Erin wakes up. 

She takes a moment just to breathe. That dream was... Something. It was definitely that. 

But hey, it only makes sense that she would dream about Star Trek and Doctor Who after a three day long sci fi marathon. So what if it was surreal and terrifying? It was a dream. Dreams are like that.

That settled, she begins to sit up. Slowly, because all three of her friends are still snoring peacefully in various, and in some cases precarious, places around her. Robin is half sprawled over her blanketed legs, and half off the bed. Which is going to be a problem. Caine and Jamie are curled together on her left side, so she'll have to get out on the right. 

Her position check completed, she slips her legs out of the covers, scrunching them up to give Robin something to cuddle, and gets to her feet. Shifting a bit in discomfort, she heads to the bathroom. 

Her house appears mostly the same from what she remembers last night. Maybe some things are out of place, which is to be expected.

When she gets to the mirror something catches her attention from the corner of her eye. A weird color in the mirror.

And once she looks directly at it she will notice many things, like how her hair is sitting precariously on her head exactly like a wig half-pulled out of place. But that isn't the only thing.

What.

What. Is this...? A prank? But how? 

Erin reaches up and strokes her cheek. It's bumpy. She taps it. Her nail makes a little 'chik' noise as it clicks against the smooth scales that now cover her face. 

She reaches up and tugs the wig - her hair? - the rest of the way off, revealing five short ridges running along her crown to the back of her head. She pauses a long moment to take it in.

Then she smacks her hands down onto the counter.

"What. The FUCK?!?" 

Her voice echoes through the house. The wig hangs from her hand, revealing it's insides, a mesh of plastic material with blinking LED dots. There is no obvious answer to her question.

At the sound of her shout, Robin snaps awake, the suddenness of his movements sending him careening off the matress in a flailing tangle of limbs and blankets. One of those limbs smacks into Jamie on the way down. The other teen, who, at the sound of Erin's uncharacteristic yelling, had been half-way out of bed, instead curls around his wounded knee with a swear. 

Untangling himself, Robin staggers to his feet and rushes towards the bathroom. Caine, following close behind him, notes that he's moving so fast he seems to be blurring. 

Reaching the door, Robin twists the knob, barely registering the snick of the lock turning, and opens it.

"Erin, what-?"

It quickly becomes obvious what the yelling was about. 

"Oh my god."

Robin has a vivid recollection of how it must have been for Erin to come to the bathroom and look herself in the mirror, pulling out her wig.

What a oddly vivid deduction.

Caine reaches Robin's side as he shakes his head like a dog, giving him an odd look before turning his attention to Erin. 

"Ah." He says. He almost looks surprised, if you're paying close attention to his eyebrows. 

After a moment, he steps closer to get a better look. It's... not exactly obvious that this is Erin. The ridges make it hard to tell if her features are still Erin-like, and her eyes are a different colour. Still, judging by the all-too-human shock on her face, and the direction Erin's voice had come from, it is most likely her. 

Having come to this conclusion, Caine reaches for her hand.

"Alright?" He asks. 

 At that moment, Jamie catches up to them, and immediately suppresses a squawk at the sight of Erin's new appearance. 

"Seriously?" Robin mutters in the background. He's blinking hard, a hand on his temple. 

A thin drop of blood drips from Robin's nose.

Erin grips him back, hard. 

"Fine, I-" 

She takes a deep breath, then stills; quick as a whip, she snaps around to look at Robin as he slides his palm down from his forehead to wipe under his nose. Her eyes follow the motion, and the red smear on his fingers as he pulls his hand away, and then she grabs his other hand and starts dragging him out of the bathroom, Jamie quickly stepping out of her way as she goes by. 

Trailing the other two, she hauls Robin up the stairs and into her room, dropping him on the bed and making for her desk. 

Caine and Jamie slip inside and blink at the state of the room. Then Jamie goes to sit with Robin, and Caine heads towards Erin to see what she's doing. 

Erin notices none of this. She's intent on the contents of her desk, fiddling with the lock on the drawer, which wasn't there the day before.

Automatically, Erin places a thumb over the lock, there is a pixelated effect over it and then the drawer opens with the sound of pressurized air escaping.

The drawer not only slides out of the desk, but unfolds, revealing several gizmos made of chromium and plastic. Some look like rectangles made of plastic with glowing writing, there is a series of vials next to something that could be reasonably called a "syringe gun", some other things are of even more arcane purpose. One looks like almost like a sonic screwdriver, with a forked tip.

Something will be off to Robin. There is one more person in the room than he previously thought.

Robin, and possibly the others, might also notice that Sam's terrarium is gone, replaced by a cat bed and tree-like perch that takes up a corner.

Jamie notices. Sam is family. Sam is life. Unfortunately for Sam, whatever the hell is happening to Erin and Robin is more attention grabbing at the moment. 

Jamie lifts the hem of his shirt to dab at Robin's nose, nudging at him to tilt his head back. 

Erin grabs one of the glowing plastic doodads, then turns it on Robin, it's squiggly writing scrolling across the screen and making no sense at all as far as Jamie can tell. It seems Erin can read it however, because she fiddles with it, pressing a series of symbols on the screen. Then she huffs in frustration and lets her hand fall to her side, blinking rapidly. 

