The drive to the mall was mostly uneventful, as the only things to do in the car were watching the road go by and keeping her extra limbs out of trouble. It wasn't quite like they had minds of their own or anything, but Jon found that when she was bored, she would absent-mindedly start snaking them around the environment, much like the way she would drum her fingers in such situations. And being a bit of a fiddler, Jon tended to start manipulating things with her tentacles without really thinking about it.
But with a little focus, she was able to keep her lower body from being too much inconvenience, and before too long they had arrived at the mall. Knowing what awaited her, Jon was none too eager to go inside, but by the time her mother had talked to a security guard and secured a handicapped cart, she had managed to psyche herself up for the ordeal.
The seat was still impacted from the last hambeast to assume that being a morbidly obese couch-potato counted as a disability, but it wasn't really an issue for Jon; her lower body was now completely lacking in skeletal structure, so she fit as comfortably in the butt-cheek craters as she would have in any other seat shape. Once she had gotten seated and piled her various appendages in the shopping basket, her mother led the way towards their first destination.
Some time later, they were seated in the food court, having lunch. Jon was, at the same time, both relieved and unnerved; it had turned out that she found shopping for clothes as a girl as boring as she found shopping for clothes as a boy. On the one hand, this seemed like a good thing;it meant that she didn't have to deal with any awkwardness at seeing herself in her underwear, and the fact that she wasn't drawn to particularily feminine clothes was an encouraging sign.
But on the other hand, whether they were especially frilly or not, the bras and shirts that they had bought for her were girl's clothes, and she was accepting them without so much as a protest. And exactly why wasn't she reacting to the sight of a busty, topless teenage girl? That could plausibly mean that her attractions were changing...
"New to yourself, aren't ya?" a voice interrupted. "When'd you change?"
Jon looked up, startled. "Uh...uh, l-last night?"
The interruptor, a woman in her thirties, nodded. "You never forget that expression, once it's been on your face." She was in a wheelchair; her lower half was wrapped in a blanket, which she pulled away to reveal eight tentacles in place of human legs, similar to Jon's, but shorter and thicker.
"But," the interlocutor continued, "there's more to it, isn't there? It isn't just squid-bits you've gained, is it?"
"H-how could you tell?" Jon asked. The octopus-woman chuckled. "You have the same kind of expression my brother did when he became a harpy," she replied. "I was lucky to escape with my sex; David, not so much."
