(Rat_lady7: Thanks.
I already posted in the
discussion thread for this RP, in which I included that information.)
The strange creature groggily awoke at the edge of the Mysterious Beyond. Having been lying on his stomach, he pushed itself up onto his hands and knees, before standing up, balancing uncertainly on his hind legs.
Instinctively he reached for his glasses, before realizing that he could see perfectly (better than usual, in fact), even though he wasn’t wearing them. Furthermore he noticed that his glasses weren’t anywhere near him. He wasn’t even in his room! In fact, he didn’t recognize where he was at all! Springing fully awake at this realization, he scanned his surroundings with a panicked expression. He appeared to be in a small open rocky area, surrounded by tall, pointed boulders. Enormous mountains towered imposingly in the distance.
“Okay,” he thought aloud, attempting to calm himself, “When I’m dreaming, I usually wake up once I become aware that I’m dreaming. So I can be reasonably certain that I’m not dreaming right now.” At that moment he noticed something anomalous at the edge of his peripheral vision. Holding his arm in front of his face, he squawked in surprise (something that was actually not abnormal for him to do) to see that it was covered in dark reddish feathers.
“What the heck?! I’ve turned into a bird overnight?! How does that happen?!” But he discarded the possibility that he was a bird upon noting that his hand still had its fingers. Granted, there were fewer of them, and they were longer, and tipped with claws. But they definitely did not belong to any modern-day bird. His initial shock replaced by curiosity, he twisted his head around in an attempt to examine himself.
Not just his arms (which, as he noted, were now large, flamboyant wings), but his entire body was covered in feathers. Those on his belly and the underside of his wings were tawny yellow, while the rest were a dark red or maroon. Even his legs were feathered, all the way down to his feet. Twisting his neck (now much longer and more flexible) to look behind him, he saw that he had a long tail, tipped with a fan of yellow feathers, which he quickly discovered contained muscles that he could flex and twitch. “Definitely not an avian characteristic,” he thought, his heart pounding with growing excitement.
Only now did he carefully run his hands over his head and face, investigating its shape and texture by touch. He felt a crest of feathers, similar to those adorning his tail, on the nape of his neck, and a dully pointed, unfeathered muzzle that he estimated to be about twice as long as his head was high. Clicking his jaws together, he discovered that they contained teeth. Testing them with his tongue, he found them to be moderately sharp; the teeth of a carnivore or insectivore. It was the confirmation that he possessed teethótogether with the clawed hands and bony tailóthat cemented his certainty of what he had become.
“I dunno how it happened,” he muttered, speaking aloud as he often did, “but I’ve gone back in time and turned into some sort of maniraptoran theropod. One with feathers on its legs. Maybe
Pedopenna or
Microraptor.” The thought sunk in. “Holy buckets, I’m a dinosaur!”
