Thank you everyone for everything so far. ^.=.^

Here's the story of Kainik.

Text Version:
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The Story of Kainik

“So you like, what – like lizards more than girls?” Dave’s misunderstood expression drove nails into Kyle’s heart as he attempted to explain himself further.
“Well, no, uh. I-it’s more like, uh…” An embarrassed laugh burst from Kyle’s mouth. His right hand shakily groomed his thick, oak-brown hair as he formulated the rest of the sentence in his mind; overwhelming waves of dread pulsing through his veins.
“I think I’ve heard enough.” The sound of Dave’s seat scraping against the linoleum floor cut deeply into Kyle’s anguished mind as Dave turned back towards the rest of Kyle’s friends on the far side of the campus cafeteria. Kyle’s heart dropped. In a desperate attempt to save the last of his ruined friendships, he leapt from his seat to grab Dave by the collar.

Kyle’s eyes were bloated with tears as he screamed, “No! You don’t get it!”
Immediately, Kyle’s back smacked harshly against the rock-hard floor. He looked up at Dave’s distraught face and the eyes of dozens of people within his vicinity.
“You’re a fucking creep – you hear me?” David looked upon Kyle with an expression of disappointment and loss. “You’re dead to us – all of us – so leave us alone. Never talk to any of us again.” David took a single sparing glance at Kyle before his pained eyes evaporated into the gathering crowd.

---

Though he’d expected it from the beginning, Kyle wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming influx of emotional distress building within his chest following his friends’ complete and utter, total rejection of his true personality. So, what if he was a scalie? He honestly didn’t think it was that big of a deal. In fact, he couldn’t grasp why so many people had agreed to ostracise him after half of them had just come out as gay or transgender. Was being classed as a dragon furry so different to any of that? Sure, there certainly weren’t as many of them around as any other minority – especially where he lived – but his peers seemed agreeable enough to accept anyone else with a mental deference from what they had classed as ‘the norm.’

His emotions were running too high. Making rash decisions wasn’t usually his forte, but, this time, the outer shell of vengeful anger setting on Kyle’s most foregrounded emotions had driven him to pack his bags and leave his roommates – Dave and Joseph – immediately. He wouldn’t be paying that month’s rent, nor would he ever accept any form of future apology. He blocked all but two of the numbers in his phone and marched, for the next ten miles, carrying nothing but his notepad, phone, wallet, and the clothes on his back.

---

The last few hours had been a slog – the sun was beginning to merge with the horizon, and Kyle hadn’t yet passed a single residential building. Part of his mind questioned why someone would build a university out in the middle of literally nowhere, but, then again, he’d never made the journey back to his parents’ house by leg before. Every mile felt like five. After the initial wave of emotion faded from his brain, he’d been left with a feeling of empty, demoralizing sadness that sucked all emotional energy from his body. He tried taking his mind off that day’s events by drawing something, but it was impossible to walk and sketch simultaneously.

Finally, as the sky began to fade from purple to black, he reached his house’s front door.
“Who is it?” An older male voice called angrily from within the building.
“It’s Kyle…” Kyle muttered tentatively.
“What? Speak up, will you! Damn it, damn ears, aren’t damn good for any damn thing anymore. What-” The door slammed open, and Kyle’s grandfather’s annoyed expression dropped to a slightly embarrassed look of surprise. He paused in hesitation before continuing a separate sentence. “-are you doing here?”

Kyle found it difficult to focus on his grandfather’s face. “Are Adam and Jessica home yet?”
A look of semi-understanding washed over Kyle’s grandfathers’ face as he noticed the wet streaks across Kyle’s face. “Wh- um… No, uh. D-do you need, uh… are you okay?”
“No.” The tone in Kyle’s voice wavered with emotion. He continued to stare downwards and grit his teeth in a futile attempt to hide his feelings. “Can I come in here for tonight, please?”
“O-of course.” Kyle’s grandfather opened himself to the living room behind him.
“Thank you.” Kyle muttered in appreciative sadness.

