Bootleg VHS tapes of people Becoming circulate on the grey market; not exactly illegal, not controlled in the same way that information about making new combat dolls is, but generally understood to be illicit.
Popular categories include:
⸢Alchemical Timelapses⸥ Selected.
content warnings: much meaner than I thought it would be, grooming child soldiers, noncon transformations, unpleasant body imagery, death.
The video starts immediately, with no explanation, its only context a steadily increasing timestamp blinking in a corner.
The camera stares directly into the face of a mangy looking late-teen sitting on a folding chair, their slight form buried in an oversized hoodie.
Big, calloused hands slip into the frame and offer the teen a cup of tea; they shake a bit as they accept it, their nervousness exposing the surface of the liquid to the camera for the barest moment.
Whoever made this tape stretched that one frame across seconds—pause here.
Take a closer look.
Whatever liquid is in the cup doesn't look at all like tea should; it's too thick, too glossy. It's boiling, a bubble frozen in the moment of popping just like bubblegum—
Unpause. The next part is what you're here for.
The teen looks up, speaks, their voice reedy and unsure. “D-do I have to?”
The voice which answers from out of frame has all the confidence of a man who has never second-guessed the suffering he inflicts.
“Yes, you do. Stop wasting time.”
The teen gulps and raises the teacup to their lips—
And as they do something flows out of the cup to meet them, to slip between their barely parted lips and slither down inside them. The video doesn't get a clear picture of it, no matter that it zooms in for a moment, but …
The teen spasms, their head jerking back and shoulders contorting; a scream dies in their throat as the teacup clatters to the floor. After a few moments of their body twisting itself into a pretzel, they collapse to the floor and the tape dissolves into static—through it you can faintly see a bulky figure stepping into frame and bending down towards the teen, hardly more than the barest hints of motion—
*
When it clears, the timestamp has advanced by a month. The teen is huddled on the folding chair, trying to fold themself into their hoodie. It’s tighter on their frame now, less oversized—their body is filling out beneath it.
“… there, that’s the tape going,” the confident man says from off-frame. “Now, take that ridiculous thing off.”
The teen looks at the floor. “I … I don't want to.”
“It doesn't matter what you want. Take it off.”
For a moment it looks like they're going to speak, going to object or try to resist, but whatever spark glimmered in their eyes fades away painfully fast. They stand up and those strong hands slip in from out of the frame to pull the chair away, then the camera wobbles backward as they pull off their hoodie.
They're wearing a tank top and sweat pants under it, neither in particularly good repair; through a hole there's a flash of something bright and shiny. Their hair hangs down to their neck in greasy chunks, and even standing upright they remain slightly hunched over, closed in on themself. They're lean and tall and their muscles are too visible, starved of insulating fat.
“The shirt too, ██████.”
They just stand there looking at the floor, the faintest blush glowing on their cheeks, until finally the hands slip back in and angrily rip their shirt off. They sputter and curse, finally looking up from the floor—and all the color goes out of their face as fear fills them.
It's hard to see their body with how much they're shaking, but there's clearly something wrong with it—aside from the silvery splotch splitting their torso in half, there are several points where their skin is unnaturally distended, red and cracked as something underneath tries to push its way out. The sides of their hips, their iliac crests, and (as they begrudgingly turn around) all up and down their spine.
“Good. I think that's enough documentation. Time for your next dose.”
The man's footsteps echo through the tape's static as he walks away; the teen sits back down and stares at their hands. They don't try to put their shirt or hoodie back on, not yet, not until this is over—
For a moment they glance up at the camera, looking directly into it for the first time. The tape glitches, shudders, and suddenly the man is standing there, offering the teen another teacup of that strange not-exactly-a-liquid. It bulges up in the center, drawn upwards, almost like it's being pulled in towards the teen's mouth, but they just sit and hold it away from their body and stare at it in resigned despair.
“Drink it already, I don't have all day.”
“But it hurt so much …”
“It really doesn't matter.”
“… fine.”
They raise the teacup to their lips. The liquid flows up to meet them, to press into them, just as it did before. They try to keep their mouth closed, try not to let it in, and for a moment it seems like they're succeeding—
Then their jaw yanks itself open with a sickening crack, hanging slack beneath the horror in their eyes, and the liquid flows into them just like they had never resisted at all.
They weather the pain a bit better this time; it takes them longer to collapse to the floor, as their limbs twist themselves around and their body's new protrusions shift obscenely beneath their fragile skin, but in the end they do fall.
The man doesn't try to help them, just tilts the camera down to capture a better angle of their convulsions against the cold linoleum floor. Whatever's forming beneath the teen's skin presses through, sharp silvery protrusions smeared with blood clawing at the air, a puddle of blood spreading out beneath their twisting body, their scream choked and broken and blending into the static that's always present at the edges of tapes like this.
Finally, mercifully (and too soon for some viewers), the tape cuts, the timestamp jumping ahead by almost half a year. There's no static this time, nothing hidden: one moment the teen is contorted on the floor, and the next they're lounging on a couch that's surely much more comfortable than the folding chair in the first two sequences.
They look good.
They're muscular, relaxed, just enough softness in their body to show that they've been eating well; their hair is smooth and shiny, nothing like it was before. The tank top and shorts they're wearing do little to hide the silver lines running across their skin. Their eyes are big and blank.
“Time for your … hmm, sixth session? Almost done, then,” the man says. His voice is self-satisfied, maybe a bit smug; certainly distracted. “How have things been with the rest of your squad?”
The teen shrugs. “Good. They're fine. It's nice to get out of this place from time to time.”
“No conflicts, no …?”
“No. Everything's fine.”
