"Damn," Karyn sighed. This wasn't good. Not only was Jon now in Super Cat-Girl Jennifer form, and thus influenced by her feline instincts, she was also completely inexperienced at controlling them. Who knew what sort of trouble a hyper-athletic girl who was acting as an unusually intelligent cat might get into? Karyn knew she had to follow Jennifer and keep her out of trouble. Fortunately, one of her powers would make it easier. Opening the window, she crawled through it and stood on the porch roof. Holding her arm outstretched, she manifested her umbrella. She'd been in a very anime/manga mood when she did her character designs, so it was a large Japanese bamboo umbrella. Holding it aloft, she leapt off the roof. Before she even began to fall, a wind swelled up around her and swept her off, Mary Poppins-style, in the direction Jennifer had gone.
-The catgirl one wasn't even a serious design,- she mused as she flew. She'd based that one on the main character from a manga, Neko De Gomen. Yayoi, the protagonist, is combined with her cat in a teleporter experiment gone awry, and as a result turns into a catgirl when exposed to things like mice or catnip that arouse the interest of her cat side. Karyn had done that design mostly as a joke to herself, adding only the ability to transform at will. She hadn't intended to use it, and she certainly hadn't expected Jon to pick it. -Really,- she thought. -He's too hasty with his wishing. That could be trouble; I'll have to talk to him about it.-
Just then, she spotted Jennifer. She was curled up on the ground next to a sushi stand in the city park, not too far from the house. Karyn floated down and landed next to the stand, folding up her umbrella. Jennifer was napping, alright, purring contentedly in her sleep. "That your friend?" the owner of the stand asked. Karyn nodded. "She ate $20 worth of fish," the owner said. "Just bounded up and ate it, then curled up and went right to sleep without paying."
Karyn payed for the sushi. "Your friend," the owner asked, "is she a cosplayer or somethin'? I swear, she came up to the stand and it looked like the ears and tail were moving on their own. Damnedest thing I've ever seen; it woulda been creepy if it hadn't looked so natural."
Karyn laughed. "Cosplayer?" she said. "Yeah, you might say that." The owner nodded and went about his business, and Karyn dragged Jennifer over to a park bench and tried to wake her up. Jennifer stretched, yawned, and opened her eyes.
"Karyn?" she asked. "I had the weirdest-" She stopped short as she heard her smooth, high-pitched girl's voice.
"Yeah," Karyn said. "As you can tell, it wasn't a dream. You left me with a $20 sushi bill, but you can pay me back later. First, let's get you home. And don't change back until we get there, unless you want a large number of people to know about it."
Jennifer didn't relish the thought of spending the whole walk home as a girl, but she liked the idea of everyone knowing that Jon posessed the ability to turn into a girl with cat-ears, tail, claws, and fangs even less, so she shrugged and followed Karyn.
"The big problem here," Karyn said as they walked, "is that you're stuck with the problem of changing when you encounter cat-provoking stimuli. And if you can smell fish down the block, that means that you're so sensitive to cat stimuli that you'll probably be changing quite often. That's going to be quite a problem at first, as you've just demonstrated a total inability to restrain your cat side. That'll improve with time and experience, but I think we're going to have a lot of mishaps like this one before all is said and done. I'll help you as best as I can, but you're going to have to learn to restrain your cat side by yourself. Meantime, we need to think about possible wishes to address the problem. And I mean -think-; we've already seen what hasty wishing can do. She gestured at Jennifer's catgirl body. "So we need to consider every possible ramification and side-effect before making a wish."
