This is the third chapter of Near-Infrared, a series which will focus on various post-TF adjustments after a sudden off-screen lion transformation.

In this chapter, our anonymous character (totally not a self-insert) is living his second day as a lion.

Story also below :

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The next morning, I was greeted by a pair of paws, and the same cyan tint as yesterday.

Still a lion. Great.

I went to the bathroom and drank some water off the faucet. Then I rubbed my scent on the living room plant and...

Wait.

That was a cat thing to do.

Fuck.

Was my mind changing as well? Or was it already altrered and I just hadn't noticed it? Feeling suddenly anxious, I did a bunch of mental checks to reassure myself I was still human inside. I was ok. I had some cat like mannerisms yesterday as well. Just like I already knew how to move my new body right off the bat, or how to scoop water with my tongue, or how I kept prowling in circles as I was thinking. My brain had to be altered somehow to make this body work or else I would simply be unable to move properly. Yeah. I would be okay. I was still myself. For the most part at least.

For breakfast, I drank some milk, this time making less of a mess : I managed to pierce a hole in another bottle, and used my jaw to hold the plastic bottle and pour most the liquid in the bowl. With that, I ate half a kilogram of ground beef from the fridge (even if I were able to, there was probably no point in cooking it anyway), and still felt somewhat hungry afterwards. I would soon run out of food edible for a lion and that was getting me really worried. How would I manage?

Obviously, getting outside wasn't on the table. Delivery seemed the only option. But I had to be careful about it : no one could see me like this. Not only that, I also had work tomorrow. It was a remote position in cybersecurity consulting, but under the current circumstances it would be hard to manage anything... or was it?

I walked (on all fours, as always) to my desk, pawed at the power button of my computer until it turned on, and encountered my first problem : the desk was too high for me, the chair too small, and standing up using my front paws meant I could only use one hand (paw) at a time. I had to find a comfortable way to sit first. I pushed away the chair, and got the idea of bringing the couch in front of the desk to have more elevation. That way, I would be able to use both paws on the computer. As a lion, I couldn't really grab things well anymore, except with my own mouth. Circling around the couch, I found a right spot to bite on, started pulling and... wow. It just was so easy. Dragging the whole couch across the room almost felt like nothing to me, being stuck in this new form had some decent upside at least. That gave me some hope. Pretty soon I had it set up.

Using the computer was hard, but not impossible. I could use a mouse and a keyboard, albeit pretty slowly. First was finding a way to call in sick at work, preferably up until the week after or so. That would give me sufficient time to figure out my next move. I found a decent medical leave template online, painstakingly used Adobe Photoshop to complete it in a credible manner, along with writing a fake doctors note. I just had to email that to HR tomorrow, present it as a bad case of flu, and that would be it. Hopefully so. Hours later, I was done, and my forearms (forelegs) were hurting a bit. I felt tired and went for a brief nap. Lions typically need to sleep a lot, and apparently, I was no exception.

I spent the afternoon browsing the news and benchmarking delivery services. I needed one which could allow personnalized requests for grocery deliveries. According to the lion page on wikipedia, I apparently had to eat at least 5 kgs of meat a day (no wonder I was hungry). Calculating the amount of money I would have to spend in order to purchase this daily amount as deliveries for one month made my skin crawl, but it was still manageable financially. I had the start of a survival strategy at the very least.

The evening was uneventful : I ate the remainder of meat products in my fridge, watched some videos on youtube to try to feel some sense of normalcy, but being unable to see any warm colors anymore kept distracting me. Then I went to sleep.