Okapi Transformation Collab

BEHOLD! A successful collaboration!

I'll keep it short, as I'd prefer you to read 's awesome story about this transformation (below). Also, be sure to head on over to his page and read MORE amazing TF stories!

The Tale of Toni Janiah-Sopko

"Since the invention of the rave, people whose hearts are neon and whose clocks are on Tokyo time have had to struggle--nay, to fight!--for the right to rave on. Noise ordinances. Police being called. Health inspctors shutting down venues. Rave-enhancing pharmaceuticals banned or strictly controlled. Even when the rave became mainstream, the rave was still underground. But no more, my friends! No more! Welcome to the Democratic Republic of Central Africa! This is the Rave-el in the Jungle, and the party will go on until the money runs out!"

The speech, delivered from an impromptu DJ booth, received a raucous cheer from the assembled ravers. Most of them were far too pallid to be DRCA locals--or even have ancestors that might have hailed from anywhere near the former banquet hall at the edge of Wagadugu that formed the Rave-el's venue.

But, under the glow of the blacklights and the thump of bass speakers powerful enough to be controlled in 117 countries, the throngs of young rich ravers were all equal.

One young lady in particular gyrated harder and faster than any of the others, a routine only broken by sporadic racking coughs and pulls from an inhaler. With her neon striped thigh socks, high-heeled combat boots, belted miniskirt, and hair almost the same shade of pink as her tank top, she blended in well with the crowd. Even as she sought to subtly move through it toward an unknown destination.

Toni Janiah-Sopko, late of the Western University medieval literature program and now a rave tourist in the Democratic Republic of Central Africa, had taken out what was left of her scholarship money to make it there. And she was determined to overcome asthma, allergies, and assholes in the pursuit of what she had come for.

Gyrating wildly, she moved through the massive crowd--nearly 5,000 ravers from all over the world. Even though her body and soul were in tune with the music and the beat, her intense sea-green eyes scanned the crowd of sweat-streaked and unfamiliar faces looking for just one.

And then she saw him. Troy Dayton, the palest, hardcore-est, most sensitive, and most cut raver Toni had ever met. His life was like a poetic rebellion against his NASCAR name and his buttoned-down parents, and Toni was finally going to reach him. After all the hemming and hawwing, the circling each other coyly at rinky-dink local raves, she was finally going to tell him how she felt.

She'd come halfway across the world to see him…

…in the arms of another girl.

Or, rather, in such an intimate tangle of raving limbs that it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. And not just any other girl: it was Dacia Tyerploß of all people, the spoiled daughter of the German consul back home, the one who got the latest Euro-rave outfits in the diplomatic bag. The one who seemed to have a different piece of neon arm-candy hanging off of her various limbs every time she went out.

Luckily, the sheer overwhelming sound on the dance floor meant that Toni's howl of anguish was inaudible. Several people interpreted it as a particularly hardcore dance move, and gave her appreciative gestures as she stumbled her way toward the edge of the crowd, struggling to hold together the broken pieces of her shattered image of Troy.

Wagadugu abutted right up against a jungle, being primarily a river town; Toni found her way to a ground-level balcony at the very edge of the primeval forest, close enough to the party to hear the beat but far enough away for the unhappy thoughts to swirl around in her head.

Well, that and the other stuff.

As she pulled out and lit a cigarette, the jungle started to do its work. Allergies flared to life, watering up Toni's eyes and giving her pale face the only color it ever got. Hay fever had always been her nemesis since Mom was still pinning mittens to her jacket, but the jungle brought it to roaring heights she could only have dreamed of before. Her asthma was inflamed by the heat as well; within moments she was alternating deep drags of her cigarette with brief, healing pulls from her inhaler.

"You don't look so good," said Camilla Pedrosa in her heavy Brooklyn accent. Camilla had come up behind Toni, having picked up on the way she had stomped out of the rave. They'd known each other for years in the scene Stateside; Camilla had Toni's spare epi-pen in her purse.

Well, spare epi-pens. Five of them. Toni was nothing if not reactive to her environment.

"I don't feel so good!" Toni shouted. "This damn place is like Hiroshima for my allergies. All those plants squirting out their nasty jungle pollens…do you know what they're doing, Cam? They've having sex with the world until their tiny green rods fall off, and choking me with their gametes. I--achoo!"

Her nose vomited up an unspeakable mass into Toni's neon skull-pattern handkerchief, and she blinked away tears from reddened eyes.

"Are you sure that's all it is?" Camilla asked, her words underlined by the heavy bass thumping of the "Rave-el in the Jungle" inside.

