Chapters.

[Illusion]

Could you imagine being ripped away from everything you knew and loved? To be taken from your home, your family... your life? It is exactly what happened to us. It happened so quickly, one moment you’re making your way down the street, and the next, your waking to tall figures in lab coats.

We all lived ordinary lives until that day, we were all average people, you might wonder, who would abduct someone? a close friend with a secret desire, a creeping stalker out on the hunt? No, it was something far worst. A faction of the government, bent on human experimentation to create believe it or not super soldiers.

Now our story is unlike that which you might see in comic books. My name is Tala and I was among the group from experiment 305, before us, the lab had failed time and time again, their mission, to create human shifters, beings that could shift their form from human, to any animal at will. It was a clever idea to say the least. Imagine your enemy, unseen, scurrying through your perimeters in the shape of a mouse? It’s to say the least a slick idea.

However, what they put us through was nothing amazing; it was one step beyond torture. Our group had about 100 beings, all between the ages of 14 to 20, they at least made a point to leave children that were prepubescent out of this nasty situation. They conducted several tests upon us, used us as lab rats one at a time. Needles, shocks, strange tools I can’t even describe, some nights we were too weak to even lift our heads.

By the time they had finished with us there were 78 of us left, and they believed they had succeeded. We where the first batch of fully shifting super beings, but something had indeed gone wrong... We as individuals could only shift into one specific animal each and not switch from one to the other. They saw us as a failure...

We were soon ordered to death, no point in keeping around an experiment half finished. A young woman was put in charge of our disposal. She looked more frightened than we did, she had always been one of the kinder lab workers, she didn’t treat us like guinea pigs, she still saw us as humans, perhaps even noticed that most of us were, children.

On the night we were meant to be executed she instead used her government authority to ship us far away, we were hidden within a large carrier plane and transported to what we now call home. An isolated island, to some extents it seems tropical enough and wild fruits and coconut grow by the masses here. She was truly kind to provide us with a place that we would not all rot.

At first all was well, we got along for the most part, some preferred to remain in their animal skins and even grew feral while others remained in human form, breaking off into little groups we populated the area bit by bit. Soon other experiments came, other failures... Some who could not shift between forms, being caught in their animal skin. Others that harboured animal traits while in their human skin, such as claws or tails. I’ve since lost count of how many of us are left. Some have vanished, others died or were killed. It didn’t take long before some apples grew sour, some are bent on killing and trying to rule over our little population, some are just simply feral and vicious and others are fighting to stay alive. In this little world of ours it’s just as in the animal world, survival of the fittest, who will survive?