Don't Poke The Bear! (Warcraft/Furbolg)

Pain.

Everything was pain.

Pain surpassing anything I had ever believed possible or experienced was flaring through my body with points of origin everywhere in my torso. Or what remained of it after that out-of-control motorbike slammed into it.

My rapidly darkening eyesight and other vanishing senses gave me an even clearer picture of how bad my situation was—of how fucked up my body was.

'I... I'm going to die… die...' I realized, stating the obvious inside my mind. I stared unblinkingly through the cracked lens of my glasses at the morbid sight of parts of my ribcage poking through my t-shirt, once purple but now dark scarlet from my blood.

I didn't want to believe it, but each weakening breath brought white-hot agony and confirmed that one of my lungs was damaged beyond hope, with most of what remained inside my chest.

Bitting heat and burning cold seeped into my being, and I struggled to move my eyes. Still, I succeed. They traveled from my body to my arm, still holding my phone; the screen was intact thanks to its protective case.

'That doesn't matter,' I thought, refocusing on my surroundings. Blurry figures of varying sizes, shapes, and colors were either standing there or screaming, but I barely heard them with the music in my ears, my headphones miraculously still on my head, somehow. My rapidly waning sense of hearing merely amplified the dreadful sensation of powerlessness.

They were panicking and filming–all useless, I thought–not that I blamed them. If they were proactive, it wouldn't have changed anything—neither for me nor the undeserving witless biker bitch who instilled my death sentence and hers.

Her head, or what little of it remained intact, was spread on the concrete like a dropped egg, but a gory painting of brain matter, bone fragments, ripped-off skin, hair, and blood replaced the eggshell, white and yolk. She was flung off her speeding motorcycle during a sort of trick from the little I saw.

A piece of trash on the sidewalk.

"Se-serve-uegh!" I puked blood but went on nonetheless with icy venom, my voice no more than an agonizing wet cough in an intelligible whisper, "Yo-ou right…"

I was angry, terrified, despairing, and sad. It wasn't fair. But there was no point in contemplating those or pondering the whys; it was just an unfortunate series of circumstances if only I had walked out five seconds later. If only I had looked up and dodged. Or if only the woman had been a functional, sane human being, maybe none of this would have happened—many ifs and maybes that didn't matter anymore.

In the end, everything went numb and then turned to nothingness as death came knocking and claimed me.

Or so I had believed at first. I didn't die, not really. Not permanently.

It was a confusing time at first, composed of cycles of short awareness and irresistible sleepiness. Then it changed. It was a relatively recent development; my brain had grown enough for me to be lucid and coherent.

Yeah, brain...

It was when I came to several world-shattering realizations about my situation.

I died, yet here I was—perfectly living. It wasn't a fever dream, and I wasn't longer human.

These were hard pills to swallow, each harder than the last–harder more when all at once–but the truth remained unchanged: I passed away with this stupid accident and was reborn as some kind of anthropomorphic bear.

It was a revelation any words synonymous with shock would fail to describe in any conceivable manner. Frankly, dreams, books, and fiction described it well, but to experience it firsthand was indescribable.

It was daunting, strange, confusing, enraging, surprising, relieving, and so much more.

However, to say I was displeased would be lying to myself. It was the exact opposite.

I was alive, and the fact that I was my species' equivalent of male made me even happier. A species that was sapient by all accounts, the cherry on the top was the existence of opposable thumbs on the pair of hairy paw-hands hybrid I now sported instead of my far less hairy clawless human hands.

They remained hands, but besides the thumbs, they didn't look alike. Each of my five digits lacked the last phalange. Well, it was more like it merged with the roots of my claws, thereby making the fingers part shorter proportionally wise and less dexterous–the novelty of my body considered–so I called them paws. The presence of pads added to that.

However, this change was insignificant to the fact my lungs took in the crisp air, and my heart pumped blood in my body, ursine or not. I couldn't be any happier. I was alive.

But the anger at what was taken was there, strong and burning, along with the reality I would never see my family and the small number of friends I had on Earth. Not that any of it mattered anymore, but it remained.

This was a harder truth to accept than all the above, so I avoided focusing on it to the best of my abilities. It was useless to waste my sanity on it, and time would fix things up.