The man hums to himself for a moment, considering—
“I'm glad to hear that, ██████. Some of us were worried about whether you'd integrate well, you know, but … well. Undress.”
The teen stands up, shrugs off their shirt and shorts, and stands there naked for a moment before slowly turning around in a circle. There are no protrusions stretching from beneath their skin, no angry red flesh, just smooth silver lines and circles etched into their skin. The flesh between their legs is smooth and blank, offering nothing up for prurient eyes; everything below their neck is perfectly hairless.
If not for the muscles moving beneath their skin, they'd look like an oddly painted plastic doll.
“Is this okay, sir?” they ask.
“… no. You know what I mean. Take off that ridiculous costume.”
“Fine, fine …”
Their body unfolds, silver lines opening into gaping seams as their flesh splits into dozens of tiny panels, each carefully held up on silvery spikes; for a moment the panels are simply held around their body, caught in the middle of something between shattering and exploding. Only their head remains intact. The gaps between them expose something sharp and silvery, like metal shifting across bone; keening static flickers mar the tape.
Then, in a flurry of motion, each part of what was once their body is tucked away behind their back, panels carefully smoothed flat and stacked.
Thick strands of silvery metal run across pale bones, shot through with little red tubes knitting their heart (the only organ they have left, wrapped in a thick coat of pulsating silver) to their bones and the smooth line at the base of their neck. They hardly look human, and they look like something more than human, this strange new body that has grown deep beneath their flesh—
“Perfect, ██████. Absolutely perfect.”
“Can I put it back on, sir?” they ask in a voice only a hint more mechanical, a tiny bit less sure, than before.
“No, you still need the next dose. Wait a second …”
From off camera comes the noise of the man walking away, then the creak of a door opening and a distant grumble.
On camera, the thing that isn't exactly the teen it was at the start of the tape slumps, confidence flowing out of it; the fleshy panels on its back jumble, one almost falling down to the ground. They stay like this for a long moment, slack, defeated … but it only takes them a second to snap back to their former confidence as the man's footsteps return.
“I'm going to have a talk with my assistant after this. Anyway, open wide!”
The liquid isn't in a teacup this time, but a thin glass vial. The man tucks it against their spine, just below their heart, and the metal strands which wreath their bones reach out to accept it. It only takes them a moment to suck it dry, but the man doesn't pull his hands out immediately; he pauses to pat the teen's heart, each touch sending shudders running through their bones.
“It's really amazing how far you've come, ██████. Now put yourself together and get out of my office.”
The tape cuts as the teen begins to walk away, their body (or is it just a shell, now?) reforming around them.
*
There's a long pause before the next segment, a black gap, muffled noises—voices? The thump of something slamming into a wall, a shouted curse, the sickening crunch of bones breaking—
The teen removes the camera's lens cap. They're not careful at all, and it takes a moment for the camera to stop shaking on its stand. “There! Got to be sure to document everything, right, sir?”
They step aside, revealing the man seated on a folding chair that's far too small for his strong frame. He's bound, gagged, blood dripping from a cut on his forehead and a bruise beginning to darken on his cheek. Physically imposing, but with little of the authority he's used to bringing to bear.
He glares impotently at the teen as they wander off frame, humming to themself.
“You know, sir, I've always wondered what you keep in your drawers. Let's see—” A crunch of breaking wood. “Oh. I hoped for something more interesting than a … half-full bottle of vodka? Huh. Not even the good stuff, really, sir?” Another crunch. “Files, files, files … ah! I was alway sure that you had a gun stashed away somewhere in here.”
The man blanches and then flinches as a gunshot makes the camera jump.
“Bet you wish they still worked on me.”
The teen steps back into frame, pointing the gun at the man's head. He tries to glare for a moment, then shakes his head mutely, unable to speak behind his gag—
The teen tosses the gun away with a laugh.
“Begging doesn't suit you, sir! And that would be too kind an end anyway.”
They step off frame again, rummage through the office; there's the crash of shattering glass, the scream of tearing metal. Each noise is distorted by the tape, by how many times it's been copied, the edges of the video getting more staticky with every moment.
When they finally return, practically dancing into the frame, they're holding the teacup and a container full of that strange glossy liquid. The man's still shaking his head, staring in fear at it, trying to beg from behind his gag—
“I read your file, you know, sir. Such interesting stuff! Especially the part about why you were never selected for this process.” They laugh. “I don't like blindly trusting what's written down, though! So I want to see. And when I'm done I'll take what's left of your corpse and this new body of mine will be properly done.”
They smile as they crack the container into the teacup, a big toothy slash far wider than it should be, a joyfully hungry thing full of not even the smallest hint of mercy.
The liquid eagerly makes the leap from the teacup to the man's face, eagerly melts through the gag and crawls inside him—he's able to talk for a moment, able to spew threats and scream imprecations, but then his body starts to twist and crack and break as the liquid pours through him, as it struggles to remake him into something that his form has always been too stable to sustain—
The teen picks up the camera and keeps it fixed on his face as he falls to the floor, as he continues to spasm; they capture every gurgling breath that he makes as his body reaches for a death that the thing killing it cannot let it have.
Finally, finally, when he's little more than a gurgling pile of jellied flesh and jutting bone, the teen reaches out a hand glowing with silver lines and the liquid eagerly flows out of its flawed vessel and into them, eagerly taking the final piece of their new form no matter how unwillingly they were given its start—
They toss the camera to the floor and walk away,
And the tape finally ends.
(That's not quite true. There's another screen afterward, a screen with information about where to send away for similar tapes, and how much money to tuck away in the envelope just beneath the name of the tape you want, but that part can wait for later. You're certainly not ready to decide what you want to see next, not quite yet.
But soon you will be.)