Jon sat cross-legged on the floor in her room, staring down at the remains of the empty pizza box. With everything that had change in the last few hours, it was a relief to know that she still relished a good pizza. Karyn sat across from her, sipping at the last of her soda. Setting the can down, she looked up at Jon. "So...now what?"
Jon stared at her. "I thought you knew?"
There was a brief, awkward silence. "Well," Karyn said, "um...I dunno. I...haven't actually done one of these since I was like eight. And, well, that was the kind of stuff that seems cool when you're a little kid. Like, we broke into Clarissa's mom's makeup and made a mess trying to use it, and stuff like that. But that's kind of lost the mystique now that we're practically adults, y'know? Plus, the fur."
Jon frowned, a little perplexed. "I mean...you have other friends who are actually girls. I've met them." She wasn't entirely sure why she was playing along with this in the first place, other than because her friend had seemed excited about this, for reasons she didn't really understand.
"Sure," the calico catgirl said. "We just...kinda never wound up sleeping over much. I mean, I guess at this age we talk about boys or whatever? But I'm not really into anybody in particular, and you...probably don't want to talk about that, I'm guessing?"
Jon felt the tips of her ears begin to burn. "...No. Not really." She thought she caught a hint of a smirk on her friend's face, but it promptly vanished, and she wasn't even sure in the first place - she was still getting the hang of reading feline facial expressions.
"Right," Karyn said. "So..."
There was a long, awkward pause. "Aw hell," she said at last, "let's just play some videogames."
Which was what they did. Jon pulled out the old Sega she'd gotten as a hand-me-down from her uncle, and they proceeded to beat the tar out of each other in Street Fighter II for a good long while. They were still doing this when she heard the door softly open behind her. She turned to see "Tabitha," the young catgirl who had been her little brother Mikey, standing in the doorway. "U-um, can I come in?" she asked.
Karyn, who had just finished taking advantage of the distraction to KO Jon, turned to see. "Oh hey, Tabby!" she said. "Sure, come on in."
Jon wondered how she knew that that was the young catgirl's nickname, but then she considered her parents and realized that of course it was. "Yeah," she said, putting on a smile. "Come join us."
Tabby smiled and stepped inside, shutting the door behind her. "Zoe's out with her friends," she said, a little apologetically, "and Mom 'n Dad are watching some old TV show and I'm boooored." She looked over at the console. "Are you guys just playin' games?"
Jon shrugged. "Pretty much, yeah. You want a turn?"
They continued on, trading off controllers for a while, until they finally began to get tired. Tabby set down the controller and lay down, nestling her head into Jon's lap. Jon was a little surprised by this, but gently stroked her behind the ears almost as a reflex. It was strange - she didn't actually remember this girl, except to whatever extent she was Mikey, but some part of her instinctively recognized her as family nonetheless.
"Some a' the girls in my class were talking during gym today," Tabby mused to her big sister, arching her neck to press her head into Jon's fingers. "They're, y'know, startin' to 'fill out.' So we all got to talking..." She sighed. "I'm still waitin', mostly. It's not fair, I'm just as old as them..."
Jon felt a little awkward with this turn of events - she was hardly qualified to dispense advice on something she'd only just started to experience this afternoon, surely? But...well, it wasn't like this period in her life as a human boy hadn't had its own similar kinds of awkwardness. "It just takes time, sometimes," she said reassuringly. "Everybody's different. Some people just get started earlier or go through it a little faster, that's all."
"She's right," Karyn put in. "You'll get there soon enough, even if it seems like other people are getting ahead of you now."
Tabby's ears perked up. "You really think so?"
"Sure. I mean, look at your mom - or your big sis. You'll make a very pretty young woman in time, mark my words."
Tabby cast an appraising glance up at Jon, to her chagrin. "Yeah," she said, looking a little less bothered, "I guess you're right. I just...I wish I was more grown-up like you guys."
"W-well," Jon said, a little flustered, "you don't need to be in such a hurry. Growing up comes with its own complications, believe me." Even before this happened, she thought to herself.
Karyn nodded. "Yeah. Believe it or not, there's times where we miss being kids, but we can't go back any more than you can jump forward. So just enjoy it while you can - before you know it, you'll be in our shoes." She frowned, wondering if the metaphor still worked when cat-people didn't seem to wear them, but Tabby didn't seem to be confused by it.
