Something was wrong. Kira knew something was wrong, deep inside. She was… not safe? And she… needed to not be alone. Venisin wasn’t around… but Venisin wasn’t what she needed right now… she needed… she couldn’t quite place it.

 

Sometimes feeling just generally off meant that she was hungry, so Kira got up and messaged Venisin to ask if she could have a snack. Her owner responded by the time she made it to the refrigerator, and she took out some leftover cookies from last week.

 

Eating them didn’t seem to help, and they didn’t taste very good. One of the downsides of home cooking was that things didn’t have Affini bio-compatible food stabilizers, so occasionally something went stale. Kira threw the cookies out, and decided to take a nap.

 

——

 

When Kira woke up again she was hungry. Venisin still wasn’t home. She felt a craving for green, plant-y things, and messaged Venisin to ask if she could make herself a smoothie. The approval came immediately, this time with a smiley face, and Kira grew a little bit worried. Venisin wasn’t usually prone to textual cheeriness, and an unexpected smiley usually meant something was happening at her expense.

 

She ordered her smoothy from the fabricator, with extra moss and algae, and drank it in one long gulp. She finally felt a little better. But the urge to take a nap was coming on strong again.

 

She’d been building a little clockwork train as a holiday gift for the floret down the street, but decided work on that could wait until later.

 

——

 

Kira woke with a strange compulsion to go for a walk. Venisin hadn’t given her any restrictions this week, so she left their hab unit and went wandering. It was a beautiful day on the Arboratis, just like every other day, and Kira let herself drift towards one of the central parks. Christmas and its varying traditions had drifted considerably over centuries of Terran stellar expansion. What was left was an odd kind of nostalgia to certain specific cultural markers. Snow was out–so many worlds didn’t have any that it was a hard association to maintain–but Santa Clause had stuck around, and so had the tradition of hanging lights.

 

Affini obviously didn’t celebrate Christmas, but seemed to love any opportunity to decorate and have a good time. So, after adapting the schedule to the Affini Standard Galactic Calendar, Christmas continued under the Human Domestication Treaty, and became something of a yearly decorating contest. Gifts had lost some of their emphasis, after all who needs them in a post scarcity economy, but hand making things for people you were close to was all the rage now.

 

Kira enjoyed the light displays on the way towards the park. Someone had built a scale model of the Arboratis, complete with firework fountains in place of the engines. Someone else had created a scale model of some foreign planet, complete with an oversized affini and their two florets. Everything flashed and shone in those Affini typical fractal patterns. It was almost hypnotic.

 

Kira thought back to the train she was building. She could probably add a few lights to it as well. Maybe just to emphasize the shape, or maybe she could ask Venisin for some of that glow-y wiring stuff and make a little logo out of it and put it on the side of the train. The wheels could pro–Kira stopped up short when she realized she’d wandered into the forest, not the park, and was halfway to her mouth with a fistful of shrubbery.

 

It smelled… tasty. She tried a nibble off one of the leaves and found it was as delicious as it smelled. She wasn’t sure what Affini had done in this forest, but it was excellent. She continued to nibble and realized moments later that she'd eaten the whole fist, twigs included. 

 

After she was done she felt sleepy again. She briefly considered going to sleep then and there, in this very soft and comfortable looking spot she’d seen near the shrub, but then shook herself and made the walk back to her and Venisin’s hab unit.

 

——

 

Kira awoke the next morning alone again. She felt… off still? Again? Now her bed was too soft and her fluffy pillows had suddenly developed an uncomfortable texture.

 

Venisin had come home briefly that night and Kira had confessed to eating the shrubbery in the forest without asking. She’d expected to be punished, but Venisin had just given her one of her more unsettling smiles and patted her head, before telling her that for now anything that wasn’t human food was permissible without having to ask first. She’d left again soon after, saying something about a Terran interrogation that had become particularly exciting, and would keep taking up much of her time.

 

The background level of tension and alertness had been picking up since yesterday, and Kira found herself wishing Venisin was around. She felt… skittish. Something wasn’t quite right, and she wished she could tell Venisin about all the little things that had been happening so Venisin could at least reassure her that everything would be fine, if not fix whatever the problem was entirely.

 

Instead she was alone. She began to do her morning yoga.

 

——

 

Kira felt compelled to go back to the forest. There was something a little bit worrying about that–compulsions for the cool, safe shade of trees and proximity to all the delicious foods within them were definitely not normal for her. But she couldn’t resist it. She’d tried working on the train again, but for some reason the detail work was giving her a headache. And it was always like there was an itch, and it got better the closer she was to the forest.

 

She found herself wandering the trees a twenty minutes later, keeping an ear out for noises, fleeing deeper into the trees at the slightest sounds.

