"Well, dear," Mrs. Madison said, "I think that about covers it, for now. Ready to go home?"
Jon nodded. "Very. If I see one more scrap of clothing, I'm going to scream."
Her mother laughed. "Oh, come on. It wasn't that bad."
Jon kind of thought it was, but didn't argue further. She turned the electric cart around, and they made their way toward the parking lot.
Meanwhile, at school, Zoe had just finished her lunch and was making her way into the bathroom. She took care of business and was washing her hands when she suddenly began to feel strange. She felt slightly dizzy, and her knees were growing weak.
She had just begun to sit down when she lost her balance altogether, tumbling backwards onto her rump and knocking her elbows rather painfully as she stopped herself from falling all the way back and cracking her head. What was happening?
This was answered shortly, when she felt a tingling sensation around her waist. She pulled down the waistband of her skirt for a look; the skin around her waist had become tough and black. She was changing! But into what?
She was nervous; she really hoped that if she was going to change, her new body would be something that fit her; there were so many generic cat-girls and centaurs out there, and she'd hate to wind up as something so ordinary.
But as nervous as she was, Zoe remembered what they'd been taught in class about good procedures for handling a transformation. She was already away from the general public, so the next step was to remove all of her clothing; many kinds of change, including a couple of the most common, could damage or destroy clothes being worn during the process.
With her clothes off, Zoe could see that the black was spreading. Moreover, it seemed that her lower body was beginning to split off into sections, the new section growing out of her lower abdomen. Suddenly there was a spreading sensation in her feet. She watched, shocked, as they split into four lengthening segments, her pinky toes receding into the next one over.
Her lower body was all black now, the new segment growing still larger, hanging off her lower abdomen, which had developed into its own separate segment, the whole thing seeming kind of familiar to Zoe. She finally understood as she looked down at her legs, which had begun to split into eight separate legs, each with one "toe" attached, although that was hardly the word for the long, pointed, chitinous things her toes had become.
Zoe watched the change finish as spinneretes formed on the tip of the giant abdomen of her new spider half. With some difficulty, she rolled over onto her stomach, then stood up on her new legs. She walked over and regarded herself in the mirror. A girl in pale makeup with shorter black hair and a lower body the size of a small desk...well, this was weird, but in terms of fitting her, it could've been a lot worse.
She smiled. Yeah, this'd work.
