Life was simple for Rez. As a rhinoceros, he didn't have any responsibilities to care about - he was but an animal, after all - so his days were spent mostly roaming about the garden, stopping to graze, and of course sleeping. He didn't mind being confined to such a space, walled in by fences, along with the back wall of his house, as he'd always been one for a sedentary lifestyle, and the garden always had enough grass to keep him fed. Whenever he felt like a change of scenery he'd step into the house through its back door - though it was always a tight fit for his large frame - looking around at his various possessions, before his desire for the taste of grass and the feeling of it underneath his belly lured him back outside. On particularly adventurous days he'd even explore the upstairs of his house, though the difficulty of descending the stairs often discouraged him from doing so. It was a bit of a novelty - he had no idea why he had a bedroom and bathroom, not only because the garden already fulfilled their purposes, but also because their furnishings were far too small for him.

Sometimes a neighbour would pay a visit, relax on one of the patio chairs, and strike conversation with Rez. He could barely understand a word of what they were saying, and entirely lacked the means to respond. Despite clearly being fully aware of this fact, they continued nonetheless, speaking in a manner that suggested a genuine desire to hear Rez's thoughts and feelings, as though they were longtime friends. They were longtime friends after all, as Rez could remember spending time with them on many occasions over the years. He always found it a little disconcerting to think, or to reminisce on the past. It was a strange, uncomfortable feeling, his mind straining in an effort to function at a level beyond its capabilities, trying to recall an education he had never received in the first place. His long-term memories only added to the confusion, often involving him getting up to things a rhinoceros like him couldn't possibly do. Memories of him using the same facilities within his home that were wholly unsuited to his form, of buying food in a store and carrying it home in bags despite his grass-based diet and lack of hands, of two-way conversations with his friends despite his inability to speak. It was all very strange, so Rez tried not to think about anything other than his basic needs and instincts, but his mind often wandered as he lazed around in his garden.

He couldn't shake the feeling there was something unique about him though, separating him from his fellow animals. None of them owned homes, or wore clothes, and while he couldn't know for sure, they never seemed like they were caught up in the kind of strange thoughts and memories he often was. There were also the photos laying about in his home, often carelessly knocked off the wall by a swing of the tail or an effort to squeeze through a tight passageway. Photos of him as a young rhinoceros, with his human friends, or his family. Strangely enough, in most of these photos he was standing on his hindlegs, something his weight and body shape rendered utterly impossible, and in some he was even grasping objects using his front feet somehow. In some photos he was wearing a different outfit, and he could remember changing clothes himself - in fact, he could distinctly remember putting on his current outfit a few years ago - yet he lacked the means to do so, and he knew it wasn't somebody else who'd changed them for him. It was all very odd, but he always felt at his most comfortable sitting outside, lazily chewing on grass, and the last memories of him doing anything that seemed uncharacteristic for his animal self were a long time ago at this point, though how much time had passed exactly was completely beyond him.

The last of those memories were some of his most vivid. Visiting a foreign land that seemed incomprehensibly far to his simple mind, one in which, unlike his home, he actually encountered others of his kind, though oddly enough he didn't see them as kin at the time, but as mere beasts, much in the same way he assumed his neighbours saw him. The hot savannas and untamed wilderness of those lands seemed far better suited to his rhinoceros self, compared to the cool and often rainy environment of his home. He also spent time wandering through towns and visiting shops, tapping a card against some device beyond his comprehension in return for various trinkets that now sat around in bags in his home, as he lacked the means to retrieve them or put them up. He could also remember returning from this place, seated within some manner of airborne vehicle, which he believed to be one of the things he sometimes saw loudly cutting through the sky. In the very last of these strange memories, he drew a clock from one of these bags, with an ornate wooden frame carved with realistic depictions of the foreign land's wildlife, and set it up on the wall. Sure enough, this clock still stood on the same wall, visible from the garden, its loud, rhythmic ticking audible throughout his house. He couldn't hope to comprehend the purpose of such an object, but its design appealed to him, and the everpresent ticking helped distract him from his thoughts. In all his memories since setting the clock on the wall, he was grazing, wandering through his home, or resting as he gazed over at a neighbour, as they reminisced on a past that made no real sense to him.

