When Jon looked out of his bedroom door, the house he remembered was nowhere in sight. Instead, he was looking at the inside of a large, rather curious open barn! And there, lying below him, was Karyn and her scaly thirty-foot naga body.
"Watch that first step, Snake," Karyn hissed up at Jon. Then, to his surprise, he noticed that his mom and his sister Zoe were in the barn, too, both with long scaly snake bodies.
Jon stuck out his head a bit further, then a bit more, then out past what used to be his waist. Then suddenly he was slipping, slipping, out of control!
"Ooof!" Jon hissed as he struck the floor. "Serves you right," hissed Karyn.
"I don't know why the two of you crammed yourselves into that tiny trap room anyway," Jon's mother hissed. "What were you doing up there? Slithering?"
"Uh, it was kind of a random thing," Jon hissed. "A roll of the die, you might say. Is there any breakfast?"
"Just a couple of rats, and I ate 'em," Zoe hissed.
Except for three white stripes down her back, Zoe's entire body and scales were entirely black. Neither she nor Jon's mother were wearing a stitch of clothes but Karyn still seemed tense.
"I'm sure the two of you can find something on the way to school," Jon's mother hissed. Unlike Zoe, she had brightly colored scales: black and white diamonds on an orange background. Her human skin was orange except for a black and white diamond surrounding each eye.
"Where?" Jon hissed.
"Try that field down by the swamp," Jon's mother hissed. "The rats and rabbits were runnin' pretty good the other day. Pigeons, too, if the hawks haven't gotten 'em all. You better get going if you don't want to be hungry or late."
Jon and Karyn stared at each other, then began working their way toward what seemed to be the outside door. Once there, Jon bumped the door with his head and worked his way through, then Karyn. What they saw outside amazed them even more than the inside of the house had done...