The young catgirl nodded sleepily as she nuzzled deeper into her big sister's lap. "I guess so," she said, smiling drowsily. "...th...an...kzzzz..."
Jon smiled in spite of the somewhat awkward nature of the conversation, gently scratching behind Tabby's ears. Not too long after, her mother came into the room. "Hey, girls," she said, "is Tabby...?" She smiled warmly as she spotted them. "Aww," she said. "Here, I'll take her. You girls should probably get to bed before too long as well - it is a school day tomorrow."
Jon nodded agreement as her mom came over and gently lifted the sleeping catgirl over one shoulder.
Jon didn't sleep particularly well that night. She wasn't used to sleeping in a nightgown - it kept either constraining her movements or bunching up around her joints - but the only alternatives were sleeping in her clothes or sleeping in the nude; she couldn't even sleep in her underwear since she no longer had any. The former wouldn't have been very comfortable, and the latter would've been awkward with Karyn around - of course she had a full-body fur coat on, and she supposed Karyn might not be bothered since to her way of thinking they were both girls now, but still.
On top of that, it took her a good long while to find a position that was comfortable with the way she was built now. Jon was used to sleeping on his stomach, and tended to let his legs splay out any which way felt the most comfortable, but as she was now, lying on her stomach left six sizable masses of flesh mashed up against her chest and made it difficult to breathe comfortably. And lying on her back had them pulled off to the sides in a way that felt distracting and weird (well, moreso than they already did,) and it was difficult to get her tail in a comfortable position - either it was slipped neatly between her buttocks, which felt vaguely unsettling having a thick, ropey column pressed between her thighs, or it was off to the side and got kinked under one leg or the other.
As a result, she wound up sleeping on her side. This alleviated the main issues with her new body, but it always felt weird having one half of her weighing down on the other half of her like that - especially with her right breasts pressing into her left ones and her left ones pressing into her arm or the mattress. And she never could figure out where to put her right arm, either, and with her curvier, fleshier lower body, her right leg tended to weigh down noticeably on her left one as well. And she never could quite get the hang of lying perpendicular to the mattress without wanting to roll over flat one way or the other. But...well, at least she didn't have her breasts smushed into her ribcage or her tail kinked under one leg.
Jon lay there for a long time, thinking about everything that had happened. It wasn't that this body was painful or anything, however many little weirdnesses or mild annoyances had cropped up over the course of the evening, from the awkwardness of her tail to the way her breasts swung freely when she moved and always stopped moving about a half-second after she did. Even going to the bathroom as a girl hadn't been terrible, although it was definitely weird. And she shuddered to think how long it was going to take her to dry off after her morning shower...
But really, it was the prospect of spending an entire year this way that was intimidating to her. Okay, spending an evening as a six-breasted cat-girl creature had been...interesting, if not really what she'd classify as "fun." But to spend not just a day, but the next three hundred and sixty-four days as this...twelve whole months...months, God! Was she going to have to live through...through getting her period? That was like...twelve or thirteen of them! She shuddered.
But...there was no getting around it, was there? The terms of the wish had been clear - no altering or cancelling the effects of the dice. She was going to live like this for a whole year...
Jon drifted off into a fitful sleep full of unfamiliar sensations and strange dreams she didn't remember.
The blaring of Jon's alarm clock summoned him from an exhausted sleep; he vaguely remembered staying fitfully awake long into the night for some reason or other, and clearly he was now paying the price. He was on his side for some reason and his left arm had clearly gone to sleep at some point during the night, because it was all tingly. It felt, too, like something was pressing down on it, but he couldn't determine what - not the blankets, definitely, something heavier and firmer...? But the incessant beeping distracted him from his bleary attempts to pull his thoughts together. Groaning, he reached over and pawed blindly around, eyes still shut, for the electronic nuisance.
But something wasn't right. He reached out too far in his attempt to get at the nightstand, as if his arms were slightly too short, and found that his sense of balance was off, as if the front of his torso weighed more than it ought to. Add to that that he was already unaccustomed to lying on his side, and to his surprise, he tipped right over and slid off the edge of the bed.