 

She’d left the hab before she got a chance to eat anything, but luckily those delicious Affini shrubs were still around. They were about head height, so on impulse she grabbed a leaf directly with her mouth. It was satisfying, but then she remembered herself and grabbed the rest with her hands.

 

Eating made her sleepy again, and this time the walk all the way back to the hab unit seemed daunting. There were so many people, and the thought of being near them made her anxious. And her pillows were so uncomfortable today.

 

There was a leafy patch of ground nearby that looked so incredibly cozy. Kira curled up and settled in.

 

——

 

Kira woke up with a brief moment of clarity. Long enough to realize that something wasn’t right, and this was NOT normal. But not long enough to piece anything together. But something was definitely wrong, she needed help. She had a portable tablet with her in the pocket of the skirt she was wearing today, she dug around and grabbed it.

 

Kira tried to contact Venisin, but whenever she tried to use her tablet it seemed to blur beneath her. She had to get home. Some part of her whispered that home was here, in the safety of the forest, but Kira had enough logic still working and enough adrenaline still in her system to fight whatever that compulsion was.

 

Kira walked past a mirror on her way home and nearly screamed. Her haustoric implant had spread from the usual ring of needles around her neck down over her torso and the tops of her limbs, and was covering her with a thin coat of leaves. They were skinny, closer to pine needles than to the flat leaves she saw much more commonly on Affini architecture. They looked almost… fur like? The thought disappeared almost as soon as Kira could notice it, and instead left an empty feeling of fear.

 

She walked faster, and made it back to the hab unit in half the usual time. Venisin still wasn’t home, which was a dot Kira might have connected under normal circumstances. Instead she anxiously paced around the hab unit, missing the cool safety of the forest, with it’s open spaces and long sight lines.

 

She briefly tried to contact Venisin again, this time with the hab’s main tablet, but she struggled just as much as she had with her own, and gave up. Exhaustion caught up quickly and she found a corner where she could curl up for a nap.

 

——

 

Kira awoke in a panic. The room was too small, there weren’t enough escape avenues, she was trapped! She didn’t even bother getting all the way up, just ran on all fours to the front door. She tried to lift her arm to open it, and realized with horror her implant had spread further down. The not-fur had gone all the way down her arm, and now the color had turned a kind of dry brown, something between bark and a dried plant. 

 

Her hands meanwhile were held together by plant material to form thin points, with her middle three fingers touching the ground in a kind of triangle surrounded by stiff bark to help take her weight. Her legs had been inverted somehow? No, her feet were just sticking up, calves to thighs, like she was kneeling, but any flexing of her foot was being translated into a long branch below her simulated and actual knee, giving her a natural four legged gait and the forward facing legs characteristic of a rei–––––.

 

Kira was proud of herself for suppressing her panic long enough to figure out how to walk, but now it was rushing back, and before she could think too hard she nudged the hab’s door button with her nose and made for the woods. 

 

She stumbled on long shaky legs, tumbling into the Christmas tree she and Venisin had decorated just last week. That felt like a lifetime ago now. But she recovered, pulling herself back onto– thin hooves? They were hooves weren't they? The panic returned and she fled the yard.

 

Worse than the difficulty walking was everything in the streets. The festival lights that had seemed so pretty yesterday were suddenly scary, and when the firecracker from the Arboratis display went off Kira jumped so high she almost tipped over, and had to scramble to find her feet again. She saw someone leave a cafe and bolted for the other side of a fountain, but then there was an Affini coming down the other side of the street and she had to bolt again, and then she repeated that process over and over.

 

She finally hid in an alley, but then a concerned affini started to approach her and she bolted again.

 

She made it to the forest, and finally took a deep breath. She was on the verge of tears, but finally out of the scary city. Her hooven fingertips felt the soft earthy ground, her hind legs found some extra bounce, and the air smelt cool and leafy. Some of the stress dissipated, she was no longer in immediate danger.

 

But she also wasn’t safe. Not alone, she needed to find a herd. The fact that until a day ago she hadn’t been one for crowds didn’t even register on the horror scale anymore. Nevermind that she was distinctly avoiding anything human or affini, so that raised only frightening possibilities for the kinds of herds she might be looking for.

 

Even through the haze and the slippery memory Kira was starting to get a sense of what had happened. Her long spindly legs, the –•

• •
• • Kira’s thoughts crawled to a stop. •
• •

 

——

 

The only thing left was wandering and eating. The anxiety, the rapid beating of her heart, the fleeing. She was alone, no herd, and behind every tree might be a predator. She was constantly alert, jumpy, responding to the slightest sounds.

 

Kira had a brief flash of awareness when, with a sharp cut of horror, she realized she was regurgitating the leaves that she’d eaten earlier, and somehow she knew she needed to chew them again. Shame suffused her as she chewed her cud. Then the haze took her again.

