Cytotoxicity

He was alone, seemingly left to rot in the middle of the impenetrable forest of coniferous trees, expanding into disordered rows for as far as the eye can see. The figure sat in the middle of the trees, the invisible sun basking his skin in its warm light that was being filtered through the trees. He sighed contently as the warmth increased, a few birds floated by his vision. He closed eyes and rested, smiling as the water floated in a nearby stream over the black river rock.

His train of thought was not derailed as two men slowly entered the padded room towards the straight jacketed figure, one holding at small syringe of medication. Still the figure continued to stare out the window. "Derek?" said one of the men while spinning the syringe with practiced, calloused hands. The jacketed figure continued to stare out the window, unfazed by the nonphysical methods of getting his attention.

The scene shifted in his mind, morphing and warping him to a cave. The cool wind moaning slightly as it whipped past the entrance of the cave. He stood up to lean against the wall, feeling the cool slate rub against him. Content turned to horror as the horizon dissolved into the white bottomless pit racing toward him. He tried to run away to more solid ground, but it fell away before he could go any further.

Derek had suddenly snapped toward the man who was just taking his hand off of his shoulder, catching him mildly off guard. "Derek, it's time for your medication..." said one of the men as he towered over him, continuing to spinning the syringe in his hand. Derek closed his eyes and looked away toward the window, the now setting sun silhouetting the room's occupants. He remembered the days before his world was a small padded box.

You see, Derek was like any other person of his nature, relaxed, yet creative and curious, uncomfortable with societal demands. If there were rats that were running the maze to get the cheese at the end, he was the rat that was trying to escape the maze. He was a man that marched to his own drum, and refused to go to the beat of others. He picked art as his medium, using the pen of writing and drawing as his way of slicing through the layers of stagnant conformity and re-expose society to creativity.

Of course, by refusing to go with the societal norms he started to garner enemies. He painted, wrote and drew works that no one had ever seen before. By the rules of society, his work was "out there" and people started to refuse to personally interact with him. He found one or two close friends online but eventually society took its own course and locked him away charging him with mental insanity.

Time took its course and the once creative individual was locked away in a padded cell nearly 20 hours a day, coming out only for consultations with a psychologist. Despite his initial pleading, the province refused to budge over the issue and soon transformed his supposed insanity into actual insanity. His only escape being the large window and his mind, often times sat in corners, lost in thought so deep that it lasted for hours and occasionally days on end.

He earned the strait jacket courtesy of the evaluator, who had recently determined that he was a threat to himself and others. They also recently put him on anti-psychotic medications, dumbing him down but never really helping. The reality was slowly starting to dawn on him, his future was bleak. Probably the reason they put him in the strait jacket, to prevent him from committing suicide.

He was far from that however, although his world was devoid of physical stimulation his mind more than made up for it and he often times creating wonderful worlds of fiction and fantasies that would rival even the most wonderful of Pulitzer Prize winning novels. He often imagined himself as fantasy creatures. His favorite was dragons, and although his ideas of them had morphed along with his mind, they were still consistent with what the layman would consider dragons.

So often would he imaging himself as a dragon that he began to see himself as less and less human. While normally such things are just purely mental, his behavior had began to change. He became more withdrawn and contemplative as it slowly began to morph into something that was far from human, acquiring instincts and desires that a normal human wouldn't dare possess.

The two workers slowly removed the plastic cover off the syringe while another took an alcohol swab and wiped the area around a large vein on his neck. The other handed him the syringe and he gently pressed it up against his neck. It was an auto injector and it was set to deliver a perfect dose of medication as soon as it broke the skin. He selected the perfect dosage amount, roughly 17mg of the drug and pressed it against the skin. He expected a click as the needle would penetrate the skin, but none came. He removed the syringe from his neck and looked at the needle.

"Dammit," said the worker as he stood back up, "Used needle..." The other chuckled as the first worker pocketed the needle in a bag marked "bio-hazard". "Alright smart-ass, you bring the spare needles?"

The second man fumbled around on his pockets before blushing, "No"

The first man chuckled before turning back to Derek, "We'll be right back sir..." Derek hung his head in over his body and let his long brown and neatly cut hair hang in front of his face, shrouding his eyes. Soon the only thing that filled the room was the sound of his now strangely labored breathing as dark melanoma-like welts started to appear under his skin.

The mind is a powerful object, much more than the powerful anti-psychotic Aripiprazole could ever dull. So long and intense had his near total rejection of humanity had been that it was finally time. Derek closed his eyes and slowly rolled to his side as the first of his modifications occurred. The black, melanoma-like blotches now just breaking the skin, the ones that were forming on his neck glistened in the reddish evening sun as more and more welled up underneath his jacket.

