A Werewolf In Under-Town

Shaggy felt a vein in his forehead throb as he tried to calm his annoyance at the situation. He was seated, legs crossed and eyes closed, in the middle of a random rooftop in Under-Town. With a creepy old werewolf staring at him and telling he needed to get his breathing under control and ‘find his inner peace.’

This was the exact shit he wanted to avoid and thought he had done so when he had chosen Werewolf at the start of the game. He wanted an outlet for his anger and annoyance. Something to help him decompress after a hard day. Now he was attending virtual anger management in order to transform into his werewolf form. He let out another slow breath as he tried to ‘find his inner wolf.’

“Could Vance be more unhelpful?” Shaggy wondered as he shifted a numb leg.

CRACK

“Stop moving! You must be perfectly still. Your wolf shape requires you to be in a place of internal calm. So you must focus!”

Shaggy groaned loudly before opening his eyes in annoyance. “What the hell for? This clearly isn’t working! Why can’t you teach me to use my rage? I assure you, I have plenty of that right now!”

“As I told you,” Vance sighed, “a werewolf can draw on a variety of emotions. It depends on the person. Most use rage, some sadness, some can even use joy. Unfortunately, you have the most difficult of triggers: a sustained absence of emotion. You explained how rage didn’t work and we tried the others and got similar results. Now we have to get you to identify your inner calm.”

Shaggy groaned again and stood. He punched at the knots in his legs and glanced out at the city. Under-Town was the same as ever. He didn’t even know what time of day it technically was. He felt like they had been at this for hours. Calming his mind as best as he could, he felt a twinge of pain come from his hands and raised them to his face.

He looked over at his werewolf claws and hands, trying to remember how he had summoned them the first time. He had a couple of near-transformations early game where he had human hands with black nails or slightly hairy hands with elongated fingers. But the first time he had fully transformed claws, in the junkyard with the Professor. Against that damn cat-lady.

That was in the middle of a fight too, and he had tried out what the Professor had suggested. He had focused his attention on his hands and tried to calm his mind. The thought suddenly struck him: he had focused on his hands.

“What if I expand on my partial transformation? I can do that to me hands, but what if I do it bit by bit until I have the full transformation down?” Raising his transformed claws to emphasize his point.

But Vance shook his head. “You were extremely lucky to get the partial transformation down. But that is only a stepping stone to the full partial transformation.”

“Full partial? That’s an oxymoron.”

Vance grimaced before he tried explaining again. “You are correct in assuming that the Partial Transformation is a stepping stone to something else. But it is a step toward the Man-Beast form. Not the full wolf that we are going for.”

After he finished speaking, Vance’s body seemed to twist and bend. The already tall man grew a full foot with arms and longs elongating with fur spouting from his body. His head transformed into a full wolfs head with a long snout and beady black eyes. Once the transformation was complete, Shaggy could see what Vance was saying. Vance now looked like a bipedal wolf with long arms and legs ending in sharp black claws. He looked how Shaggy thought a Werewolf should look.

Suddenly Vance shifted again, this time moving to all fours and growing even more fur. Soon, a large brown and white wolf was standing next to Shaggy on the roof. Shaggy marveled at the size of the werewolf. Vance was seven foot tall at his front shoulders and his head raised it to eight feet. Shaggy moved to see how big Vance was from nose to tail, but suddenly the roof they were standing on collapsed and they went tumbling into the empty shack.

“I am getting sick and tired of going through houses!” Shaggy shouted as he threw a couple of sheets of metal off of himself.

“HAHAHAHAHA!”

Vance’s boisterous laughter echoed through the destroyed building as Shaggy climbed his way out to the street. Once outside, he saw Vance was back to his human form and digging his way clear of the rubble. Shaggy shook his head at the old man’s joy as he contemplated what he had just seen.

All this time, his mental image of a werewolf had been the man-beast form. He didn’t even consider the fact that he would transform into a full on wolf. He wanted to slap himself for being so ridiculous. It was called Were-Wolf. What did he think he was going to turn into? As Vance’s laughter died down, Shaggy sat on the dirt road and tried to calm his mind again, focusing on the image of a standard wolf.

For a little while, Shaggy felt nothing, just the same quietness he had when he had first tried to find his calm. But soon he felt a pull in his chest. He thought it was similar to the pull he felt when he was running. The almost instinctive need to do as his body willed. So shaggy exhaled a breath and let it.

The pain started in his spine as it seemed to twist and grow. Shaggy grit his teeth and tried to remain calm as the pain moved up to his shoulders and down his arms. Then it moved to his waist and legs, all the while he felt his bones snap and then regrow. He felt every new hair grow out of his skin, from his arms to his face. The weirdest part was his nose, as it felt like his entire face was stretching outward, trying to escape his skeleton.

Shaggy let out another ragged breath as he kept his eyes closed and ignored the pain as best as he could. Once the bones had stopped repeatedly breaking themselves and he felt the hair stop growing, he opened his eyes. He felt like he was hunched over on all fours, but when he tried to stand up, nothing happened. Looking down, he could see why.

