Jon caught up to Karyn as both of them hurried to their next class, which was Feeding.
"Where were you during lunch?" Karyn hissed.
"Joseph and I hung around the bottom of pond for about forty minutes," Jon hissed in reply. "I turns out we can breath underwater, and we can control most types of animals, not just apes."
"Really? I'm gonna hafta try that breathing underwater trick. Are you sure everyone can do it?" Karyn hissed.
"I could wish it and then you'd be sure," Jon hissed.
"OK, but how are you carrying the stone?" hissed Karyn.
"It's inside my rib cage," Jon hissed, then the continued, "I wish that for as long as Karyn's a naga, she's one of the best at breathing underwater."
"Thanks. I already knew about controlling lesser animals such as birds, fish, and mammals, though. Brittany and I were catching squirrels, and pigeons that way for lunch."
"You ate live squirrels for lunch?" hissed Jon.
"Yeah, they're not so bad if you catch 'em head first and bite off the tail," Karyn hissed. "You wanna join us tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow we'll be normal humans beings again, and I don't think we'll be eating squirrels," Jon hissed.
"Not if you wish otherwise, Jon. I'm telling you, there are some things I really like about this body and this way of living. And even if we did change back, we'd roll one of the dice again, wouldn't we? What if we didn't like the next change as well as this one? 'Cause this one is about ten out of ten for me."
"There could be something else you like better," hissed Jon. "I could make you hate this, you know."
"But you could also make yourself very happy, even ecstatic about being a naga," Karyn hissed. "This is just so cool, so different, so powerful, so in tune with nature And so sexy! I feel like I'm living for sex! Yowsa!"
"Feeding is our next class," Jon hissed. "C'mon, we probably shouldn't be the last ones."
Feeding was in the same classroom as Parseltongue had been first period. Jon and Karyn took the same places, coiled their snake tails beneath them, and faced the front. The teacher was Ms. Shugart, who in Karyn's memory had taught Nutrition and Home Economics. Karyn seemed agitated but managed to sit on her coils fairly still.
Once again the class had no written material and no visual aids. Perhaps, Jon thought, the naga race's entire store of knowledge was folklore, passed down verbally from generation to generation. At least, there seemed to be no written language at school. Judging from the crude construction of his mom's house and the school buildings, even professional construction nagas didn't have fine control over their animals. Controlling an animal's hand or paw finely enough to write might be impossible, Jon thought.
Shugart's course consisted of four units: seeking animals, selecting animals, controlling animals, and ingesting animals. (Nagas, apparently, ate no vegetable material at all.) On that particular day, she hissed about ways to differentiate healthy mammals from sick and dying ones, and she emphasized the importance of eating only healthy prey. On and on he hissed for most of an hour.
"Oh! I am so glad that class is over," Karyn hissed after Shugart completed her lecture.
"Well, it made sense to me," hissed Jon. "If you eat dead stuff, whatever killed the prey is likely to kill you, or at least make you sick."
"Oh, but I am soooo horny," Karyn hissed. "Look, that group over there is going outside. I bet they're gonna slither. C'mon, let's go!"
Sure enough, ten or twelve students had already lowered their torsos to the grass and begun slithering together. Karyn burrowed right in and after a few moment's observation, so did Jon.
Within seconds Jon lost all track of who was slipping and sliding against him; he only knew that the mass of exotic bodies was writhing and pulsing against him. Then he was cumming in long powerful pulses, over and over again, one series of spurts beginning almost before the prior one had ended. For a brief moment he saw Karyn's face and tried to kiss her, but the thrashing swarm of nagas whirled her away.
After about half an hour of slithering a few of the nagas started to pull out, then more, then the last few. Their next teacher was standing off to the side, watching and waiting for them to be done. Jon recognized her as Ms. Norton, his history teacher.
