Warm...

Warmth was all around me. I wasn't sure how, or why. It was dark, and quiet, but most importantly it was warm. It felt so... peaceful. Relaxed. I was curled up in a tight ball, and something firm was holding me. I thought my eyes might be closed... but I was too perfectly content to bother opening them.

My body felt too soft and heavy to move. There wasn't anywhere I wanted to go, either. I drifted for a few more seconds, then fell back to sleep.

Another moment of awareness came. The warmth was still around me, but it wasn't as strong. My head and back felt warm, but a bit of chill had begun to creep in below me. I tried to move, with a half-formed idea of turning over, but my body still felt too soft and heavy. It was just too much effort to move, too much effort to even want to move. I floated aimlessly in the dark like that... then sleep took me again.

Cold.

I woke to the sensation of cold all around me, and a pounding ache in my head. I felt a shiver run through me, but it felt strange, like parts of me were shivering that shouldn't have been, and parts of me that should be shivering weren't. I had a vague thought that the lack of feeling might be a bad sign, but the lack of warmth was a much more pressing concern.

I struggled to open my heavy eyelids and tried to make sense of where I was. There was nothing - just darkness all around. I lifted a hand and tried to feel around, and immediately felt a wall in front of me. I pushed against it and felt a similar pressure against my back.

That explained it - I was in a small area of some kind. Walls all around me, and... I pushed my head up and confirmed that a ceiling closed in right above my head. I was trapped in this... thing, whatever it was. I felt around for a door or a gap - anything that might lead to an opening and help me get out - but I couldn't find anything. There must be something though, right? How else had I gotten inside?

I had a sudden memory of a group of shady men emptying a moving truck as I was walking by, with one suddenly dropping a couch to grab me.

The memory faded as soon as it appeared, and I shook my head in confusion. My head bumped into the wall, which did not improve the headache I had, but I felt the wall give way a little. I paused for a moment, trying to understand why somebody would have trapped me inside a tiny room with such weak walls. Especially one that was so small. This must be a box of some kind, then. Though... the curve to the walls seemed strange. And who would have put me in a box like this in the first place? And why?

Another shiver ran through me from the cold and I shoved those questions aside. I needed to focus on getting warm first. And there didn't seem to be any way to do that inside this... whatever it was.

I used my hands and feet to push against the wall, and after a moment I added my head in too. The wall flexed and bulged against my motions... then the walls rocked around me. I pulled my hands back but it was too late - everything wobbled and I tipped over.

The darkness around me suddenly seemed a little brighter, and I felt a thrill of excitement. I was lying on my side, but the roll must have damaged one of the walls. I felt around with my hands some more, then found the source of the light - a fracture, running the full length of the wall along my side. I squirmed to get a better angle and pushed at it, tearing out bits of the wall to make it wider. Suddenly, the walls around me split apart, and the world was filled with light.

I blinked against the sudden brightness and waited for my eyes to adjust. It took a moment, but the light faded, becoming a faint glow that felt like distant moonlight. I was honestly surprised it had hurt my eyes so much, which made me wonder how long I had been stuck in complete darkness. I shivered again, both from the continuing cold and from the fear that thought brought. I blinked a few more times and looked at my surroundings.

Beside me were the remains of what could only be called an egg. Half of it wobbled beside me, and I was sitting up inside the other half.

Further out I saw glass walls surrounding me, forming a cage, though these were clear enough to see through. A pair of round metallic tubs were in the cage with me, though from where I sat both looked empty. The ceiling of the cage was clear, but the area above it was dominated by what looked like a large lightbulb, though at the moment it was off. It seemed to be hanging down from a shelf above the cage, rather than resting on the glass ceiling of the cage itself, but I couldn't tell much about it beyond that from the angle I had.

Another memory filled my thoughts as I stared up at the lightbulb. Lying in a chair and staring up at a bright light, feeling incredibly nervous, while a voice behind me said 'okay, now you're going to feel a little pinch...' The memory followed with a sensation that was most definitely not a pinch before the memory faded.

A word popped into my head as I stared up at the light fixture. Dentist.

I blinked. That word hadn't come to me like the memory had. It had been different somehow, like I had been passed an encyclopedia entry after I had thought about the memory. Was that supposed to happen?

I tried to remember if anything like that had happened before... but the headache only redoubled. I quickly gave up on that idea and went back to examining the rest of the room.

Beyond the cage was a room that had clearly been built for giants. A huge bed dominated the center of the room, a padded thing that sloped upwards and reminded me of the chair in the memory of the dentist. Large machines surrounded it - monitors, something that looked like it would fill with air and then contract downwards, a velcro armband with a machine on the end - though all of the machines were turned off.

Various other items surrounded the bed too - needles, vials, a bag of IV fluids - but all of them were much larger than it seemed they should be. I could recognize the items, but I couldn't imagine how large a creature would have to be to require medical instruments of that size.