As he entered, he inhaled the familiar scent of the incense his grandfather liked to burn at night. It helped offset the odd smell of chemicals that would fill the house every morning. Nobody had found the scent’s source, but Kyle’s parents assumed it was some sort of gas emission from the local morning truck routes. Kyle reminisced about the photos covering each glossed hard-wood wall. He remembered each time his parents asked a random stranger to take their photo in front of this building or that beach. Once, they even had their camera stolen – a whole holiday; reduced to mere memories. Kyle spied the old, haggard couch his grandfather had been sitting on moments before, and the fireplace he had been tending to. He also spotted a new television mounted above the mantlepiece.
“Your father made sure to keep your room the same way it was when you left last year. Everything is where it should be.” Kyle’s grandfather gestured to the dark staircase that lead to the top floor turning off the front landing hallway.
“Thanks. Has Jessica called about their expedition?”
“Her name, to you, is mother, Kyle. And no, they’re still deep in a no coverage zone.”
“Okay.” Kyle sighed with fragile annoyance and took a side glance at his grandfather before continuing up the stairs to his room.
“Oh, and Kyle?”
Kyle gazed back down the stairs to his grandfather as he was half-way between two steps. “Yeah?”
“Could you leave your grandfather be after 10 o’clock? He’s got an important call to make.”
Slightly confused, Kyle replied, “Uh, sure?”
“Thank you. Are you going to stay in your room for the night?”
“Probably.”
“Alright. See you tomorrow, Kyle.” And his grandfather hobbled back to the living room.

Continuing up the stairway, Kyle pondered his grandfather’s distracted personality. Admittedly, he expected arranging a house-stay to be exceptionally more difficult. His grandfather was usually quite an unacceptable character. Maybe he would be normal again in the morning? Whatever it was, he was glad he could stay at home tonight.

Entering his room was like entering a different time. Everything was the same as it had been eight months earlier, albeit covered in a heavy layer of dust. His desk was still utterly untidy – covered in draft submission papers and graffitied assignment handouts. His bed was still buried under the clothes from when he excitedly – and hurriedly – packed to leave home. His cupboard was even still ajar. Though, what he was most relieved to see again were the drawings. They smothered his walls. It was impossible to know what the walls were truly made of, give or take a couple of tell-tale gaps in the layer of marked paper on each wall. The drawings began childish to the right of his door, but, as they progressed along the room, they became more detailed and thoughtful. Across from Kyle, a particularly excellent drawing reminded him of the day he was accepted into the A-level art class in high school, and to the door’s left were the last few dragons he had inked before he left home.

Though it filled him with joy to return to his own domain, Kyle felt a twinge of sadness at leaving the pile of new drawings he’d created back at his roommates’ house. He promised himself he would bring them home, but now that promise would likely never be fulfilled.

Kyle shoved clothes off his bed and slumped onto the covers. All he bothered to remove were his backpack and shoes. And though he was miserable and confused, his tired, emotionally-wrecked body almost immediately pulled him into the comfort of sleep.

---

Screams filled Kyle’s dreams. Unceasing, terrifying pleas for forgiveness. Though he tried to think nothing of it, they continued to haunt him; closing in on his mind and growing louder and louder, until, finally, his eyes snapped open.

For a small moment, the screaming stopped. Kyle sighed in relief and began to mutter to himself. “Just a nightm-”
“Stop! No! Leave! Leave me alone! Just leave me, please!”
“What the fuck?” Kyle’s brain burst into overdrive as he attempted to figure out what was happening. In tired stupidity, he jumped into his untied shoes and sprinted down the stairs, carrying a pen that was sitting on his bedside table. His mind was still flustered with groggy confusion, and he stopped for a second at the bottom of the stairs, holding his head, before sprinting into the overlarge living room, closer to the sound of his distressed grandfather.
“Stop! Please! Kyle is here! Kyle is here!”
Kyle didn’t know if it was his tired brain messing with his aural perception, but the screaming seemed to be coming from behind the fireplace.

