How do I set a title?

I wrote this alllll the way back in January after reading Mice Tea and Out Of Placers and realizing how much that particular kind of TF appealed to me.

You were a human, but due to shenanigans you find yourself transformed into a smaller, weaker, diminutive creature. You still have your human intelligence, but your new form is something that will be difficult to acclimate to.

Being much smaller than a human, weaker, you find yourself reliant on your friends for help and safety. It's not long before they've taken to carrying you around, despite your objections. They find you new clothes. Perhaps they're a little more.... dollish than you'd like. You're so cute and little now they can't help but dote on you.

Getting used to your new body, your new features and their limitations is taxing. Your mouth is different, so speaking has to be relearned. Your legs are much more different, walking is now an exercise in concentration, at least until you get used to it. Your large ears and tail betray you, showing your emotions clear as day to those around you. You can insist that having your new fur brushed and stroked by your friends isn't that great, but your swishy tail and relaxed ears insist otherwise. It feels glorious. Imagine the feeling of having your scalp scratched, amplify that euphoria, then put those nerves all over your body.

Your sensory perception is something bizarre you need to get used to. Your hearing, taste and smell are all significantly more powerful. Good food is incredible now, and due to your tiny size, everything feels so much bigger and louder. Your friends faces look huge, and every micro expression they make when talking to you is dramatically amplified. Their concern when you behave less.... human... is painfully apparent, despite them trying to hide it. The slightest frown at the corner of their mouth is extremely apparent to you.

Learning to fight your new mind is frightening. Your head is filled with new instincts, desires, compulsions that are difficult to resist. You try not to cave, fearing further transformation and loss of humanity, at least that's what you tell your friends. Honestly, you're more just embarrassed about your lack of self control, your compromised mental state making you act out in bizarre unexpected ways. You'll have brief lapses in lucidity where you find yourself doing things you didn't mean to do. It's embarrassing.

Despite trying to play it calm and cool, as you find yourself subconsciously leaning into these instincts, acting more like the creature you are now, doing things no human would do, the distress takes over. You break down, panicking. Your friends care about you, immediately scooping you up, doting over you, assuring you it will be okay. Your dynamic changes. They move closer to being carers. You're almost a pet. You insist they not treat you as a pet, but you accept there are some things you just need help with now. You're just too cute for them not to, if not just a little pathetic.

God, the food. Thanks to your heightened ability to taste and smell, some things are just incredible now. Things you wouldn't have cared about as a human, and other things a human would never dare put near their mouth. It's a goddamn religious experience sometimes. It almost makes you never want to change back. Almost.

Your position in society is changed. People don't treat you as highly as they did as a human, and so you end up even more reliant on your friends. In a world not designed with a creature like you in mind, your tiny stature and proportionally weaker muscles, navigating the world is just not possible any more. People need to get things off high places for you, open doors, lift you onto hard to reach places. You can no longer carry the things you used to. Even just your old phone is inconveniently heavy to carry. Not that you can use it like you used to. Your tiny, clawed fingers don't exactly make it easy to type.

As time goes on, your mental state adjusts. You accept this new form a lot more now. The compulsions and desires to do strange things no longer make you break out in a panic anymore, it's just part of what you need to do to soothe your racing mind. Get those scratches, gnaw on that object, cram that delicious food in your mouth. You accept the satisfaction these things bring now. You can appreciate the positive feelings.

Sure, your newfound limitations can be troubling at times. You're too small to do things you used to. There isn't a video game controller designed for you, so no more games, you guess. Your taste and digestion place new limits. There are some foods you used to like that taste foul now, and some normal human foods just make you violently ill. You insist you can walk, but you're just too small to get anywhere at a decent pace, much less without straining your tiny lungs, or making your already rapidly beating heart go into overdrive, nor is everywhere safe for you to wander. You begin to accept your friends just need to carry you sometimes.

The clothes you were given are incredibly uncomfortable. You can't tell if it's because they weren't designed with your unique anatomy in mind so much as a dolls, the terrible fabrics, the comparatively gigantic seams that were never meant to touch skin, much less snag your fur and pull it in unpleasant directions until you desperately need to be groomed lest you go nuts. Maybe it's another compulsion, an instinct to remove the clothes, like how a cat goes ballistic when you put a sweater on it. You can't tell if the shame of not wearing clothes is worse than the discomfort. Maybe you need to look into getting clothes custom made. That might be better. Finding the right fabric might be hard, at your size everything feels coarser than it used to.

