Jon didn't get to sleep until late that night. She was extremely grateful that her grandfather knew what she was talking about when she brought up the stone, but she was less than perfectly pleased with how things had gone after that. Six months she was supposed to stay like this? And another six before she could go looking for the stone, if the spell her grandpa had mentioned failed to give her an acceptable form? She could hardly bear to think about it.
Shifting her coils around as she tried to get comfortable for the night, Jon thought about what would happen then. She trusted her grandpa to keep his word and give her the information he had on its whereabouts, but from what he had said, it sounded like it wasn't exactly a treasure map that lead straight to the stone's resting place. She'd have to spend time and money looking for the tomb he hadn't been able to find, and even then...what if it wasn't there? If after all that work, the stone turned to have vanished from reality after all? Or...
Jon's eyes went wide. Or what if someone beat her to it? She'd already seen what the stone could do when used carelessly; who knew what kind of catastrophes it could bring about in the hands of someone who was actually unscrupulous or malicious? She'd have to find it, just to make sure it didn't wind up in the wrong hands! But she knew her grandfather, and if he said he wasn't going to give her the information for a year, he most definitely wasn't.
Which meant that in the meantime, she was going to have to put up with life as a naga-girl. True, it hadn't been misery and disaster so far, but half a year like this? She at least didn't have to worry about fitting into the school's social hierarchy like Sarah, but there was still the whole reproductive-cycle thing; whether it was blood or eggs that would be coming out every four weeks, she was not looking forward to it. And there was the nagging question at the back of her mind: what if I actually start acting like a girl?
She kept dismissing the thought as implausible, but it kept coming back. She'd even looked it up, but that wasn't much help; she'd found that there was no known pattern for alteration of sexual preference in response to gender changes, and there was no evidence for a direct, physical link between gender changes and adoption of typically feminine or masculine behavioral patterns, but that didn't mean that any of that wouldn't happen to her. What if she did start liking guys? What if acting more feminine was just a side-effect of getting used to life as a guy-turned-girl? What if, by the time she tracked down the stone, she no longer wanted to change back?
She didn't know, and she didn't think it would help if she did. Jon sighed and rolled over, trying to fall asleep.
