Rainy Oaks III - Doctor & Patient

Yet another relation to an older caption can be found here. I think I went a little overboard on length, but insisted on making it a caption anyway...so, there's a text+images version below in case you're having difficulty reading it in pure-image form.

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Dr. Piers entered his patient's room, coming up to the bed the man lay on and examining his chart on the tablet. Of the few "homes" he'd worked, Rainy Oaks was probably among the more technologically advanced, although not by too much. Felix had only meant to pick up work at this place for a couple of months, but it must have been...a couple of years, at least, since he'd signed on. Every day felt exactly the same here, so it was difficult to keep track of time except by the calendar back at his house. It was just hard to let go when all these people needed him and they seemed to be having trouble attracting a worthy replacement...and the pay wasn't too bad for the work he was putting in. Really, the nurses knew what they were doing and it was only the more extreme patients he had to look in himself on with any real frequency. Such as this one...

"I'm going to take your temperature now, Clarence," he said calmly. The man on the bed made a wheezing sort of grunt that seemed to be acknowledgment. Mr. Oswell was anything but well. He was stable, and not exactly in pain, but he'd been bedridden for half a year, at least. The surgeries that might improve things were risky—in Felix's opinion, too much so for the relatively small benefit that would result from them. And he'd said as much to the man himself, as well as his family. They were still considering it—and it certainly wasn't his place to dissuade them from trying for a better quality of life.

The doctor leaned his head over the patient so he could look him in the eyes—which were, for the moment, open and aware. "Have you been feeling any better lately? Any worse?"

Clarence tried to clear his throat, and narrowly avoided another painful coughing fit. "Not much different, doc," he said a bit hoarsely. "The grandkids came by last night."

"Mm-hm." Dr. Piers leaned back out of view, recording some more things on his fancy handheld-computer thing. "You let me or one of the nurses know if anything does come to feel out of place," he said—the same thing he always did at this point of their conversation. By now it was like a well-rehearsed play, although with how many patients he must have, Clarence guessed the man wasn't even aware he was phrasing it almost the exact same way every time.

"Will do."

The afternoon checkup done, Felix was about to say goodbye to this patient and move on to the next one—when he was struck with an unusual thought. Would he take the chance to be young again, if he could? It was a silly thought, of course—an obvious question, if anything. It took a couple of decades of dedicated study to attain a Ph.D., and even though he was living the dream it was years he couldn't otherwise get back. It'd be nice if he could have skipped all that, and simply known everything he knew now as a kid...a ridiculous notion, of course.

Dr. Piers cleared his own throat slightly, suddenly aware of an unusual pause in the cadence of their conversation. Where did that thought even come from, he wondered? "Well, you should be all set for..." he started, but trailed off, feeling a little strange. Something was off that he couldn't exactly put his finger on. Maybe a kind of sudden-onset vertigo as the room seemed to be moving..only not spinning or whirling, and it didn't seem to be affecting his balance. He looked down at the floor, then back up again, waving his hand in front of his face. There it still was, however, and maybe getting worse—a sense of the room rising around him.

On the bed, Clarence closed his eyes briefly. If only he could be well again, he thought. Able to breathe normally, to get up and move around like he could when he was younger. If only he didn't need expensive, risky surgery just to laugh without a horrible coughing fit. That'd be nice, he thought. After this, he distantly heard the doctor starting to say something else, but he wasn't exactly listening. His arms and legs were tingling something fierce—almost, but not quite, itching—and he could swear he felt less rasp in each breath he took.

Was it just his imagination? Wishful thinking? He gave a test throat-clearing, and felt neither pain nor an urge to cough—an almost alien sensation to him, lately. He turned his head to one side, trying to see why Dr. Piers had fallen silent and—judging by the lack of footstep sounds—not yet left the room, either. As it turned out, he was quite visibly shrinking, and naturally looking extremely confused by this turn of events.

"What in the...?" Felix muttered, looking down once again as he felt his lab coat sliding across his skin a bit to see it was actually much looser than it was supposed to be. In fact, his pants, shirt, and underwear were all much the same story, as his body was not only decreasing in height but overall size, too. His shoulders were narrower than before, his waist and legs all clearly slimming down further as it continued. He grabbed at his coat before it could slip down off of a shoulder, and found his hands smaller and his arms no better off than his legs. By this point he could hardly do more than stare, his usual analytical mind locking up completely from the sheer impossibility of such a sudden, drastic alteration to his body's structure.