Vayryn struggles with how much bigger the world is around her. She has to deal with fans on Twitter who are calling her "Matriarch" (which was funny at first, but now it's kinda weird, and then a fan mentioned a Discord server where they roleplay "her enclave"?) She gets kicked off disability because technically her illness was cured, and while she probably could apply for disability on the basis of "being a yinglet", actually setting that precedent is probably a bad idea (even if it didn't take months to years to get through the bureaucracy, guaranteed to be worse given the uniqueness of her case). She makes friends with a cosplay designer and gets custom-made clothing to suit her body (though most of her shirts are regular shirts bought from the Kid's section). She hesitantly allows her boyfriend to scritch her ears and finds she likes it more than she expected. She has a moment of indignant seething when he picks her up and holds her that ends with grudging admission that this was kinda nice. She attends a furry convention and runs into Valsalia himself ("Are you a fan of his work?" "Zhat's za guy zhat does za comic! I AM his work!") When she has to move apartments, her friends have to do basically everything, because she can't even lift a single box anymore. She tries to force herself, managing to drag a tote all the way to the building's lobby, but being asked how she plans to get it up onto the truck forces her to admit defeat.

And she has moments where the ying-brain gets a hold of her, leaving her really distracted and unable to focus, easily running off on tangential thoughts, reacting to sudden emotions before she can really hit the breaks (Thank goodness for the time it takes to type a reply, it's usually enough to catch herself and hit backspace.), and my personal favorite, the narration gets colored by her mental state that she's not consciously aware of. When she's feeling good and having her first clam high, the guy she's hanging out with (and later starts dating) is repeatedly described as smiling. When she's having a really bad time and the self-loathing is kicking her tail, people are described as being angry with her.

I don't do a whole lot with mental changes, because the thought of losing who I am is really uncomfortable for me. I dislike identity death, but I DO love new instincts tugging someone into acting in ways they normally wouldn't even think to. It's a fine line that's pretty difficult to walk.

I've sadly been on hiatus for a while due to health issues (too bad I couldn't get a Zat Zhing in real life), but the 17 chapters so far aren't going anywhere. Chapter 1 is here (plaintext) and here (PDF).

My other series are on pretty similar themes, since "exploring post-TF life" is my absolute jam. "Princess Tells Her Story" (txt) (pdf) (38 chapters) is about someone who ends up in a magical world called Terra, gets turned into a dragon, and becomes the pet of a guy learning magic when he rescues her from the mad wizard that transformed her. "Exodimensional Hoofbun Flopsy" (txt) (pdf) (24 chapters) is about Flopsy, who's a Living Construct created on Terra that finds herself stuck on Earth, learning about technology, and becoming the resident cryptid/superhero of a small town (So it's both "double reverse isekai" and "superhero comic book in text form.) "Cinnabar: The Dragon of Eden" only had one chapter before the hiatus took hold (it was both a vent piece and an attempt to shake off the impending hiatus), but it's a bit darker tone, with the main character having gotten herself turned into a dragon like she always wanted, but now she's stuck in a camp trying to force her back to being a human male because "Magic is Evil".

Being far enough along starts dropping your "Sanity" meter, and it hitting 0 means you give in to the infection and become one of the horny monsters. The ending text will depend on flags you've set and what infection you had (whether you get "rescued" or you give in, and yes, you can "surrender" to basically willingly make your sanity drop to get a desired ending). You also have to find food and water to manage hunger and thirst, preventing you from just hiding in your bunker to avoid ever encountering anything.

I don't know if the game is still being actively developed, but for a while it was constantly being added to. The remake made this easier by moving from a single map to a series of areas that you discover by exploring, with most areas having a theme to their encounters. The carnival area has plush toys and carousel horses. The park has woodland creatures (like the infamous Skunkbeast, but I'm biased on that one), the beach had otters and sea life, etc. It's been forever, so I don't remember too many of them, though.

One of the other fun tricks of private equity firms is to charge the company to be managed by them. Imagine if your boss charged you literal actual dollars to be managed by them.

