This is the exciting small print for this tale.

First, the characters, locations, and events in this story are fictional creations of Reserved Rodent. Certainly, there are names of locations and entities from the real world referenced in this work. These are all used to grant realism to the setting and should in no way be considered accurate representations of these places, events, things, or people in real life. Any other resemblances found within this work to other works are accidental as well as coincidental, and should not be considered monumental. In whole and part, original characters in this work belong to Reserved Rodent, so please make your own characters. This work was written with the intention of posting it and following chapters on SoFurry.com. If you must take it and post it elsewhere, at least leave it fully intact, including these warnings and give credit (or blame) where it is due.

Second, while this opening installment is pretty darn clean, future chapters are going to range from just as clean to various levels of naughtiness. I do not foresee delving into extremes, but there will be various adult level activities, including M/F and M/M, before too many chapters roll by. I will make sure to tag such adult segments correctly, so make sure you pay attention, because they will also have the following warnings (mentioned here so you don't get surprised (not that I expect you will be if you're browsing this site.))

If this is something you are not old enough to legally view in your society, please obey the law and turn away. If this kind of subject matter will offend you, I know you can find something else that will not, so keep browsing. (Unless you want to be offended, then, read on, I suppose, just don't complain if you get what you're looking for.)

Special thanks to my good friend, Tengu the lynx, for proofreading this chapter for me. Anything less than perfect that remains is due to me being stubborn and ignoring his help.

For Every Door that Closes

by Reserved Rodent

One

I believe my first thought as I struggled back to consciousness was, Surviving the end of the world hurts like burning.

Well, okay, the first thought was a lot more colorful and a lot less coherent, but the first thought I'll share was something to that effect. I wasn't immediately sure where the 'surviving the world' part of my thought came from, but that was likely because I hurt everywhere.

My skin felt tight and hot like the summer I got the nasty sunburn after falling asleep on an inter-tube in a wave pool.

My skull felt like it had been crushed and my sinuses filled with boiling tar to expand the shattered bone back out.

Every single bone in my body ached and itched while each muscle felt swollen yet worn down to nothing.

Somehow poking out as an uncomfortable pain amongst an avalanche of bad sensations, my tail-bone felt like it had been bent out of shape - bruised, if not broken.

While the details of how bad I felt kept rolling in, concentration on how or why continued to escape me. A high, ringing tone filled my ears, which felt like they wanted to pop from a rapid change in air pressure. Of course, since I was gasping like I couldn't get a enough air to satisfy my aching lungs, I wasn't really surprised. But I did try and calm my self and take a deep breath in rather than continue my quick, pained gulps. I needed to fill my lungs despite the pain - it helps prevent pneumonia complications after a surgery.

I have no idea why that came to mind. This wasn't recovery after surgery, it was... Where was I?

Hot steel-wool felt like it wrapped around my eyes, and I couldn't seem to open them. I had calmed my breathing down - surely I could open my eyes. I focused on the slow, deep breaths I had managed, focusing on controlling myself past the pain. I needed to gather my thoughts and see if I could figure out what had happened because, in addition to the various pains, everything felt very, very wrong.

Breath in, breath out. Slow and controlled. Now the thoughts. Stop focusing on the pains now. Look for what came before.

Slowly, I brought my thoughts together and began to organize my memories.

I had been driving home after visiting family in Colorado for an early Christmas. I had not made it to Salina on I-70 yet. Not even halfway back to home. The radio station had been making fun of the fact that today was the end of the world according to the Mayan calender. I had gotten tired of the line they kept using about how the Mayans were already destroyed as a culture, so the date was late.

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\n I was still in my car, I realized suddenly, feeling the seat belt across my chest. My skin had cooled, my sinuses had stopped burning - though they still felt wrong - and my bones had stopped aching though they still itched. The discomfort in my tail-bone was less painful, but still an obnoxious distraction.

I could feel the car seat under me, but there was something else there too. How in the world did something get under me on the seat, and was it what had caused the irritation to the base of my spine?

No, it was past the end of my spine... A phantom tail?

I wondered if this was a dream. Often, I can remember my dreams. Occasionally it is not a story I watch, but something where I can consciously control my actions. Like the flying dreams where I can actually feel having wings on my back.

Sometimes, the next day, I'll feel traces of needing to stretch wings that just aren't there. What kind of nightmare was I having with this much pain and discomfort - and a tail?

