Behind the door was a spiral staircase that went down some twenty feet. At the bottom was a large window that looked into the tank. Fubar was already at the bottom of the stairs, even though I went first, and he never passed me on the stair. “There’s a light switch over there.” The lights brightened the insides of the tank, and I got a better look at Fubar’s real body. He was sort of stretched out on the Barcalounger ™from hell, and he wasn’t moving. He was humanoid- that is, if you’re very loose in your definition of ‘humanoid’. His body was sort of flabby looking- ah, who am I kidding, it was bloated- and there was something about the way that his joints were set that didn’t seem right. His hands were these massive claws, and there these things jutting out from behind his back that might have been wings. But the thing that really jumped out at you was his head. His head alone must have been as big as my entire body, and it was definitely misshapen. Misshapen? Hell, the entire front of his face looked like a freaking squid! There was this mass of tentacles writhing- and believe me, I don’t normally use the word ‘writhe’, but in this case, it FIT!- around in front of his face. The tentacles whipping around were the only sign that he wasn’t dead. Other than that, he didn’t move an inch. “I have the dubious distinction of being the most severe case of Gross Structural Dystrophy on record. At least of those that survived. I can’t move out of water, because my entire skeleton has become cartilaginous. I’ve even developed a set of gills in my lungs. On the other hand, besides being an Exemplar, I’m also a high level ‘Package Deal Psychic’. There are only a handful of Exemplar/PDP combinations that I know about.” He looked out the window at his own deformed real body. “And none of them got anything even like this.”