Commissioned by Kaerou on FurAffinity
 
Refresh for updated version with a lot of small edits.
 
 
A traveler on his first day in Val Salia encounters one of the local nonhuman residents, who generously offers him a tasty fruit as a welcoming gift.
 
Being unfamiliar with how suspicious is for a yinglet to be generous and considerate, he thanks the small creature and goes on his way, enjoying the fruit’s unique flavor. It isn’t until he feels an odd tingling and pulling sensation from within his mouth that he realizes this might not be a perfectly normal fruit.
 
This realization is confirmed as his bones and muscles grow numb and weak, shifting and stretching into the proportions resembling those of the small creature from before.
 
By the time the shock subsides, he finds himself on all fours, looking up at the city from his reduced height as he struggles to comprehend what has just happened, and what he will do now.
 
He had checked in to a local inn before taking to the streets, and left all his belongings in his room, aside from his small utility dagger for basic protection, which now seems like a full-sized sword in his small, padded hands. Naturally, the innkeeper denied the scav’s strange request to retrieve one of his occupant’s belongings for itself.
 
After being promptly thrown out of the inn by the Ivenmoth Guard, he hopelessly wandered the city on his awkward new legs until meeting others of his new ‘kind.” They thought his story of being a human was a very funny lie, and adopted him into the city’s yinglet enclave for the entertainment.
 
Weeks later, still penniless and hundreds of miles away from home and too small and vulnerable to make the trip back, he sits in a meal den contemplating his future; his only mementos of his life as a human are his dagger, and the tattered, re-fitted remains of his tunic.
 
Once again the meal consists of a mixture that would be fatal to must human stomachs, but just because he can now digest it, doesn’t mean it tastes much better.