"Aah! I see you have the machine that goes 'ping'. This is my favorite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way, it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account."

Hedge funds and other corporate ghouls have no interest in "running a successful business". That's not their goal. Their goal is to "extract as much value out of a company as possible". If the company survives and keeps generating value? That's just an unexpected bonus, but that's goal is secondary at best.

It's like the vore of the furry community. You'll be sharing images, and then someone posts a dragon (in a normal pose), doesn't even have to be a NSFW channel, and suddenly you've got someone talking about wanting to be swallowed and digested and spamming maw shots and yadda yadda yadda.

Like, I'm into transformation. I am NOT normal about it, I've written something like 560k words across three series about transformation/post-transformation. One series has someone who's a willing pet, one series has a main character who was a "Living Construct" and basically kept as a pet/property and has to adjust to being A Person now, and the third series has the main character struggling with how almost everyone treats her like a wild and possibly dangerous animal.

But I don't see someone post a picture of a random dog and be like, "Oh, man, it'd be so awesome to be turned into a dog and wag my tail!" I don't go "Oh, a pink collar? Twinsies! Here's a picture of my collar!" I don't go into graphic detail about sexual arousal (not that I really even feel that anymore) on some random person's pet.

It's like the vore of the furry community. You'll be sharing images, and then someone posts a dragon (in a normal pose), doesn't even have to be a NSFW channel, and suddenly you've got someone talking about wanting to be swallowed and digested and spamming maw shots and yadda yadda yadda.

Like, I'm into transformation. I am NOT normal about it, I've written something like 560k words across three series about transformation/post-transformation. One series has someone who's a willing pet, one series has a main character who was a "Living Construct" and basically kept as a pet/property and has to adjust to being A Person now, and the third series has the main character struggling with how almost everyone treats her like a wild and possibly dangerous animal.

But I don't see someone post a picture of a random dog and be like, "Oh, man, it'd be so awesome to be turned into a dog and wag my tail!" I don't go "Oh, a pink collar? Twinsies! Here's a picture of my collar!" I don't go into graphic detail about sexual arousal (not that I really even feel that anymore) on some random person's pet.

So i need you to read and internalized this next sentence.

There is not a single innate quality that makes any person better or worse than any other person.

Bigotry is strengthened by lack of understanding. By lack of empathy and compassion, which are born from understanding. Understanding comes from connection.

Sure, it's tempting to cut ourselves off, retreat to spaces where we can be alone, and thus be safe. And such spaces ARE important to have. But we can't STAY in them permanently. We have to be visible to gain acceptance. We have to be visible so people who are cisgender and heterosexual and everything else can see that we are here, and we are nothing to be afraid of. Otherwise, the only voice they hear is the bigots who want them on their side.

We have to be a group of compassion. Of care. Of acceptance. We have to be the people who say "It does not matter what gender identity you are, what sexuality you are, what anything you are." We cannot be that if we are going to be bigoted towards people who have done no wrong, on the assumption that they will. We cannot demand to be judged by our merits if we are willing to judge others for things they cannot control.

Spirituality, the striving for self-improvement, is also the recognition that we are all The Same, that one cannot harm another without harming oneself, that each of us has an infinitely complex universe within equal to every other person’s.

Humility, the strive for balance and moderation in all things, is also the recognition that we are all Different, that each of us follows a different path in life, and that all paths are valid as long as they are walked with Virtue. The farmer does not have less Virtue than the knight, for the knight cannot serve others without food in their stomach.

Flopsy is gonna fight with everything she's got to help RH-01 have a chance at a good life.

I've been through many "main forms" over the years. Some eventually faded, some that weren't there before came into being.

Cancer? Life/healing energy is running amok within you, concentrated at specific points. Perhaps dust from crystal shards got in you and caused it, similar to real-life carcinogens. Problems with foreign energy flows or natural flows that are stopped/shunted in some ways could manifest in all sorts of ways, such as making a limb wither because life energy can't reach it.

