〈⇥⇤ THE UNEARTHING⇥⇤〉

"So glad school's done for the day," Marquesa groaned to her friend as the two descended the stairs, passing by emptying classrooms to join the mad rush of students. Inside the abandoned rooms were the teachers left behind: some still doing work on their laptops at the front of class, others packing up their equipment to become more droplets in the sea of bodies surging toward the school's entrance.

Kara, following Marquesa closely, laughed. "Ugh, same!" She adjusted the straps of her backpack, allowing the older girl to take the lead. "We still on for Saturday?" She had to raise her voice slightly to be heard over the collating chatters of conversation from the students and classmates all around them.

"You bet!" Marquesa smiled, brushing her brown hair out of her eyes. "Sergeant misses you already!"

Kara's happiness became tinged with longing at the mention of her friend's pet Tegu lizard. The girl herself had loved lizards for as long as she could remember; most of her weekends were spent at the reptile enclosure in the zoo with Marquesa (they and the handlers knew each other by name now), and then heading back to the latter's place to hang with Sergeant and have a hearty Spanish dinner prepared by her mother. 

The two reached the edge of the school marked by black gates. Students poured out into the world, released from their conviction to return home; the sun gleefully greeted all its worshippers.

"I'm happy Sergeant loves me," Kara said as she and Marquesa made it to the end of the street – where they would part.

"And so do I, you tonto," Marquesa shook her head, the smile rooted firmly in place. She struck a hand up in a wave. "See ya tomorrow!"

Kara waved back as she kept walking, peeling off from the street and continuing down the left. It wasn't long until only the squawking of birds kept her company.

Another druggy day at school done, she groaned as she adjusted the straps on her bag. Why do we have so much homework? 

The girl shifted her backpack uncomfortably, the contents inside rustling around with her movements.
She glanced behind her at the high school as she walked further away from it; the large walls looked imposing as the sun had just dipped behind them, welcoming the end of the day.

I wonder who Chase likes these days, Kara thought as she started for home, as any 16-year-old would. It was innocent enough, having a crush on the popular kid. 

As she got clear of the shadows, Kara felt the hot, heavy sun beat its rays down, baking her skin and eliciting sweat to moisten her clothes. She avoided eye contact with any strangers she passed, keeping her eyes to the ground; school had sapped all her social battery, and now the girl was more than eager to return to the familiarity of her house.

The walk back home heralded no issues for the most part – crossing roads, warily eyeing the entrances to car garages in case someone was pulling out; mostly the biggest obstacle was the sun.
Kara was trudging along with her eyes glued to the ground, head down with the effort of her walking like a hardworking horse, when she spotted something amongst the grass on the sidewalk: a small lizard. Its odd dark grey scales were what caught her eye, stark against the lime grass. Whenever the lizard moved, it didn't look right. Maybe it was hurt? 

Kara stopped walking, bent down and put her hand next to the animal. Strangely, it willingly climbed onto her fingers, its cool body bringing relief to her scalded skin.

"You are not allowed pets,"  her mother's voice rang in her head, doing little to stop the girl as she continued down the street with the new addition to the family in her hands.
Damn her allergies.
Kara gently curled her fingers protectively towards the small lizard, determination setting through her body. She'd find a way to keep this little guy. She could use hand sanitiser whenever she was around her mum. She could hide the animal from her parents.

Kara felt a connection to the scaly, small reptile. Time and time again Kara had enquired her parents about owning a lizard of her own, but Laura's allergies spanned from reptilian to canine and all in-between. 

Marquesa and Sergeant were the closest Kara could ever get to owning her own pet lizard...
Until now.
And the girl was sure she couldn't part with one that had so eagerly tagged along with her.

I am a teenager, after all, Kara thought as she spared an affectionate glance at the dark-coloured lizard, which had taken to curling up to sleep in her palm.
I'm at a time in my life where it's natural to rebel.

〈⇥⇤ THREE MONTHS LATER ⇥⇤〉

Footsteps paraded up the hall to Kara's room. 
"Daughter?" 

The girl in question froze, her hand poised above her secret lizard's cage.
That was her mother's voice coming from the hall.

Three months ago, Kara had come home with her pet lizard and taken it in; she had asked Marquesa all about how to care for it, and the girl had even given her a small glass cage to keep it in. Kara had lived with the lizard undercover, thankful the local stray cat saw her as a friend and offered her assortments of hunted creatures as gifts – leaving dead caterpillars and mice outside the girl's bedroom window. At first Kara had thought hiding mice corpses in the freezer would've been a difficult task, but it's amazing how concealing just one bag of peas could be.
The rest of the lizard's diet consisted of whatever ants, moths, spiders and flies it could snatch for itself, often assisted by Kara bringing it freshly-killed pests from around the house.