Fortunately, Jon more slumped down onto the floor in a tangle of limbs rather than falling flat onto his chest or face; nonetheless, several things about the experience struck him as odd. For starters, there was the fact that his chest seemed to have a lot more chest to it; unfamiliar lumps were squashed uncomfortably up into his ribcage, making it hard for him to breathe - weirder still was that he could feel them as if they were part of him. Additionally, there was something long and snaky that was still draped over the mattress above, and he could feel that too. And his arm, having flopped down with the rest of him, was lying across...across...
Jon opened his eyes to see his arm lying across the chest of a creature that was definitely a woman, but just as definitely not human. Suddenly, with ice-water clarity, everything came rushing back. She gave a strangled yelp, scrambled awkwardly to her feet, trying to deal with only just now remembering that her feet were digitigrade cat paws, and stared down in shock at herself as she felt her half a dozen breasts each jostle from the sudden movement.
By this point Karyn was already awake, and she casually reached up and shut the alarm clock off as Jon was staring down at herself and hyperventilating. "Well, good morning to you, too," she chuckled, engaging in a full-body stretch as casually as if she'd been born feline. She got to her feet and gently took Jon by the shoulders. "Easy there. You okay?"
Jon sighed, her shoulders sagging. "I...I forgot...I thought maybe it was a dream..."
The calico catgirl chuckled softly and shook her head. "Obviously, it's a lot realer than that." She pulled Jon into a gentle, sisterly hug, which would've been more comforting and less unsettling if it hadn't left Jon with the sensation of Karyn's multiple breasts smushing up against her own through the silky fabric of their pajamas. "Don't worry, Joni-girl," Karyn said. "We'll get you through this. It's only a year, and it's not so bad being a girl, you'll see."
Jon - or...Joni? - wasn't convinced, but it did at least feel reassuring to have her best friend standing by her for this. Anyway, more than anything, she needed coffee before she could really begin to process this.
On which basis, she stumbled downstairs, still in her nightgown, still moving awkwardly on her new paw-feet, with Karyn close behind, to find her ever-reliable mother standing by with a pot of said elixir. "Good morning, girls," her mother smiled. "Karyn, would you like a cup? Breakfast should be ready pretty quick."
Karyn grinned, and Jon noted how different that looked with a mouth full of not-quite-fangs - but, whether it was because she was also a cat-person now or it was just universal, it didn't seem any less casual or friendly. More interesting was the fact that breakfast apparently meant the entire family gathered around for eggs and bacon - before, they'd usually grabbed cereal or toast as they rolled out of bed at their own pace. Maybe it's because we're all half-carnivore now? she wondered.
She took a seat at the table, then frowned and had to readjust to slide her tail through the gap between the back of her chair and the seat. That was going to take some getting used to...as was the fact that her nightgown merely had a slit down the back from the base of her tail, like a hospital gown or something. While the lack of a button-up "fly" for it, as the skirts had, meant that she didn't need to adjust the fabric underneath her to keep it from pulling down uncomfortably, it was more than a little unsettling, in light of her sudden underwear deficit, to have her nether regions only really obscured from the general public by posture and her own tail. She kept trying to remind herself that this was normal for everybody else - Tabby was dressed similarly, although Zoe had, as usual, already dressed and arranged her hair in her preferred state of deliberate, calculated indifference-to-Society, and her mother was also up and dressed - but she couldn't quite convince herself.
Aside from the slightly unusual experience of breakfast being a full-fledged family meal and the change in fare, things went about the same as they always did. After they'd finished up and cleared the dishes, Jon went back up to her room, with Karyn just behind. "Cripes," Jon muttered as she pulled open her dresser drawer, "I don't know how the hell I'm supposed to get a shower in and dry off in time to catch the bus, not with all this fur."
Karyn laughed. "I was wondering about that myself," she said. "Did a little poking around online and I don't think we really are expected to. Cat-people don't do the whole daily-bath thing because we don't sweat all over like humans do. It's like a weekly thing at most. Though it's probably gonna take a bit for you to brush your fur out, and your hair's a mess. C'mon, we'll get that taken care of." She paused for a moment, thinking. "Hey, can I borrow a change of clothes?"
Jon didn't hear at first, slightly lost in thought over Karyn's casual identification as a catgirl and reference to humans as a different group. That didn't take her long, she thought. Then, realizing that Karyn had spoken to her, she started out of it. "Huh? What?"