There was no reason to destroy this new life with depression. Be that it may, I was affected by it all. Many nights and many more will be short and unpleasant, no more pleasant than the ones I have already lived through.

Frustration was the most potent feeling regarding my early departure and fear of death.

There was a clear sensation of detachment; it was my memories, but not so either. The change was crystal clear, yet the connection remained.

I was a male cub; I wasn't an adult human male anymore, but I had the experience and knowledge attached to being one. It was... weird, neither strictly bad nor good.

But now that I was something else, a new species, I had a different body. It needed to be stated, even if it was obvious. It wasn't cosmetic. It was a fundamental change to my person.

I had a different, inhuman brain with the following adapted biochemistry, metabolism, and instincts, with the added factor that I was a baby, a cub. At least I was the same sex, a blessing that avoided further internal chaos.

Nonetheless, my body morphology and exterior were still the most striking features of my rebirth. A few weeks ago, I began to be able to see a long, light honey brown-furred protrusion ending in a coal sizeable button that had been in my sight since then.

It was my snout with my nose at the end—an incredibly sensitive one that proved, beyond a doubt, how inferior a human's sense of smell was.

It was impossible to describe how large the bridge was for the once-human. It was simply incomparable. I could detect water, where it was, how long it had been here, and its quality, and that was only a fraction of it all.

My hearing was also superior, if not to the same degree. If I were to focus, I could hear things I never did before, such as the bioacoustics of plants or my heart. The fact that my ears could shift around instinctually or by my will only helped—quite a strange sensation at first thought.

My sight was in the same bag, too, but that was more because I didn't need glasses than any kind of innate superiority to the average human. Or so I guessed. I wasn't the best bear person to ask. However, I had excellent night vision.

As for taste and touch, the first was mostly moot since I wasn't weaned yet, but my nose amplified it, so it should be stronger. I still didn't have a point of comparison, and other stuff besides milk didn't make me feel hungry.

However, the latter sense didn't notably differ aside from feelings that I had dense hair everywhere, but like all others, it wasn't the same. It wasn't human, but it wasn't alien; it was the new normal.

I never was free of body hair, but there was this and that. It was like I had hyper-dense hair everywhere, barring my nose and paw pads.

Then came two more, which I could only describe as supernatural. These strange senses allowed me to sense… energies, for lack of a better term. One related to life itself, which I called life force, and the other was dubbed mana, the name given to the energy in everything to do magic. I know it wasn't very original for both, but there needn't be a pretentious name.

Yes, magic—or at least, that's the name I used for it based on what I have seen in my rare outings, from growing plants to healing wounds. My ability to sense the mana used was poor and limited in range for now, but I still felt the ones doing so used their mana. So magic it was.

Magic! Bonafide magic, if that wasn't incredible, not as shocking as releasing you reincarnated, but still, fucking magic! And I could use it.

Something I was doing at this instant while sitting atop my sleeping mother, Tara, her fluffy belly of dense light brown fur, a most comfortable training mat. I had nothing else to do besides sleeping, eating, excreting, and living as a cub.

I was very limited in what I could do. I had a deficiency in mobility from my age. I could move my arms, which were longer than my legs–a bizarre sensation I wasn't still used to, again–letting me crawl without effort, though I couldn't.

The term mama bear for my bear mother was fitting to a tee. She wouldn't let go, not that I complained. My instincts made me feel good, stronger than I ever recalled.

That left me with mana training, a mixed bag in difficulty and effort-to-reward ratio.

Moving it inside my metaphysical reservoir that stored mana everywhere and nowhere in myself was easy enough; it came intuitively, but it got complicated after this. It was like trying to move a limb without structure or delimitation.

It wasn't hard, per se, just new. It didn't require a great deal of will. It could be equated to learning to crawl, walk, and run, and I was at the beginning of the first. And if that wasn't evident enough, the once-human didn't have a single clue of what I was doing.

But doing nothing was boring; my developing brain craved stimulation, and mana manipulation scratched that itch in the best way. And it was magic! Superpower, even if it wasn't so much here, but to me, it didn't make a difference.

Of course, I knew what would happen if I was caught. I had been multiple times, and I wasn't dead. my parents first showed shock, then joy and pride at what I did, making me feel very nice and warm… So it was all good.

