Forward. Backward. Left. Right.
Forward. Backward. Left. Right.
It was just that Jon wasn't really comfortable on four legs yet, so instead of pacing like he normally did when agitated, she lost herself in a rhythmic swaying in different directions, feeling the differences with the way her weight shifted between four points instead of two, and getting the feel of her altered leg muscles. Her wings nervously flexed in little non-flaps, still folded closely against her body but not held there as tightly as they could be if she concentrated on them, and her tail lashed from side to side.
"Overall, it could've been much worse," the doctor was saying to her mother. "A few bruises and cuts, but nothing that shouldn't clear up within the week, and nothing broken or seriously hurt. Considering how panicked you said she was, she pulled herself together pretty admirably."
That was true, she supposed. Mostly it was because, once the initial panic had subsided a bit, she'd realized that all she needed to do was get the stone and wish herself back to normal. Unfortunately, that hadn't been until after her mother had bundled her out the door and into the van to drive her to the hospital. She'd just have to do it when she got home, she supposed - and until then, she'd just have to put up with the strange and unsettling new sensations of being...this.
The quadruped thing wasn't even the weirdest of it. Even the wings and tail weren't. That honor went to the flood of new information her brain was processing from an enhanced sense of smell. She'd always thought of dogs as being the ones with the especially keen noses, but she supposed that any predator probably benefited from being able to pick up faint scents and make fine distinctions. And I thought hospitals smelled weird before, she thought to herself. There had always been that unsettling combination of chemical over-sanitation and, coming faintly from over in the in-patient wing, the fetid sick-person smell that the chemicals were there to suppress, but now, although she couldn't name ninety percent of them, she could pick out a lot of the individual substances and discern individual patients and staff. It was like the bit in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy steps out from black-and-white into color, or at least it would've been if she'd stepped out from black-and-white into a sort of beige-and-teal world. Presumably someplace other than a hospital would make the comparison more apt, but she hadn't exactly been paying attention at home or on the drive over.
There was also the small matter of her having become a girl, but as much as the concept unnerved her, the actual sensations were rather mundane compared to everything else. There was the extra hair, and she could feel that her face had changed if she really focused on it. There was, of course, the strangeness of having nothing between her legs, except that she actually did have something between her legs and it was just completely different from what she was accustomed to, but even that more or less slipped into the background when she wasn't actively thinking about it. The only seriously distracting aspect of it was her discovery that she actually did have a pair of smallish human-like breasts on her chest, they were just covered in and buried in a ruff of soft fur there. They weren't particularly large, and with the fur and the quadruped posture they were only really visible in profile when she sat with her back end planted on the floor and her forelegs holding her front end up, but they were definitely there, and she could feel them. (She didn't know and couldn't really feel whether she also had nipples down her belly like a cat.)
"So...I mean, what exactly is she?" Jon's mother asked.
The doctor shrugged. "She's a sphinx," he said. He didn't actually say "Isn't it obvious?" but Jon got the impression that it was implied. She didn't think it was an unreasonable question - was she just someone who had chanced into having the body of a lioness, the wings of a bird, and the head of a woman, or was she blanketly a sphinx? Did that mean she was going to move to Greece and starting posing riddles to passersby, or was it just a convenient name to put to it? - but maybe a guy who'd lived in this reality for years and worked with these kinds of things figured everybody knew everything about it.
"Well, I guess," her mom said. "But...I mean, does that happen? I'd never heard of this before. Usually it's just simple half-animal stuff, isn't it?"
He shrugged again. "Usually, yes. This is a fairly uncommon change, but it's not at all unheard of. I know of three cases in the last ten years just in this state. There's certainly a wider variety of known changes than what most people ever see, but it's a pretty straightforward diagnosis in her case."
They continued discussing Jon's transformation, while Jon turned her attention to a little box of informative pamphlets and whatnot that she assumed the doctor had pulled out as soon as he'd been notified of her change, since they all appeared to be more or less relevant to her situation. As usual with this kind of thing, the materials varied by intended age group - the adult-oriented stuff was all pretty straightforward-looking pamphlets with the kind of noncommittally reassuring, positive graphic design you see on ads for life insurance or prescription medication, while down at the other end there was a children's book entitled Sandy Has Four Legs. It was done in that kind of nonspecifically '70s-'80s scrawly-gang-of-multicultural-city-kids sort of style, and looked like the kind of educational children's book where any child who actually read it would be more likely to come away confused and unnerved than informed or reassured. (Jon wasn't actually sure if there was any other kind of educational children's book, to be honest.) Cripes, she thought. I do have four legs, don't I?
Tentatively, she lifted her left forepaw and brought it up for examination. It was still weird to consider that these were hers - that they were what had taken the place of her hands. There was not a shred of anthropomorphization about them - they were a lion's paws, pure and simple. There were five toes on her forepaws, but what had been her thumb was no longer opposable. She could rotate the wrist and shoulder and move the leg side-to-side somewhat further than any real cat she'd known, so there was that at least, but there was still no mistaking that she was built for a quadrupedal stance. Ye gods. Well, that would be problematic if she were stuck with it, but fortunately all she had to do was get home, to the stone...
"You're sure?" her mother said. Jon blinked and tried to rewind her memory to catch the context, but she hadn't been paying attention. The doctor nodded. "I ran it while the nurse was cleaning her cuts. I'm afraid it's permanent. The good news is that society is a lot more willing to make accomodations today than it was even twenty years ago; she'll have some adjusting to do, but there's no reason she shouldn't be able to lead a fulfilling life in her new form. That said, if she does have any trouble, we have several good occupational therapists and counselors on staff here..."
Jon felt a little knot in the pit of her stomach at that, but the reminder came back to reassure her: just get home, and this will all be over. She sighed. Her mother turned to her. "Honey, I'm sorry," she said, "but...you heard the doctor. I promise we'll all do our best to help you, Jon, and we love you no matter what..."
Despite knowing perfectly well that by the end of the day she'd have changed things so that none of this would ever have happened, Jon honestly did feel a little choked-up by this display. "I...th-thanks, Mom," she said. "I'm okay, though."
Her mother smiled. "Brave girl," she said. "I guess we'd better get going, then."
It took longer than Jon would've liked for them to actually get out the door, and it wasn't without an armful of pamphlets and a medical transcript for the school nurse, but eventually they were out, and Jon was sauntering across the parking lot with her mother. The feeling of asphalt under the thick pads of her paws was weird, and it was still bizarre to be walking on four legs at all, but it was okay - soon enough they'd be home. She hopped into the van and laid across the middle bench, and they drove off.
It took a few minutes before Jon realized that they weren't driving straight back home. "I...uh, Mom?" she asked. "Where are we going?"
"To school, honey," her mother said. "I need to drop off that transcript with the staff, and I think you ought to catch as much of the school day as you can, since you weren't seriously hurt."
The knot in her stomach came back with a vengeance. "I...I, uh...I'd really rather not..." she said. The thought of walking in there as this, and with no clothes on to boot (even if she was covered in fur...)
Her mother gave her a warm, sympathetic smile. "I understand, Jon," she said. "But you're going to have to do this sooner or later - sooner, in fact. You can't put it off forever, so it's really for the best if you do it now and get it over with."