Karyn repeated her request. Jon stared at her for a moment. "What, like, mine? Why?" She frowned, confused.
Karyn shrugged. "Well, because mine are dirty, obviously." She looked at Jon with a puzzled expression for a moment, then chuckled. "Right. Guys don't really borrow each others' clothes much, do they? I kinda forget that."
Jon nodded. "It just sounded a little weird. But...sure, I guess so." She felt a little nervous as she began to realize just how many random little things made up the cultural divide that she'd been thrust over onto the other side of. This is going to take a lot of getting used to, she thought to herself. Wait, no, she didn't want to get used to this, did she? But...well, was that better or worse than spending a whole year not knowing how to fit in this way? Ohhh, it was too early for this...
In any case, she was soon distracted from this train of thought as Karyn, having picked out a T-shirt and skirt that looked like they would fit her, and another set for her distracted best friend, led Jon into the bathroom, where - after some protest - she persuaded her friend to undress and let her brush out her hair and fur.
Jon felt more than a little embarassed to be standing naked in front of her best friend, let alone being methodically groomed by her. But as Karyn pointed out, her fur was, while not greasy and stringy the way human hair got with too long between showers, more than a little messy from a night of sleeping with too much rolling around trying to get comfortable, and her longer, denser hair was in similar disarray. Part of her wanted to say the hell with it and not bother, but then, that was probably more likely to draw attention to her if anything, and she was hoping to spend as long as possible staying under the radar while she was like this. Besides, something about the gentle, rhythmic stroking and scratching of the brush Karyn was using felt...really nice...
"Heh," Karyn said. "You're purring."
Jon realized with a start that she was. Sputtering slightly, she tried to come up with some excuse, but couldn't - and it was pointless anyway, because Karyn knew full well. Biting her lip, she simply stood and let it happen, feeling silly, but not enough to change the fact that this really did feel good.
After Karyn had finished up with Jon (to her great relief, leaving her more intimate areas alone, aside from tidying up the tuft of downy white fur that tended to frizz out of her topmost cleavage,) she promptly stripped and gave herself a similar going-over. Jon stood there, feeling even more awkward at seeing Karyn naked, fur notwithstanding, but her friend gave no indication of feeling uncomfortable over it. She really does just think of me as one of the girls now, she thought.
The idea was kind of upsetting, but...well, she supposed it made sense from Karyn's perspective. They'd been friends for ages, but it wasn't like there hadn't been times where it was awkward for one or the other of them to have their best friend be of the opposite sex. Karyn probably figured that this would mean they could more fully relate to each other...
"That oughta do it," Karyn said, looking herself over approvingly, then looked over at Jon, who was still standing there unclothed. "Hey, are you just going to stand around gawking?" she teased, leaving Jon with the sensation of blushing - yes, ears this broad and thin could burn just as hot - but no outwardly visible effects. "Come on, get dressed and I'll get your hair. If we don't hustle, we're going to burn through just as much time as if you had taken a shower."
Happy to not be awkwardly naked with her best friend anymore, Jon slipped on the shirt and skirt that Karyn had picked out - dark blue verging on navy for the skirt and white for the shirt, which made her feel a little ridiculous, like she was just a cravat away from wearing an anime sailor uniform - but that, she had to concede, was just her overreacting. In reality it was as prosaic as anything she'd seen her mother or sisters wearing, and she had the feeling Karyn had picked it more for the way the colors coordinated with her soft gray fur. That said, she was a little irked at having to fiddle around with the buttons, but it seemed like most of her shirts were button-up now, probably because sliding any kind of blended fiber down over a fur coat was just begging for major static buildup.
In any case, she finished not long before Karyn did - she seemed to be having a little more trouble with the top buttons, as apparently she wasn't quite as close a fit for Jon's new form as she'd thought. Nevertheless, she persisted, and managed to close it up snugly to about where her usual neckline was. She looked over at Jon. "Seriously?" she said. "You don't need to do up every single button, y'know. You look like Nadine."
Jon felt herself beginning to flush underneath her fur again. "I...look, I'm not trying to get people to look at...at these!" she said defensively, gesturing down at her bosom.