Kyle looked from side to side, attempting to search for the real source of the sound, but he kept looking back towards the fireplace in utter confusion. Was this a dream? A poltergeist? The screams grew more strained. Kyle became ever more panicked. Sweat dripped from his freezing palms. He clenched the pen like his life depended on it. He began to lose focus. He moved his eyes from side to side, looking for an answer somewhere in his utterly, boringly familiar living room. Glass door to the yard on the right. Open-plan kitchen and dining room on the left. Front door behind. Floor below. Roof above. Fireplace and new TV in front of him.

“New TV?! Why?! What happened to the old one? It was working just fine!” Kyle stepped forward, and back again – indecision clouding his focus further, before it all came to a dramatic head
in the form of his next strained, utterly confused, screaming sentence.
“FOR FUCK’S SAKE, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!”
Kyle’s voice cracked with exhaustion. The screaming stopped immediately, almost as if whatever ghost had been haunting the mantlepiece had been exorcised by his overwrought vocal chords.

A moment of pure, utter silence followed: it chilled Kyle to the bone and froze his feet to the ground. Kyle’s face went pale with fear and the unpleasant level of silence this moment had brought upon his previously warm, comforting home. For this moment, he was truly alone.

A large figure burst through the wall where the fireplace was. The television and mantlepiece swung to the side and slammed against a rocking chair previously situated to the right of the fire. A blinding white light silhouetted the dark body. Kyle’s tired brain didn’t have time to comprehend its shape before it shoved him to the ground – scraping against the end of the pen in Kyle’s outstretched arm – and bounded for the front door. Kyle heard the ear-splitting sound of glass shattering and wood splintering as the figure broke through the oak-wood front door and out into the scarcely-lit midnight street.

Kyle scrambled to his feet, glanced towards the door – hesitating – and turned to the blinding bright light. As he ran through the large opening, his nostrils filled with the stench of familiarly recognisable chemical gas. His eyes began to adjust to the light, and he stared around the room in awe. He began to make out glass vials and metal containers on stands, with tubes slithering across the ceiling; all contained within a glaringly bright white room. However, his eyes soon locked on a darker blotch lying in the centre of the floor.

“Grandpa!” Kyle screamed as he dropped to his knees before the unconscious body. He checked the pulse. A small wave of relief washed over him. His grandfather was still alive, just unconscious. Kyle checked his pockets for his phone and felt a sharp pain in his lower back. Gasping in pain, he realised he was still holding the pen. Placing the pen on the floor, he stood up to reach his back pocket, attempting not to inadvertently stab himself a second time. Though, in doing so, Kyle’s left elbow knocked a rather large glass. It spun and spilled forward onto Kyle – covering him from the stomach down in water.

“Gah, shit!” Kyle was barely concentrating on anything but his phone. The water was a mild inconvenience, but he had to get his grandfather to a hospital. His left hand still dripping, he dialled for an ambulance; frantically checking his grandfather’s pulse again in anguished confusion. He was still alive.

As he waited for aid to run through the front door, he glanced again through its splintered tatters, and thought he spied, in the scarcely-lit bushes of the cold night, a pair of cat-like eyes staring directly back into his soul.

“It’s going to be okay, grandpa. You’re going to be okay.”

---

Thankfully, the ambulance arrived in enough time to save Kyle’s grandfather from any further harm. Unfortunately, the police wanted a taste of the action as well as the press, so Kyle was sent away from home. Fortunately, his cousin happened to be in-town, so, after another half-hour journey by car, the police dropped Kyle at the front door to his cousin’s apartment at four-thirty in the morning. Somehow, Kyle managed to keep it together enough to direct them to her building, and not give up and ask them to take him back to campus, as that was a popular police chauffeuring zone, and it would have been much easier not to talk to them and just let them drive.
“Kyle! What the hell happened to you?” Kyle’s cousin pushed locks of dishevelled ginger hair from her frightened face.
“I’m still not quite sure, to be honest, Jordie… I-I think I saved a life tonight.”
Jordie’s face changed from fear to surprise. “Come in. Tell me everything.”


