Sarah stumbled through the gym trying to retain her balance as it seemed like her body was constantly shifting around her. First it was her feet extending up like she was wearing heels or something, then her legs shortening so that the total length was about the same, and everything felt weird and wobbly as she tried to walk like this...she wasn't going to end up going around on all fours, was she? Like...like Biff...? And dammit, this stupid tail was still cramping up in the back of her favorite-
There was a sudden tearing sound as the denim gave way; it took quite a bit of pressure for that to happen, but there was apparently only so much tail that could be crammed into a pair of skinny jeans, and hers had just surpassed that limit. Despite the craziness of the situation, the sudden alleviation of the discomfort she'd been feeling gave Sarah a feeling of relief, as her new appendage unfurled from the rip in the back of her pants; she subconsciously gave it a vigorous shake so the matted, mussed-up fur had a chance to sort itself out. She sighed deeply, her tongue hanging slightly out; then, realizing how she must look, she clamped her mouth shut and breathed back in through her nose instead.
The world exploded in sensation all around her. The smells...Sarah had never imagined that she lived in a world that smelled like this. It was staggering...the flood of new information, details that she'd never noticed - that she could never have noticed before - jumping out at her. It was like she'd spent her entire life up until now living in a grainy, faded, blurry old black-and-white photo, only to suddenly find herself in a world of crisp, vibrant color. The sounds, too...she'd never realized just how high-pitched the squeak of someone's shoes on the polished wooden floor of the gym was, but it was practically punching her in the eardrum now...! Really, it was too much to take in all at once - her head was swimming as her brain tried to process it all, and combined with the existing balance issues from the radical changes to her body, she found herself stumbling, tipping, falling...
A pair of slender but sturdy arms caught her from behind as she dropped backwards. "Easy there," a firm but feminine voice said, as the person behind it carefully lowered her to the floor. "Just calm down and let it pass - it's always overwhelming the first time you go were-self. Lots of information your human brain never had to deal with before, right? Just breathe slow and let it pass over you."
Sarah complied - there wasn't a whole lot else she could do. The flood of sensation was overwhelming, but at the core it was too natural and right for her to feel anything like panic. She was just...overcome. She laid back, her now-canine head resting in the woman's lap, jaw slack and tongue lolling out, panting as she tried to just take in and process everything that was happening to her. Even her basic mental process felt strange and unusual like this - the barrier between conscious thought and raw instinct that came with being a (somewhat) mature human being was blurred, and it was harder to distinguish one from the other like this. It was okay - she could just lay here for the moment and figure it out later, sit and let the nice lady scratch behind her ears the way she was doing - but no, there was a strange scent...? Like cat, but like human...but it felt so nice like this...
As she lay there, absorbing everything that had just happened to her and letting herself process it, Sarah began to calm down. Her panting grew shallower, and as it did, her tongue drew back, her muzzle slowly receding into a human face, the fur shrinking back into her skin over most of her body, her limbs returning to their normal structure and proportion. She found her thoughts clearing up, the normal separation between animal-self and conscious-self gradually re-establishing. She breathed deeply in and out as she came back to herself, then glanced up at the woman whose lap she was resting her head on. Recognition came slowly - right, right, this was one of the teachers, wasn't it? She had to search her memories for a minute before realizing that this lady was the girls' gym teacher for the changed students. Hot on the heels of this was the realization that she was also the source of the cat-smell that had been prickling at her nose earlier...!
Sarah leapt to her feet, stumbling slightly again upon finding that she'd returned to normal human structure for her legs. She found herself baring her teeth at the woman for a moment, before confusedly wondering what in the hell she was doing and giving the teacher a sheepish, apologetic look. The woman chuckled. "It's alright," she said, rising to her feet in a languorous, slinky, unmistakably feline manner. "Instinct overload happens to every new were - you should've seen what I did to my parents' couch when I first changed!"
For the first time, Sarah properly looked her over. The teacher was a tall, sleek woman with slightly dusky skin and deep, glossy black hair that she wore at shoulder-length. Her eyes were an almost luminous yellow-green, with slitted feline pupils; her ears, up atop her head, were the rounded type, clearly marking her as a member of the big-cat family; these and the tail that was idly lashing around her legs were covered in silky fur the same color as her hair. Sarah supposed that made her a panther, then...? A were-panther, she guessed, going off the things she was just saying...but she was too caught up in thinking about what had just happened to her to think about feline taxonomy. "Th-that...that was so weird..."
