Clem had a tough time adjusting after his overseas trip, what with the business meetings, jet lag, and near-drowning experience. He'd enjoyed the side trip he'd taken as a tourist, visiting some little-known hot springs, and that part that went poorly wasn't one that he'd brag about. He made it home and slept all weekend.

On Monday at lunchtime, he left the office for his favorite pancake restaurant. A light rain began, and by the time he'd parked it was coming down hard. Clem braced himself and rushed out of the car, clutching a book under his jacket. The storm drenched him immediately. Crossing the parking lot, he wobbled. His feet suddenly ached, all his skin prickled as with tiny needles, and he struggled to stand. He feared for his health. He staggered toward the door, yanked it open, and fell to his hands and knees.

A customer saw him and screamed. Clem felt his fingernails digging into the dirty carpet. He propped himself up. With a ripping noise his toes seemed to tear right through the front of his shoes, revealing golden hair and black claws. When he looked up from this hallucination, three people now stood in the entryway including a cook clutching a frying pan and a man recording him on a phone instead of being useful.

"Help!" Clem said. Something felt wrong with his teeth too, like they were pushing forward. He lost his balance again and felt something yanking his jacket up and away from him.

"What are you?!" said a thin, panicky waiter hiding behind the counter.

"The guy who orders the cheese grits and short stack every week!" His words slurred. He raised one hand from the floor and it hit his mouth with a clack. He went cross-eyed trying to see how that'd happened, too far from his face. He found a hard, smooth surface jutting out. His smallest two fingers had stuck together and he could hardly move them separately. The skin looked bright yellow, scaly even, with black nails. "Seeing things," he mumbled, and his mouth clacked open and shut.

"Don't you move!" said the cook with pan held high.

Another customer spoke up from the side, saying, "Dude, if it can talk it's not gonna eat you."

"Are you gonna eat us?" said the waiter.

"No, damn it!" Clem said. "What's happening? Get this jacket off me. There's something in it."

A relatively brave man approached and tried to pull Clem's jacket off. It tore along with his shirt, leaving him craning his neck to see big, feathery wings popping out along his back. They twitched and ached as though long confined. He wobbled and fell back over at that point, dazed.

Whatever hallucination this was, remained when he could focus again. He was laying in the same spot, surrounded by rags, wearing bits of cloth and leather. The individual torn threads of a scrap six feet away stood out clearly.

He wobbled upright, or thought he did, only to discover he was on all fours. Standing up on his feet didn't go as well, making him feel he was leaning back on hips not built for it. The sense of heavy blankets thudded behind him, against the doorway. When he turned to see those again he fell over and they spread, banging painfully into the walls and dropping him back to his hands.

"What is this?" A cop had arrived and was standing with one hand on his holster. "Uh, sir, you can talk?"

"Yes."

"I need you to take the costume off --"

The filming customer said, "There's no costume, officer. We all saw him change."

The cop stood there bewildered. Then muttered into a radio. To Clem he said, "Whatever this is, you're making a disturbance. Can you go outside? The rain's nearly stopped."

That seemed like a good idea. Walking wasn't, though. He toddled a few steps to get just outside with someone holding the door before he flopped over again, wings flailing and whacking a guy. When Clem fell over, he felt the rush of air across those big things, spreading wide and slowing his fall. Blushing, he said, "I can't walk." He was able to crawl out of the doorway, though, and his arms somehow took his weight well. The feel of his scaly hands and claws clicking on the wet concrete made him look up at the grey sky, then at the fact that no part of him looked human at all. A long, tufted tail with feathers along its edges flicked behind him. He went cross-eyed looking at a bulging shape where his nose ought to be. A beak!

"I look like a griffin!" he said. Rain tickled his back and dripped down his wings. He could make them twitch, giving him a mix of excitement and fear that they'd suddenly fling him into the iron clouds.

"That's great, sir. You need to move on though."

"How, exactly? My car is over there." He started to point with one hand, wobbled, caught himself, and managed a three-point stance while jabbing a talon toward his Nissan.

"We could get you to a... hospital? A vet? I don't even know."

"I'm going to see if I can get a ride home. I can panic when I get there." He looked around and called out, "Did anyone see my keys? And my wallet?"

Using the keys turned into a challenge. He was able to hold them while on two legs and one hand again. Then to push a button to unlock the car door. He made a valiant effort to get into the driver's seat, but quickly found he had too many limbs and would only hurt himself. "Will you shut that camera off," he snapped at the restaurant customer. The guy shook his head. Clem started cursing him out till one of the others told the snoop, "Dude, put it down," and got him to quit.

