After lunch, Jon had a study period, and with nothing better to do and no significant coursework to be done this early into the term, she decided to go to the library. She went, padding softly through the hallways, thinking about everything she'd heard at lunch.
It was weird, she thought, for it to get to her as much as it did. After all, by suppertime it would all be completely irrelevant and only a weird, weird memory. But there was just something about it that kept gnawing at her - it didn't exactly irritate her, she wasn't angry, it was more of a sense that this just couldn't be right. All this junk that they thought was necessary - how on Earth could a species survive if it couldn't get by without...without toothbrush holders, for God's sake? It was a little like watching commercials and seeing a new kind of soft drink promoted as the way to world peace, personal fulfillment, harmony with Nature, and probably true spiritual enlightenment thrown into the bargain. If sphinxes really needed all that stuff, how come they hadn't died out millennia ago?
Of course, she reflected, it was making a lot of assumptions to think that they were even around millennia ago. The stone had of course changed reality so that everybody thought the change virus was normal, but that didn't mean it had always been around - shouldn't things look even more different than they already did, if sphinxes and catgirls and fox-people and who knows what else had been running around for all of history? On the other hand, she didn't really know how the nitty-gritty of the stone's manipulations of reality worked. On the other other hand, now that she thought of it, some of the things her mom had said seemed to imply that it might be a relatively recent development...
Anyway, there was also the thought that humans didn't strictly need a lot of things either, yet they'd been using and relying on more than what Nature gave them for aeons. You've seen feral animals before, she reminded herself. Parasites, untreated injuries, mange - you know that state-of-nature stuff isn't what it's cracked up to be. All the same, there was just something troubling about the idea of a sentient creature that supposedly needed so many extraneous doodads to live a "normal" life, even if she hadn't currently been one of the creatures in question. Shouldn't the stone be able to conjure up new species without so many apparent shortcomings? Granted, she'd never specified any such criteria, but still...it just seemed like shoddy workmanship, that was all.
Jon entered the school library and made her way over to the computers. Like the bathroom, some simple accomodations had been made for anybody who might have trouble sitting in a chair at a desk; one of the computers was sitting on the floor next to the counter that held the others, with an adjustable-height monitor. Shrugging, she laid down at the computer, settling in with her hind legs pulled up against her sides and her forelegs out in front of her, her tail twitching idly, then set about trying to figure out how to work the computer.
It was slow going, but she managed. The main problem was that the toes of her forepaws were too large and stubby to work a normal-sized keyboard properly. It took her a little bit to figure out that if she extended her claws, that gave her a much finer point of contact to work with. Still, they were too far apart for her to be able to do home-row typing - she'd need some kind of special oversized keyboard for that, but for the moment she just settled for hunt-and-peck. The mouse was easier, at least; she could rest her paw on top of it and drag it around without much trouble, although she had to hold her paw at a funny angle to be able to move and click the left button at the same time. For the first time she found herself wishing the school still had those old iMacs with the ridiculous hockey-puck mice that they'd had until about seven years ago.
Once she'd gotten that worked out, she spent the period browsing around, looking at different stuff related to the change virus and all these apparent adaptations people had made. It was, as she suspected, a recent development - it had started to crop up here and there in the US in the early 1920s, although quarantines had kept it from becoming widespread until the Great Depression left millions of people out of work and migrant. The going theory in this altered reality was that it was some kind of mutant offshoot from the influenza epidemic of 1918, although this was disputed due to its complete lack of flu-like symptoms; there were apparently other people who thought that it was something older that had made a reappearance, and that isolated cases in ancient times were responsible for tales of different monsters and cryptids throughout history, and that it was the increasing connectedness of the modern world that allowed it to develop into an ubiquitous global phenomenon. In any case, it was widespread beyond the point of containment by the waning years of World War II, and there had been nothing more for society to do but adapt to it.
Moving on to the subject of adaptation (which she was more interested in anyway,) she found that it wasn't as uncontroversial as Zoe and Sarah had made it sound. Nobody at this point thought that the changed didn't belong in society (things had been too far gone for that point of view since the early '50s,) but on the part of the changed themselves, there was dispute over the extent to which it was reasonable to expect them to hold to human social standards. Particularly in the late '60s-early '70s, a growing number of transformees felt that they were being pressured to go to too much trouble to seem human. Some of them just felt over-taxed by trying to keep up with the demands, while some of them, in the spirit of the time, felt it was just more natural to not try and fit in with the Man's demands. In any case, there were a not-insignificant percentage of the radically transformed who felt this way on a number of points.
Fur, for example. Plenty of people with virus-bestowed fur coats kept them rinsed and shampooed and brushed on a regular basis, just as if it were a normal human head of hair. (Of course Sarah was one of them, Jon reflected. As much as she had avoided becoming a cliquey, snooty jerk in this reality, it was evident from her beautiful, carefully-groomed coat that she was as meticulous about her appearance as the old Sarah. In a way, that was kind of comforting; it was a clear indicator that she really was Sarah, and not just some completely different person with the same name.) But there was no denying that, as Sarah said, it took a lot more time to care for a full-body coat.
On the other hand, some of the changed refused to go to all the bother every single day; they pointed out that nobody expected people to wash their cat or dog daily, and since most animal-changed, like most animals, didn't sweat all that much under their fur (Jon wondered idly whether Sarah sat around panting when she got hot,) they shouldn't be held to the more stringent standards of humans and the strongly humanoid. This was controversial, especially at the time, when they were seen as pretty much of a piece with dirty hippies and the like, but it had begun to gain some traction in more recent years.
The issue of clothing had been pretty well settled even before that. As Karyn had suggested, the general view was that anything that hadn't needed to be covered on normal animals probably didn't really need to be covered on animal-changed; considering that people had been depicting talking-animal characters in various states of undress in folklore and fantasy for centuries, Jon supposed this wasn't too surprising. There were, of course, "covered" transformees who still wore clothes by choice, but considering that most of them already had full-body fur coats, it wasn't a shocker that they were fairly in the minority. Again, Sarah was one of the ones who stuck more closely to human standards, but even she didn't wear shoes, Jon noted, and it was already fall - she might very well wear less in the heat of summer.
As far as the topic of assistive gadgets went, these were a bit of a hot-button issue. Some changed felt they were helpful advances making life easier for those with more extreme changes, while others thought they were overpriced junk sold to panicky newly-changed who were afraid to truly accept what had happened to them or who didn't know how to deal with these things on their own. Jon even found a page aimed at harpies extolling the benefits of "natural" preening; she didn't really buy that it was so much better as they claimed, but apparently it was possible to do it oneself, without a beak. And of course she knew better than to think that Zoe was trying to scam her into buying crap she didn't need, but apparently the topic wasn't without controversy.
Ah well. It was all academic, anyway. Soon enough and she wouldn't have to worry about it at all.
In the back streets of the city, a cat padded softly and quickly away from the door that it had followed a mysterious figure to. It made its way quickly through a maze of alleys until it arrived at a little old bungalow in a quiet little wooded neighborhood on the border of the suburbs. It went to the back door, scratched on it, and waited patiently, yawning as it did.
Presently, the door was opened by a short, wiry old woman. She looked down at the cat, and a meaningful look passed between them.
"Good Lord," she said to it. "That could be a problem."