The teacher nodded, smiling knowingly. "I remember. You'll get a better handle on dealing with your inner animal as time goes on, but it's very strange the first time you experience it...you've never even imagined having anything replace the ape-self that underlies normal human behavior, probably never even thought about that side of yourself before, and then suddenly you're something different. I'm assuming this is the first time you've changed?"
Sarah thought for a moment. "I, uh...yesterday, I had a tail, just for a little while...I thought I was going crazy. Then it was gone...just now is the first time I changed all the way."
The panther-woman chuckled. "Honey, that wasn't all the way. That was just your animal self starting to find its way out."
Sarah stared at her, mouth agape. "Y-you mean...it gets worse!?"
"Well, I wouldn't call it worse," the teacher said. "The wolf-self is a part of you now; it's not bad for it to make itself known. Start thinking like that and you're just going to cause yourself a lot of undue stress trying to repress it." She shrugged. "But if you mean 'am I going to change even further,' well, yes. Monthly, in fact."
Sarah groaned. "You've got to be kidding me...! I can't- I have a life, dammit!"
Another chuckle. "You and me both. But there's nothing you can do about it - you are what you are, and if you try to deny that, try to clamp down and put a lid on it, it's just going to come leaking out at the seams in a bunch of unpleasant ways. Trust me - there's plenty of people just like us in this world, and they're dealing with it just fine. You can, too."
Sarah thought back to her childhood - back before her dad's practice had taken off, before they'd moved up to a nice house with a big yard in the suburbs, they'd had a neighbor lady who used to turn into a horse every month. Had life been difficult for her? Sarah couldn't really remember - she was just a little girl then, and she'd never imagined that that would be her someday. She sighed and slowly sat down, her tail brushing across the floor of the gym. The teacher sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulder.
"It's a challenge sometimes, I won't deny it," she said. "Especially when you're just starting out. But there's plenty of resources to help people like you and me deal with our condition, and it gets easier with time. It's like puberty - it's weird and scary and uncomfortable because your body is going through changes it's never dealt with before, and even if you're told about them ahead of time it only helps so much. But you get through it anyway, and in a few years the awkwardness clears up and everything feels totally natural."
Sarah chuckled in spite of herself - puberty had been a bitch for her, and she remembered the awkwardness all too well, how she'd filled out from a gangly sixth-grader into what she none too modestly classified as a bombshell, but only after a bunch of mismatched in-between stages; how the other girls had made fun of her when her breasts just wouldn't stop growing even while her curves had yet to really start filling out, so that she spent the latter half of seventh grade looking like a beanpole with two grapefruits stuck to it...fortunately, the end result had shut them up but good, and they'd moved by the time she was ready to start high school, so nobody here remembered her awkward phase...but to think that...that suddenly becoming an animal was anything like that!?
"Now," the panther-woman said, suddenly turning more business-like, "since we're here, I guess I may as well give you 'the talk.' You've already been through your first shift, so you have some idea what to expect, but like we talked about, that's not the full extent of it. Right now, your body is in kind of a transitional period, where it's still getting used to having this other-self that wants to poke its nose out from time to time; until the next full moon, you're probably going to experience more of this kind of spontaneous, uncontrolled shifting."
Sarah grimaced. "You mean this could happen again? Like, any time?"
She nodded. "And more - you're probably going to have occasional spurts of going full-wolf, until then. Though if, er, your time of the month comes around before then, it might kick your metamorphoses into a more stable state until the full Moon comes around and both cycles sync up to it properly. Anyway, I'd strongly suggest that you wear loose, cheap shoes and pants - or just stick to skirts - until then. Your full-wolf shape should be able to slip out of your clothes pretty easily, but you may or may not pass through the state you were in just now on the way there, and that's just going to ruin yet another pair of shoes, so they might as well be crummy ones." She frowned, eyeing Sarah sympathetically and looking a little embarassed herself. "Also, uh, until you get a proper feel for when you're about to shift back...you're probably going to end up naked and mostly-human at least once. Believe me, it happens to pretty much all of us at one point or another. Best thing you can do is just accept it, until you know enough to plan around it."
