Behind the heavy door at which Liwei and Mona stood was a large room, functioning as both office and laboratory. One half was furnished neatly with bookcases spiralling to the ceiling, their contents ranging from highly regarded examinations of extinct animal species to obscure and admonished texts of animal and human genetics intertwining in unexpected and alien matters. In front of the cases, a desk of sleek black fashion and a chair of once fashionable leather but now wearing to its under-fabric from overuse. The desk's items were most ordinary - laptop, pens, pencils, files and reports from any number of sources - but there also lay open a photo album as if someone had recently been exploring memories from the past. The first photos were faded and showed a young boy with two adults most definitely his parents, but then sometimes the same child was with a peacock and a flamingo in a manner far too familiar for them to be wild animals. Later entries in the album could not be seen for only this page lay open. The other side of the room transition into something out of a doctor's surgery. Medical instruments lay on metal trolleys, a sink was surrounded by white cabinets, and stains of reddish-brown spotted some parts of the floor as if somebody had forgotten to clean them away. This area was only used when the owner was entirely alone, as he was at the moment.
This man was The Boss. That name rang throughout the voices of the many who lay in his organisation and was spoken in awe, fear, and sometimes hate. You might have expected a man of impeccable strength, but The Boss was frail with wrinkled hands and curled back. There was a problem with his skin, with his eyes, with his chest. Some were of age, others were the results of the needles he'd pushed into his own skin at only the mere attempt of attaining that which had not been given to him at birth. For years he'd searched the world as a young man trying to find how to achieve it... Shifting. Spiritually, physically, mentally, he'd pushed himself and searched the globe. He'd found pockets of shifters in every corner of the world, or wandering shifters with no place to go, and all had told him the same thing - it just happened. There was no control for it. He refused to believe it. He refused that he, his children, his children's children, would not shift if they were not born to it. Medical and scientific pathways were his last shot. The last chance he had before he passed from the world.
Today, he had one fine specimen spared to him from the scientists. A boy who was a girl. How curious. A lab assistant had wheeled the child up on a gurney earlier and at last the shifter was his own. Would he be willing to shift? Nothing excited The Boss like the feeling of human skin becoming fur or feather beneath his hands. It was like grasping that which he had not yet obtained. For the moment, the boy was unconscious beneath a thin grey sheet. The Boss prepared to remove it, but was interrupted when the door swung open. He sighed. "Have I not informed everyone here that I should not be interrupted when I am working?"