It's not easy seeing green...

The rays from the multiple strange lamps over the platform hit Sheldon like a green avalanche. He went to his knees first, then a crawling position, then prone before he lost consciousness. “It doesn’t hurt,” he remembered thinking later. In fact, it felt better than anything else in his life ever had. Even better than… well, better than anything.

He tried to open his eyes to avoid thinking too much. Green. At first, he saw nothing but green. It surrounded him, penetrated him, held him up. He seemed to exist in a bright green flood.

He swam in a glowing green sea. He had no trouble breathing and seemed to move rapidly with no effort at all. He recognized his motion by the fact of his zooming past other glowing figures in the greenness. They all seemed to be female and expressing varying degrees of astonishment. “Mermaids?” he barely had time to wonder, but all of them had legs instead of fish tails.

He approached a woman standing on a familiar looking platform. Leaves and plant-like tendrils served her for clothing, barely covering her nude form. She beckoned him to come closer. He tried to look to see if he were still naked, too. He saw nothing but green when he tried to look down at his body. Had he misplaced it somewhere?

“That would be so embarrassing,” he thought just before George’s shouting and shaking brought him back to the spooky basement laboratory.

At the best of times, George’s stutter gave him problems with words that started with sounds involving the tip of the tongue. Like Sheldon’s name, for instance. But when he really got excited, George tended to gabble, making no sense at all to hardly anybody, though his best friend could almost always understand him. Which is what he was doing when Sheldon came to, along with shaking Shel’s shoulders and patting his cheeks, a little too roughly.

“Eh-wing! Eh-wing! Wake-up! Pweags wake-up! Ew me oor aw gheag!”.

“I’m not dead. I’m not dead!” Sheldon managed. “Stop slapping me!” He pushed his friend away.

George sat back on his heels, adjusted his glasses and sighed in relief. “I fo’kweeg kiwg’oo.”

“No, I’m okay. Actually, I passed out because it felt so good!” Shel laughed at how that sounded, and George made his snorting chortle. He tried to sit up, realizing as he did that George had apparently covered him partly with one of the dusty canvas tarps that had concealed and protected a lot of the machinery. “Huh?” he said. "Why did you cover me up?"

Words failed George completely; he just blushed and gestured.

Shel rolled over and pushed the tarp off himself while George stood up and turned around to face away. He kept gesturing at the wall, though, as if explaining a hard problem in geometry to a classroom full of apes.

“You’re being weird,” said Shel. “Weirder than usual.” When he had the tarp down to his waist, he paused. “Hey! My skin looks a bit different.”

Sitting up now, he bent forward to try to get a good look at what seemed to be smoother skin on his belly. Shel wasn’t looking at him, but George still faced the wall, shrugging repeatedly and ever more dramatically until his whole body flinched.

Shel felt excitement building up. He suppressed a squeal of delight. The strange machinery had actually produced an effect. He threw the rest of the tarp aside to look at his legs.