Awake. I was awake, truly, for the first time in my life. Words floated in the darkness in front of me.

  And I understood them.

  Light. Sudden, harsh. I yelped as I stumbled forward, my paws unwieldly as a newborn puppy’s. They skidded across the metal surface of the box—a shipping container?—and then went in opposite directions. My chin struck the floor, stunning me. I lay there, trying to make sense of what in dog’s name had happened.

  I had... eaten a human? That didn’t seem right. Anthropophagy was taboo. That had been drilled into me as a puppy by... Huh. I actually couldn’t remember. Or how I even knew what anthropophagy even was. Everything before this moment felt foggy, a half-remembered memory. Like it had happened to someone else.

  Right! Words. I had seen words appear in my vision. Words that hadn’t been written on a surface, or displayed on a screen, but that hovered as if inside my own mind.

  Wait, how did I know they were words? Or what a screen was? Knowledge spun about inside my mind so rapidly, I couldn’t make sense of it all. Every time I tried to examine one thing, a thousand others crowded it out.

  Well, it didn’t matter. Not right now. I clambered to my paws and looked around. This was definitely the inside of a shipping container, and one that hadn’t seen use in a while, too, by the looks of it. How had I gotten here?

  Oh, now I remember. After I had... *shudder*... eaten that human in my desperation and hunger, the words appeared. I tried to remember what they had said, but I hadn’t been able to read then. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. The words had appeared, and...

  I had been sealed in a cocoon. Like a butterfly, I’d been sealed away, and slept. And now, I was awake again.

  Something did come back to me then. The words, even if I hadn’t read them, had left an impression on me. They’d said they were changing me, making me... more compatible? I didn’t understand that last part. Was I still me? Was I still a dog?

  As I considered all of this, more words began to appear in my vision. And just like when I’d first awoke, I understood them.

  Okay, slight amendment. I could read the words, but that didn’t mean I understood them. Still, it seemed to confirm what I had suspected. My basic nature had been changed.

  I twisted my head about, trying to see what was different. My body seemed the same as before. Long nose. Four paws. Tail in the back. I wagged it once, just to make certain it was still functioning. My fur was a mottled black and brown, and I stood about three feet tall from my paws to the tips of my ears.

  Everything appeared normal. I did feel somewhat weaker than before, but that could have been due to my extended confinement. What had the words said? Ten days?

  I certainly felt hungry enough to have been asleep for ten days.

  Uhh....

  My eyes darted back and forth across the wall of text obscuring my vision. Most of it didn’t make sense, so I focused on the parts that did.

  First, my race. It said ‘Canid’ now. I was fairly certain it didn’t list that before. Wasn’t canid the biological classification for the dog family? Did that mean I was still a dog?

  Visual evidence still pointed to the affirmative. I had fur, paws, and a tail. All the important parts. Opening my mouth, I let out a short bark.

  Yep. Still a dog.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Uhhh... okay?

  I barked again. Then, remembering myself, I mentally confirmed.

  My eyes darted faster and faster, reading the words as they scrolled their way up my vision. For most of it, like anthronites, I had no idea what it meant. And yet, I could intuit that it was trying to explain what happened to me. The longer I was awake, the more knowledge seemed to come back.

  Except I knew that I’d possessed no knowledge like this before my metamorphosis. It was a strange sensation, having something feel both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

  And what was with the annotation at the end? Even though I couldn’t hear the words, they felt like someone else speaking.

  Oblivious to my confusion, the tutorial continued scrolling past.

  Interesting. Before, the messages had seemed customized to me specifically, but this tutorial felt... more artificial. Like they were pre-generated.

  The words disappeared, and the interface moved back to the center of my vision. The first line enlarged itself, and additional text appeared.

  That word. Bubba. Seeing it set off something inside me. A distant tickle of a memory, a time before... before... well, before all this. I remembered a dark night, laying in front of a warm fire, and a soft hand rubbing my belly. Then it was gone.

  I blinked. The question still floated in front of me. Not sure what else to do, I mentally confirmed.

  These words scrolled so fast I barely had time to read them. I didn’t know why, but they left me with a nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach. Probably the death part.

  Level? Huh?

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I’d occasionally had to fight other dogs for a prime piece of food, or a place to sleep, or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Usually, it involved a bit of snapping, maybe some posturing. Now the words wanted me to not only fight, but kill? That was a lot to take in.

  Ten was average? I glanced back at the rest of the interface. I had only half that in two of my stats, and even less in the remaining three. Was I simply that weak, or was the system not measuring my abilities correctly due to my non-human race?