The novice werewolf stared at her, not sure what to make of any of this, other than that the next...what? How long was it until the full moon? A week? A month? Or was her period due first...? How messed-up was it that she might end up looking forward to it for once? But the next heaven-knew-how-long was going to be pure hell...she found herself panting nervously as she thought about it, and to her surprise, she felt her face shifting again...not quite into a full muzzle, but something in between. She yelped in surprise, and the sound was a lot more canine than she cared to admit.
"That's another thing," her new-found guide said. "Calm down, girl. Getting stressed out over this just makes your human side less able to cope with the situation, so your animal-self tries to take over the more you lose your cool - and learning to control that is something that only comes with experience. So brooding on all this or panicking and freaking out are counterproductive in addition to just not being emotionally healthy, okay?"
Sarah nodded and tried to steady her breathing and calm herself again. Her faced slowly resumed human shape, although she still found herself nervously panting a bit - but right now, she was too focused on the larger issue to worry about it.
"Right," the panther-woman said. "That's better. Keeping a handle on your emotions is the first step in learning some control over your outward form. That's not to say that you can't feel things, but letting them rule you takes control away from your human mind, and that just leaves your inner wolf trying to fill in the gap."
"Then," Sarah said thoughtfully, "then...it is possible to keep it under control?" If she could just keep herself from changing...
"Not like that," the teacher said archly, giving her a look that said she knew exactly what Sarah was thinking. "Remember what I said earlier? Your wolf-self is a part of you now. You can't make it go away, no matter how you try - you'll only hurt yourself, and it won't work anyway. Real control for a were comes through acceptance, not repression. You need to accept that you're as much wolf as you are human now, and care for your animal-self and its needs; if you can take care of it, it won't have any need to make itself known forcibly. But if you want to keep your inner animal from taking over at inconvenient times, you're going to have to let it out at other times - and in any case, you can't stop the Moon any more than you can stop the tide."
Sarah sighed. "Oh. But...I mean, you can control...how you look?"
A shrug. "To an extent, yes. When we're not under the Moon, we have more control over our shape." She reached down and slipped off her shoes, and as Sarah watched, her face re-shaped into a feline muzzle, fur spreading down her body as her feet became paws and her legs changed to match. "It's as easy as that," she said, her voice a bit darker, thicker, more...velvety. "All I'm doing right now is letting go of my shape and letting my other self take over. I could go full cat even more easily, if I wanted. You could do it, too, right now. It's more challenging going the other way, because the animal-self doesn't really understand why it should want to be anything else, but..." She concentrated for a moment, and her human visage returned. "...it's completely doable...once you've come to understand yourself a little better."
"Then...what about, um...full hu...man...?" Sarah trailed off as she noticed the teacher shaking her head.
"Not a great idea," she said. "Remember, you need to accept and care for your other self, not keep it cooped up inside you and never let it out. I think it's possible, but the more you try and hide this part of you away, the harder it's going to fight back, unless you somehow find it in yourself to truly accept it on the inside without wearing it on the outside. For anyone I've ever heard of, though, you're almost certainly going to have some permanent features of your animal-self." She dug through her purse and fished out a compact mirror. "Here, take a look. You haven't really seen yourself yet, have you?"
Hesitantly, Sarah took the mirror from her and held it up to her view. The face looking back at her was more familiar than she'd feared - the structure of it was perfectly human and exactly as she knew herself. There were two major differences that she could see. The first was that her eyes had changed - the irises were larger, and rather than the familiar blue, she had one eye that was a pale gray-green and one that was hazel. The other was that her ears were still large, triangular, fur-covered, and positioned on the top of her head. She gasped softly, and two more discrepancies were revealed - her teeth had become canine, sharp and pointed (even what had been the incisors and molars,) and her tongue, while it had receded to a somewhat more manageable length for a human mouth, had retained the thin, slightly crinkled appearance of a dog's. Of course, she could still feel her tail behind her as well, twitching nervously across the floor and probably accumulating its own colony of dust-bunnies.
