FSE

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Dying sucks. There is nothing at all worse in this world or any world than to be dying. Especially when you know that there's nothing you can do stop it. Even worse when there is the notion that ever after you have died your body may still go on, years even, all without you. It all started with the draft. It's funny. Even though you grow up knowing that there is always the possibility that you could be selected for in the draft there is a part of you that always just thinks that it could never happen to you. The odds are just too slim. Heck the odds of being chosen in this draft are about as good as it is for you to win the lottery. Only about one hundred people in the country are chosen in the draft any given year, and out of over three hundred million, what are the odds, right? But then that notice comes and to make sure you don't try to do something like flee from your fate the moment you are told that you have been selected for the draft you have an armed guard with you at every single moment. The only way out is death and to go through with it is another kind of death.

Being selected for the draft only really means a single year of required service. Theoretically once that year has ended you are free to go if you wish. But of all the thousands of people throughout the world that have been selected for the draft over the years not a single one has ever returned back to their old life. To be selected for the draft means that in all essence your life as you know is over. Who you are is dead. Or will be. And should you somehow manage to survive a year in that hell you'll likely come out so very much changed from the person you once were that no one would even be able to recognize you.

To be fair, the least everyone does is to accept your fate. No one tries to sugar coat things for you. No one lies to you. Everyone tells you exactly what is going to be the end result. For the week or two they give you to set all your affairs in order you get to go around your life being treated as if you were already dead, and all just to keep the peace. A treaty had been made. To prevent an invasion a simple game was set up. They send in all of their criminals, all of those deemed to be irreconcilable and send them through the gateway to our world, letting us know in advance when these gates are being opened. And then once opened they come through and it is the responsibility of those drafted to stop them.

Going through the gauntlet of our draftees is considered a pardon to them. Of course they televise the entire thing. Make a big deal about it. To them we draftees are almost celebrities in our own way. They even make trading cards of us all. That's sick, right? But that's their part of the bargain. Make us out to be heroes. Showboat us around for all to see and make a butt load of money televising us effectively carrying out the death penalty to all of those that the society has deemed unfit to stay in their world. And in exchange for all that we make it something extremely unpalatable to invade. To invade us would not only eliminate the source of income to them that we provide, it would eliminate the entertainment value that we represent but it would also mean that they would be fighting a war where these people propped up as heroes and celebrities would be the first and for the most part only line of defense between them and the rest of the world.

Heh, to think about all the difference between our world and their own. To us, those selected for the draft are dead and paid no more mind than they do to soldiers fighting in some other country. Sure when one of us dies it is mentioned in the news, but then again the main reason for that is that when one dies, it means a draft will be coming shortly. But beyond that no one could give a rat's ass one bit of deference to us. And yet if one were to go to the other side of the portal there are probably those that almost compete with each other to see who knows the most information about as many of us as possible. We are a spectacle to them. Everything we do matters to them.

And that gets to the creepy part. We are told repeatedly that they will be able to see everything we do from the moment we are drafted. They apparently have a few different levels of service. The basic package for them is to only see what is broadcasted of the battles between their criminals and the drafted. One level above that lets them be able to see what is going on in any of the public areas in the place that we will be sleeping, training, living. And the top level lets them basically have a free camera, so to speak. It's not so much an actual camera so much as a spell of some sort. Either way it lets them go wherever they want so long as it is either on one of our complexes or is following one of us. If they wanted to watch us take a shower, they could. If they wanted to watch us take a shit, they could. And there would be nothing we are allowed to do to stop them from doing so.

And to make things more fun. In the heat of the battle there is a condition we must abide by at all times. For apparently just sending their criminals at us is too simple. No, they send volunteers as well. People who literally have paid for the chance to go up against us in battle while we are fighting to keep our land safe. And if one of these surrender, we cannot kill them. So not only are we fighting for our lives against people who do truly want us dead and are given no chance to surrender but we also have to deal with those who can. If a criminal surrenders, it's the death penalty for them anyway. So they don't surrender. And if we for some reason kill one of the volunteers after they have surrendered then we have to go be put on trial by their laws, and if found guilty killed. Blood for blood.