Clem snorted through little holes around his beak. The big thing sticking out from his face unnerved him. He retrieved his phone and discovered his talons didn't work on the touchscreen. He needed an old-fashioned phone, a thought that troubled him because he was hoping not to be stuck this way. There had to be some fix for all this, somehow! Forcing himself to focus on solutions, he got someone to call a taxi service that offered handicap-accessible vans. Currently that was what he was; maybe he could get a parking tag to hang on his tail.

The man who made the call got into a lengthy discussion of how he'd be picking up a "pet", a well-behaved one, and that led to an aggravating couple of transfers before the company actually sent someone. Even then, the policeman had to intervene to explain to the driver that Clem just wanted a ride home and was not going to maul anybody.

The driver looked at Clem's beak and talons, and at the claws on his feet. "Oh yeah? If this, this critter is really safe, how come you're still here?"

The cop grimaced. "I'm still figuring out what to put on the paperwork."

Clem crawled up into the van. He grimaced; the carpet felt dirty and a bit sticky. The driver got in and said, "What is this? What's going on?"

"I don't know. I have to get somewhere safe and figure this out."

He got home and tipped the driver with cash. He'd been carrying his phone, keys, and wallet in an awkward sling made from what was left of his shirt. Sitting up on his hindlegs wasn't too hard and that freed his hands for opening his townhouse's front door. He looked furtively around but had gotten around to the door, out of sight, and there'd been no commotion. He got through, turned, started shutting the door, saw his own tail about to get squashed, panicked, and shoved the door with one hand. It shot back out with claw marks in the wood. His heart raced and he reached down to grab his tail for safety. His hand tickled the feathers along it. It was warm and the touch against it made his wings twitch too. He looked down from the feathers along his chest to where they faded into lion fur. This change still baffled him, but it wasn't all bad. Maybe he'd get to fly, physics willing, or he could at least learn to glide. Something to try later.

For the moment he had to pause and think. A good way to do that might be the shower. He fortunately had a big one. He stacked several towels on the bathroom counter and shut himself away to get rinsed and relaxed. He paused on the way in, to brace himself on the towel rack and peer into the mirror. An eagle-like face looked back at him with bright blue eyes and pointed, feline ears. Despite the view of a beak in his vision he could see straight forward without trouble. Seeing this creature copy his movements unnerved him.

Shaking his head, Clem trotted into the shower. He could spread his wings slightly in this glass-walled space.

The relaxation was not to be. A few seconds after he got under the hot water, he felt the prickle of all his feathers standing on end. They were shrinking! His wings twitched and not only folded away but shrank rapidly into his back. He was now leaning against the shower wall, in only his human skin. Clem stared at himself as though he weren't familiar with this shape. Steam clouded the room. "What just happened?"

Convenient, anyway! He stood there trying to understand, scrubbing his hands after all that walking on them. Did grime carry over? He'd been having enough trouble washing as a griffin that now, the townhouse's heater ran out, and the shower plunged in temperature.

Which rapidly sent him back to paws and talons, with wings bumping the walls and his beak thumping the glass door. He felt the water seeming to pour feathers onto him, spilling out across his face farther and farther as his beak extended again.

Clem squawked and flailed at the shower controls until the water shut off. He shivered and felt himself fluff out. "It's the water doing this!" He thought back to the hot springs visit. There'd been a tour guide muttering incomprehensibly as Clem got out of the pond he'd fallen into. That had at least been a comfortably warm spring and not a boiling one. Good thing he hadn't changed like this back there, where he might've been unable to go home at all.

Could that incident be related to these transformations? He had no better explanation. He was enchanted somehow. But he could still apply science!

Clem shook out his feathers and fur as well as he was able, then clutched a towel in his talons and used that. He was ticklish under his wings. He trotted out of the shower on all fours and into his living room to peer at the kitchen. What he'd try next was to heat some water on the stove. He struggled with the pot and sink, but this body wasn't too clumsy. When he tried to stand up like a normal person he was unsteady, shorter than he was used to, and his tail and wings kept flicking to help him balance. It was more comfortable to crouch, but then he couldn't reach the sink. Maybe a stepstool would work.

He laughed. No, obviously he didn't need one because he was going to fix this somehow and go back to being a normal human. Still, he wanted to see...

