Someone had framed her, she knew it. Lauren had been set up by someone on her way to the train station. They'd put some classified data chips on her person and reported her to the police. Before she could even state her innocence she was clubbed by police batons and another officer injured her throat so badly she could not speak. The mute zebra was sent to a show trial where she was quickly found guilty and sentenced to the mysterioius Pangean Prison.

This was no ordinary prison, not by a long shot. Someone had wanted to get her out of the way so badly they were willing to go to great lengths to ensure her silence. She should've realized it earlier, the officer probably injured her throat on purpose, so she could not speak in her own defense. Never allowed a writing implement she could not tell anyone she was set up.

The thing that made this prison unique was that once you entered its walls, you were theirs. She resisted as she was forcibly stripped by two male guards, who restrained her in a chair and injected her with several mysterious treatments. The substance began its work almost immediately, changing her body from its normal form into something different.

She felt it first in her face, her skin changing into hard scales, and three horns pushing out of her skull. The hard plate at the back of her head gave her an inclination as to what she was becoming. Her arms thickened and her chest flattened out as her curves faded into bulk, and her body became much more built.

Her thin tail became a thick muscle a moment before her hooves became thick round feet, and her body went from a lithe female form to a muscular male shape. She blushed as her anatomy completed its changes into a male triceratops.

He grunted as he was released and an orange bundle thrown into his hands. Lauren had some difficulty putting on his shirt, but the pants slid on easily enough. Once he was finished, a guard slapped an ankle bracelet on his left leg. A guard them gestured towards the door, and he was unceremoniously pushed ahead by the barrel of a gun. The small mammal guard was a ferret, half his size.

At first he wondered why the guards would make their prisoners deadly and twice as big, but then it became clear. Areas the prisoners were to be were reinforced, designed to carry her now 250 lb body. Guard only areas were only rated to support a much lighter mass. Any prisoner that attempted to get into an unauthorized area was betrayed by their greater weight and dropped into the pit below, an area where the guards would come to collect you without much conversation. The last prisoner that tried to attack the guard post found his thin arms too weak to hold his mass and fell below. (He was a T-Rex.) The guards gave him a broken rib to ensure he would not try again.

He also noticed the way the prisoners were standing. Lauren realized all the male prisoners were now female dinosaurs, and the female prisoners male dinosaurs. It explained his own present state. Another inmate later informed her that the only way to get your body back was four injections at release, and that they did this to ensure prisoner behavior. Any black marks meant you would not be considered for release at all, and escape was something prisoners just didn't do. Not because they didn't want to, but even if they succeeded, the prison was built in the arctic circle. Dinosaurs were cold blooded, and any escaped prisoner would once again be betrayed by their new body. Within minutes they would go into torpor and their bodies would shut down on them, and it would be up to the guards if they rescued you or left you to die. Several skeletons on his way in indicated they usually did not.

So that was it. Stripped of his true identity, gender, species, and name, he was now called only by his number. Lauren struggled to remember who he was in this male reptilian frame, but it slipped further from him every day. He only had his hair to remind him of what he was. Living this way was uncomfortable, especially since the co-ed prison did not allow separate living or bathing quarters for their transposed gender prisoners, but in fact forced them together to remind each what the other lost.

Lauren had been attacked his first day in the shower, by two female raptors. He had fought them off with his greater strength, and even jammed his horns into one of the raptor's torsos, but after the guards took the others away and gave Lauren a kick for his trouble, no one bothered him after.

Now he could concentrate on the only thing that mattered. Proving his innocence and getting his body back the way it was supposed to be.

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Art by  caribou