“And I think someone broke in somehow and tried to kill him, but they heard me coming, and ran away.”
Jordie’s face continued to harbor a joint expression of confusion and supressed excitement. “But why would they have broken the door to get out, if they’d already broken in?”

Kyle reconsidered the story. “That’s a good point; maybe grandpa had invited them in, but things turned bad, and they had to escape as quickly as possible.”
“By breaking through a massive oak door? Did they have an axe on them or something? Because seriously, that door is tough.”
“Was tough…” Kyle tried to picture the figure in his head, but all he could see was a dark silhouette. He’d also just consciously realised how warm the skin on his stomach, hands and legs was feeling. “The intruder was huge – I remember that – maybe… seven feet tall?”

“It could have been a wrestler, looking for performance enhancing drugs that grandpa could be making.” Jordie suggested.
Trying to comprehend the events that had just transpired was making Kyle uncomfortable. He shifted in his seat, but he couldn’t seem to stop sitting on the lump in the back of the chair.
He pushed it from his mind – he’d sat in worse – at least this chair wasn’t made of cheap campus-owned plastic.

“I can totally see that, sure… But we live out in the middle of nowhere. I think someone would have noticed all the wrestlers making out-of-town medicine runs by now, don’t you think?” Kyle found respite in his conversations with Jordie. Though she was almost five years older than him, she was the only person he could relate to when it came to expressing his personality. She had no idea he was a furry, but that didn’t stop him from feeling like he never had to share that with her. She knew full well he was super interested in dragons and had always joked that he loved them more than people. Maybe she already knew?

“Hey, I never told you why I left campus in the first place.” A small wash of adrenaline pulsed through Kyle’s veins as he readied himself to tell Jordie the truth. Though he was stopped short of panicking when she guessed an unexpected answer:
“Was it a girl?” She questioned thoughtfully.
“Wh- uh…” Kyle’s eyes widened in surprise. “No, actually, huh…”
“Hey, it’s okay if you tell me. I promise to keep it a secret.” Jordie probed facetiously.
“Woah, no. Okay. It’s really not a girl.”
“Is it a boy?”
“No, of course not!” Kyle coughed as he replied.
“You coughed! Did you get in trouble?”
“What does coughing have to do with getting in trouble?” Kyle coughed again.
“You did it again!” Jordie pointed at Kyle accusingly. “Okay, so, I read this thing online that said-”
“Yeah, and you can always trust that.” An annoying kink formed in Kyle’s jaw. He worked it away by opening his mouth and moving his jaw slowly from side to side as he listened to Jordie’s irritated retort.

“Oh, come on! You can’t call me out for that!”
The lump at the back of the chair started to hurt Kyle’s back. He rose from his seat to stretch and walk around for a bit. “Yes, Jordie. I can. And you and I both know that all the mystical things they say on the internet are almost never true!”

Jordie’s eyes widened and her mouth sealed shut. She began to go pale.
In content reaction to this, Kyle began to wag his tail happily. “There, you see? No. It’s not a girl, and it’s not a boy, and me coughing doesn’t mean I got in any sort of trouble! I’m just feeling all off because of my lack of sleep.”

“Uhh… Are you sure that’s all it is?” Jordie kept her eyes fixated on Kyle’s tail. Where it joined with his back, aqua-blue scales shimmered dimly in the light of Jordie’s apartment. She noticed Kyle working another kink out of his neck, when it cracked and grew noticeably before her eyes. Jordie rose from her seat tentatively, as if awaiting an attack.

“Yes! What do you mean? Is this another thing you read online?” Kyle itched at his back. It felt like his pants weren’t on properly, so he reached a hand down to readjust them, when the tips of his fingers touched the cold, blue scales growing across a tail that he was positive didn’t exist a minute ago. He froze. Kyle slowly and meticulously let his fingertips slide across the scales; feeling a shiver wash up his tail and spine to the back of his neck as he reached the tip of his new appendage. He wrapped a hand around the end and slowly pulled it into view; feeling the apartment’s cool night air waft across its surface.

