"Eh, on second thought, let's skip the humanoid modifier," Karyn said.
Jon nodded. "Sure. The stone can figure that one out." He was having second thoughts about whether this was a good idea, but Karyn seemed to have come around to it. She had a way of powering through people's reservations when she thought something sounded cool, and that was in full effect right now.
Karyn thought for a moment. "Hey, can I see the stone for a minute?"
Jon shrugged. "Sure, just be careful."
She took it and got a devilish little smile on her face. "I wish," she said, "that the stone cannot be used to alter or cancel the effects of these dice." There was no fancy flash or anything, but both of them knew that it was now so.
"Karyn, what?" Jon said. "That's a recipe for disaster..."
She grinned. "We'll be careful. And this way we can't welch on it. Makes it more of an adventure."
He sighed; there was no way to undo that now, anyway. "At least take out the possibility for a permanent change, then."
Karyn frowned. "Oh, damn, I hadn't thought of that." Another quick wish removed the "lifetime" option from the time modifier die, just in case.
Jon was about to suggest that they stop and think over any other potential implications, but Karyn, ever the impulsive one, grabbed the dice she'd been thinking of and flicked them up into the air. Time seemed to slow down as they arced upwards, sailed down to the floor, impacted, sprang back into the air, and clattered back down until they finally came to a stop. With bated breath, the two of them examined the results:
One year, feline, all girls.
"Shit," Jon said.
Even while he said it, the change was starting. It began with hair creeping up the back of the neck, quickly blossoming across the back and wrapping around the front of the torso, until they were both covered in a full-body coat of fur. Karyn's was calico, while Jon's was a soft grey; both had an area of softer, downy white fur running from the chin down the front of the torso to the groin. Jon felt his hair grow out, rippling downwards until it hung to slightly below his shoulders. He looked at Karyn and saw that her hair had changed color; it was now variegated like her fur, with streaks of black, white, and tan intermingled, but it was dominated by an orangey color that was quite a bit closer to her original red than the blond that her accidental wish had gotten her. Curious, he brought a lock of his own hair in front of his face, but it was the same dark brown it'd always been, if a little fuller and shinier.
The next thing that happened, however, was all Jon. He felt a sudden kind of scrambling sensation in his lower abdomen, as if things inside were rearranging. His eyes went wide and he shot a hand down inside his pants. "Nononononononoshiiiit!" he hissed, feeling his penis shrink back into his body, leaving an unfamiliar cleft between his - or was it her? - legs. She felt herself trembling as she tried to come to terms with what had just happened to her.
They both found themselves thrown off-balance as they felt their bodies changing in build. Jon got the worst of it, as she had farther to go; she felt her hips expanding as her shoulders narrowed, and her body shrinking, but her legs shrinking less than the rest of her. Then she really did lose her balance, as her legs altered much more significantly, her upper and lower legs compressing upwards as her heels raised off the ground, her feet elongating to take up the slack. She was left standing (or rather, failing to stand) on the balls of her feet as her toes changed, until finally she had a pair of largeish paws at the end of her legs.
While she was on her hands and knees, trying to pick herself up off the floor, she felt a pressure building at the base of her spine. She gave a suspiciously feline-sounding yowl, her voice now noticeably higher, as a tail burst forth from her backside, tearing through the seat of her pants and extending out until it stuck out straight nearly three feet behind her, the fur puffed out from the discomfort of tearing through denim.
Jon finally managed to regain her feet only to find, as she pushed herself up from the floor, that her arms felt weird. She took a look at them and noticed that they were slimmer, although not noticeably weaker. The hands were different; a bit slenderer, but with slightly thicker, stubbier fingers. Not paws, thankfully - the fingers were still fully articulated and long enough for a good grasp, and the thumbs were still opposable - but they were noticeably more paw-like, with spongy pads of bare, black skin on the palms and fingertips, and retractable claws in place of fingernails.
"Ah!" Karyn gasped, and Jon turned her attention back to her friend. She was feeling at something under her hair, and Jon realized that she was following the course of her ear as it migrated up her head; she could feel the same thing happening to her. They gradually emerged from her hair, changed from human ears to an increasingly triangular shape, until they finally settled on top of her head as full-fledged cat ears, twitching this way and that as her brain tried to come to terms with their newfound mobility. She brushed her now-longer hair aside and felt around to find only blank, fur-covered skin where they'd used to be.
She felt her face rearranging somewhat. Her jawline reshaped, becoming narrower at the front and wider at the back, tufts of thicker, softer fur obscuring the back corners. Her entire lower face pushed outwards slightly, and her nose broadened out until they were joined into a unified structure, a cat-like muzzle. It wasn't as pronounced as a normal cat's, but it was definitely different from a human face. She didn't have a mirror handy, but she felt her face and found that her nose was now a flat-ended, triangular feline one, slightly damp. The feeling of her thick finger-pads on it was a strange new sensation, as was the feeling of her hand brushing against the whiskers that now poked out of either side of her muzzle not far behind her nose. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth and discovered that it had a rougher, sandpapery texture, and that her teeth were now sharper and pointier - not quite a full set of animal fangs, but definitely leaning more towards it.
