Two Men At A Lake – A Story About Otters

A parody of Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team.

Two men go camping at a lake and undergo a transformative experience that leads them to become rescuers of various strange anthropomorphic animals they keep encountering on their journeys.

– Chapter 1: That was good work! –

Two men at a lake, roaming, sweating, camping. Two men at a lake, resting, sleeping, dreaming. Two men that now no longer were just men, having undergone a mysterious transformation. Matt and David.

Matt had already woken up with sunrise, taken two steps to the shore to dance with the fishies in the lake again, when the slowly rolling water surface told him of his changes, showing him that his face had overnight gained unusually much fuzz. Annoyance at how much work shaving all this would be quickly disappeared when he realized that a razor wouldn't suffice to return him to the man he was last night, though, and he stormed back to the sleeping bags he had spent the night in to shout at his still silently snoozing man:

"Bro!"

--"Hmm" David tried to appear unbothered, but his brow furrowing gave away how much he would have enjoyed getting more time to prepare before being dragged into more weird ideas.

But his companion had never been one to pick up on signs. So he had to make it clearer: "I would have enjoyed getting more time to prepare before being dragged into more weird ideas."

Like this hike to a lake no one knew.

"Like this hike to a lake no one knew." he added.

Matt came closer, now towering over his "best friend".

"This lake is amazing! Look at me!" he said, raising both his arms into the air to show off the miraculous effect he believed the lake and fresh air here had had on his body.

"Hmm?" Reluctantly, David opened his eyes and was about to get up when he noticed that his friend really had changed overnight. Or been taken hostage and replaced by someone … who had stolen his orange shorts and could imitate his voice perfectly. Someone with a lot of brown hair covering all of his body like fur, almost pitch-black feet with webbed toes and long nails that resembled claws more than anything, a mouth that extended like a cute little snout with silly little whiskers on both sides of a black dog nose, and barely visible rounded ears on a flat head that definitely stared back at him, still beaming, with eyes that were definitely Matt's bright brown ones. And there was also that long brown tail hanging out from over the waistband of his shorts, reaching towards the ground.

"Um." David paused for a moment. "Uh, that's- that's true. It's amazing to see such a huge specimen of a river otter, the size of a giant! T-Truly a marvel of nature." Matt snickered in return and then let him continue. "But where did they get such a terrible sense of fashion? Or really any sense of fashion at all."

Laughter.

Normally this would have put him at ease, but David still felt tense, even if he tried to suppress it. Even something as bizarre as this surely shouldn't be reason for concern, right? It would be annoying if he let this get between him and enjoying their vacation as much as Matt seemed to be able to even now. But the tension he felt clearly wasn't just nervousness, as he sensed it all over his body, and his behind even seemed to ache, as if he had slept very awkwardly the entire night, he couldn't even make himself stretch to calm down. On top of that, there was still one question burning in his mind:

"And… they speak English, too?"

-- "Bro, you do, too!" Matt said, pointing a hand, or maybe paw, in David's direction. He was still grinning.

"Hey, my fashion sense is just fine!" he blurted out in return.

-- "Sure, man. Just look at yourself. Nice new haircut, by the way!"

David looked down on himself, the tension in his stomach turning to dread as he encountered the same kind of brown fur all over his body below his white t-shirt and black shorts, too. And the pain turned out to have him having laid uncomfortably on his tail. Now he was certain he was really talking to the same Matt he had known for years.

"Oh, come on! What did you do to me this time? Do you realize how much I will have to spend on shampoo now?" he exclaimed.

-- "Hey, I have no clue what happened either!" Matt looked just a tiny bit hurt for a second before his giggle returned. "If I had… I would have come here much sooner! Come on, let's go for a swim. You need to cool down anyway!"

David knew there was no point in protesting, and in fact barely a moment later already heard a loud splash in the water. Matt never waited for anyone. Whereas many of their friends were scaredy cats (well, not literally, at least not last time he saw them) who were perpetually insecure about their decisions and could also have trouble standing up for themselves, Matt instead was the kind of otterly… utterly unswayable man that either ends up the one to cause trouble for everyone or the protagonist in an action movie. And, well, that's kind of what had attracted David to him in the first place. Matt was the one to get David out of the house and on this trip, too, but could the man not slow down one day at least? David could only admire the unstoppable energy. But that even waking up as a different species altogether was something Matt could take in stride just like that was almost too much.