Toni looked at the windows in the distance, the neon of cracked glow-sticks reflected and dancing across her skin even there. Troy Dayton was visible, dancing with that omni-skank Dacia Tyerploß. "That's all it is," she said. "I can't breathe, my eyes are watering like Niagara Falls…"

She shrieked as something buzzed by her ear and swatted at empty air for a few moments.

"…and this place is full of bugs big enough to show up on radar and lizards planning the stomp Tokyo," Toni finished. "It's a nightmare."

"It's not that bad," Camilla said.

Toni took a fresh shot from her inhaler and gave Camilla a venomous look. "Tell that to me when I'm not dripping and being stung and with an asthma gorilla perched on my chest," she said. "If my ancestors had been meant to go outside and get stung to death and molested by plantsperm and fried by sunshine, they wouldn't have been from Scandinavia."

"Look, I told you that it was a bad idea for you to come here, Toni," said Camilla. "I know you're dedicated to this stuff, but look at you. You're a hot mess, a walking mass of mucus, and for what? Troy? We've all seen how you look at that asshole, and now you're ten thousand miles from home with nowhere to go if you run out of epi-pens or inhalers."

"It would be the same back home," Toni mumbled. She lit a new cigarette with the stump of the old. "Unless it's the deadest part of winter, and even then I'd be gasping for air like a beached fish or having to pick through my trail mix for nuts."

"Instead of picking through a rave for them? For Troy Dayton's nuts in particular?"

Toni turned away, gazing deep into the jungle. "Very funny."

"All I'm saying is, you know who you are, and you knew what was probably going to happen here. What exactly were you thinking, huh? What did you want?"

"I just want to dance," said Toni, "and not have to worry that doubling over with coughs or hives or an inhaler blast. You know, the sort of thing that drives people away."

"Well, let me know if you find it," said Camilla. "In the meantime, go back to the hotel. Get some recirculated air in you, and then go home. You'll feel better if you're not constantly in the thick of the worst place in the world for you."

"Yeah, we'll see about that." Toni finished her cigarette, waited until Camilla had disappeared back into the rave, and then walked into the jungle.

"You like that, huh? You like that, you stupid allergies and lousy fragile parchment-twig of a body?" Toni said through gritted teeth as the brushed through the foliage. The beat grew fainter and fainter as she went, and soon the only light came from her cigarettes or (now useless) cell phone. Bugs of all kinds swarmed her, and she felt dozens of bites along her exposed lower thighs, arms, shoulders, and neck.

Yet she toughed it out and pressed on, snorking from the inhaler every few steps until it ran out and she cast it aside. Toni was too clouded with anger, confusion, and mucus to really know why she was pressing on.

Maybe a vague idea that if she could throw enough allergens at herself that she would get used to them?

Perhaps it was a morbid form of punishment, denying her frail body the raving it craved but wasn't suited for while inflicting the maximum amount of suffering.

Either way, it soon became clear to Toni that she wasn't alone.

Pausing, she heard the soft sounds of something moving through the underbrush. The light of her useless cell phone only revealed a wall of green. "Cam? Is that you?"

More noises, this time from a different direction. Toni spun around, only to be confronted with more fresh virgin jungle. Then the noises returned: on her left, then on her right, now in front, now in back.

"Cam, if that's you, it's not funny!" Toni said, coughing violently as she did so for want of an inhaler. She didn't get a response. A moment later, the greenery in front of the erstwhile raver gave way, and she found herself in a small clearing, one large enough to let in a fresh batch of silvery moonlight to offer some illumination.

Her pursuer was also suddenly revealed, and Toni gasped.

It was like a large dark zebra, or perhaps a short and very sun-kissed giraffe. Or, more accurately, a blend of the two, with a long neck and dark fur fading to bright white stripes on its long hooved legs. A head with a long and giraffine face craned down on a lengthy neck to examine Toni with glassy eyes; a long black snake of a tongue lazily wet the creature's lips (or what passed for them).

"Oh! An…an…" Toni struggled to put a name to a silhouette that she had only seen in books or perhaps once on a long-forgotten zoo trip. "O…o…okapi! Y-you're an okapi!"

The creature made no sign that Toni's speech had frightened it; it regarded her all the same.

A loud sneeze followed by intense coughing wasn't enough to drive it away either, at least not that Toni could see now that her eyes were red and swollen as well as watery.

"Yeah, I know," Toni said after a moment. "I'm a mess, totally unsuited for life in the jungle or in a rave. I may be wheezy, but you're endangered. And tomorrow I'll be…well, I'll still be wheezy. And you'll still be endangered."

Silence.

Toni closed her eyes to rub them. "What am I doing out here," she groused. "Talking to a fancy giraffe lost in the forest. Just when you think the night can't get any worse. Isn't that right…"

Looking up, she saw that the okapi had melted back into the dark jungle.