Jordie and Kyle were both utterly speechless. They both silently stared as scales continued to cascade across Kyle’s tail, until it was completely covered in blue reptilian skin. The silence was only broken when Jordie looked back up to Kyle’s face to try and make eye contact again. “Gaahh!” Jordie was taken aback when she found herself staring directly into two yellow, cat-like eyes surrounded by more growing blue scales.

“What now?!” Kyle shouted in a panic. He was beginning to hear small creaks and groans throughout his body as more of his anatomic structure shifted away from human and more towards…

“Wh- am I? Wait.. What?! WHAT?!” Kyle reached a hand up to his face. Scales had spread from his eyes outwards. They were all blue, save for the large ruby-colored scales flowing from the top of his nose, up towards where his hair used to be. He slid his hand up to the top of his head, where he noticed two particularly obvious, sharp protrusions. “Horns, too?!”

“A-and teeth!” Jordie added in a terrified tone as she pointed a shaking finger at Kyle’s elongating muzzle.
Kyle staggered. He turned towards a wall and fell against it; his growing body cracking the drywall.
“Ghuuuuh!!” Kyle groaned in confused terror as, for a small moment, he felt violently sick to the stomach. Though the moment of sickness passed as soon as it had begun, the confusion was brought to new heights as he stuck a long, slick tongue out of his mouth and felt the tip of each new fang in his carnivorous maw. Kyle found he had the urge to cough a third time, though, as if expecting what was about to happen, he turned his head away from Jordie as he coughed a small spit of orange flame from his mouth and nose.

Jordie stifled a scream as the blazing fire narrowly missed a large wooden cabinet. Keeping herself more together than she believed she could be at that moment, she ran into the kitchen and snatched the water jug from her refrigerator.

Kyle groaned again, this time with a much deeper, more raspy voice, as he felt the fourth and fifth fingers on his left hand merge with three unnervingly loud crunching noises. His elongating, claw-like nails dug into the wall as he slid to the ground; his legs beginning to shift themselves. Though he found it difficult to keep his eyes open as they started to grow with his head, he managed to spot more blue scales crawling across each of his elongating fingers. He shut his eyes as his ribs expanded outwards, ripping through his shirt and jacket, and the muscles in his legs started ripping blue-scaled holes in his jeans.

Jordie arrived back in the living room, just in time to see the last remnants of Kyle’s shirt falling from his scale-plated chest, and his jeans fall to the floor in tatters.
Kyle stared at the ceiling, gritted his teeth and clawed at the soft, leathery skin under his chin, feeling saliva drip from his mouth and nose as the pain in his feet grew almost unbearable. Thankfully, his semi-tied shoes finally gave way, with six individual popping rips, to two three-taloned blue-scaled reptilian feet that Kyle flexed in thankful relief as he used each sharp-taloned foot to cut the shoe away from the other. Another few crunches, and the bones in each toe elongated his feet by four more inches. Additionally, the ball of each paw had raised, becoming far more anatomically suitable for Kyle’s reptilian body.

---

Another moment of absolute silence befell Kyle, though, this time, it was Jordie who felt completely alone. As a panting Kyle finally opened his new eyes, letting each iris adjust to the light and his nostrils adjust to his new scent, he looked to Jordie, and sighed a breath of relief: miniature licks of fire spitting uncontrollably from his mouth.

“A-are you… Kyle? Are you still… in there?” Jordie asked tentatively.
Kyle opened his mouth to speak and noticed how much more manoeuvrable his neck was. “I-I think so…”
Jordie was slightly startled by how raspy and deep Kyle’s new voice was, though it still sounded childish; she could hear the youth in his voice. “W-well, that’s a fucking relief…”
Jordie slumped back onto her couch, noticed the water jug in her hands, and placed it carefully on the ground, as if it would explode at the slightest prod. “Is this what you wanted to tell me about?”

Using a scaled hand to rub his new muzzle, Kyle considered his answer. “Not exactly.”