He couldn't believe it.
She couldn't believe it.
In the space of one day, Jon had gone from just barely believing in the reality of an interesting magical trinket he'd got a few weeks ago to being transformed overnight into this freakish monster-girl thing. Even though she knew in the back of her mind that she was just a wish away from returning to normal, she couldn't help being horrified by this turn of events.
Perhaps the worst thing, in a way, was that it didn't feel bad. Being something so bizarre and so at odds with the normal, human male Jon should feel horrible, or painful, or something; for her to be feeling as comfortable as she was was like being betrayed by her own body. Oh, sure, there was the knot-in-the-stomach feeling anybody gets when they're upset, and the great heaving sobs that now passed through her gills instead of her abdomen. But as traumatized as she was mentally, she was the picture of freakish health. The only real complaint registered by Jon's body was that she was cramped; the family pool wasn't a particularily large one, and on the short axis, some of her tentacles were touching the sides only partway down their length.
Only they weren't tentacles, were they? Jon remembered a few tidbits from biology class about squid, one of which was that tentacles, properly speaking, had suction cups only at the ends. And she did have a couple of those, one each on the left and right sides of her lower body. The other things were called arms, with suckers all the way down; there were eight of those arranged radially around her waist. Curious, she stretched everything out straight. From head to tentacle-tip, she was about twelve feet long. There were real squid that could get up to three or four times that size, but by human standards she was enormous; no wonder she felt cramped.
It was bizarre to feel as curious about her new body as she was, considering how horrified she had been mere minutes before, but she was a bit calmer now. After all, she did have the stone, so it would be easy to get back to normal. And she had to admit that, in the abstract, it was kind of fascinating to see this strange creature up close and personal; she just wasn't too hot on the "personal" part.
The next thing Jon noticed as she observed herself was the mantle, an organ that was basically a giant flap of skin and muscle. Relaxed, it hung like a skirt around her waist, down to around where her knees used to be, covering the top part of her tentacles and, if she remembered correctly, an assortment of other organs, including her gills and siphon.
Experimenting, she found she could expand and contract it and move it around. She considered lifting her "skirt" and taking a peek at what she had underneath, but the "girl" thing was harder for her to want to find out about than the "squid" thing. And anyway, as unsettling as it would be to come face-to-face with her new vagina, it would even creepier if she found that she had whatever downstairs equipment real cephalopods did. She'd just rather not know.
She lowered her mantle, which was covered in the same pale blue skin as the rest of her squid half, mottled with white highlights...wait, hadn't it been black this morning? Jon stared down at her lower body. Oh, the highlights were from the light on the pool surface. But that didn't explain why she thought the skin was black this m...wait, the highlights weren't moving in quite the same way as the light on the waves...
Oh, that was it! Cephalopods could change their skin color, couldn't they? She remembered the video they'd seen in class of a cuttlefish changing color to match its surroundings; she must have been doing that subconsciously, matching the play of the light on the bottom of the pool. She experimented and found that she could change the color intentionally, but she had to concentrate to keep it that way.
She gave it up and let her skin go back to chameleon mode. As objectively interesting as this was, she very much wanted to get back to normal. But how was she supposed to get to the stone? Were her tentacles and arms strong enough to move on? Or if not, could she drag herself along with them? That didn't sound safe or comfortable, but it would only be until she got to the stone. Or maybe she could ask her mom to bring it, but then she'd have to figure out how to make the wish without her hearing it. Hmm...how to do this?
