Title: "Metamorphosis: Chronicles of the Mesozoic"

**Title: Saurian Dawn**

**Part I: The Surge**

My name was Daniel Strickler—former grad student, amateur paleontologist, professional slacker. Now, I know some introductory remark like that is supposed to set the stage, maybe preface my story as one of tragedy, warning, or redemption. But this isn’t any ordinary cautionary tale. It’s the chronicle of how I, along with three friends, shed the last vestiges of Homo sapiens and awoke to a world through reptilian eyes—that of dinosaurs.

It started, like so many of our foolhardy adventures, in the cluttered lab of Dr. Reese Larkin, somewhere below the Biology building of MacArthur University.

***

“Danny, look at this!” Reese had barely swept aside the gas chromatograph before shoving a canister the size of my palm beneath my nose.

I peered at the glinting cylinder. “Do I want to know?”

Sarah trailed in, wielding her tablet like a shield. “If it’s that mRNA project again, I’m leaving.”

Reese grinned, lips stretching over teeth too large. “Not mRNA this time. Direct proteomic re-sequencing. Retrovirus. The big leap.”

At that moment, Max shouldered in, always late, always lugging caffeinated sodas in a six-pack. He paused, reading our circle of faces. “Why do I get the feeling I walked into a Michael Crichton sequel?”

We laughed, but I felt the crackle of something electric. The experiments with ancient genome fragments, the reckless university grant proposal—everything converged on Reese’s palm.

He pressed on, eager. “We can push gene expression. Simulate de-extincted phenotypes with gene editing. Temporarily. Just to see how ancient proteins fold—how traits emerge. It’s perfectly safe.”

Sarah groaned. Max snorted. I, for reasons unfathomable, said, “Let’s do it.”

***

The cocktails were tailored—down to the viral capsid, “to ensure transfection specificity,” Reese insisted. Each of us, a different lineage. I remember the sting of injection, the sour taste of terror, then wine to chase it down, mocking bravado under flickering halogens. We toasted “To science! To the Mesozoic!” before departing to crash in the lounge beneath a thick, feverish night.

***

Transformation is rarely a moment but a process—a creeping, relentless dissolution of what you understand as normal. When I woke, I remembered dreams of drifting through primordial swamps, a hunger as vast as ocean, the brush of fronds against a body sleek and strong.

My arms and legs throbbed—a deep, subdermal ache. At first, I thought I’d pulled something, but when I staggered to the bathroom mirror, I froze.

My hands—larger; fingers swollen, thickening at the base, nails darkening into nascent, vicious claws. My skin, always pale and flecked with freckles, had taken on a faint, pebbled texture, like alligator hide beneath the surface.

Sarah called out, a warble of panic. I stumbled to her, legs buckling, toes numb. She was hunched over, shivering, her ginger hair plastered to sweat-soaked skin. “Danny, my back—my arms—what’s happening?”

Max, normally bombastic, whimpered from an adjacent cubicle. I found him curled up, clutching his calves—the beginnings of talons etched along his toes. Even Reese, defiant until the end, was seated quietly, mouth working dumbly as teeth sharpened before our eyes.

Over hours—unbearably slow, yet somehow far too fast, our bodies metamorphosed. My chest widened, collarbone vanishing, ribs flaring out and down in a barrel-like arc. I shrieked as vertebrae elongated, tailbone ballooning outward, muscle and skin forming around a burgeoning, tapering tail.

My feet… words fail. Ankles snapping, realigning, as the bones within twisted—a horror of crunching, reforming tissue. Three elongated toes, the central one thick, supporting my increasing mass. My tail erupted outward in spasms, lashing in the small, cramped bathroom stall, knocking over a mop bucket as my center of gravity shifted.

By evening, my face had begun to stretch forward. I gripped the rim of the sink, vision swimming as my jaw lengthened, teeth falling out, replaced by conical horrors that slotted together in a cruel, crocodilian grin. Eyes slid sideways, nostrils rode upward, and scales—true, iridescent, glimmering in the fluorescent light—spread outward in overlapping fans.

Hunger. A deep, feral urge gnawed at me. Not for pizza, not for beer, but fish—hulking, wriggling prey. My neck arched forward, powerful and sinuous. I croaked, rolled my new jaw, and bellowed—a resonance like the call of something ancient waking at last.

Sarah’s eyes—now slit-pupiled, ringed with emerald—met mine in the shame-lit corridor. Her arms had dwindled, fused to sides, as the beginnings of membranous wings sprouted from her shoulders—a pterosaur, she later realized.

Max retained some of his proportions, but his feet were slender, armed with a sickle-shaped claw—a raptor’s talon. Reese, always the outlier, grew jaws so wide and massive that even in this nightmare, he managed a skeletal grin: a mosasaur, the grand marine hunter.

***

**Part II: The New World**

We retreated from campus as best we could—hiding obtrusively as four giant, mismatched beasts. My own body—now a colossal, hunched hybrid of crocodilian and bird—broke furniture and doorframes. Every move was agony, but exhilaration too.

My snout was nearly six feet long. A towering neural sail erupted from my back, arching, fanning open as I flexed, radiating with blood heat as nerves sang with primal vigor.

We fled to the wetlands north of campus, Sarah half-gliding, Max pacing with avian quickness, Reese slithering through the dark water.

Days bled into each other. Communication was hard—my tongue and vocal cords resisted human sounds, but we learned, through growls, hisses, and gestures. Sarah’s carmine wings caught the dying sun, Max’s sickle claws rapped out signals, Reese’s tail churned the lake in a warning or challenge.

My hunger—an insatiable predator’s drive—ruled me. At first, I fought it, ashamed of my bloodlust, but eventually, I gave in, snatching a fish from a rushing stream, feeling it twitch, then still in my jaws.

When night fell, a strange contentment settled over us.

Human memories faded, blurring. The world smelled richer, the air heavier with scent-trails—prey, predators, mates.

Once, a ranger’s floodlight pierced the reeds. I reared up, a shadow enormous and sail-backed, roaring my ancient challenge. He fled, convinced he’d seen a monster.

***

**Part III: The Choice**

Weeks passed. We debated, as best our new bodies allowed it, seeking to choose: Remain as monsters, or try to undo what Reese’s hubris, and our own curiosity, had wrought.

Sarah, always the pragmatist, pointed out the beauty of flight, the freedom from travail.

Max, a raptor, found joy in every sprint, every successful hunt, but mourned the slow slip of language, of stories.

Reese, now more marine than man, wanted only to swim—to disappear into the dark, primal waters. He would never be human again.

For me, the spinosaurus, the choice was agony. Human self, or this vast, thrilling power, this connection to a world so much older.

In the moonlit swamp, I stretched my jaws to the sky, bellowed my confusion. The sound echoed, joined by the cries of my friends. For a moment, four monsters howled at the same uncertain cosmos.

***

Somewhere, labs burned. Authorities combed the woods. But we were gone, vanished into river and fen, legend and nightmare. My mind—it’s hard to remember language now, to shape memories. Scales have covered what once was skin, claws sheathed what once were fingers. But when the dawn breaks over misted water, something inside me still remembers—Daniel Strickler, dreamer, fool, and now, predator of the dark and shining deep.

We endure. We hunt. We remember, after a fashion. The world is old, and in its rivers and skies and shadowed woods, ancient things are waking. And if you hear a bellow on the wind, or see a ripple where no fish should swim, perhaps you will think of us—the monsters who chose to become themselves.

**THE END**

This story was generated by user kade with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

AI Prompts