A normal person would be terrified of such changes, but Derek was to deep within his own mind to notice these worldly things. He continued to stare at the padded room of the facility as the scales raced up and down his body, covering his arms and numbing the rough canvas of the straight jacket. Derek closed his eyes and rolled onto his side, slowly easing back into reality as the rest of his body continued to metamorphose.

His muscles shivered and quaked as the very cells morphed, transforming his human muscle fiber into the stronger and denser dragon fibers. The sounds of single snaps resounded throughout the room as his bones snapped and broke from the strain his muscles put on the bones, disintegrating his human skeleton beneath his now scaly skin. Derek subconsciously rolled over onto his side as his bones reformed with loud grinding sounds, the fractured calcium deposits started to recreate themselves into a form less than human.

As his skeleton reformed, taking a majority of the things that made him human. His thumbs repositioned themselves on the side of his paws, two toes vanished from his feet as his hips reformed into a quadrupedal stance before finishing off with a long extension of his spine. The pain now suddenly snapped Derek back into reality, as the extension pushed from the base of his spine and shredded his orange jump-suit's pants. The limb grew, grinding to its full length, fully extensile and flexible and covered in the same black scales that covered his body except for the bottom, which for the moment was his human skin.

For the first time since this ordeal, Derek came to realize what was happening to him. He felt an itch as the scales flowed over his face and skull. His long brown hair fell out in clumps as the scales flowed over the skin, quickly cutting the hair off from the root. He felt his jaw push out in a loud grinding sound as the taste of blood filled his mouth as sharp draconian incisors and molars replaced their human counterparts, hearing small clinks as all 32 of his human teeth hit on each other as they fell to the padded floor. His muzzle also dragged a bit of his human head, making it sleeker and more triangular and aerodynamic shape. He grunted in pain as the process happened, still unable to move his forelegs under the jacket.

A sharp pain on his shoulders indicated to him instantly on what was to come. He felt the straight jacket strain against his growing wings, futilely hanging on by the gold colored threads of its seams. With a roar of effort and pain, the jacket shredded as the two large sails rose above his back. The posts were covered in the same colored scales as the ones on his body as the "fingers", filling out with a violent yellow-green. These limbs grew and developed before connecting with his body and automatically folded up against his body.

His skeleton by now had finished developing with a final few snaps and bone grinding sounds. Completely quadruped now, he stood up on all fours as thick acid green scaled plates flowed from his neck, replacing what was left of his human skin. He took a look, his longer neck allowing for easy look at his underbelly as his tail slowly sashayed and wings twitched against the side of his body.

Derek had little time to internalize what was happening to him as a second round of pain surged through him. His scales were on fire as patterns raced across them, piercing the skin as green plates grew across his legs and shoulders and solidified, their color and texture much like his underbelly. His back burned as they traveled up his body, creating a single stripe of green plates that traveled to the end of his tail. They then refocused on his draconian head, flowing over his head and down his muzzle in an intense wave of physical feelings. He closed his eyes as the pain finally caught up with him, forcing a feral hiss from his muzzle as he collapsed to the ground and grasped his head with his strange new forepaws.

The final changes had started as Derek's paws were pushed out of the way as the a large acidic-green, fin-like ridge sprouted near the base of his muzzle, flowing over the back of his head and down his back. The ridge was flanked by a series of green and black colored spikes that flowed down his back and both tapered out as it reached the tail. His head exploded with pain, causing him to roar as two large black and dark green horns shot from the base of his skull, creating intricate and beautiful patterns as they matured to their full length. Finally, the tip of his tail calcified as it grew pointed and sharp, creating a small barb that was blacker than pitch on the end of his tail. It was another brief moment of pain as the barb seemingly connected with his body, oozing a viscous layer of translucent neon green fluid that occasionally dripped onto the padded floor.

As Derek reopened his eyes, he took a look back at himself. His red, slitted eyes gazed upon his new form for the first time and couldn't help but crack a grin. His mind, so long not matching up with his human body, had finally found what it was conceived to control. He let out a happy hiss as he took a few steps with his paws, effortlessly moving across the padded surface of the floor. He flexed his ears as the sound of rubber on concrete, their finned structure easily cornering the sound. He lowered his head sinisterly as a smirk crossed his muzzle as the sound grew louder. He moved to out of sight of the door's window before turning toward the door and crouched down with his tail high in the air, poised to strike.