Now if one were to die suddenly, either by dying from any order of attack, then it is okay if they haven't already surrendered. After all it would be too much of a burden on us to have to hold back, especially in dealing with some that would have no such restrictions. But if one were to get in combat and then surrender when they become certain that they've lost then we have to yield to them. Once surrendered, we have to hold off on any more attacks on them. Apparently the ones in charge will be the ones that take care of ensuring they get away properly. But when dealing with the concept of magic it doesn't really surprise me that they'd put in place some sort of mechanism to that extent.

But I'm probably getting ahead of myself a bit. The battles come later. The first thing they once they've finally collected you is to ship you to a special place on the planet. All of the new draftees chosen throughout the world are gathered in one place. They perform a bunch of tests on us, likely to see whether or not we are fit enough to participate. Or I guess more importantly whether or not we will likely survive the process they put us through. All things considered whether or not someone is overweight or out of shape doesn't really have much of an impact on whether they are rejected or not.

Once they've deemed you fit for service they give you some drugs to take and then send you back to your room, telling you that the drugs will make sure you survive the next step. It's probably a lie, as it is likely the drugs that actually cause the next step, but who's to say. A few hours later they take a blood sample, probably making sure that the drug has fully dissolved into your body. If it hasn't then it's more drugs. Once everyone has sufficient quantity of the drug in their system they take us all into this one big room with a very scary looking laser like device aimed right at us. And to add insult to injury they stripped us all down, so that there would be no clothing to interfere and potentially mess up the results. And going into it there is always that irrational hope that maybe it just won't work on you. Logically it's never happened. From all the times they've done this there has never been a single time when the process has failed to work on them. The effects are completely different for each person but they never fail to produce them. But even with that there is a hope beyond hope in the back of your mind telling you that maybe you'll be lucky. That despite all the odds you'll be the first to ever make it out of this process completely unscathed and return home. And the fact this possibility is covered in the list of things we have to be told and signed doesn't help. They made the contingency in the off chance it ever did happen and felt compelled to tell everyone what would happen if it happened to them but as of yet the odds of that off chance seem to be zero.

And then they turn the machine on and a light comes from the tip and hits you. Well to be fair that's sort of a lie. You never see anything come from the device. But a light turns on at the tip of the laser and then you feel a force hit you, like someone just turned on a really powerful fan and hit you with an impressive burst of wind for half a second before instantly turning it off. Anticipating the change you almost begin to hyperventilate and clench your arms as hard as you can, partly out of the panic of knowing what is to come and partly from the irrational thought that maybe if you tried hard enough you could completely stifle the process, prevent it from taking any effect. Which is of course an illusion. It's never failed to produce the effects. And from the panic and the anticipation you begin to feel the effects of the process probably before they've actually started. Which increases the amount of clenching and trying to fight something that cannot be fought and the effort causes everyone to start groaning from the exertion.

The changes are small at first, bits of fur growing along the length of your arm or chest, a rippling along the stomach for those with a bit of a paunch. And that just even further increases the panic. To say that the process hurts would be a complete lie. You can feel the body changing, but graciously the process seems to have completely turned off our ability to feel pain. It is like going to the dentist. When they work on your mouth they rub all that Novocain along your mouth until it has been completely numbed. And though you can definitely feel what they are doing, it doesn't technically hurt. Except your mind doesn't really take to that well. There is the expectation to deal with. Yes it doesn't hurt but in your mind you know that something like what they are doing in your mouth should hurt and so it imagines the pain on top of it. And so you superimpose the pain on top of something that isn't there. This is like that, but over the entire body.