Jon felt a pricking at several points down her chest; at the same time, there was a feeling of pressure under her nipples. "Aw, no..." she moaned in her new voice. She felt flesh begin to pile up underneath them, and she knew what was happening. But at the same time, she felt it from additional points further down. She glanced to Karyn, who had lifted her shirt, visibly surprised at what was happening. Jon was developing breasts - but so was Karyn. Four small lumps in two rows of two had begun to expand out from her torso; the lower set sat slightly above the base of her ribcage. As Jon watched, feeling the same thing happening to her, Karyn's new additions grew out to full size. Her middle set was somewhat smaller than her wish-expanded originals; her bottom set, somewhat smaller than that.
Jon glanced down at herself, seeing a woman's bust from a first-person perspective for the first time. She had, of course, also developed the top set that Karyn had had all along. Her top breasts were smaller than Karyn's, though still fairly ample. She reached underneath her shirt and tentatively felt at her other two sets, experiencing the strange sensation of not only touching a girl's breasts with her hands, but feeling those same hands touch her breasts. Her lower sets followed the same proportional decrease in size that Karyn's did, so that her bottom set was only a small handful and just barely prominent enough to hang off her chest. As she held them, there was another sensation, and she felt them...not exactly firm up, as they were still soft to the touch, but it was like there was a thin layer of muscle underneath the skin that held them somewhat more securely in place.
And then it was over.
It was a minute or so before either of them said anything. Jon was in a daze; Karyn was more just curious. She prodded thoughtfully at her altered breasts, feeling the new layer underneath that helped support them. "Wonder what that's about?" she mused.
"...maybe a survival thing," muttered Jon almost subconsciously, still not quite able to process this as a thing that was actually happening to her. Like this...for a whole year... "Maybe the species is designed as if it'd always been this way."
Karyn thought for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense. In a primitive environment, hunting would be easier if they weren't quite so prone to getting in the way." She frowned. "Though that raises the question of why they're there in the first place, but I suppose we never really figured that out with humans, either." She chuckled ruefully. "Hell's bells, though, I really got a double-whammy with this wishing business! Between yesterday and this, my 'girls' have gotta weigh in at like twice what I was originally lugging around, at least." She grinned slyly at Jon. "You didn't do so badly for yourself, either."
This finally broke through Jon's mental fog. She would've flushed beet-red if she'd still had the capability; instead, she found her fur standing up, her ears going back, and her tail stiffening out. "It...it's not funny, dammit!" she stammered. "Because of you I'm stuck like this for a whole year!"
Karyn shrugged. "Well, join the club. It was your idea anyway, y'know."
Jon moaned. "It wasn't suppose to turn out like this...we were supposed to become something cool...now I can't even fix it..."
"Aw, don't be like that," Karyn said. "It's only a year. And honestly it is kinda cool. Cheer up, okay?" She turned to walk over to her transformed friend, but stopped for a moment as she got a feel for her new distribution of mass. "Whoa. If it weren't for this layer underneath, I'd probably need a back brace." She did a quick double-take, then peeked down her shirt collar. "Especially since my bra seems to have disappeared."
Karyn looked herself over; not only was she not wearing a bra, her underwear was missing as well. On top of which, her jeans had been replaced with a plain, knee-length denim skirt. She noticed that Jon was wearing something similar. "Well that's weird," she said. Curious, she pulled open Jon's top dresser drawer. There were some pajamas, but nothing in the way of socks or underwear. "Guess as a species we like to go commando. I suppose it's easier than tailoring around the tail. Probably explains the skirts, too."
Jon grimaced. "Oh, for...I don't want to be stuck in skirts for the whole year on top of all this!" She yanked the other drawers open one by one, but it was no use; no sign of pants could be found. She planted her forehead firmly in one padded palm, groaning audibly. Karyn suppressed the urge to laugh. "Hey, I'm sure you can get them someplace," she said. "If it's really such a big deal. I mean, nobody is going to think it's weird if everybody's like this."
Jon sighed. "I will. And I already feel like enough of a freak." She hefted her multiple rows of breasts to emphasize the point.
Karyn made a dismissive sound in the back of her throat. "Oh, come on, Jon. You wanted to try this. Okay, it didn't turn out the way you anticipated, but so what? It's still a little adventure, and nobody will think you're weird, and at the end of it if it's all that terrible you can just go back to normal. Suck it up already!"
