Human Experimentation
Ugh...
I barely managed to pry open eyelids that felt a thousand pounds heavy. Yesterday had been the kind of ordeal that left you feeling like you'd clawed your way back from the brink. Whether it had been a vicious flu or something else entirely, all I could remember was my whole body burning like a furnace while I drifted in and out of a feverish haze, the memories already dissolving into fog.
But now? My condition had recovered so completely it was almost insulting. Not a single ache, not a trace of that sticky, sluggish misery—just my ordinary body at its absolute best.
The instant the sickness vanished, a soaring sense of liberation flooded every inch of me. Riding that crest of pure good feeling, I kicked the blankets off, thrust both arms high toward the ceiling, and let out a triumphant whoop.
"Yeah!"
...In that same heartbeat I startled at the sound of my own voice and clamped both hands over my mouth.
Hold on. What the hell was that clear, bright little voice just now? Under normal circumstances, the only thing that should have come out of my throat was a proper cat's nyaang!
And the view was wrong, too. This wasn't the world I'd always seen from below, looking up. Right now my line of sight sat at the exact height and angle I'd had back when I was human.
My heart started hammering. I scrambled off the bed in something closer to a roll than a step, then bolted for the full-length mirror in the corner of the room as if a magnet were yanking me forward, desperate to see what I looked like.
"Eh...!"
The moment I faced the glass, my eyes flew open so wide they couldn't possibly go any farther, and my whole body locked up.
Staring back at me with the same stunned expression was the figure of a small child.
At most she looked like a third-grader—tiny, delicate, almost frail. But the shock didn't stop there. Between soft white strands of hair, a pair of large cat ears stood perked and alert, and from behind my frozen hips a long tail jutted straight up in rigid alarm.
What kind of absurd nonsense was this?! Reincarnating as a cat hadn't been enough—now I'd turned into some kind of beast-person, a mash-up of human and cat?!
And this world wasn't even one of those fantasy novels where magic ran wild and hunters went around slaying monsters. This was an utterly ordinary, mind-numbingly mundane modern society, scrubbed clean of anything remotely resembling supernatural powers.
Trembling from head to toe at a surreal phenomenon that belonged only in novels or comics, I prodded my face and body with disbelieving hands.
And then... the most critical, most devastating realization hit me a beat too late.
My precious that had vanished without a single trace. The understanding struck like a lightning bolt. I wasn't a tomcat. I had been a female cat all along!
Maybe I'd simply never stayed a cat long enough to notice. It wasn't as if I'd ever actually looked at a cat's genitals before.
Because I'd transformed so abruptly from cat to beast-person, of course I was completely naked—not a thread on me.
Face burning with shame and panic, I scanned the floor. Yuyeon's T-shirt happened to be lying right there in a heap. I was in no position to be picky, so I snatched it up and yanked it over my head.
My body had shrunk so drastically that the shirt hung on me like a baggy dress, the hem swinging down around my knees.
No surprise there. Comparing a grown man's height to my current tiny stature was like comparing the sky to the earth.
I was so flabbergasted that even a hollow laugh refused to come out. A beast-person. Me. A beast-person...!
But I didn't have long to spiral. A faint, familiar presence from outside suddenly pricked my nerves.
It was that hypersensitive instinct cats and dogs are born with—the uncanny ability to pick out their owner's footsteps from a distance. That was why pets always gathered at the door the moment their butlers came home and unlocked it, and I possessed that same gift in full.
Thump. Thump. From far off came the beeps of the door lock, followed by familiar footsteps drawing closer.
...Wait. What if she sees me like this?!
In a flash, every sci-fi thriller scene I'd ever watched flooded through my mind: black-suited NIS agents kicking down the door, hauling me away, dissecting me in some secret underground base while jabbing me full of needles—human experimentation!
"Hiiik...!"
Terror-stricken, I whipped my head around in search of a hiding place. But the studio apartment was tiny, and there was nowhere that could completely conceal a body this size. In pure panic I dove under the bed on pure feline instinct, jamming myself into the narrow gap.
Faced with crisis, the wild survival habits from my cat days had kicked in without permission.
