freeze. “Is everything okay in there?” Filbo called in a stage whisper.
“I thought I heard a, uh… a scream, earlier.”
Snorpy was silent for a moment, his paws clasped over his mouth as he tried to calm his ragged breathing. Had he screamed? Seemed like an exaggeration, but at least now he knew that he was in danger of drawing attention, even in his home.
“Ah… yes, that was me. Nothing to worry about, just… having a bit of a nightmare.”
He heard a relieved sigh from below. “Okay, that’s good— well not good, but… is there anything I can do?”
“No, no. You can go back to bed. I apologize for the noise.”
He covered his mouth again as Filbo’s footsteps faded into the night. It had been hard to not react to what was happening to his body for the couple of seconds he had been talking. Even now, there was a… taste, sickly sweet and rising in his throat like bile. With the chocolate wedges of his one mutated paw pressed against his face, he desperately tried not to think about what had happened to the snakification on his thigh, or focus on how it was similarly growing numb. Fortunately, he had a distraction as something tore its way from his abdomen. Snorpy sputtered out a tearful whine from between his melting fingers.
It looked like there was another leg— if that’s what you could call the spindly, boneless appendages that had replaced his real legs— erupting from his belly. While it was laying limply on the ground, he could feel it as clearly as any other limb. The question was, could he move it? He was having trouble even maneuvering his regular two, which were jutting sharply to the side. It was a struggle to get them to bend forwards, but easy to let them slip backwards. Snorpy raised up the foreleg, a tremble in the newly-formed muscles. Still, it was stronger than it looked, enough to support most of his weight and gouge a line into the floor. Propping his body up with his “normal” legs, it was enough for him to crawl, if not properly walk.
Snorpy collected his clothes and bundled them into his good arm. There was probably more he would need out there, but even if he was in a calm enough state of mind to know what, he didn’t think he could carry anything else. Every couple steps his balance was thrown off again, his legs continuing to stretch and buckle. The way the new leg pushed and pulled against the point where it attached to his belly was already making Snorpy queasy, but it was when he saw another appendage pushing through the surface of his apparently porous skin that he gagged. He coughed up a mouthful of syrupy fluid on the floor, and he was overwhelmed by the taste of sugar. Artificial vanilla mixed with the flakes of chocolate wafer that had flaked off of his tusks from gritting his teeth, and the tang of blood from a source he couldn’t place beyond a feeling of shifting in his jaw.
As he hit the first landing, he glanced back at the upper floor and winced. His things were in even more of a disarray than usual, and the floor was streaked with claw marks and pools of frothy, undifferentiated snakmatter. Snorpy turned away and tried to push the image out of his mind. He wouldn’t look back again, even when he felt his arm slough off into a heap of liquefied chocolate on the steps behind him.