…huh. Guess I scared it away after all," mumbled Toni. "Now I just need to pull it together and get back to the rave."

As she turned around, though, Toni felt a sharp twitch in her ears. Thinking it was another bug, she reached up and slapped wheezily at the general area. But then her brows clouded with confusion. Her ears…they'd been too high up, too pointed.

"What the…?"

Toni's ears were growing, impossibly ballooning from their petite and lobeless state to something large, cupped, and…hairy? Yes, even when she brought her hands down to eye level, Toni could see dark brown hair pushing up out of her knuckles and her forearms.

And then suddenly the hair was everywhere. Toni jerked about wildly, partly in fear, partly in surprise, and partly in a desperate attempt to itch the crawling sensation that was suddenly everywhere on her body. But it wasn't until she craned over to scratch a hard-to-reach spot that Toni saw the pale stripes beginning to form on her thighs, where the dark fur at first grew around her pale skin before filling in the voids with white fuzz.

"Oh no…oh no, oh no…M-must have scratched up against something trippy, or maybe a b-bug fever…"

The fingernails on Toni's hands were cloudier and much stronger now, the color of freshly turned earth. All but those on her pinky fingers; those nails withered away to nothing as the fingers fused with their neighbors. With nothing to fuse with, Toni's other digits simply bulked up from nowhere, stronger and more elegant than they'd ever been.

Her toes weren't so lucky; they pinched together painfully, agonizingly. Toni could only stumble about in intense pain as her boots swelled and the laces pulled taut. After what seemed like an eternity, the stitching on the front ripped open. A cloven hoof, hard and dark, emerged, rapidly peeling off what was left of the boot. Toni was able to get the other off after fumbling at it with her strange new fingers, but her sock was still ruined; it couldn't contain the twin hoof rapidly forming from her other foot.

"Weird dream, just a really really weird dream," Toni said, repeating the words like a mantra even as she watched a tail sprout its way free from beneath her skirt. How was she able to see it so well? Had her neck always been that long?

Even under the reduced number of hairy fingers Toni had at her disposal, she could feel that her neck had grown long and lithe and was only becoming moreso. But the changes had also reached her face. Her pale button of a nose was suddenly two flaring nostrils…and increasingly far out in front. She let out a noise that was half gasp, half moan as her round face and pointed chin were molded into something with much wider vision, a better sense of smell, and somehow a much better view of the dark foliage around her.

Throughout the whole ordeal, Toni had been subtly growing taller; now, as the changes entered their final stage, her musculature caught up. Her thigh socks split at the top and went from loose to skintight elsewhere. Ballooning hips opened tears in a skirt that had never been meant to be a hip-hugger. Increasingly well-muscled forearms strained at the straps of Toni's tank top, while her b-cup "girls" grew in proportion to the deepening chest and tightening pectorals around them.

"Aaaagh!" With a final tremor that shook every corner of her new body, Toni felt the strange sensations stop. Swaying on new hooves, sea-green eyes now deep-set in a long skull still crowned with pink hair, she was…well, Toni herself couldn't have said. But she felt closer to the okapi that had stared her down than the pale human girl who had stumbled into the forest.

She should have been horrified at the sudden transfiguration, aghast at the way her humanity had been so suddenly ripped away. And yet…

And yet…

Toni took a deep breath. Released it. There was no blockage, no mucus, no asthma. Her eyes shone clear and clean in the dark. Scents of a warm, moist night filled her new nostrils, and instead of burning she felt only the sensation of gently stirring air on her fur. All the allergies, all the maladies that had afflicted her since she was a little girl, a human girl…suddenly gone.

"Whoopee!" Toni cried. She leapt into the air for joy, her legs carrying her almost into the treetops. Landing with a lithe grace, she darted a midnight-black tongue out of her mouth.

"If this is just a weird dream, I'm going to make the best of it."

With an unerring sense of direction and an infectious enthusiasm matched only by her sudden dexterity, Toni skipped through the forest back toward the rave. She burst through the doors and cut through the crowd, ignoring the strange looks her new form attracted.

Then, in the middle of the dance floor, as the next song started, Toni danced like she had never danced before. She danced like she was finally free

I hate that I even have to put this here, but here goes: STOP RIGHT THERE! Please do not steal, reproduce, trace, or otherwise use this artwork without my permission; this piece was conjured by my brain and drawn with my hand, and is NOT a base, clipart or free-use image. If you do repost this image for whatever reason, please use proper etiquette and CREDIT your source, in this case me! The same also goes for the author's story ; please be considerate and ask permission before reposting, referencing or otherwise distributing! THANKS FOR UNDERSTANDING!