In the year 1971, astronomy student and aspiring guitarist Brian May's ill-fated camping trip may have more consequences than he first realized. Small but unexplainable things start to happen to him after he is bit by a dog in Humpy Bong Forest. His...
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Brian couldn't stand playing that game any longer. Usually, he would be glad to play Scrabble and be pretty good, but that day he was miserable and out of focus.
The whole day he had aches and pains and felt uncomfortable in his skin. His bones felt like the yearned to reach out of him. No matter how he sat or stretched, he was unable to ease the muscle tension that stiffened his movements. Brian was plagued with poor motor skills and was thankful that Roger would be driving later instead of him. He found it difficult to grab and hold things, especially when they called for him to use his thumbs.
When he went to take his test, not only could he barely hold a pencil but also his senses were extremely strong. He could hear the inhales and exhales of everyone in the room and a student that sat diagonally a few seats behind him desperately needed to blow their nose. His classmates' pencils scratched and screeched across the paper, and Brian cringed at the sound of an eraser skidding across their tests. However, the most disturbing thing he could hear in the testing room was the heartbeats of those closest to him. He felt nauseated by the irregular and out of sync lub-dub sound that entrapped him at his desk.
All of this was nothing compared to the sudden influx of smells. He could smell everything from perfumes to the chalk on the chalkboard and even the individual distinct scents of his classmates. He could even smell their scents on each other such as one girl with the scent of her friend from a hug before the test and a boy with the scent of his roommate on his unwashed clothes. Most notably, the professor's wife's scent still lingered on his sweater-vest in such a way that Brian couldn't help but raise his eyebrows in surprise.
Most embarrassingly was Brian's decreasing ability to speak. He didn't want to admit it, but he struggled to talk even when the band left the petrol station about halfway through their drive up to Hompy Bong. Then, during Scrabble, he felt like his mouth refused to cooperate. It was like the line between his brain's commands to his extremities had been tampered with.
Then there was his mental dullness and primitiveness. After the exam, he hovered over his grilled cheese and lettuce sandwich and even growled at unfamiliar people when they came too close. (One girl neighed back at him and he was too stunned to react.) When he first started to unload things from the boot of Roger's car at the campsite, he saw a squirrel and its alluring aroma urged him to chase it. Roger even noticed and asked Brian if he was alright. He wasn't alright; he was a vegetarian with a carnivorous urge to kill an innocent creature! And then, later on, he sincerely thought that 'who' was pronounced 'hwah.' No one would ever guess that I was a Ph.D. student, Brian thought.
As Brian walked through Hompy Bong Forest by himself after the Scrabble game, he started to feel hot. Sweat started to accumulate on his brow, so he took off his shirt. He paused for a moment and looked around. Pretty sure that camp is back that way, he thought when he turned behind himself for a moment, I can find my way back later. He stepped out into a clearing in the trees and his mental haze doubled.