He finally jumped in as well and was disturbed to find out that he had never found any water as enjoyable as the same lake that just last afternoon he had vowed to never set foot in again. Even though it was still early in the morning, it just no longer was as horribly cold, the water didn't get into his ears anymore, and swimming never felt this effortless before. He flowed gracefully with the waves, thoughts melted like ice in the summer sun, until he was tackled from behind by Matt.

It wasn't long before they had invented water wrestling, and when they started training as if preparing to become otterkind's first Olympic athletes, they noticed they had gotten far away from the shore they had come from, now being almost at the opposite side of the lake. And neither of them felt like they had the energy to go back all the way anymore, so they gathered their last energy and swam to the closer shore.

Barely out of the water they heard shouts in the distance, coming out of the forest, faint but impossible to ignore.

After a minute of walking amid the firs and spruces growing tall they encountered strange creature, though no stranger than they themselves were. A human-sized purple butterfly with two pairs of white wings with black lines was turning towards them, standing on two legs and gesticulating with two arms. Aside from their purple color, the limbs looked very human. The butterfly looked at them with two large red compound eyes on a strangely oversized head and shouted again:

"Somebody! Please help me! My poor baby caterpillar fell down a crevice and I'm not good at climbing!"

"Yo" Matt said to David, "looks like someone needs our help!"

-- "What are we, a rescue team?" David replied, though he knew the answer he would get already.

"Sure we are!"

Matt walked up to Mother or Father Butterfly and announced: "Ma'am! Or Sir. We, the Rescue Team Otter Know, how we can help you…"

--"Oh thank goodness! Yes, a rescue team like you ought to know how they can help me. The crevice is just a few minutes in the direction of the creek. Please look for a green caterpillar with red antenna." The butterfly pointed away from the lake with its arm.

They followed the creek and after a while David said: "You know, your English teacher would have probably wanted to fail you for that pun alone."

--"What pun?"

The silence of the next few minutes was pregnant, probably with triplets. Eventually, it was broken by a smaller caterpillar-human appearing from a bush a bit further away, and running towards Matt, who started running towards them. David could only watch in horror as they collided some seconds later and both falling to the ground, Matt cursing and the child crying. David dashed towards them and embraced the child, attempting to comfort it. It didn't seem injured at least.

Then, he asked Matt:

"Are you okay? Do I have to worry about encountering the demon that just possessed you next in this forest? Wouldn't surprise me the way this day is going…"

--"I did feel strangely compelled to just attack everything that moves in front of me…"

"Wait, really? Come to think of it, the butterfly baby here seemed to as well…"

--"I'm not a baby! I'm old enough to be alone in the forest!" the caterpillar protested. David looked at the boy, still sitting in his arms, wearing an overall that was cream-colored in the front, red at the back with many bumps. A tall red spike was on the head seemed dangerously sharp. The head itself of the boy was also red, with large yellow eyes with black pupils located on either side of it and a smaller yellow spike in between both.

"Does this boy not look a bit like a demon already…" Matt muttered, and David wished he hadn't heard it. "In any case he isn't who we are looking for." he continued, louder. "Let him go, he's probably big and strong enough to find his way back alone. And sorry for the headbutt, man!"

With the big and strong caterpillar boy now smiling again, things seemed patched up enough for David to move on, and so they bid him goodbye and continued their path down the creek.

Over the next half an hour or so David had to stop Matt from running into other young animal-humans in the most literal sense again and again, while evading their attacks. More red caterpillars, small brown humanoid doves, and perhaps the weirdest, child-sized yellow-black germinated seeds with stubby legs hopping around. There were also strange large eggs rolling around for seemingly no reason. This forest evidently was nothing short of being extraordinarily cursed.

Finally, they come across a crevice and find the green caterpillar-boy the giant butterfly had wanted to be reunited with. He was teary-eyed, huddled together against the ground and entirely lacking in spikes, unlike the ones they had encountered before, and was the only one that did not aggressively charge, simply looking at them from large yellow eyes, his red antennae hanging low.

They brought brought him back to his parent, cried all tears of joy and waved goodbye after getting a bag filled with various strange berries neither of them had ever seen before.

"That was good work" Matt said to David.

--"Thanks. It's always harder when you have to do it all alone." David replied, grinning for the first time that day.

"How about some fish for lunch? It would go well with the berries."