Visiting an unusual taur patient

"Oh, I'm here to see a friend," you say. "Penny McRory, Trish said she got me approved as a visitor?"

The blonde receptionist tapped her chin a bit, and then when she read your mind for Trish's full name, it came to her. "Oh my, Trisha Adams with the Taurasite issue, yes. She's in the lower levels, you'll go down the hall and when you see the glass rooms overlooking the forested area, you'll want to head down the stairs to the left to floor B2, room 17. Enter quietly, use the doorbell instead of knocking, and stay out of the containment field until given the green light, Trisha will inform you when."

You bit your lower lip. Today was the first time you'd heard of Trisha being some sort of witch, and all these extra instructions sounded pretty serious. When the receptionist pushed a button to open the door for you, you walked slowly along, trying to absorb in the reality of everything hitting you all at once. Magic was real! Your friend was in trouble! She might be a danger to you! But still, you were the first person she contacted, and you and Trish had been really close for some time... surely you could work through whatever's going on, right?

Following the instructions, you stepped down the hall until it opened up into a large area, with a building stretching a few stories high with glass panel walls overlooking a beautiful forested park! It was stunning, and felt like a great vacation destination, if not for the fact that outside the boundaries of the walls surrounding this hotel and park looked like a menacing cave. With no sky to look up to, even though everything was open, it felt very isolating. And given the instructions the receptionist gave you, Trisha didn't even get to enjoy this view... you saw some strange sights, people with altered body shapes or they were constantly on fire or they floated in the air, or whatever else seemed to be going on with these other Magical Misfire patients. They weren't your concern, so you had to limit your staring and head downstairs.

Inside the basement levels, where you stepped through corridors with various signs with instructions on each door about how to enter and approach, you stopped by at the proper door, reading a posting on the door about Taurasites, the thing the receptionist mentioned.

Taurasites are enchanted creatures that are created by a spell which typically turns a regular creature into a headless variant of itself where a giant gap exists instead. The Taurasite will seek out a human, draw their lower half into the body, and create a magical connection to combine both beings into a singular creature. The effects of this connection can vary, where either the Taurasite or the human are in partial or complete control of the body, or influence the behavior of the body.

That sounded frightening! How would Trish even end up in a situation like that?!

You rang the bell, which instead of a typical ding you expected let out a soft humming pulse, probably along the lines of avoiding sudden stimulus. The door slid open and you stepped into the room, heading deeper into the chamber. Your hands covered your mouth to stifle a gasp at the being you saw before you.

The shoulders, arms, and head were instantly recognizable to you, as the bright red hair of Trisha Adams sat atop this body. Normally her cute face would be smiling in the bubbliest way, but this time you could see anxiety behind her eyes. Resting inside the watery tank was... a shrimp. Specifically, it was the body of a mantis shrimp, far larger than anything you had ever seen! You were expecting something like a horse for this Taurasite being you pictured in your head, but this was... something else. It looked like a normal mantis shrimp right up to where its head should've begun. That was where things became far weirder.

Along Trish's waist, crustacean exoskeletal structures still ran along her body, right until it reached her chest. Instead of breasts, or some clothes to cover up at least, it appeared to be the eyes of the mantis shrimp were sticking out of Trisha's body. Mantis shrimp have these large globular eyes that could swivel independently, but these eyes looked like they still had some squishy consistency as human breasts would, creating a strange sight where these eyes would swivel about to examine surroundings, but jiggle a little in the process. That seemed to be the point where this Taurasite began and Trish ended, although it was hard to tell... because Trish's hands would occasionally come up to 'clean' the eyes, wiping them from particles from inside the water.

"Hey, Penny," Trish spoke at you, in a low voice as her hands made it look like she was playing with herself in front of you, wiping at those strange eye-shapes. From faraway it sort of looked like she was wearing a shiny bra when the eyes weren't moving about. In fact, it seemed like except for her head, the colossal shrimp had free reign of the body to roam about the tank as it pleased, so Trish had to turn her head to maintain eye contact with you as this other creature roamed on her behalf. "I can... explain. Kind of. Long story short, I forgot to read a page in one of my spellbooks... and you remember Lenny, right? From in my aquarium, my pet shrimp? I thought it would be interesting to see if I could do this taur thing, but the part of the spell I forgot to do would've let me keep control after I turned Lenny into a Taurasite."

You were absolutely shocked. Here was your friend, half human and half crustacean, unable to control the shrimpy side of herself! You were tempted to run out the door right then and there in horror, but Trish's pleading face kept you anchored. "I just want to talk, at least for now," Trish said. "We can talk just fine, just no hugs or anything yet. The doctors said they could fix the last part of the spell for me, or use a new spell to change this into something else, and then we can undo it. But right now, Lenny is a bit... unpredictable. Worst case is he might detach from me and attach to someone else, but at the moment he's stuck on pretty firmly. So, will you stay for a bit? Please? I could really use someone to talk to."