"This is you, dear," the panther-woman said, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. "And that's okay. This is what you are now - even if you were to find a way to look completely human, this would still be you on the inside. The person you're seeing is still the same person she's always been, but there's a part of her that's different now. The challenge is in learning to accept and understand that part of her the way you understood and accepted the part it's replacing. And we're all here for you as you deal with that, okay?"
Sarah wasn't really sure she was okay with it - but what could she do about it? The way the teacher was talking, it didn't sound like there was any way to avoid dealing with all this stuff, at least not if she didn't want to completely screw herself up mentally. And as many unusual developments as had been happening around this area lately (she was number what out of the student body lately to end up transformed by a phenomenon that normally only affected younger children?) she'd never heard of anyone ever changing back. Surely, if there was a way to rid yourself of this condition, her neighbor from back when wouldn't have still been dealing with it into late middle age and beyond?
While she was pondering this, her now-heightened sense of hearing alerted her to some kind of commotion out in the hallway. She felt her ears twitch and pivot as they tried to focus on the sound, and she turned towards the door to hear it better. There were cries of surprise from a bunch of her fellow students, and the sound of some fairly large creature thundering through the hall - but the footfalls, though she could hear them, were oddly soft, and the primary tell was the clattering of claws on the tile, as well as the great soft woosh of...wings?
All of a sudden, a massive presence - a tawny golden shape - careened through the door of the gym, banking hard to one side, catching onto and launching off the door as if it were the starting block at a track meet. The shape - lion-bodied, wingéd - soared across the gym and thudded onto the floor a few yards in front of her, its wings spreading out to act as an air-brake as it skidded awkwardly to a stop, claws gouging into the flooring. The creature's wavy black hair flew forward and covered its face, but as the shape stopped moving and began to resolve in Sarah's brain, a sense of familiarity came over her. Then the sphinx tossed its head back, clearing the hair out of its eyes, and she could see its face.
"Biff!?"
"Sarah!" the sphinx shouted, a raw animal edge creeping into her voice. "Are you okay!? They...they didn't...you aren't hurt, are you? If...if they did anything to you, I'll...!"
Sarah stared at her. "...Huh?"
Biff caught herself and looked around, a look of embarassment gradually coming over her face. "I...I, um...that asshole James said you'd changed, and I...I thought his asshole friends..."
There was a brief and intensely awkward silence. Then Sarah began to laugh, wrapping her arms around herself and sinking to the floor, her doggy tongue lolling out just slightly as she lost it. "Oh, seriously...!" she said. "Like his loser friends could...I mean, even before this...!"
Biff seemed taken aback. "I...I mean, they got me, and I was afraid...!"
Sarah got ahold of herself and smiled warmly at the sphinx. "No, no...I get it. And I'm...touched...that you were worried about me. It's just, y'know, that dolt barely had the guts to try and make a move on me before I changed, back when I was just at the top of the social hierarchy in this little school. Now? Man, I could wreck them...!" She was honestly a little alarmed to hear herself say it, but she couldn't deny that it felt true. She'd been relatively fit, as head cheerleader, but she'd never felt this confident in her ability to protect herself and those she cared for before. That...that was what being an alpha was really about, wasn't it...? All the pathetic social gamesmanship from before seemed so trite, when now...she clenched her fists, and yelped slightly as a sharp prickle in her palms alerted her to one more persistent physical aspect of her wolf-self, the claws that had replaced her nails.
Biff stared at her ex in astonishment. Sarah...Sarah was...a wolf? That was what this was, right? She smelled like dog, and not domestic dog. She wasn't sure how she could even tell that, just by scent, but there it was. It was strange...she was recognizably Sarah, but she seemed so different like this...it felt in some strange way like layers of pretense and fakery were being stripped away, and she was really seeing her for the first time. Was...was that really true? Was this part of being changed, or was it just Sarah? Did...did that mean she...?
"Easy there, girl," said the panther-woman who had for the moment stayed back from the conversation. "Remember what we talked about? Your wolf-self's instincts are coming on pretty strong right now. That's not necessarily bad, but...it doesn't really understand how to get along in people-society. You'll need to learn how to keep that in balance." She shot Biff an apologetic look. "Sorry, instinct overload. It happens to almost every new were."
