Ever since they started doing video games and TV shows where people spend a lot of their time bashing down doors and throwing flash-bang grenades into rooms full of terrorists before shooting them, all filmed in a "realistic"^* style, the convention has been that the next few seconds will have everything blurry and fading back from white, with the sound muffled and drowned out by a loud ringing noise. As I understood it, this is roughly what actually happens when you're exposed to a flash-bang grenade.

^* (Dingy, desaturated, and brown.)

Whether it happens when you're exposed to a high-energy electromagnetic discharge at close range, I didn't know - but that's what I subconsciously expected in the aftermath. It wasn't what I experienced, though. For a moment, everything was black; then I could see again, but I wasn't focusing correctly. This also took just a moment to clear up; I shook my head, and my eyes re-focused normally. There was a ringing sound, but it was softer and not ultra-high-pitched like the faux-tinnitus that you hear in those scenes. And, oddly, it felt like it came from inside me, and it died out in a matter of seconds.

To my surprise, I was fully conscious and functional maybe five seconds after the discharge; the only lingering effect was my heart somehow racing even faster than it had been earlier - impossibly fast, pit-pat-pit-pat-pit-pat... But it was the wrong rhythm. The heart beats ba-thump, ba-thump, a double-stroke, not this mechanically-precise one-two-one-two metronomic rhythm. Maybe Gil was right; maybe I really was going to have a heart attack...

Then my brain started catching up with the events of the last forty-odd seconds. That's right, the accident. The door was open... I looked; yes, the door was open. I tried to think - the inside of the door and the chamber walls formed a Faraday cage, but with the door open, the control room must've been exposed...but how badly was probably a function of the aperture width and the angle of incidence. I knew a radio engineer online who'd tried to explain signal propagation to me once, but I only half-understood anything he said, and my racing heartbeat was accompanied by the most distracting clatter in my head as I tried to remember now...

Wait...God, were Tammy and Emma exposed!? I swung around to look at Emma, and found myself face-to-face with-

With her headless corpse.

I gaped, horrified, dumbstruck, feeling like I should be sick to my stomach and wondering why I wasn't. My...my classmate, the person I'd just been working with...I'd helped her sign her own death warrant. I should be freaking out; I mean, with my nerves!? I should be hyperventilating...why wasn't I!?

It was then that I realized that her body was, firstly, breathing, and secondly, standing - both of which require a functioning brain to accomplish. And the place where her head and neck should've been was conspicuously not bleeding profusely. Instead, it was...emitting some kind of haze...?

It reminded me of smoke, but it wasn't. It was like a heat mirage, that shimmering in the air that makes deserts look like oases in cartoons, but it clustered and billowed and flowed like smoke from a chimney - only the "chimney" was the space between her shoulders, above her missing neck, which... I glanced, hesitantly, at the place where it should've been, but I couldn't see much through the shimmer. Considering what I should've seen, that was probably for the best.

"Gah...what was that!?"

I started, feeling a sudden release of tension somewhere in my chest, which felt...alien, somehow. But I hardly noticed, because that was Emma's voice. I looked around, wondering what in the hell was going on here, but it only took a moment before I found her, sitting snug and secure in the chair at the workstation...

...except that "Emma" here was just a severed head. I stared at her, then at her body, then back at her - and, inexplicably, neither seemed the worse for wear. Moreover, as Emma-the-head's eyes fluttered, blinking away the temporary blindness that I should've experienced and glancing around the room, the motions of Emma-the-body matched up perfectly, to the point where she reached up to eyes that were actually down and to the left, and got visibly confused over it.

"Wh-what the...?" she said, dazedly. "I can't feel...no, I can feel...why can't I reach my...?" Then she looked up at me, and past me, and back at me. "W-wait, wait. Stuart?" I was about to respond when there was a roar from behind me.

"OH WHAT THE EVER-LOVING HELL IS THIS!?"

That was Tammy's voice, and I whirled around to face her as she descended into a string of half-muttered, half-gibberish cursing. I felt a spasm somewhere in my chest at her yell - a flurry of unfamiliar physical sensations, but clearly due to being startled while already highly stressed. Is this what heart palpitations feel like? I wondered. The way my pants moved with me when I turned felt funny, too, but that wasn't important right now.

Tammy's situation was less alarming than Emma's; "severed head" had set the bar pretty high. I noticed first that something was subtly different about her, but I couldn't put my finger on what - and that line of thought was dropped when I noticed what was majorly different. Tammy's legs had become a fish's tail, peeking out from under her skirt; sleek and sinuous, with orange-gold scales.

Or, more appropriately, a mermaid's tail. Fish can be surprisingly flexible, but few (eels excepted) have a tail-section as long and articulate as merfolk.^* A mermaid's tail is built more like a snake's: thick at the waist (slightly flared out, in fact, with their human-type pelvis) and tapering towards the tip, with a rounded ribcage giving the lower body a columnar cross-section. The ribs are more loosely-spaced and can move relative to the vertebrae, for added flexibility.

^* (One of the funniest things about the old propaganda film was the ultra-fake nature of the "mermaid" costumes for the "actresses" playing the transformed protagonist and her careless bunkmate. Wrapping human legs with sequined fabric does not hide the fact that they only bend at the knee, and it was even more obvious to later generations who grew up with the real deal than it was to audiences in the '40s who'd been seeing that getup in nightclub acts for years. The use of file footage of the actual victims undergoing medical exams only drew further attention to it.)

Like other mermaids, Tammy's new caudal fin was oriented vertically like a fish's (rather than horizontally like a marine mammal's, the way artists always used to draw them,) and I could see her pelvic fins thrashing around under her skirt as she stared down at herself with an expression of...baffled rage? She was glaring at her new body with teeth bared and hot tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. I had to admit, it wasn't the reaction I'd expected.

As I took this all in, the stream of cursing grew louder, less muttered, somewhat more coherent, and much more imprecatory, though I still wasn't clear why she was angry about this rather than surprised, confused, and/or distressed. But there was a sudden shift in her tone, and to my surprise I heard my name come up. Puzzled, I turned my attention back to her.

"Stu?" she was asking, a look of surprise on her face and concern in her voice. "Stu, is that you? Are...are you okay?"

I was a bit surprised. Sure, I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer strangeness of the situation, certainly disturbed by seeing my one classmate beheaded and my other classmate angry as I'd never seen her, to the point of railing against the universe itself over this, but did it really show that much?

Okay, apparently I was much worse at hiding how I was feeling than I had thought, but still, I wasn't feeling the stress as much. The nervous tension was still there - I could feel something inside me practically vibrating with it - but the raw hormonal edge to it was gone. And they were the ones who were really dealing with something crazy here; why would she worry about-

My train of thought derailed in spectacular fashion as it hit me, the realization I should've come to much sooner: I had been caught in the discharge, too.