If this was a dream, and my understanding of dreams is correct, there will be one sense missing, usually taste and smell. So my next deep breath in through my nose, I paid close attention.

Clear as day, multiple scents and memories associated with them flooded me. It smelled like I was in my car - an old, mixed scent of the plastics, metals, and fabrics that made up the interior, infused with my own scent and lighter scents of things left or spilled within over time.

There was a heavy dose of salt in the air, as if I were near an ocean. "No oceans anywhere near Kansas" was my first thought, which brought forth visions of a massive pillar of water appearing in a bright flash of light ahead of me on the interstate.

The torrent of water that resulted slammed into the front of my Dodge Intrepid and flipped it off the road.

There was a tang of blood, my blood, in the air. Not fresh, but left over from the scratches I took when the passenger side windows shattered during the roll that resulted from being swept from the road.

A barely noticeable scent under the salt, the sour cream and onion chips I had been snacking on were still somewhere in the car. Or probably scattered throughout the car's interior.

It was just a small bag, but I had no more than opened them when the flashes of bright light had started, distracting me and most of the other drivers on the road. They had been completely forgotten a few minutes later, when I had come over a hill and seen the edge of a huge, perfectly circular hole against the left side of my lane up ahead. It had stretched over the passing lane and the whole of the two westbound lanes. I think the bag had probably flown onto the floor when I had swerved onto the right shoulder to make sure I didn't slam the breaking car ahead of me into this frightening pit.

Gasoline, oil, various plants and animals where all lighter, more distant scents in that one breath. Somehow, I could tell all of those scents were barely wafting in through the passenger side windows. Even stranger, I could tell that most of the plant and all of the animal scents were ones I had never come across before.

All of this did little to make me think that this was not a dream. While I could never remember a dream where scents where included, little lone with such clarity and numbers, they were too crisp to be believed. Sure, I had some weird allergy or other bad reaction to pot so that I could tell if someone had been using it or even exposed to someone who had for days after their usage. Occasionally, I'd catch a whiff of something that brought back childhood memories associated with that scent. But all this detail from one breath was simply beyond my, and possibly any human's, ability.

So my stubborn streak started to kick in. If this was a dream, it was a very stupid nightmare and I wanted to be done with it. If this was some kind of shock-induced delusion because I had been in some kind of an accident, I needed to snap out of it and make sure help was on the way. Either way, focusing on getting fully conscious seemed my best course. That's how I stopped nightmares that where resisting me turning them aside. Surely that was the best way to get out of shock.

The ringing in my ears had dimmed enough I could make out unrecognized bird and animal calls in the distance. My thoughts were gathered enough to realize that meant my sight was the only sense yet to be accounted for. Time to open my eyes no matter how much they were still feeling dry and achy.

I got them cracked open. The light was so bright, I had to squint and bring my right hand up to shade my eyes. Then, I freaked out as my hand hit something furry and pressed it against my head.

Now, I'm not going to lie and tell you that I never freak out. I have several times in my life, through surprise, had similar reactions.

Playing hide and seek at a cousin's house when I had been ten, I had run around a corner in a barn and almost face first into a huge (to a ten year old) orb spider. I had screamed bloody murder, jumping back and falling on my ass, shaking from the adrenalin surge.

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\n Stepping on a large garden (or maybe small bull, I hadn't gotten that good a look at it) snake while barefoot, I had screamed and jumped back as a fifteen year old, shaking my leg uncontrollably while the snake had slithered off. Fortunately, neither of us had been hurt, just shocked and surprised by our accidental contact.

At twenty four, while visiting the parents, I had again freaked out when I had almost stepped (barefoot this time too) on a rattle snake in their back yard. That encounter did not end well for the snake, even though it had been minding it's own business. Since animal control would not come out to catch and relocate it somewhere away from the parents ranch with all the horses and dogs and cats, I had ended up killing it.

I had hated doing it.

It hadn't even noticed me, I had thought. But the chances of one of my parents or their pets or livestock encountering the snake - since it had been less than ten feet from the house - had been too great a risk. I hadn't had the tools to catch and relocate it myself, so I had beheaded it with a machete.

Anyway, while the unknown usually pulls my curiosity to the forefront, some surprises get a brief panic attack from my system. This was one of those times.

Scrunching my eyes tightly closed, an adrenaline surge drove both hands up to start trying to bat whatever it was away from my face. I managed to land a solid smack to the bottom of my jaw and hard thump against my nose. Well, maybe the second was the creature - I was neither paying too close of attention nor completely focused.