Karyn laughed. "Joni-girl, you've been a teenage boy. You know perfectly well there's nothing you can do to change the fact that they'll be looking." She gave her friend a knowing glance, and Jon's invisible blush intensified. "Hell, the more you try to hide 'em the more you're going to draw attention to yourself. You seriously need to relax if you're gonna get through the next year. Until then, you're a pretty dang good-looking catgirl, and you might as well take pride in it."
She chuckled. "Anyway, you're going to trap more heat than you probably think, especially with all that fur. You're going to want some ventilation." Holding out her index finger, she puzzled over it for a moment before a claw poked out from the tip, then grinned. "Here, hold still for a minute."
Jon wasn't sure how to react as Karyn approached her, but it didn't matter. Quick as lightning - or, er, with catlike reflexes - her friend grabbed hold of the collar of her shirt and deftly sliced off a couple of buttons. "The hell!?" she sputtered, as Karyn moved without pause to grab the hairbrush and began to work at her hair, handily preventing her from going to get a different shirt.
"Sorry," Karyn said. "It's for your own good. Now hold still, you've seriously got dense hair here."
Jon stood there while Karyn brushed her hair into a less tangled, more presentable state, silently pondering her de-buttoned neckline. It was weird to see the tops of her top breasts peeking out of the collar; she was probably being overly self-conscious about this, as it didn't seem all that low, but merely having cleavage was still new to her, let alone displaying it. And that was on top of the general weirdness of having her braless, bare-furred breasts hanging free inside her shirt, supported only by whatever natural structure had developed there yesterday... As Karyn was finishing up, there was a knock on the bathroom door. "Girls, hurry up!" Jon's mother called. "The bus will be here any minute!"
With no time to waste, Karyn shook her hair out into a passable state and dashed out of the bathroom, dragging Jon with her before she'd had a chance to go back for a different shirt.
Arriving at school that morning was quite an experience for both Jon and Karyn. It was like stepping into some weird cartoon universe where all of the forms of normal, real-world life were present, but one specific thing was completely different and nobody treated this as unusual.
The faculty was a fairly even split between catgirls and humans (male or female.) Jon was a little surprised by this initially, but she realized that a fair number of the male teachers had children - so, like her father, they couldn't be catgirls in this reality. And the female human teachers must either have sons who'd fathered children of their own (which would explain why a lot of them were on the older side) or, possibly, were the sisters of men who were fathers. (Jon wondered offhand if the stone would go so far as to, say, invent second marriages in order to permit catgirls to have human half-brothers, or something like that. That was a mildly disturbing thought, but this whole situation was profoundly weird to begin with.)
Even knowing this, it was still surprising. Jon had no idea, for example, that her gym teacher (or, well, her former gym teacher - she supposed she'd be in the girls' P.E. class now) had a kid - even now he didn't wear a wedding ring, but she supposed that not being married didn't preclude him from having fathered a child somewhere along the line in his fifty-some years. On the other hand, she knew for certain that Mr. Thomas the English teacher was a single father to two girls, yet she saw a middle-aged cat-woman in his trademark awful sweater-vest stepping into the teachers' lounge as she went by - were they adopted, then? She had no idea.
She had been somewhat dreading the prospect of going to school as a six-breasted catgirl, and all the attention she knew that would draw to her, particularly after Karyn forced the issue on her neckline, but it turned out Karyn had been right - nobody seemed to take any more notice of her than usual. Considering that the vast majority of the student body were also six-breasted catgirls, she guessed that made sense.
Of course, "the vast majority" was not the same as "everyone." It was amusing, as she settled into her spot in homeroom, to note who had changed and who hadn't. Biff Meadows and Steve Farber were both catgirls - so as much as they may have had active sex lives as guys, they'd apparently been careful enough to avoid getting anyone pregnant. And now their caution in one life had ended up with them losing their manhood, if they only knew it. In fact, Jon realized as she watched them that "Stacy" - as one of the other girls called her - was visibly pregnant herself! (Evidently in this life, her proclivities had remained, but she'd been less cautious or had worse luck.) And, of all people, schlubby, overweight, socially awkward Leonard Drullers had apparently managed to father a child, because he was there at his desk, looking the same as ever. Jon wondered who the lucky lady was.