A set of much-too-large sliding doors were at one end of the room, leading out to another area that was much too dark to see anything in, and shelves and cabinets lined the walls, but otherwise the room was empty. Nobody else was around, and there were no other cages like the one I was in.

Overall it looked like I was inside some sort of hospital room. If it wasn't for everything being so large, I would have thought I had just ended up in an emergency room and been subjected to a very unusual form of treatment.

But... where were all the people? Where were the doctors or nurses that would work in a hospital room like this one? And why was everything built so big? And most importantly of all, why was it so cold?

I tried to get out of the shell beneath me with the idea that maybe I could get out of the cage and find someplace warm, but my body didn't move the way I expected it to. I wobbled in the half-egg and slipped on something wet coating the smooth surface... and I tumbled out onto the clear floor as the shell slid underneath me. The impact didn't hurt, aside from making the headache slightly worse, but it was embarrassing. At least nobody was around to see it.

I tried to get up to my feet, but my legs and back protested too much when I tried to bend them. I lay on the cage floor for another moment, trying to think. I must have been cramped in that egg thing for so long that my muscles had grown weak. I probably just needed to rest, and do some slow stretches.

I stretched my arms and legs out to my sides... then felt a new sensation in my back. Something else wanted to stretch, too, and the idea of stretching it felt so good that I felt myself stretching it out without even thinking about it. I blinked, not having any explanation, and tilted my head to one side to try and find the source of the feelings.

A silver wing stretched out from my back. My first thought was that it was pretty - it was covered with tiny scales that each seemed to glimmer even from the dim light, and reminded me vaguely of a bat wing. I tried to move it, thinking back to the stretching instinct, and let out a surprised gasp as the wing actually moved.

The gasp sounded strange - more musical and more of a chirp than what I thought I should sound like. I stared at the wing, feeling a sense of worry building in me, and slowly repeated the gasp.

Another chirping sound came from me instead.

I brought my hands up to try and feel my throat, but stopped as I got a look at them. I had expected human hands, attached to human arms, but these... weren't that. The arms were shorter than I thought they should be, bending at an elbow that was much closer to my body than I could remember it being, and the arms looked more like the strange wing than the hands of a human. Fine silver scales covered them, running as far up my arms as I could make out - and out of the corner of my eye I could see a similarly silver-scaled leg where mine should be.

I gulped. I was having trouble remembering much... but I knew this wasn't right. I was a human; I was supposed to have fleshy arms that ended in fingers, not... I blinked again as I flexed my hand and saw sharp claws slide out of the strange digits with the motion.

This was not supposed to be happening. What had happened to me?

I half-crawled and half-wobbled until I was closer to the wall. It took some tilting of my head, but I finally managed to get a glimpse of my reflection.

What could only be described as a silver dragon stared back at me. Four legs, two wings hanging limply at its side, a long thin tail that dragged forgotten behind it, and a long neck that led to a head with two wide amber-colored eyes full of worry and fear. Strange tufts rested at the sides of his head... and they suddenly rose into the air as I heard a loud 'bang' somewhere in the distance.

I turned away from the wall and towards the sound, trying to figure out where it had come from. Somewhere beyond the doors of the larger room the bang repeated itself... then I heard a soft hum that I recognized. Electricity. A generator must have kicked on somewhere.

The machines in the room began to come on. The lightbulb above me flickered a few times before it grew steady, and it cast a sullen red light down into my cage. Warmth started to filter down with the light, and with it a lot of my concern faded. The warmth simply felt too good, too right, to worry about the other strange things that were happening. My body began to feel weak and urged me to stretch out so as to soak up as much of the warmth as I could... so that's what I did.

I slumped down to the floor as the warmth above me slowly chased out the cold, and gave in to an instinct to stretch my wings out around me. The strange limbs were a little unnatural to move, and the muscles felt uncomfortable as I pushed the unfamiliar limbs out around me, but I ignored that feeling in favor of soaking in the feel of warmth. The relief from the cold was almost intoxicating, and as the urgency to find warmth faded I realized I was still very tired. Even the headache seemed to fade a little.

After enjoying the feel for a few moments I shifted my wings to get them a little more comfortable... and as I did, I caught sight of the two metal tubs again. I stared at them as sleep began to take hold. They looked like they would be familiar, somehow, if only they weren't so large. I stared at them a little longer, trying to make sense of it... until a memory came to me. A small metal bowl, half-filled with food, and a cat sitting next to it and begging as if the bowl was completely empty. I blinked bleary eyes at the small tubs again - no, at the food bowls. Suddenly I had a nasty suspicion why everything beyond my cage looked so large...

I fell asleep with my last thought being that I had somehow become much, much smaller.