Soon after taking it home, the girl's room had become a stranger to fresh air blowing under the door, as she had invested in a draft stopper to prevent her lizard friend running out of the room. Her window remained closed whenever she let the lizard out of the glass cage.

Now, Kara's fingers were hooked on a small frozen mouse suspended above the cage – which she hid in the crawlspace under her desk. She cast a panicked glance to the discarded shoebox she used to hide the cage and wondered if she had enough time to drop the mouse and throw the box over it again.

"Kara, I hope you're doing your homework!" Laura turned the knob and burst into the room before Kara could even get her heart to beat again.

Laura's jaw fell at the scene, and Kara knew she was in trouble. The girl's mouth dropped into an O, racking her brain for explanations.

"Kara..." the dumbfounded woman shot a hand to her mouth, collapsing into a fit of coughs. 

"Laura? What's wrong?" Jack, Kara's father, barged into the room, and the girl's heart skipped a beat.

I'm dead. 
I'm so dead. 

"Laura! Kara, what is this?!"

Kara glued her eyes to her lizard, envying it for the fact that it wasn't about to be screamed at.

〈⇥⇤∆⇥⇤〉

The starry sky illuminated the night, making the tears on the girl's face shine as the little rivulets streamed down her cheeks. Her crying hadn't even been caused by her parents rightfully berating her; it was more because the girl had to give up this companion she had bonded with.

Kara clasped the lizard in her hands, walking out the front of the house. She set the reptile down miserably on the cobbled pavement near the forest that curled around the street, ending the line of cement and tar.

"Goodbye, Alaina," Kara whispered, then was whisked away back into the light, leaving her friend alone.

The lizard heard the night in motion all around it, seeing the outside world for the first time in a while. After a few moments of unsure stillness, it wriggled quickly forward. Its paw landed in a tiny amount of green liquid spilled amongst the cracks in the cobbles, hidden in-between the stones – hidden so well that the glow of the green could barely be seen.
As soon as it made contact, the lizard felt its body moving, shifting, until it became... something other-worldly.
The small lizard brain, powered usually by biological instinct, suddenly expanded alongside its rapidly-changing body until it welcomed a conscience, a higher understanding. Thought and morality.
Alaina now had the bipedal, physical build of a human, but the body of a lizard. 

Alaina looked at herself in shock. She had mutated into a humanoid lizard, with the same long whip tail she had always had. She saw four thick fingers on each hand, and round, flat feet with four toes on each.

She was small, shorter than Kara had been.
Much shorter.
This body was only a year old.

The lizard went to click in alarm, but something recoiled inside of her when she realised her voice didn't sound right. 
In her shock, she made a quiet babbling noise.

A noise made with the rolling of the tongue, of the forming of a word. An action that the new mutant had never been able to do before.

"W.. wh'at?" The mutant exclaimed to herself, repeating a phrase of confusion she had heard her owner say.
She gasped, grabbing her throat with her fingers as she heard her freshly-acquired voice speak a word the very first time.

Alaina experienced an emotion – one that was no more limited by the biology of her species, but was now complex and layered, complicated and intricate, an emotion on a human level:
Fear.
The new mutant stumbled as she fled into the darkness of the forest.

〈⇥⇤THE MEETING⇥⇤〉

A bear was meditating in the forest.

He was not an ordinary bear: he wore a montsuki haori robe that was a shade of brown darker than his thick fur coat. He slept on a bed of leaves and walked on two feet. He kept his belongings – which included bladed weapons and photographs, writing stationery and books – in the cave where he lived. He honed his fighting and ninjitsu skills by training every day.
This bear was a mutant.

Every night, he would sit outside of his cave – surrounded by the nature he had grown to enjoy so much, grown to be a thriving part of – to meditate. 
Hearing the forest in motion all around him helped put the bear at ease. The trilling of the birds, the whispers of the leaves as the wind trickled through them, the faint droning of the gentle river deeper in the woods.
As he centred his mind, his round ears picked up a strange rummaging noise.

Sachari Yinto opened his amber eyes, concentrating on the sound.

A small body was fleeing through the forest; disturbing the grass, hitting branches and bushes, interrupting the usual flow of the nature that he called home.

Sachari Yinto got to his feet in a fluid motion, warily eyeing the claws on his paws. He hoped he would not need to use them.

But something was coming his way.

He cast a glance at the opening to the cave behind him. He had been living in this place for years; humans had had no interest in toying with this particular forest yet, instead leaving it alone.
Perhaps that was about to change.

Sachari Yinto narrowed his brow slightly as he readied himself for the ever-approaching intruder.
I won't let that happen.

