As always when it came to a new substance, people decided to ‘experiment’.
There were the usual cautious tests… how much was this new water’s density (it varied) what was the opacity (fluctuates) what was the basic principles of its behaviour (somewhere between a perfect liquid and slime) all of which baffled most normal scientists.
Then you got the mavericks… the ones who were quite happy to try anything to get a kick out of it or even a ‘high’. While the transformations did not give a person an artificial high like most drugs there ‘was’ a demonstratable effect that the sheer horror of transformation could induce a rather ‘real’ high… given that what they saw was happening in actual reality. Now one could say this was somehow ‘worse’ then a real drug given that at least drugs only happened within the mind… and most people ‘should’ recover…
…but the same argument was made with the new curious Metamorphic variants that came into illegal markets. They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, in various strengths and with different methods of using them. Liquids to inject, pills to swallow, pens to lick, tattoos to wear… all of them laced with Metamorphic water.
The most popular variant among high school was a pill that the police tended to call ‘Temporalis Adductus Mutagenic Compound.… but it had more fancy names such as Rainbow Drops, Freakout, Wild Side, Demon High…
The pills themselves contained a somewhat diluted variant of the compound. People realised that when the substance was placed in pure water you could easily make more of it. The water tended to ‘infect’ pure water below a certain threshold. Then people realised that the infection would stop, once it hit a barrier of salt-water. So, people created ‘bubbles’ of the liquid existing within a semi-permeable wall of starch or certain oils. The effect of this was to draw in from a well of salt on the outer wall, neutralising the ‘core’ water slowly… while allowing some of it to escape. This was an incredibly difficult balancing act and the liquid itself was very unstable. It was not completely unheard of for the semi-permeable wall to just rupture. However the illegal trade was good to improve it…
…after all they wanted their customers to come back for more.
What kind of customers? Well, they came in all shapes and sizes but for the most part, they were people who ‘wanted’ to experience a transformation… but to have it only temporary. There dared not go to the mainstream clinics that went allt he way into the deep end… they just wanted to dip a little bit inside then run off.
Such people wanted to feel what it was like to be someone else… some ‘thing’ else… perhaps even experience that life for a night and then return as if ‘nothing happened’.
Such temporary transformations were seen as a bit of a pipedream to those who studied the material and how dangerous it was… there were almost no routes back to turning back from a permanent transformation… yet people tried to find ways to make it work. People who were used to dealing with a substance that was to them ‘safer’ then actual drugs…
They refined it... found various techniques and pulled much further ahead then mainstream science creating products that did indeed provide a temporary transformation even if that change still could not be controlled. The first was a kind of ‘pill’ laced with layers of salts and oils.
And of course, many who took the pill found themselves trapped in their new bodies when the compound acted different than expected. What was once supposed to be a temporary dream (or nightmare) … became a permanent dream (or nightmare.) The pills were banned of course and carried a hefty penalty for anyone selling them… though generally being caught with them for personal use didn’t merit much more than a fine.
It didn’t take long to create a sort of ‘patch’ on the skin that was considered far safer than the pill. Without actually going inside the body it could easily be removed if a person felt they were going too far in their change. Even the Army became interested in this as a ‘last ditch’ use to safe a person’s life. The results of this use were… mixed.
Slowly releasing the Morphic Water was not sufficient. It had to go into a person’s body at just the right amount to cause an initial transformation without the ‘settling’ effect as it was nicknamed. The patch was designed rapid release the strange liquid then to slow down and ‘hold’ the change to allow a person to return to human…
The patch could then be removed, and their humanity will return almost instantly to an hour. However, damaging the patch or sometime just ‘bad luck’ could still result in a permanent transformation…
Yet there were always thrill seekers willing to take the risk.. to have a body to enjoy if only for a day and live out a fantasy…
… and even more would want to live out that fantasy one more night… paying whatever they could…