You think that it should hurt when your bones begin to shift and change, when the more major changes begin to come over you and so you imagine it does. Eventually one of the people in the room begin to scream out in imagined agony and it creates a chain reaction amongst everyone else. A scream of agony from someone in the similar state gives the brain more credence to believe that the pain that doesn't exist, does. And so soon everyone is screaming out from the pain of their changing bodies, made all the more painful to hear from ears growing larger and more sensitive. But that pain is only used to further fuel the fire of the pain of your body betraying you bit by bit. You drop down as your feet begin to alter themselves, growing longer, thicker, changing configuration so that no longer can your heels stay comfortably on the ground when standing. A new sensation begins to flood the senses; a thing that wasn't in existence suddenly now is. Despite yourself you turn to look and see a thin little whispy looking thing growing out from behind you, the tip beginning to grow the same fur as the rest of your body. Thankfully the hands seem to stay mainly that, hands. Fur does seem to grow along the back of it and the skin changes color on the front but that seems to be the only change there. Not that anyone is paying attention. Your hands are clenched so tightly, still futilely trying to hold back the tide of changes, that in some the nails have pierced through flesh, drawing blood.

That there are things beginning to grow on your chest and another part of you beginning to shrink is briefly noted in the back of your mind, the part that is trying to catalogue all the changes to maintain a sense of what you should look like by difference. But that part of your mind is greatly overshadowed by everything else that is happening to you. That's a thing but more attention is paid to the feet, the tail, and more importantly the head than to what is and is not growing on your torso. Eventually as the major changes reach a conclusion, as you get to the point that there isn't any more great sensation of bones grating against each other, of muscles snapping and reforming, the pain ebbs. And in almost every single case by this point in the process everyone has curled up into as close to a fetal position as they can, crying out at the violation their body has put them through. And that is how we're left for a few more minutes, crying softly in shock while holding on to our knees and staring forward, trying not to see any single part of our body and futilely convince ourselves that it didn't happen. It's an impossibility, though. The muzzle is a dead giveaway; that and the tail curled up between our legs trying to give us some form of comfort.

And that is how we die, and how we will die. A power to fight monsters at the cost of one's humanity. But there is a hope in that. A small sliver of a chance. Over the course of twenty-four hours we regain half of our remaining humanity. Ideally if we never used the form ever again we could end up in a state of being completely human again given long enough time. But there is one tiny little hitch in that. As we grow to accept our new bodies, our humanity slips away bit by bit. Thankfully it only works on what is being accepted. An avian species becoming more comfortable with the notion of having wings for flight can still end up almost human, they just will always have wings. So thus begins a constant war against ourselves. To deny what our new body is as much as possible and try not to use the ability to change back into our more bestial forms. You might think that considering what is at stake that one would never try and go through with it but it does have a few key features. For one, our ability to cast magic is related to how much of our "final" form we are in. Once completely human we would lose the ability to cast magic or do anything that could be considered superhuman. Which during the time still drafted would be an extreme handicap. Possible, but would take quite a bit of doing. Second, the act of transforming back into that form heals any and all wounds, giving a second chance. So if backed into a corner our only option may be to die or to transform, getting a second wind as not only would our abilities suddenly become a long stronger but we will be entering the battle anew at full strength. But doing so makes us fully animal again. And that's the crux. To fight from accepting any and all parts of your new form, to use what resources it gives you to their utmost as much as possible in the meantime and then have that small trump card lying in wait, knowing that you can just transform again to stay alive one more day and know that you have to start the battle afresh.

They let us sit there for a few moments, settle down a little bit, but then again it might be just them working to begin pouring in the gas in on us. For it would be best to make sure that the entire process is completed in everyone before doing something like adding another compound into the mix. But the gas isn't enough to fully knock us out, just keep us slightly sedated so that they can put us into wheelchairs and wheel us away to another room without much of a fight. And then with us still trying to come to terms with what all has happened to us they take us to a bright and shiny room with a glowing ring of energy and then put in some commands into it and it glows brighter and they wheel each person in one at a time, often having to pause between entries to go change the commands. And after I am wheeled in I find myself here, in this infirmary, being given loads of tests.