And again, the weirdest thing about this was that absolutely nobody else thought anything was out of the ordinary. As far as the other students knew, Biff had always been "Becca" and Stacy being a girl was even less of a surprise than Stacy being - what, five months? Six? - pregnant. And she supposed that nobody knew that Leonard had knocked up some girl with the same logical certainty that she did, although given how many fewer males there were in the school now, it was only a matter of process-of-elimination.
Aside from the general weirdness, class went fairly normally for most of the morning. "Stacy" had to excuse herself to go to the bathroom several times, Jon noted, but she was pretty sure that was normal for her condition. Or at least she hoped that was the case - had this been Steve, it probably would've meant he was going for a smoke, but (fortunately for the baby, Jon realized) she didn't come back smelling of it.
Actually, it was interesting to Jon to think that she would notice the smell of it from most of the way across the classroom. Her sense of smell was definitely stronger now, and she could pick out individual people in the classroom - moreover, she could recognize them, at least the people she knew. She wondered briefly how that could be when she'd only just gained this ability yesterday, but if history had changed so that she'd always been this way, perhaps the brain in this new body had that information stored away already - like how she instinctively recognized her mother and sisters when she looked at them, even though they looked completely different from how she actually remembered them.
She wondered how the magic differentiated between conscious knowledge of the new reality (which she didn't have) and this kind of thing (which, evidently, she did.) But, well, it was magic, after all. She wondered briefly what other miscellaneous brain-pattern stuff might have found its way into her head - a slightly unsettling thought - but there was no way to tell. Short of finding out through experience, of course.
The morning drew on, and finally it was time for lunch. Jon and Karyn meandered into the cafeteria, where they discovered that serving a student body made up almost entirely of cat-girls had had a noticeable effect on the menu - namely, the meat appeared to be something a good deal closer to actual meat, and there was a lot more of it to boot. It came in a variety of dishes, of course, many of which were still kind of questionable, but the actual dead-animal bits were noticeably higher-quality. And while there was still fruit and salad stuff available, they didn't seem to be making the same efforts to get anyone to eat it anymore.
Jon followed Karyn through the line, slightly dazed by the sheer number of other catgirls present in the room. It hadn't really struck home until just now what it meant to have everyone - or, well, nearly everyone - be, in some substantial way, the same. But on the other hand, they were all different, too...different colorations and fur patterns, different choices in clothing, different expressions on different faces (and Jon really had no idea how she could tell one cat-person muzzle-face from another - probably more of that brain-pattern stuff.)
As they were sitting down, a young catgirl approached them. She looked to be about Mikey's - er, Tabby's - age (Lakeside was a bit too small to have a separate high school, so this wasn't out of the ordinary,) and had white calico fur with a mane of silky white hair. Jon wondered what she wanted, but she turned to Karyn instead.
"Hey, sis!" she said.
Karyn gawked at her for a moment, then realized she was gawking. "Uh, h-hi," she said.
The young girl looked at her curiously, then smiled. "D'ja have fun at the Madisons' last night?"
Karyn forced a smile, then showed a genuine one as she thought back over the events of the previous evening. "Y-yeah," she said. "Yeah, we had a great time."
The newcomer grinned. "Hee. You 'n Joni. You gotta bring her over sometime, then me 'n Tabby can have a sleepover too." She giggled. "Anyway, Mom said to ask you if you can stop by the library and pick up a book for her on the way home. She said she told 'em to hold it for you."
"Uh, sure," Karyn said. "Thanks."
The young catgirl looked a little concerned and appeared to be about to say something, but before she could, Tabby pushed her way through the crowd and grabbed her by the shoulder. "C'mooon, Karina!" she said. "We gotta hurry or they're gonna be all outta the tuna steaks!"
Karyn watched them go in stunned silence, then turned to Jon. "Who the heck was that?"
Jon shrugged, almost as stunned as Karyn was. "Um, your sister, apparently."
For once in the last twenty-four hours, it was Karyn who was clearly thrown off by the course of events. "Jon, I don't have a sister!"
Jon nodded. "Well yeah, I know that. But apparently now you do." She shook her head in amazement - whatever the magic could or couldn't do, it apparently had no trouble making new people just happen. "I guess in this reality your parents didn't stop at one..."