"Derek's cell right?" said one of the workers as he worked the heavy lock and pulled the door open. The door, like any here, was anything but flimsily made. Make of grey steel that was a minimum of two inches thick, giving the door a heft that the two returning workers had to fight against.

"Yeah, the noises came from here..." Said the other with a bit of a grunt as he pulled the door open. Derek waited for the door to creek open a little more on its hinges, opening three-quarters of the way before making a mad dash to the door, using his black claws to dig in to the surface of the padding for added maneuverability as he rounded the corner and sprinted and leaped at the two workers.

The two employees had no time to react as the black and green dragon tackled them, carrying them a few feet along the smooth concrete floor of the facility. Derek looked down at them, as both workers were now frozen with fear as they saw their captor. He couldn't help but hiss a bit as the smell of fear, unknown to the human senses, now wafted through his nostrils. He savored the moment as the two men beneath his forepaws continued to stare into his soul piercing eyes.

"Theree aree sssssso many things Iah could dooo to yoooou right nooooowh..." Said Derek as he struggled to form  English words through both his mind and muzzle as he drummed his claws on their chests in thought. 'These people put him through a lot of pain over the years,' he thought, thinking of what they had done to him. They laughed as they rubbed the Novocain and alcohol along his neck, then snickered as they drugged him up. If he refused to cooperate, they pinned him to the ground in a painful and brutal method.

Derek bared his fangs and wiped his neon green tongue across them, smearing small amounts of venom across their fronts. He took another look into their eyes, of course they had been doing their job, a depressing a bleak sort of thing many years before he arrived. He began to think a little more, still putting on an aggressive face in the mean time. 'Was it really worth it?' He thought, 'To end the lives of others for choices that they did not even had a say in?' Derek's train of thought was derailed by the sound of hard rubber boots on the floor concrete floor. He looked up at the nearby camera then down at the two employees. He growled menacingly at them before taking off.

Unlike the doors to the cells, these doors were of much poorer quality. This comes in handy when you're in a hurry and you cannot operate doors effectively in a short amount of time. Derek was in one of those situations, trying desperately to reach his objective. He knew of only one room with a window, the evaluator's office.

He rounded another corner and scanned the endless wall of doors on his left, looking for the cherry wood door that marked the door to the evaluator's office. He couldn't help but smile as he saw it at the end of the hall, another cherry wood door marked 'Dr. Daniel Young'. He hissed and lowered his head like a battering ram, briefly catching a glance of his hated name placed proudly on a brass name tag on the door.

He winced in a moment of pain as the top of his head made contact with the door, smashing it off of its cheap hinges and sending it flying against the window. The door cracked the glass before slamming to the ground with a loud bang, Dr. Young's neck grabbing his head from the noise and forcing him toward the mysterious creature that was now glaring at him.

Derek didn't waste a moment, jumping and smashing into his chest and carrying him and his posh leather chair flying onto the ground. He dug his paws into his chest, drawing a little blood in his frenzy of payback. He kept himself in check though, he had a more fitting punishment.

"It'sssss beeehn a looong timhe Doctor Younnngh..." Said Derek, hissing almost every symbol in the sentence in a spat of hatred. "Yooouh only think that you have power over ussss..." He continued, small amounts of venom tinged saliva dripping onto the blue carpet near his ear. He smiled sadistically, "What yooouh have done too me... My futurrre... My lifeee and my mind, I will gladly retuuuurnh the favorrrr in the fleshhh..."

Derek reared his head back, the venom dripping off his fangs before striking his wrist. Dr. Young screamed in pain as he ground the venom into his body, the bits of blood confirming to him that he had indeed penetrated his cardiovascular system and a slow and painful eating of his body would begin. Derek whipped his tail gently as he stared at him, the pain already beginning to manifest itself and contorting his face in a scream that sent a rush through his body. In his eyes, he wasn't being sadistic, rather he was delivering justice where it needed to be served.

Satisfied, Derek stood up and walked out into the hallway and pushed himself against the wall. The human security that he just outran was now catching up with him and he needed to move now. He sprinted at the cracked window, leaping through and shattering the thin layer of silicate glass and moving him into free fall.

For the first time his new wings opened and he reoriented himself appropriately before giving his wings a resounding flap. He pulled up out of the dive and gave his wings another flap, now achieving lift. He banked out towards the surrounding forest, leaving the immaculate lawn of the facility behind. So Derek laughed, in a laugh that has come from a mind that has just rediscovered humor, hard and genuine. His human life might have been gone forever, but he had a new beginning, a second chance at a life that was once considered impossible. It was time for him to do what he had been denied from for so long, to be himself and to explore the incredible world around him.