Four wolf legs were extending down from his torso. Shaggy was already standing as ‘up’ as he could. He had done it. Shaggy was now in his wolf form. He tried to shout in joy, but the only sound that came out of his mouth was a joyful bark. Something shifted behind him, grabbing his attention, and he tried to turn and get a better look at it. But as he moved, it moved with him.

“Just your tail, Shaggy.” He thought. “Don’t you dare start chasing it?”

He calmed himself and tried to get a better handle on his new form. But the increased stimuli he was getting from the world around him were unnerving. He could smell everything. He could tell that somewhere to the west someone was cooking and that further south something with a salty smell was moving closer. Shaggy was sure he could almost taste the dirt in the air with his new, longer tongue.

He was also surprised to learn that he could see in color. He had always thought his vision would be monochromatic in wolf form. As Shaggy focused on his sight, he started seeing traces of color in the air. Like little wisps of light. Some were blue, others yellow, and one was red. He followed the red wisp in the air as it floated off to his left. It eventually settled on his companion’s chest.

Vance glanced down at the red wisp as it entered his body before he returned his gaze to Shaggy.

“Look at you. That didn’t take too long. I am better at this than I thought I’d be.” He circled around Shaggy and glanced down at his wolf shape. Shaggy was annoyed to see that they were almost the same height, even with him in his wolf form.

“Well, you’re a little on the short side. But your musculature is impressive.” Vance laughed.

Shaggy snapped his jaws menacingly. At least he tried to. What actually happened was he slobbered over his front with his tongue as he flapped his jaws ineffectually. Vance chuckled as he moved out of the splash zone. Once he finished laughing, the old werewolf got serious again.

“Okay, now see if you can revert.”

Shaggy nodded his large wolf head and closed his eyes again, and focused on his human form. The same bone-snapping pops and the feeling of hair receding back inside himself was disconcerting, but he put it off as he felt dirt beneath his forearms. Opening his eyes, he found himself on his arms and legs… completely naked.

“Oh, what the hell?!”

“It happens with your first couple of shifts until you learn to take your clothes with you.” Vance explained.

Shaggy grimaced as he thought about spending all his money on clothes and backpacks to carry a change of clothes. Being a werewolf was going to be expensive. He was about to ask if Vance had a change of clothes when a translucent blue window popped into existence in front of him. Annoying the hell out of Shaggy.

Werewolf Skills Unlocked

Werewolf Senses – Beginner Level 1

Werewolf Form – Beginner Level 1

Werewolf Speed – Beginner Level 1

Werewolf Durability – Beginner Level 1

Skills Unlocked

Claw Fighting – Beginner Level Maxed

Leaping – Beginner Level 3

Enhanced Senses – Beginner Level 2

Endurance – Beginner Level 4

Congratulations

Your Claw Fighting Skill has reached max level. Claw Fighting is a Combinable Skill. Would you like to combine it with another Max Level Skill or Transform it to Intermediate Level?

Combine/Transform?

Notice

You have your first combinable skill. A combinable skill is a skill that the player can combine with other skills to create new ones. Once you combine skills, you lose all current ranks in both skills, but gain the perks from your new skill. You can still level the old skills up again. Instead of combining a skill, a player can Transform the skill up to its next ranking. The different rankings are Beginner, Intermediate, Expert, and Master. A Transformed Skill starts at Level 1 and levels up as normal. Skills higher than Beginner Rank can’t be combined.

Shaggy blinked away all the messages before he went into information overload. Though he was happy that all his skills leveled retroactively, he was pissed off that he hadn’t had them since the beginning. Who knew how long his Claw Fighting skill had been maxed out and he couldn’t access it because he hadn’t transformed yet? Even his HP saw a large jump now that he had the Endurance Skill. If the game hadn’t glitched, he would’ve had his mentor earlier and his skills would be higher.

Shaggy briefly thought about sending an angry message to A.G.E customer support, but he let it go. He was doing fine without the skills and now that he had them; he was sure they would level up quick. But if at any point he felt like he was lagging behind the others, he was definitely going to send a message. An angry one. He put off going through the skill descriptions for now, as he wanted to see if his mentor had anything else for him.

As he turned to speak to his mentor, a pair of pants hit him in the face. “Now that you have acclimated to your new senses, it is time to go on the hunt. Normally you would do this in your wolf form, but I only have one pair of pants. So for now, you can follow in your human form.”

Shaggy quickly slipped on the pants as Vance transformed into his wolf shape. The older wolf waited for Shaggy to get dressed before it ran off further west. Shaggy groaned as he followed along behind, bare feet slapping through the dirt. Oddly, he felt more at peace as he ran, and soon he was loping along on all fours again. He still wasn’t as fast as Vance in his wolf form, but he could feel the difference his newly unlocked skills made.

He effortlessly leapt up to a nearby roof and continued loping along, tracking the red wisps in the air the showed Vance’s location. He wasn’t surprised that he could now see them in his human form and he had a vague idea of what the wisps were, but he wanted to question Vance about them first. That meant he had to catch up with the old wolf. Putting more power into his legs, Shaggy launched himself across the rooftops. Following his new mentor deeper into hostile gang territory.