As Clarence's breathing became better, he could feel something like a weight lifting off of his body, and found with some experimental wiggling that his arms and legs and—everything else, really, could move easily now, just as though nothing was wrong. He dared to try and push himself a few degrees toward upright with his hands, and found his waist bent upward without a bit of pain or difficulty. No sooner had he lifted his head up this bit than he felt his hair suddenly crawling across his cheeks and forehead, and some of it brushing across the bed behind him as it grew out to just barely shy of his shoulders. That wasn't all, either—he could clearly see from some of his bangs that it had (mostly) taken on a light brown shade, a far cry from the dull gray it had been a second or two earlier. After this, he felt a gentle pushing, like a massage, all across his body, and slowly leaned his back down and closed his eyes, simply enjoying it too much to do anything else for the moment.

"Hmmmh..." he mumbled with his mouth closed, feeling his stomach flatten and his waist gently push inward, his arms and legs turning small and slender, even something like hands rubbing his face smaller, softer and rounder. A bit of the rubbing was on his ears, making them start to—stretch...? Which was a little odd, but it still felt rather nice.

As Felix shrank down, he felt his lower wear slipping entirely off of him, falling down across his legs into a little pile on the floor. His lab coat was nearly reaching down to his knees, and his shirt at least at the thighs, from how far his height had fallen by now, so this didn't expose much—only that his legs were now looking rather soft-skinned, hairless and smooth, and every bit as slim as the baggy leggings of his pants had suggested they were. "Wha..?" he mumbled, still unable to fully process what was happening—and heard a far higher-pitched, younger voice than he expected. "Whaa~a..?" he repeated slowly, and heard his voice rising in pitch mid-vocalization. His hair tickled his cheeks as it gently flowed out to near-shoulder-length, bangs falling out to where they threatened to cover his eyes but didn't quite. He felt vaguely tingly between the legs for just a second...and then didn't.

"Mm...mnh?" the doctor muttered, unable to fully process the odd sensation. Numbness...down there...? Or, no...it was just—a slight movement of the upper legs confirmed it—gone. Dr. Piers was no longer a man, and in fact not feeling too much like a woman, either. "Mmh!" Her body continued to get smaller, sinking below the height of any normal teenager, and her voice was faring no better—really starting to edge into the range of a little girl.

"Mmmmmnnn..." The man on the bed quietly hummed to himself, listening to the pitch of his voice slowly rise. He could feel his body pulling upward across the bed as he grew shorter and smaller. His hospital gown slid around on his body, shrinking closer to his upper body and pulling itself farther and farther up his legs. His ears tingled as they stretched out taller and taller, first forming fuzz all across them, then growing that fuzz out into a thick sea of soft hairs—fur, even. He squirmed his hips back and forth as the massage seemed to widen them and plump his bottom out a bit, and then let out a soft "Aa~aah" as a tail seemed to simply release itself from his back, already quite thick and covered in long, fluffy fur that felt very nice brushing across the bed below it and his legs above it. He could feel an unusual tugging, tingling, slipping sensation between those legs which seemed almost like the result of all that massaging, and felt a distinct heat in his cheeks as he found himself welcoming the change coming down there more and more.

Indeed, not long after Clarence's big, fuzzy ears picked up some high, girlish panicked noises from where the doctor had to be, he let out a low "Oh—Ooooo~ooohh" in a mature, womanly voice as his manhood melted away into its polar opposite, allowing a pair of soft panties which suddenly replaced her undergarments to pull snugly flat between the legs.

"W-wha..why..?" Felix managed to say, still clinging desperately to her lab coat as she began to feel it shrinking itself a little shorter and closer across her tiny form. She'd finally stopped getting shorter, but it was quite a long way down she'd fallen, and it felt impossible to get used to. But then she felt a sudden, sort of popping sensation from her right ear. "Waah!" she yelped in surprise, and then a similar "Yah!" at an identical feeling from the left one. Suddenly she could feel her ears twitching, her long, soft hair brushing across them as they did so. They were much big and very sensitive, it seemed, and covered in..hairs of some sort? One of her hands let go of her remaining garments to reach up and feel it, and discovered something not unlike an animal's ear, if a bit larger in size.

