(Special thanks to @DuoRogue for inspiring this idea!)
It was a hot summer day on Delta Theta, and on any other habitable planet that’d mean it was perfect weather for wearing sandals. Here, there were warnings against such things, but Andrew had lived here for over a year now, and nothing bad had happened to him last summer. Nobody would tell him what footwear to use! Besides, those kinds of things only happened to other people—
Andrew’s train of thought came screeching to a halt as his foot plunged into what’d looked like solid ground just a moment ago. Now, though, it rippled like liquid, despite its surface bearing the appearance of sand. It reminded him of some kind of bug in a video game, like water incorrectly using the ground’s texture. The comparison soon fell apart, however, as the sandy surface crackled and shifted, revealing a pink, viscous substance underneath… in which his foot was embedded, of course.
A shift in the goop caused Andrew to lurch forward, and he put out his hands to brace himself against his imminent impact with the ground, only for them to meet more fake earth and sink into it with an almost comical splash. No such shift would have occurred if this man had simply heeded the warnings and worn close-toed shoes, since these creatures identify potential prey by taste, only activated upon contact with their skin. This species didn’t prey on humans, though. Their digestive chemicals only worked on Delta Theta’s native species. The effects they had on humans were much, much stranger than that…
As Andrew would now experience firsthand.
The sandy layer that used to coat this creature had completely crumbled away now, revealing the pink puddle that all four of Andrew’s limbs were now partially submerged in. The substance, unlike the sand that’d caked it, was quite cool, even pleasantly so if the frightening nature of this situation could be ignored. It began its attempt at digesting the poor fool by slowly drawing together and crawling up his body. Struggling didn’t make the process faster or anything, but that’s because it simply did nothing at all. There was some clear display of intelligence as the goo carefully routed itself under Andrew’s clothing, making him squirm terribly as it got between his skin and the fabric. Before it even finished its journey, however, the human felt his feet, and then his hands, tingle and sting gently. The digestive chemicals were trying to do their thing, now.
He’d heard of what these things did to humans, but found it incredibly hard to believe. Not that it necessarily defied science, as humanity had long since figured out body modding… it just didn’t make any sense! And then his feet began to change, and his attention was captured completely.
They stretched. There were no gross cracking sounds or sudden lurches or even much pain to speak of. They just began to lose a bit of definition and stretch and swell. Five toes turned painlessly to four, and his heels pressed into the back of his sandals… and simply deformed and squished against them. He himself was becoming squishier, like his slimy captor, and it was spreading up his legs and beginning in his fingers too! The goo was translucent enough to let him watch as his sandals (his poor, poor sandals!) finally snapped apart, setting his smooth, squishy paws free.
Speaking of paws, jeez, his fingers weren’t doing great. He kept the same number of them, for whatever reason, but they got so much thicker… and at some point his nails had apparently just vanished? So had the hairs on his arms and legs, in fact. Oh no, was he gonna be bald?? The thought was interrupted by an absurd pressure mounting in his backside and releasing just as quickly, gigantic tail spilling out and thumping onto the ground. His rear and thighs were, at the very least, somewhat thicker to support this weight… actually, he was at least a little bit thicker everywhere affected by the changes. His legs in particular were a little more animal-like, though. Made his shorts mighty uncomfortable, but he was simply too squishy to tear through them.
Trying to stay calm as the slime crawled up his neck to his face, Andrew took in a deep breath and held it. His mouth and nose were promptly covered, but he was prepared— sensations crashed down upon his ears and face and he lost composure almost immediately. His ears sprang up, almost rabbit-like in their height, and the lower half of his face bloated out into something like a muzzle, consuming his nose in the process and reducing it to barely-visible nostrils. The goo seemed hesitant to journey into the short-ish, dark-ish hair atop his head… maybe the product or even the natural oils in it tasted bad? Either way it didn’t touch it. In fact the goo all over Andrew’s body was finally starting to fall away, starting with the rather explosive growth of his muzzle flinging the stuff right off and allowing him to gasp for breath!
Andrew stood from the puddle and stepped out of it on strange, wobbly legs. His destroyed sandals still clung to his feet, and the goo had done an excellent job of ridding his body of itself completely. His squishy, somewhat shiny skin now bore its pink coloration, and his spit tasted sweet, but the lifeform itself was no longer on him. He looked down at his changed body and sighed, and thought about how much it’d probably cost to get this fixed. Having a muzzle in his vision wasn’t the worst thing in the world, and his bones gaining the ability to bend like rubber was… interesting, at least. There were weirder and worse looks, to be sure.
But none that screamed “I ignored the warnings and paid for it” quite like this one. His buddies were gonna find this hilarious.