I was an odd one and didn't try to hide it. It was a gamble I took from the start, but I didn't have a choice. I couldn't have played the ordinary cub even if I wished from all my heart.

I wasn't terrible at acting, but I wasn't exceptional, and aside from my instincts, I didn't know how a baby of this species was supposed to behave.

But most importantly, I didn't desire to act this way, so I just didn't, for the most part.

I was still a cub, more or less human mind or not—I didn't know; I changed much already. My behavior, in general, was not dramatically alien from the others I saw. I just cried a lot less–barring a few panic attacks from dying and reincarnating–and didn't need potty training to be clean.

There were differences in culture, technology–or the lack thereof–environment, and species, but it wasn't incomparable when it came to teaching babies how not to make a mess. It was the basis of any society.

Anyway, my eyes focused on my left paw; the dark leathery pads were bathed in my mana. It took the form of a thin, formless veil of glowing emerald green with the occasional motes of vermillion red swimming within and out of the rough, leathery, dark skin.

It was all I could manage without losing control, and maintaining it was draining my reserve little by little. I couldn't keep the form stable enough to prevent the part from leaking into the air.

Pathetic as it might appear, I was delighted with it; it was an incredible sensation, and my heart fluttered in excitement. Every bit of progress was the equivalent of a few dopamine shots in my system. Giggles and childish cries came from my snout without my mental consent at the light show.

I kept this going for ten more minutes until it became too hard and started to get wobbly. Soon, it all went poof in a puff of light that made me giggle even more.

I went immediately back at it, so focused that I only noticed my audience when a deep, guttural yet affectionate growl broke my concentration, making me feel like my heart would jump out of my throat.

"AH! How's my little Ohto doing?" I barely managed to turn around to glare at the one who broke my focus that I was lifted and put face to face with a visage that would, as a human, most likely terrify me if not through a reinforced glass panel or screen. Oh, and Ohto was my new name, one I was getting used to and quite liked.

A long black furred muzzle full of sharp teeth, many with the sole purpose of ripping flesh and breaking bone, and the predatory eyes… Yet there wasn't a shred of fear in me, my perked-up ears facing forward as proof of that.

"Pa! Me good!" I whined out happily with a fanged grin as my father, Krolg, nipped my left ear and nuzzled me in the mighty protective embrace of his massive arms. Limbs thicker than tree trunks and strong enough to snap one held me tenderly, a paradox yet a growing familiarity.

Then, my mother woke up, likely from the noise, and she grumbled a chuckle. Without any shame, I let hunger and instincts take care of the rest as she started nursing me while he half-mindlessly listened to my parents. My body made a purr-like sound of contentment, closer to a car's engine in rhythm than a cat's.

The language was rough and growling—a civilized bear vocalization—probably hard for anything that wasn't one of us to speak, yet it wasn't complex. In fact, it appeared straightforward from what I grasped.

But while my brain absorbed everything like a sponge–a frankly addicting sensation–I couldn't hope to master an alien language this fast; as such, half of the vocabulary and larger meaning of their conversation was flying over my head.

Still, he understood fragments of it.

They were speaking about me with excitement in their voices. There was also a word I was associated with, 'blessing,' which was tied to me by another name. A name that, from what he inferred, was one of the two deities we worshiped, Ursol.

The name was different than in human languages, but it was clear what I was, with everything else, painting a clear picture of this world where my new shot at life was with other glaring points like the two moons in the sky and the aesthetic of the forest and my new species.

There were only so many coincidences before denying became an example of madness. But the final nail in the coffin was when I caught glimpses of a caravan of long-eared, purplish, bluish people with glowing eyes and excessively long eyebrows that couldn't be anything but night elves that had passed by in the village.

I was a furbolg somewhere in Ashenvale on the planet known as Azeroth, a majestic, magical world of countless wonders.

Wasn't this a promise of a pleasant life, free from senseless death and bloodshed? Alas, I knew better, far better, too much even to believe anything outside of the opposite.

I grasped enough from the knowledge of my past life to realize it wouldn't be a smooth ride. I knew I needed to be prepared; whenever I was, the future wouldn't be kind no matter what I did, but doing nothing would be far worse.

It was a fate that terrified me to my core, for I understood it, and wasn't that an excellent motivator? I was alive, and I was going to keep it that way no matter what.