He stretched tall again, grabbed the pot with one hand, braced against the counter with the other, then risked using that hand to run the sink. He wobbled but managed to get some water and shut it off without crashing. The next test was the stove. It was like was wearing some ungainly costume as he turned around, still trying to walk on two legs. One lion paw in front of the other, he urged himself. His wings twitched and he held out the heavy pot like an offering to keep from toppling backward. "These things are a liability. Probably don't even work."

While he was grumbling, he staggered far enough to reach the stove and thump the pot into place. All right! He planned his next moves. He had a hand free to get balance by grabbing the oven door... which started to swing open. He wobbled and this time his wings worked in his favor, helping to push his torso forward enough to keep steady. He slapped one hand down on the stovetop with a click of talons, then turned a knob for moderate electric heat on the other side. He went through the motions again more carefully to make sure he could shut the thing off again, then backed off. He stood in the middle of the kitchen on two paws. He looked around for clearance, then let himself flop down again. His arms took the impact better than he would've thought; they felt sturdy and certainly didn't bother him as much as crawling would normally cause. He practiced walking into the more open space of his living room, between couch and television.

Practice? He didn't need it, since this would be over and done with soon, somehow.

Clem tried to figure out which muscles controlled his wings. They'd been waggling and  twitching all the time or laying limp like a heavy jacket. The jacket metaphor was doubly accurate because trying to reach consciously for those limbs was like flailing around in the dark to put clothes on, not sure which hole was where. It took a minute before he got one wing to flick up and down on purpose, then another to repeat the process with the other. He gave one quick downward slap of both. They felt like they wanted to push backwards as well as down, like oars. He didn't hurt himself when they hit the floor either; he'd thought of that and didn't push too hard. Even so, he'd felt lighter, pushed upward as though in a falling elevator. His ears flicked higher. That was just a test. He needed to climb up on something that ranked in between floor flapping, and throwing himself off the roof. Maybe his bed? But he could try that later. He needed to be human again!

He returned to the kitchen and carefully raised himself to feel the air above the pot. Hot but not dangerous. He didn't know how much he needed, so that was the next test. A way to bring some science and sanity back. He shut the stove off and grabbed the handle to carry his hot water supply back to the bathroom. He made it halfway there before having to drop the thing on a table, grab a chair, and steady himself again. Maybe he could grab the handle with his beak. He leaned up and got a grip, but right away it started to slip and it felt no easier than trying to hold a hammer in human teeth. Bad balance. He'd need a rubber grip... if he were going to try this kind of thing regularly. For now he wobbled back onto two legs and carried the pot the normal way, but set it down safely when he needed to. One more stint on all fours and back up let him finally bring the pot into the shower stall.

"Ha! That wasn't too hard."

He checked himself out in the mirror again. The bird tilted its head and he let out a chirp, then pressed one taloned hand to his beak. "What kind of majesty is that? I sound like a squeaky hinge." He coughed and tried to do a proper mighty eagle noise. He only ended up sounding silly, and feeling his chest vibrate with laughter from powerful lungs. "Need some practice if I'm going to be a movie star."

He blinked at the idea. Maybe he could really do that! Or make money doing advertising, or something like that. Appearing in public was probably the best way to avoid getting grabbed by wild animal control. There could be problems, yeah. The next step was to go human and have some normality.

He looked back at the slowly cooling water. As far as he could tell, he could control this shifting and only the exact rules were uncertain. That and how the heck this had happened at all, which was beyond any experiment he could do right now.

Really, he didn't have to do the hot-water test right away. The creaky heater should catch up soon enough to let him take a quick hot shower within the hour. He'd proven he could do basic things on his own in this shape. Sure, he'd probably need some custom tools to avoid making a fool of himself, but he could get by. He flexed one avian hand. Different, less dexterous, but usable. The mind behind it was more important.

For the moment he made his way to the bedroom and found he could hop up like a cat, springing with his hindlegs and landing in a wobbling stance on the covers. He turned, figured out how to spread his wings, and gave them a flap. He surged. The down-and-back beat pushed him only slightly upward, and his wingtips brushed the wall behind him, but he felt himself leave the bed for an instant. "A Kitty Hawk moment," he said. He did little, tentative flaps. Still not ready for the rooftop, but he wanted to try the park at night. Yeah. It was only a few blocks away, there were benches to climb on with wide open space around, and he could bring a few hot-water thermos bottles. Illegal to sneak in by moonlight, but who would notice?

He did need to experiment to find out whether the thermos method would land him back in human shape when he was done fooling around. Clem flicked his tail and raised his ears high. As weird as all this was, he was starting to look forward to more of it!