[I’m currently receiving physical therapy for a muscle strain in my leg. Part of the treatment consists of lying on my stomach with my leg connected to a machine that uses electric current to induce muscle contractions. The current makes my foot twitch involuntarily and rhythmically from side to side at 5 second or so intervals. While lying on the examination table, feeling my foot repeatedly twitch without my making it happen - or being able to prevent it from happening, it was easy to imagine myself visiting...]

Circe's Physical Therapy Clinic:
(the best HMO in town!)
"Transduction Transformation"

Circe, the clinic's director is personally overseeing my treatment. She tells me transduction therapy is guaranteed to make me feel like a completely new person. She wraps a large pad around my right leg below my knee. The pad is connected by a coiled wire to a small machine on a cart next to the platform I'm lying on. Circe sets the machine’s intensity, frequency and timer, then saying she has another client waiting for an acupuncture treatment, she leaves the room, closing the door behind her.

The treatment begins and the sensation is quite pleasant - extremely relaxing, in fact. I can feel the machine’s effect spreading up from my right leg, along that side of my body, and gradually working its way over towards the left. It’s only when I glance at my right arm and notice the scaly skin and growing claws that I realize something is wrong - seriously wrong! A pressure building up in the seat of my gym shorts suddenly gives way with the sound of ripping fabric, and I realize that I’ve grown - and I’m still growing - a large, bulky tail!

I begin yelling for help in an increasingly gravelly, deepening voice, but none of the clinic’s other clients can hear me through the dense soundproofed door. I try to reach behind me to unstrap the device from my leg, but it’s no use - the machine’s stimulations have relaxed me into immobility. Minutes go by as my transformation continues, and continues, and continues... I feel my tail thump down upon the examining table’s padded surface, and as it continues to grow, dangling off the end of the table. My cries for help, still unanswered, devolve into wordless bellows.

Finally, the machine’s timer bell sounds a dainty ‘ding.’ The device turns itself off and my leg’s rhythmic twitching comes to a halt. At the same moment the door opens and Circe enters. She sees the results of my transduction therapy and smiles. “Mr. Comus, you’ve responded wonderfully; in fact, I think you’re ready for the next part of your treatment -" she opens a second door in the room; on the other side is a mysterious and strangely inviting mangrove swamp "- total environmental immersion." The sight and scent of it triggers something deep in my mind, and I find myself slithering off the examination table and clambering towards the doorway. I cross its threshold and slip beneath the water’s surface. Only my eyes and nostrils break the surface. As my tail undulates behind me, effortlessly propelling me through the water, I feel completely at home.

Circe's Physical Therapy Clinic: (the best HMO in town!) "Transduction Transformation"

Circe's Physical Therapy Clinic:
(the best HMO in town!)
"Transduction Transformation"