Jon wanted to retort, but...there was just nothing to be gained from it. And she supposed Karyn had a right to be a little irritated with her bitching. Still, that didn't actually improve the situation any...
"Hey, look at this," Karyn said from out in the hall. Jon left her room to find her friend gazing at the Madison family portrait. It showed the whole family together, and they'd all signed their names underneath. But Jon and Mikey were now catgirls, and they were "Joni" and "Tabitha" to boot. "Tabitha" had cream-white hair and orange-and-white striped fur; Zoe had dark grey fur with black stripes, and black hair. Their mother looked pretty much exactly like Jon, except that her fur was grey all around, without the white patch on the front. All of them had the same six-breasted configuration, except for Tabitha, who didn't appear to have hit puberty at the time of the photo.
"Hey, how come you got a girl version of your name and your brother didn't?" Karyn mused. "And actually, why's your dad still a guy? Wasn't this supposed to affect everyone?"
"Oh man, I hadn't even thought of that," Jon said, a brief vision flashing through her mind of his parents as two catgirls. She shut that out before it got any more detailed. "As for the names, my parents weren't all that creative with that stuff. They were going to name me 'Joni' if I was a girl, because it was a girl version of 'Jon,' which they were going to name me if I was a boy. By the time they got to Mikey, they just picked it at random in the hospital room after the delivery. I guess she's 'Tabitha' because she's a tabby." In spite of everything, she couldn't hold back a wry smile. She knew her parents.
"Heh," Karyn chuckled. "Anyway, check this out." She held out her phone, with a relevant Wikipedia article showing. Jon took it and started reading, a little nervously. She was never that comfortable with touchscreen slabs, really, and now she had claws on top of that. Fortunately, the manufacturers must have been forced to step up their game on producing scratch-resistant screens, because even Karyn's cheap off-brand phone wasn't harmed at all by her clumsy scrabbling.
What Jon and Karyn learned from this was that, in the changed world, catgirls existed in addition to the human race, rather than in place of it. They were all female; nobody knew for sure what had happened to cat-men (or, indeed, if there had ever been any,) but one theory was that, at some point in ancient prehistory, after something like a near-extinction event, human men had out-competed the remaining males when they were a small enough group to completely eliminate them from the picture, or perhaps come along after they were all gone and simply filled the role left behind. In any case, whether or not there had ever been male cat-people, any child born to a human man and a catgirl was a catgirl.
And that's why my dad is still normal, Jon thought. Catgirls can't have children by themselves, and there are no catboys, so he'd have to be. Granted, it didn't really explain why the change had deviated from the most literal interpretation of the dice results. Maybe it took a kind of path-of-least-resistance approach, and altering biology so that catgirls could reproduce on their own was rejected on that basis...?
Anyway, because of this quirk, some towns tended to be largely catgirl enclaves, particularly in rural areas where those that wanted to could indulge their feline instincts more openly. This wasn't to say that there weren't catgirls living in the rest of human society, but it was a noticeable trend nonetheless. As a result, they also tended to be overrepresented in professions like farming, forestry, and such. And I suppose Lakeside is rural enough to be a candidate for an "enclave," she mused. She frowned, realizing something. "Hey, wait. Doesn't the stone have a limited radius of a mile or so? How did it change the entire world?"
"Hey, yeah," Karyn said. "And we know it has to have changed, 'cause there's no way the Wikipedia servers are anywhere near here."
Jon nodded. "I wonder if the stone can create items with a larger area of effect than it itself has?"
Karyn shrugged. "Could be. Or maybe just some kind of planetary alignment or something. Who knows, it's magic."
While they were thinking this over, Jon's new ears picked up the sound of footfalls on the carpeted staircase. She turned to see the cat-woman that was her mother coming up the stairs, apparently looking for them. "Karyn, I just spoke with your mother," she said cheerily, "and she said it's fine if you stay over. You still have all your school things, right?"
Karyn grinned and nodded. "Yup."
Mrs. Madison smiled. "Good. I'll let her know. You girls have fun; I can bring you up something later if you like."
Jon stared after her. "...stay over?" she murmured. Karyn chuckled. "It's a sleepover, Joni-girl. Us girls do this stuff, y'know. Anyway, somebody's gotta help you with any stuff you need to know about being a girl, and your mom would just look at you funny because she has no idea you haven't always been one."
Jon frowned. "I dunno...this is..."
Karyn scoffed. "No ifs, ands, or buts, we're doing this." She grinned. "Trust me, it'll be great. Truth be told I've always wanted to do this, but there's no way they would've let it happen when you were a boy. I promise I won't make you let me do your nails, though."
Yeah, that's because I don't have any now, Jon thought. She wasn't sure that this wasn't going to be kind of weird, but she did like hanging out with Karyn and it did seem comforting to think of having someone on hand who knew everything she might need to know. Still, though...this whole thing was just so overwhelming...