"You doing ok, 'rin?" Jamie asks, hesitantly. Robin pulls his hand away to check if he's still bleeding, then quickly puts it back when it becomes clear that he is. Makeshift tissue in place, he glances around, squinting in equal parts confusion and pain.

Erin nods absently, muttering something mostly unintelligible, then, "Not even bleeding, so far as I can tell."

Then she blinks again, and shakes her head, "What?" She takes in the room, "I think I'm hallucinating. Weren't we just in the bathroom? And I thought I looked like a lizard." 

She catches sight of her hand and balks, "Oh, never mind, then."

The mechanisms beep softly and there is a clear pleasantly polite but emotionally detached voice from a drawer device. "Synthesis complete." The device ejects a thumb-sized glass vial with cyan liquid.

Caine reaches into the drawer and picks it up, holding it up to the light streaming in through the window. Some kind of medical scanner/synthesizer set up? He shakes it, and then shrugs; not his area. He passes it to Erin who takes it automatically. 

"You hyperfocused or something," Jamie says, "As soon as Rob started bleeding, you were right on him." 

Erin nods, staring at the vial Caine had passed her. She's happy to ignore her sudden makeover for a little while, but- "We should probably not test the mysterious liquid on Robin before we have any idea what is going on here."

"Good plan," Robin says, a bit muffled behind the shirt. He's squinting intently at the half-open door to the dressing room. If he had to describe how this knowing feels he'd say it's like the feeling you're bein watched, except you're the person watching. Which makes almost no sense even to him, honestly. 

So they're just going to ignore the scaly elephant in the room, Caine assumes.

Robin clears his throat, "Yeah, uh, speaking of scaly elephants, hey, 'rin, where's Sam?" 

Robin feels a "pull" towards the closet.

Robin rises to his feet, dragging Jaime by his shirt. He steps towards the closet, reaching out and tapping the door open a bit more.

 "Sam? You in there, buddy?"

Through the crack of the door, Robin can see a lizard that's not quite the Sam he knows. Quite a bit larger, and with a red crest around his neck. It peeks its head out of a towel nest. 

<Yes, I am, Robin One. What was all the screaming that happened moments ago? Some of us want to sleep.>

"Ack!" Robin half jumps, half falls away from the closet door, losing his grip on Jamie's shirt. Luckily it seems the bleeding has mostly stopped. 

Distracted from the vial by sudden giant lizard, Erin hurries towards the closet, eyes widening as she takes in Sam's new form. 

 "Sam, is that you?" She kneels down in front of the towel nest, reaching towards him. "You look really different! What the heck is going on?"

Caine, meanwhile, seeing that situation is being dealt with, picks up the wig Erin had dropped on the desk and peers at the tech inside of it. 

<Who else would I be? I am not feeling different.> He looks at the closet's mirror. <Same dashing Oroth Lizard of yesterday.>

It looks like a mesh of plastic, LED lights whenever two lines meet, touching it gives a slight electric feeling.

Robin squints at Sam, "But you weren't-"

Joining the others near the closet, Caine interrupts Robin with a more important topic.

"How does this work?" He holds the wig up. Based on Sam's reaction, he can only assume that the giant lizard is the only one who has any idea how to navigate the situation they've found themselves in. 

<You put it on your head. And let it activate the hologram.> There is something somewhat amused about the tone of his words. He turns to Erin. <Is this the result of what human call a 'hang over'?>

Erin- well, she doesn't flush, but if she looked human she definitely would have. Ok, they'd had a bit to drink last night, but only a bit! She'd managed to head off Jamie when he'd tried to sneak into the alcohol cabinet, so they'd only had enough to get them a bit tipsy. And she'd made them all drink water! They definitely didn't drink anything that could have had them hallucinating this. she glances at her reflection. Yep, still a lizard person. 

Then Caine drops the wig on her head, arranging it to sit properly on the ridges. 

And her reflection changes. 

"Well," Caine says into the silence, "I vote we go to my dad."

"Good plan! I am on board with this plan! Let's do that, let's do it right now!" Robin babbles, standing up from his place on the floor and waving spastically towards the door.

Erin stares for another long moment, trying to find any trace of lizard in her reflection. At length, she nods. "That seems like a good idea," she says, and then turns to Sam, petting his fringe in thanks as she stands. 

Sam licks her hand and goes back to his towel nest.

Being closest to the door, Jamie leads the way downstairs, Erin staying behind to pull some clean clothes out of her closet and get changed. The other three duck into the recroom to do the same, Robin taking his meds, and Jaime grabbing the pile of dirty, and in some cases bloody, clothes to drop off in the laundry room for later. Ms Lowry, the maid, will do them if she has time, and if not they'll deal with it whenever they get back.

 Once Erin joins them at the front door, they head out onto the porch and begin the long jog down the lawn to the street, climbing over the fence once they reach it. 

Steadying Robin when he slips on his way down, Jamie frowns when he notices the other boy squinting. 

"Headache?" He asks. 

Robin nods, then shrugs, "Just the hangover, probably."

They make good time into the downtown area, heading towards the condo where Caine and his dad live. A few blocks from the building they turn down an alleyway to take a shortcut.

They are lucky to behold another unusual sight. A man crawling on the ground half-covered by a metallic blob. They can't see his face, but given the way he struggles there is a definite sense that the man would be screaming.