Don't drink that!

[dvarin]

During your senior year of college you make a particularly wild visit to New Orleans at Carnival where you are transformed into a TNMT-sized mutant alligator person by Generic Antagonist #38 for reasons which are not important to this question. For similar reasons you have provisionally given up on getting changed back

Comments

[platypuslord]

What about "prove my identity to my family and friends, and get them to cover for me"?

What about "turn myself in and hope the Government Bureau Of Dealing With This Sort Of Thing isn't secretly evil"?

[dvarin]

Sanity!

prove my identity to my family and friends
Heh. As you can tell from the rest of the options, I was not even thinking in this genre. It is the most straightforward option. It also fixes one of the things I was thinking about but didn't put here--how to get them from New Orleans to mid-California, where the plot starts--because the family can just live in CA. I imagine it'll put a bit of a strain on their relationship though. Employment options are mostly limited to internet-mediated, but living half online might make it easier to become acquainted with the other adventur... protagonists.

The Government Bureau you link to may or may not be a good example of "not secretly evil".
Unless they recruit the character themselves (maybe they need an accountant), they could place them pretty much anywhere... depends on how prevalent similar victims are and whether they've been made public yet, I guess.

[harinezumi]

Get an agent, become a Talking Gator celebrity, try to get a job as a Lacoste spokesgator..

[dvarin]

Hm. I wonder if you could actually make any money at that last one without being independently famous first. You would probably have to be cheaper than CG...