 

Some unknowable time later Kira's awareness broke to the surface again when she saw her face in a pond. Leafy bark had extended over it, creating a more pointy appearance and an elongated snout. Her ears were pointy. And of course everything was covered in the brown not-fur.

 

She turned her body and confirmed what she already knew about her feet. To her surprise, or maybe not quite surprise, she had a short bushy tail. She wondered for just a moment what had happened to her companion dress, before a noise in the bushes sent her on high alert, and her newfound instincts washed away her conscious thought once more.

 

——

 

Eventually Kira had clawed back enough awareness to consistently feel the fear. From there she managed to slowly piece things together. When she focused, really focused, she even managed some understanding of what happened, but she could never maintain it for long. Her reindeer instincts were driving her, and she was just a scared, horrified passenger. And then she’d exhaust herself, the need for food and then sleep would grow larger and larger, and the haze would take her higher reasoning once again.

 

It was almost a relief when she was captured.

 

——

 

It’d been two days since Venisin had last seen Kira, which meant it was time to do a little retrieval.

 

Venisin wasn’t using a locator for this, she wanted the thrill of the hunt. The forest Kira was in was large by human standards, but not something an Affini would have difficulty with. She started on the side closest to the hab unit and almost immediately found the tracks. Her little leaf must have been so scared, to barrel right through a fairly thick hedge separating the park cafe from the woods.

 

Venisin ruffled in pleasure and began her chase.

 

——

 

In the end she only lost track once, when her little petal had gotten extra confused and retraced her own steps multiple times. But even that didn’t take long, and soon Venisin’s vines sensed Kira’s proximity.

 

Her little reindeer was hiding in a copse of trees in the densest part of the forest. 

 

Silent like a ghost Venisin raised herself into the trees. Just like in the jungles of her native homeworld, vines hung themselves from the trees all around her Kira. They were slow enough in appearing that even a skittish beast like her pet didn’t spook. Venisin herself watched from directly above as Kira sat on the forest floor, resting a chewing her cud. 

 

It was only a matter of time until her little floret ran into one. Kira got up, tried to walk somewhere else, and fell into Venisin’s trap. The zap elicited a sharp wail from the little deer’s throat. The haze and memory alteration had conveniently taken away Kira’s familiar comfort with Venisin’s often painful touch. But it was already too late. The vine stuck, curled around its prey, and slowly, with plenty of thrashing, dragged it to Venisin’s core. Kira’s thrashing only caused additional vines to make contact, and the reindeer became progressively more entangled as it struggled along the forest floor.

 

Eventually her victim was right beneath her, and Kira finally looked up. The pure unadulterated fear that Venisin found on her little leaf’s not-quite-human face went straight to her core, and suffused her with pleasure. The trembling, twitching, struggling limbs, made long and spindly by Venisin’s modifications, the rapid, twitching breaths, it was almost too much. 

 

Venisin stayed in the moment, drinking in her florets suffering, for long enough that some of her capture vines started to relax. But then it was time to end things. She deposited herself back on the forest floor in something resembling her normal shape. Then she untangled the vines holding Kira and deposited her a human arm's length away. She tapped the back of the haustronic implant with the electric impulse that would begin dissolving the mental modifications.

 

This was always one of her favorite parts, too.

 

Kira’s irises came back into focus as the mental block allowed her conscious thinking back in. She stared at Venisin wide eyed as awareness came back, and the memories of the last three days came with it. Then those same beautiful eyes widened even more as the horror of what had happened washed over her.

 

Kira’s eyes shone, with worship and submission, as she ever so slowly broke out in sobs. She threw herself at Venisin, and Venisin wrapped her in her vines and pulled her against her pulsing core.

 

“I was so scared, so so scared. So alone, so alone and unsafe and I was just looking and looking and… And I missed you so much!”

 

"Shhhh, next time I’ll give you a little herd of other reindeer, so you can relax just a little bit more." She gave Kira the tenderest of vine strokes. "But only a little bit."

 

Venisin felt Kira shiver, that lovely combination of want and fear. She picked Kira up, still wrapped securely, and carried her out of the forest as the implant’s more physical changes slowly reverted themselves. The internal modifications to enable the cud chewing would take a little bit longer, and probably shouldn’t happen until Kira was asleep or sedated or at the very least restrained.

 

But that could wait, it would make a delightful source of embarrassment at tomorrow’s Christmas party.

 

Her little leaf shivered again, which usually meant another step on her road towards processing something difficult. 

 

“I love you, Mistress. Thank you.”

 

The phrase was accompanied by a nuzzle from Kira’s once-again-human face, as if she could bury any deeper into Venisin. The advantage of being a giant plant was that Kira could, and Venisin let her slip a little further in. One of her internal vines stroked Kira’s face, and Venisin walked them past the light displays back towards the hab unit, feeling the whole way like the luckiest plant in the galaxy.