"I-I..what is..?" she started, only to be interrupted by her own traitorous mouth letting out a high, feline mew of surprise as something suddenly pushed itself out from her lower back all at once, brushing past her shirt and former-coat to slide out behind her skinny little legs. She twisted half downward to see the confirmation that it was, in fact, some sort of ultra-long version of a thick, puffy feline tail. Her eyes bugged out with the incomprehensibility of the entire situation as her remaining hand's grip on her top loosened; said top was now pulling just small enough to keep her decent as it changed into a dark hoodie with a cat-like shape in a lighter gray across the chest.

The other new girl was enjoying herself a bit more. It felt like something was gently rubbing her chest, making it tingle and then...slowly pushing it outward into the tight top that most of her gown had turned into. While she squirmed a bit more and her tail flicked back and forth slightly, she could feel a skirt fluttering around her hips and very upper legs. "Aah..mmn...mrf!" she let out, a little surprised by the canine yip but finding it a bizarrely natural reaction at the same time.

The two little bumps quickly, with her own mental encouragement, grew out bigger and bigger, seemingly stretching a newly-formed bra and the tight, sleeveless top she had on over it into larger and larger sizes along with it. Clarence let out a few pleased yips alongside at least a few quite womanly "A~ah"s as she came to enjoy her new body more and more, until finally, with one last, deep-throated bark, she felt a final push from her chest blooming it into a full, round pair of breasts fit for her curvy new form.

"Mmmngh.." Felix grabbed the tip of her tail with one of her tiny hands, twiddling it slightly as she tried to make any sense whatsoever of her present situation. The clothes that should've been around her ankles had disappeared at some point, and she was now aware of some...fitting..underwear and a pair of shorts being present on her lower body that just seemed to have sneaked themselves into existence while she was quite understandably distracted by being suddenly transformed into some sort of...cat-creature. Then she was startled by a loud, low bark from the bed in front of her—which she had also been very distracted from until now—and let out an entirely feline "Reeaarroww!" as she jumped—really jumped—back two or three feet in surprise and possibly even instinctual fear.

The canine woman on the bed was slightly aware of a loud cat mewling off in the direction the shrinking doctor had been.

"Eeh..?" She opened her eyes up, fingering the new skirt with a gloved right hand, before slowly sitting up and turning around in the bed to face the source of the noise—a small, young girl with cat-like features which were, at the moment, looking as agitated as she sounded, rattling off a series of confused questions one after another.

"Why—what—how, what is, who—what?!"

"Heey...doc..?" Clarence said slowly, one of her ears falling to one side as the realization hit her that this was probably who the small girl was.

"Wh—what? Who are—wait. Misterr..Oswell?" she said slowly, both of her ears drooping.

"That's me. Although, I suppose not exactly anymore," the woman said, putting one hand on her generous chest. "Are you alright?"

"I...suppose. If this is what passes for 'all right', anyway," Felix said, feeling a mild blush of embarrassment at her entire situation and tugging at the hoodie's collar with one hand nervously. "What—why am I, and you..?"

"I think this may be a question a lot of folks are askin'," Clarence said, her ears upright again and twitching to hear the reactions of everyone else in the entire home, just about. Dr. Piers's ears were equally active by this point, finding much the same thing.

"So it's not just us." The young catgirl crossed her arms. "I have to check this out. Are you feeling...well?"

"I haven't felt so good in decades, doc," Clarence grinned, standing up and stretching. Her tail started wagging vigorously without any real prompting. "Aaah, it's so nice to be able to move and breathe again!"

"I imagine so. Do you...want to appraise the situation with me?" she said.

"If you like. I don't know how much help I'll be, but any excuse to get out of this room!"

"Hmmph." Felix turned around and carefully walked out of the room into the hallway—although she needn't bother being so cautious, she realized after a moment. Her body seemed to have an impeccable sense of its own balance, even despite—or maybe because of—that gigantic tail. Ms. Oswell wasn't much different in that regard, now following her out quite easily. Or maybe it was that her stride was so much bigger than the young girl's was now, she thought.

There was a lot of confusion. Many people yelling, talking—some panicking. Somebody clearly needed to get a handle on the situation before any harm was done, accidentally or no. "Excuse me..!" Dr. Piers tried first, at a slightly raised volume which proved wildly insufficient to even be noticed over the din. She instinctively hissed in frustration, and then tried yelling: "YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE!" Felix winced at herself slightly, hearing a shrill child's voice come out of her own mouth, but it seemed to mostly work.