Unfortunately, a body the size of a human child was nothing like a cat's. As I forced myself in, my long tail—which I still hadn't learned to control—stuck out from under the bed in a ridiculous little tuft. I simply couldn't pull it inside.
With a click, the front door opened.
"Nabi~ Unni brought you medicine~ How are you feeling?"
Worry saturated every note of Yuyeon's voice as she stepped inside. Seeing me laid out sick yesterday must have really shaken her; she seemed to have come back with a whole bag of cat medicine.
Her footsteps into the room stopped dead in front of the bed.
"Hmm? Nabi, why are you under the bed? I can see your whole tail."
Yuyeon started to bend down. I realized there was no more hiding this.
So I desperately tried to avoid her eyes—exactly like an ostrich burying its head in the sand.
As if that could possibly work.
Yuyeon's gaze, peering under the bed, swept over my small back, the cat ears, and the oversized T-shirt that belonged to her. The air in the room froze solid in an instant.
"Kyaaaaaaah! Who are you?!"
"Eh..."
Our eyes met.
And just like that, Yuyeon had found me. Of course she had. No matter how frantically I tried to hide, there was never any chance of concealing a body this size inside the cramped one-room apartment where we lived face-to-face every single day.
Yuyeon opened the door. Nabi had looked so unwell that she'd gone to the animal hospital and gotten medicine prescribed. She hadn't been able to afford an actual examination.
Of course, if Nabi's condition had been truly dire she would have hauled her straight to the clinic, but yesterday hadn't seemed that bad.
"Nabi~"
Yuyeon called her cat's name with a soft smile, the corners of her mouth curling up. Normally Nabi would have flopped over on the bed the moment the door opened, belly exposed in greeting. That familiar sight was nowhere to be found.
There was a strange feeling, as if some presence still lingered in the room.
Then Yuyeon let out a small pfft of a smile. She had spotted the cat tail poking out from the gap under the bed. Nabi sometimes crawled under there when she was sulking or needed alone time; to Yuyeon it was a completely familiar scene.
"What are you doing hiding under there? Caught you."
She knew because Nabi went under the bed so often.
But when she bent down, the figure she saw was not her cat Nabi.
Huddled there was a small child wearing Yuyeon's oversized T-shirt like a dress. Faced with a sudden stranger who had somehow appeared inside her tiny apartment, Yuyeon screamed on pure instinct.
"Kyaaaaaaah! Wh-who are you?!"
If the person hiding under the bed had been a large adult man, Yuyeon would have flung the medicine bag aside then and there, bolted out the front door, and called the police. But the figure before her was clearly a slender little girl, so young and fragile that the urge to run never quite took hold.
Still, something about this child was deeply wrong.
"Yu... Yuyeon."
The terrified eyes and the way the child wriggled out from under the bed reminded Yuyeon powerfully of her own cat, Nabi—someone she knew better than anyone.
And the large cat ears and the tail attached to her rear only drove the point home harder.
Confronted with an impossible sight that belonged in some sci-fi fantasy film or novel, Yuyeon asked in a dazed, flustered stammer:
"Is... is it really you? Can you understand me? Are you actually Nabi?"
"Yeah. It's really me, Nabi."
At the sight of Nabi nodding, Yuyeon could only clutch the back of her neck.
Something that only ever happened in fantasy movies had just happened!
"Is... is it really true?"
"Yeah, it's true."
Yuyeon touched Nabi's ears and tail. This was no cheap cosplay.
They were real parts of her body! Yuyeon hurriedly pulled out her phone.
She still couldn't make sense of any of this, but first she had to call the National Intelligence Service...! Reason for contact: world's first cat-to-human transformation...!
Seeing Yuyeon's frantic motion, Nabi's eyes went wide with shock.
The terror that she might actually become a sacrifice for human experimentation if this got reported crashed over her. The dread she'd felt while staring into the mirror was about to become real. Nabi launched her small body forward, seized Yuyeon's wrist in both hands, and desperately blocked the reckless action.
"No... nooooo! Don't call!"
"Kyaak!"