One element of magic in my Earth/Terra setting is "The shape of your soul", which gets into a few things, including healing magic. Weaker healing magic can't affect wounds after they've had a chance to be incorporated into the soul's "self-image", it takes things that are stronger/more difficult to "reach through" that and make it "remember" being whole. Someone born with an illness/defect (or who's had it for a long time, like missing an arm for ten years) might find it exceedingly difficult to get it corrected, because of that.

Then there's stuff related to mixing effects. For instance, someone transformed into another body can't be healed normally, because their soul and body don't match, so healing magic can't close the wounds. Not only can they not benefit from healing magic, but if they're forcibly kept in that shape for too long, their body can start breaking down from the inside, as they're basically not regenerating tissues naturally the way they should. Organs will start to go through cell death and systemic failure. There's little documentation on this, because it's such a horrific and inhumane thing to try to do to someone, but the scattered references to it call it "Soul Sickness".

And there's also new takes on old stuff. Like addiction: What if someone's addicted to something magical? Whether it's strength-enhancing potions or the rush of cutting themselves to feel the relief of a healing potion, or something else.

And then there's things that aren't illnesses at all. The primary focus of "Princess Tells Her Story" is that the main character, Princess, was permanently transformed into a dragon. Normally, such a thing should be impossible; the soul should break down any spell and reassert its true form. If the form was kept applied by an outside force, she should eventually suffer Soul Sickness. In either case, she definitely shouldn't be able to use innate dragon abilities, like breathing fire or flying. And yet, she is a perfectly healthy dragon. Turns out, transformation magic opens up a previously unexplored treatment option for those whose souls already don't quite match their bodies: transgender/therian/otherkin/etc people. There's simply so little research done on it on Terra, even less than has been done on Earth, so it's hardly a surprise that nobody's ever really been able to encounter this kind of thing before.

Princess (a dragon) is the first (known) person to be permanently transformed, and has slowly been trying to come to grips with the realization that she's kinda always been a dragon at heart her whole life. She's always thought everyone had feelings of wanting wings, dreams of flying, desires to have someone take care of them and put a collar around their neck... The part that she's been having a lot of trouble with is realizing that not only is she so much happier like this, but that it's okay to be happy.

Flopsy (a hoofbun) doesn't remember being human, since she died and her soul was lost in the Chaos Void for an indeterminate amount of time. But her soul wouldn't have taken so well to her body if she'd ever really been human inside. She was asked once about whether she'd want to be human (aside from using a spell to disguise herself as one), and she decided that no, she would not like that.

Vayryn (a yinglet) was basically... "fine" with being human? Hard to really explain, but her inner species was basically "null". She didn't have anything specifically against being human, but she was really only one because it was the default, and she never thought she would have an option to pick anything else. So she never paid any thought to it. Becoming a yinglet, she was not happy about that, but that was purely because of how much trouble it would be. Tiny, awkward, embarrassing, doomed to a life of disrespect and challenge. But, over time, she's been overcoming challenges, adapting her environment, making friends, and so on. So she's been growing to love her new body. Especially her fur, she prides herself in how soft and nice it is.

I'm still Typhin, like I've been for some 27-28? years.

...I created the name to play Ultima Online. I needed "a fantasy-ish name that isn't taken", so I stared at the keyboard and let phonemes come to me.

When a player introduced me to ICQ, a way to talk to friends made when not in the game, I used the name Typhin there as well, because I figured I wouldn't want people confused by the discrepancy.

And then when I stopped playing UO, I kept the name, because why not. And as I signed up for other places, well, that name wasn't taken, usually. So I kept using it elsewhere, too.

So, yeah, still using it. It's Me. It's My Name. It's Who I Am.

And then there's the "nicknames". Since I've had many forms over the years, sometimes I give them nicknames/pet names, for fun. And also for a sort of shorthand for discussion.

And then I started writing books, and creating main characters based on my forms, and using those nicknames for the character names.

So, sure, there's also Princess the dragon (because it's an adorable name for a pet dragon), Flopsy the hoofbun (because a bunny named Flopsy is cute, even when it has hooves), Vayryn the yinglet (picked from the gemstone Vayrynenite because it's a nice yinglety name), Sapphire the chocobo (for her blue feathers), Lazuli the Vaporeon (actually V-7357 the rubber Vaporeon doll, in-universe nicknamed "Lazuli" after the gemstone), and so on... They're all also me, kinda, in a way?