Not sure if it was because of my blood and hormones pumping from my fright or if something else triggered it just then, but several memories tumbled into place suddenly.

Staggered flashes of light had been starting to occur, scattered randomly ahead and behind me as I had traveled home on I-70. The radio station had announced that this phenomenon was widespread. While hard to confirm, they had said, reports had suggested it was happening world wide; the cause unknown.

Both from the frightened voices of the news announcers on air before the station was suddenly cut off, and from my own sight, I had known the flashes were almost instant, and changed what they hit.

They all had seemed to affect perfectly circular columns of unknown height and depth. Sometimes the changes had been minor, deep snow where before there was just frost covered ground, odd looking trees where the prairie has once stood, a two lane, or empty gravel road where a semi had been pulling over on the other side of the four lane interstate. Other times the changes had been more drastic, like the pillar of water that swept my car from the road, the pit I had seen, the two hundred foot tall, leaning tower of stratified stone that had looked like a laboratory carved mesa.

And finally, I remembered myself reaching for my glasses where they had flown into the passenger seat amongst the broken glass. The flashes had started only five or ten minutes ago. I had needed to be able to see what was going on better than my unaided, nearsighted vision would allow.

The car had tumbled over twice into a ditch, and if I had hoped to figure out what to do next, I needed a clear look at where I had ended up. Just before I had grabbed them, a white flash had filled my vision and pain like millions of mosquito bites had chased me from consciousness.

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\n As the memories rolled to a halt, I took a deep breath and stopped batting at my face, hands hanging ready to continue inches from my closed eyes. I felt sore from my self inflicted beating, and my tail-bone still felt half bruised, half numb. The rest of my body seemed only mildly achy, though still weird. No longer wrong, but somehow different.

Cautiously cracking my eyes open again, I took a long look at my hands, clearly visible despite the almost painfully bright light coming through the window by my side. The thought passed through my head, Why doesn't that make my hands feel wrong instead of simply feeling different?

They weren't human hands. A mild wiggle of my fingers confirmed they were my hands, but they looked nothing like my hands. Sure, the centers of the palm on both looked close to how they had; all the lines that palm readers use appearing to be in place, the color and texture looking right. But light tan fur surrounded both palms, running down my wrist and up my fingers as well. The pads of the last digits of my fingers and thumbs were devoid of fur, though they no longer held the prints they used to, being smooth flesh instead.

Turning my hands to look at their backs, I realized that both hands had small flecks of a darker color scattered unevenly through the fur that wrapped around them. It was closer to what I thought of as the light, dusty brown of prairie soil. On my right hand, these dark spots were rarer and non-existent in the large white patch that started halfway from the wrist and seemed to flow down my arm, ending just before my elbow.

Examining the back of my right pointer finger, I saw the small scars I've had as long as I can remember. No fur covered the line and thin triangle where I had always assumed a cat had told me to leave it alone when I was a curious, grabbing animals I should have left alone, toddler.

My eyes followed the white spot down, turning my right arm to get a better look at the notable scar I had gotten a year ago. The two inch line was visible because it too lacked fur. It was right where the sleeping cheetah cub had snagged me.

He had twitched when the needle poked in while I had been holding him for his first set of shots. We had gotten through his two sisters without incident, but he had always been a trouble maker. The zoo vet had wrapped me up real well, giving me good humored grief about not knowing which parts of a cheetah were dangerous. It had been long, but not deep, so I hadn't thought it would scar, but being close to the elbow, the movement had evidently made sure I got a puffy white line of scar tissue when it had healed.

While checking for that scar, I had realized that there was a lot more lower face - also furry - sticking out further than my nose used to. My hand was steady as I reached up to adjust the rear view mirror to get a better look at myself. Yay for no longer shaking though I felt I should have been.

Taking a long look, moving my head to get better views of my whole head, I unconsciously reached for my glasses.

I managed to locate them without taking my eyes from the blurry view in he mirror and also without cutting myself on any of the glass there.

The magnetic shade attachment was still on them, which helped relax my eyes as I held them on my new snout... muzzle... I wasn't sure what the correct term was for me now. 'Nose' no longer seemed appropriate in any case.

I realized that I was going to need to figure out some way to keep my glasses in place now that my ears had changed structure and placement on my head.

Somehow, I had not only managed to change into something no longer human - gaining an increased sensitivity to light - I was just as nearsighted as a humanoid rat as I had been before.