His eyes were trained on the line of trees and bushes a few paces in front of him, alert and ready for any threat that may invade his home. The intruder was getting closer, the disregard for the flow of the forest getting louder.

Sachari Yinto set his jaw, bracing himself.

From the foliage burst a small crying body, stumbling through without a care. Sachari Yinto could see their skin was dark thanks to his grizzly DNA giving him night vision; he could see that the newcomer looked reptilian, and young, and confused and afraid and alone.

"Child?" Sachari Yinto couldn't stop the concerned word from leaving his tongue. This had taken him by surprise, and the bear felt a familiar sense of sympathy and paternal instinct fill him.

The new mutant looked up, noticed the bear for the first time, and in a new shock-induced fear fell forward onto the ground. The reptile was babbling nonsensically, noises sounding like half-formed syllables of words coming from her throat.

Sachari Yinto kept his guard up but moved forward, lowering himself next to the mutant. He was no stranger to the green substance that morphed and changed lifeforms, and he was certainly no stranger to the confusion one felt when they got mutated. 

"It is alright," he tried to console the newcomer, who was attempting to cover her head. "Don't worry, I will not harm you. It's okay, it's okay."

He lay a gentle paw on the reptile's arm and saw for the first time that she had a tail. A lizard mutant?

At the contact, the lizard mutant went completely rigid and keened a garbled cry.

Sachari Yinto retracted his paw immediately, his grizzly eyes widening. Oh no. 
He had been a man before he was mutated – a human. 
But this newcomer was making noises that sounded animalistic. There was a possibility that she had been a lizard originally... so gaining a human consciousness in the span of about a minute...

No wonder this mutant was so out-of-sorts.

We have a long way to go, don't we?
"Shhhhh," Sachari Yinto gentled the distressed mutant. "Shhh, it's okay. Just try to get to sleep, you'll feel better in the morning, it'll be better in the morning."

He wasn't sure how long he was crouched by the child's sprawled figure; he didn't know how many hours of the night he gave to her. But eventually, her disturbed crying waned; and eventually, when she fell into her first human sleep, Sachari Yinto carried her into his cave so she would be safe.

And he would make sure she'd be safe, he decided, as he crawled down into the cave after a brief area-check; he would make sure she'd be okay. She wouldn't be alone any more.

〈⇥⇤ FOURTEEN YEARS LATER ⇥⇤〉

Alaina paced through the shadows, crouching as she ducked and weaved through the darkness. The residents of New York City bustled about in the busy streets, unaware of the mutant making her way through the town.

"Don't let anyone see you," her old master's voice rang through her head as she moved swiftly among the dark alleys, stealthily keeping out of sight with the refined quality that years of nurtured practice brought.

Alaina remembered the night she had met him, her old master: the same night she had mutated. 

The then-new mutant had run into the bear mutant in the forest, and he had helped her. She realised he was like her, that he knew what she was experiencing. The two became teacher and student, and then father and daughter.

Sachari Yinto had taught her how to defend herself, in the form of a fighting art called ninjitsu, before he succumbed to his age. He had become a father to her.

Alaina shook her head. That had happened fourteen years ago; she was fifteen now, and she had been taught not to live in the past.

The thought that Master Yinto was in a place where the creek sparkled, where the sun shone, and where the insects buzzed brought her peace of mind.
Alaina smiled to herself as she moved across the cobbled streets of the city. Though Master Yinto was gone, he had left her with everything she needed to know to survive and continue living herself. And for that, and for being her father and taking her in and teaching her when she was lost and confused and scared, Alaina would always be grateful.

Her hands went subconsciously to her dual ninjaken, which were strapped on her back using thick bands that covered her waist and chest. These bands were connected by gold buckles which jingled lightly with each movement.
The white wraps on Alaina's tail and hands weren't too visible at night, and the black wraps on her feet helped conceal her should the light steal back some of the shadows. Plus, the lizard's dark skin helped matters a great deal.
Alaina noticed her hand placement and took them away, trying to focus as she slipped into a back alley.

She stepped on the side of a manhole hidden away in the darkness of the alley.
The manhole, deciding it didn't like the fact one side was now heavier than the other thanks to the mutant, flipped upwards like a penny thrown through the air.
Without any time to cry out, Alaina fell down the open manhole, reaching out for anything to stop her as she descended. She found something, unfortunately, when she banged her head on a ladder rung. Her head shuddered with the impact, and by the time she had hit the ground below, her vision shattered like broken glass and faded to black.
The lid comically rolled on its side like a cast-away tire, before falling over to half-cover the way to the sewers.

The last thing Alaina heard was a faint, "What the shell was that?"