… but it fell on him anyways. The effect was immediate. There, in broad daylight, surrounded by strangers, he doubled over at the bizarre sensations flooding his growing body, crying out in confusion and discomfort… not quite pain, though. After about a second, the cries started coming out wrong, his voice distorting into much more frightening growls. This made the people around him terrified, of course, and he couldn’t really blame them. He was scared too! His claws were huge, his tongue long and pointed and terrible, his fur was dark and shaggy… he was a monster!
One person hadn’t run away, though… his friend had stayed with him. They were hesitant to approach at first, but that changed when he finally managed to force his transformed jaws to speak his name out, in a desperate attempt to let his friend know that it was still him in there. They ran up and hugged him immediately after that, causing him to recoil. Strange instincts poked as his mind… so easy to resist, a part of the curse meant simply to scare him. It worked for a while… everything about this was terrifying to him. But he found peace in his friend’s refusal to be afraid, and as the hours went by, it started to rub off on him too.
His fur was really soft, after all… and the way his ears swiveled around in response to sounds was cute… even the tail was pretty fun! He’d survive this for sure… and so he did, changing back by the start of the next day.
Three days later, when he began to transform again, he wasn’t as afraid. He knew to run off somewhere private before his legs started changing, and call his friend quickly… and so things were perfectly fine. This time he even managed to make use of his new form’s incredible strength to take care of a few heavy lifting tasks.
Over the following months, he kept changing at more-or-less random intervals. That was the only part of the ordeal that still scared him. Whenever the transformation began, it startled him pretty badly… but even that became less true with time.
One night, the curse did something different… it targeted his friend, instead. Surely this would be devastating…!
But they were okay. They were ready for this sort of thing, after all.