Biff blinked in surprise. "Wait...you're a werewolf?" She knew, somewhere in the back of her head, that such creatures were one of the countless things you could become under the Mist's influence, but she'd never actually encountered one before, that she knew. Normal animal-changed, who just had the one form, were far more common.
Sarah looked thoughtful, then surprised, then a little sheepish. Wait, I am a werewolf, aren't I? she thought. It was one thing to experience all this, and to discuss with the teacher all the things she was facing now that she was this, but it was something different to identify as a werewolf, or to have someone else call her what she now was. "I, uh, y-yeah," she stammered, caught a little off-guard. "Yeah, it...it happened just n..." She trailed off, hesitated for a moment, her ears drooping, then took a deep breath. "Well, n-no, it...it happened yesterday. Biff, I...I wanted to apologize. I...I didn't mean to brush you off like that yesterday. I...I care for you, honest, and I know you're going through a lot right now. I just...the first change happened to me yesterday, and I was so freaked out...I didn't want anyone to see, I thought I was going crazy...I mean, I haven't even told my parents yet...!"
She sighed. "I...I know I probably hurt your feelings, and I just wanted to let you know that it wasn't anything you did and I'm sorry. I was just scared, that's all. I..." She hesitated, then decided just to get it out. "I...still want us to be friends, Biff. I...care for you, even...even if we can't..." She trailed off.
Biff felt a knot forming in her stomach as soon as she heard the word "friends" - because it was entirely clear what they couldn't be. It wasn't like she hadn't basically known this was coming, and it wasn't like she didn't believe that Sarah still cared for her, but...but to have it all but spelled out like this...she bit her lip and shook her head, trying to clear stray hairs out of her eyes, which must've been getting irritated since they were starting to water. "L-listen, Sarah, we can...we can still be...! Please, we can...make it work...?" But she wasn't even sure that she believed what she was saying. In spite of her determination not to, she began to cry.
Sarah's heart wrenched, and she found herself starting to cry as well. She wished she could say something else, honestly she did, but they both knew it'd be a lie. She knew what she was and wasn't, and she wasn't into girls. She knelt down by the sphinx and put a hand on her shoulder, grimacing and wishing for some way out of this. If only this other-self could be what she couldn't...but it was no use. The wolf-self wasn't telling her any different, it was just less concerned with all the awkward, messy entanglement of human relationships. Wolf-Sarah understood perfectly the simple fact that this creature smelled female, so they were no longer mate. In fact, they smelled like cat, so they weren't even kin. But she had some understanding from human-Sarah that, in spite of these things, this person was still pack. And when pack members were distressed, it was the job of other pack members to comfort them, wasn't it? Letting go for the moment, forgetting the whole messy unhappy business of being human, Sarah flung her arms around Biff's neck, leaned in close, and began tenderly licking her face.
"Ackpfth!" the sphinx-girl sputtered, arching her back and trying to side-step away, only to find her werewolf ex following her. "Sarah, wha-!?" It wasn't quite the same as being up close and personal with a dog; Sarah's breath was a whole lot better, thanks to the wonders of modern oral hygiene, and while her scent was distinctly canine now, it wasn't the doggy musk of a creature with a full-body coat of hair and no knowledge of soap or shampoo.
Surprised by her packmate's reaction to her comforting attentions, wolf-Sarah drew back for a moment, and human-Sarah came back to the fore. Compared to her previous experience, gradually returning to human thought patterns as her mood calmed, this was like a bucket of cold water to the face, abrupt and arresting. She had been fully aware throughout the entire process, so it wasn't as if she hadn't known what she was doing; but the wolf-self was another part of her, not some separate mind that she just happened to share a body with, so until just now she'd been thinking of it in the way that wolf-Sarah did. Now, realizing what she was doing, she felt more than a little embarassed. Should...should she apologize? Back off and give Biff some space to process this? Or find some other way to comfort her than...than licking her?
When she came to a conclusion, it wasn't a conscious decision; she just found it easier to let the wolf-self take back control. Wolf-Sarah, not particularly bothered by her human side's sudden bout of shyness, decided that the idea had been sound after all, and redoubled her efforts as the sphinx-girl protested and tried to extricate herself.