As unnerving as the impossibilities of his memories could get sometimes, Rez knew he had been a rhinoceros his whole life - even in these memories he was one, after all - inexplicably using his front feet to grip objects, speaking a language he lacked the physiology to speak or the mental capacity to understand, walking upright despite being incapable of supporting his weight on two legs, acting according to knowledge and concepts far too advanced for his bestial mind, and comfortably using the furnishings of his home despite them clearly not being designed for his species. As he lay on the grass and contemplated these things, his current visitor, who he felt an especially close bond to, wandered over, got down on their knees and stroked his side. He lifted his head, and in response they kissed him on the cheek. As they did, memories flooded back of time they'd spent together, dining at restaurants, where he often ate foods poorly suited to a herbivore like him, and sitting on a couch, in one another's embrace as fantastical scenarios played out on the screen in front of them. It made little sense to Rez, how a mere beast like him could forge such a bond with a person, but he was thankful for it, and they clearly remembered this bond too. Alas, maintaining such a relationship was fundamentally impossible - as it always should have been - and as they got up and left him alone in his garden, it seemed both parties fully understood this.

Rez was a rhinoceros. He had always been one, and everyone knew this. His parents were, and theirs before them, having lived the lives of people despite being beasts, though by this point he was the last of his family. Why were things different for him now? Even though he'd always been this way, it felt like there was a time he could do a great many things he should have been incapable of, so why couldn't he now? Nothing had changed about him, or about his life, and despite his memories, the idea of personhood, of being anything other than a quadruped beast incapable of speech and devoid of sapience, was utterly alien to him. At that point, he came to realise something - he was thinking, a bad habit he'd never quite been able to shake off. He set these pointless, discomforting thoughts aside, and sat on the ground, belly squished against a puddle of mud, and then sniffed at the grass before him, before tearing it from the ground with his teeth. Rez was just a dumb animal. If he could, he'd clear out these strange thoughts and memories for good, and devote his brainpower entirely to more important things, such as tasting grass, gazing at the sky, swatting away flies with his tail, and keeping an eye out for the natural predators of his species - the fact they didn't even exist within this region was something beyond his understanding.

The life of a beast is simple, and if the world made any sense, Rez would be living with his fellow rhinoceros in the savanna wilderness, rather than in the middle of a town surrounded by people, in a home he'd somehow come to own, a lowly beast in a world ruled by humans.

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I felt like doing something different this time around, writing the story first and then drawing a piece based on the story, rather than the other way around. Recently I've seen a few reality-warping TFs out there, and the concept intrigued me, so I figured I'd try doing something along those lines myself. Given their nature, as something narrative-focused that is difficult to depict visually, doing things this way around seemed like the best approach. I don't have experience with this particular kind of scenario though, so it was a balancing act of trying to make it clear this was a retroactive change to the timeline, rather than a more typical TF coupled with memory alteration, while writing from Rez's perspective and trying to avoid making it sound like he actually understood what happened. To the folks out there more familiar with these kinds of scenarios, I hope I did a good job, because I had a lot of fun writing this. Probably a little too niche for me to do this kind of thing on a regular basis, but I think it could be fun to try this kind of thing from a different angle sometime, perhaps something larger in scale and with a more bizarre end result, since the concept allows for basically unlimited range in both of those.

As for why I went with a rhinoceros specifically, well, he's always been one, silly! The real reason is that I realised I don't think I've ever drawn any TF art involving any kind of pachyderm, despite them being among my favourite animal species. Plus I just felt like turning Rez into some manner of big animal again. This is also the first time in a while I've done any shading - already having the story written out helped motivate me in that regard, since while shading I knew it was the last thing I needed to do (other than write this final paragraph). I'm pretty rusty with it though, so I didn't go all-in with it, just enough for the more heavily shaded head to not look too out of place compared to the rest.