"Hi, I'm Dr. Piers," she said, waving slightly before forcibly dropping her hand back to her side. "Something very unusual—in fact, impossible—has clearly happened to us all. Now—who here are the nurses? Administrative staff?" Nearly ever person present who looked to be a child or teenager raised their hand or said 'here' in response to this. "Please listen to these people, everyone...however young they may look. I assure you we retained our mental faculties..or at least I did, anyway. I can see that you all appear to be quite well, but before taking any rash action, I believe at least one last checkup with a qualified professional to ensure that...whatever this is...didn't leave behind or cause some lingering health problems would be wise. And I understand if you want to let your families know, but please form an orderly line instead of mobbing the phones! And if possible, perhaps anyone not currently busy could round up whoever's still in the bedrooms, hallways, cafeteria, and so on..."

Even though she'd come with Dr. Piers, Clarence was far from the first person to get a checkup from the small girl—waiting in line like everyone else. "Well, you seem a whole lot calmer," she commented while the catgirl operated a stethoscope by simply holding the earpiece near her right ear with one hand. "Not upset about being turned into a kid?"

"I'm not entirely happy, I assure you," she said, while continuing to work. "But I'm trying to think positive. I was merely a normal doctor before, but now I'm effectively like a child prodigy. If someone can look past these bizarre appendages I've grown, at least."

"We're far from the only ones with those," Clarence pointed out. "If anything, they seem pretty cute, right?"

The catgirl shook her head, failing to entirely suppress a faint hiss. "No accounting for taste..."

After the doctor established some semblance of order on the crowd, Neil stood up and moved to a wall, letting everyone else go first as far as checkups went. She watched the room carefully, and soon picked out a pair near the wall as a bit unusual—one short, dark-brown-haired woman with some foxlike features, and the other a taller woman with wolflike features, black-and-white hair, and two eyes of differing colors, who appeared to be pointing out one-by-one the members of the community who had grown one manner of tail or another. The green-haired young woman slowly approached the pair, until she was off to one side of them and close enough to hear them talking.

"Well," the wolf-girl was saying, "I don't know about your 'mentor', but I'm certainly proud of all this. It's difficult to even count how many; and you said a few of them left already, which puts my estimate even higher!" Her expression was very bright, and her tail wagging vigorously like a pleased puppy's.

"I reckon it was just two perfectly-human ones that left," the calmer fox-girl said. "All the same—you're a bit of a character, ain't ya? All worked up 'bout..." At this point her ears both stuck up and she slowly turned her head toward Neil, which also drew the wolf-woman's attention that way.

"Excuse me," the bespectacled woman said, adjusting her glasses as though it were a gesture of greeting. "You two stick out from the crowd a tad, so I couldn't help a bit of curiosity. I wouldn't say you're not happy, but you sure don't seem like you're unused to those bodies like the rest of us. Hmm?" She was bluffing, of course—just about everyone present, including herself, were already seeming quite comfortable in their new appearances, not the least because of the youth and energy all the formerly-old people living here had.

"Well, I just got here," the wolf-woman said. "I'm visiting this town, sensed a huge wave of magic, and came to see if someone was nuking the retirement home or something. Thankfully not the case."

"It's not out of line to guess you're responsible for all this, then, is it?" Neil asked the fox-girl directly.

"Well..." She twiddled the tip of an ear with an index finger nervously for a second or two. "I won't admit to anything, but I will say I know just what it's like to be facing the end of one's life. Surely anyone with enough power and know-how and a..sympathetic disposition, would be inclined to attempt somethin' a little like this eventually."

"I see." Neil crossed her arms. "Well, I think anyone in my position could be reasonably expected to want to thank such a person, in that case. In fact I imagine a great many people here would appreciate some sort of explanation, or at least an opportunity to do the same. Hmm?"

"Maybe..." The fox-girl's ears drooped slightly; she was uncertain of the right course of action.

"Still a little new to the trade, are we?" the other woman said with a teasing tone of voice. "Explaining the genius of one's successful prank is just gloating, after all. It's not like it'll disqualify you for anything."

"I...see." The fox-girl nodded, apparently to herself, and started in the direction of the larger crowd.

"I suppose you knew what happened right away," Neil said.

"Of course. They don't call me 'Sage' for nothing," the wolf-girl stated proudly. This posture only lasted a second before relaxing into one that made it clear this had been a joke. "Naww, it's really 'cause that's my name. I don't suppose I could interest you in growing a tail or two, hmmn?" she added with what appeared to be a mischievous expression. While she wasn't entirely sure if the offer was serious or not, or even of its entire meaning—the green-haired woman was prevented from answering by the fox-girl taking this moment to try and get everyone's attention.