The sky...the sky was peaceful. Scott knew that just the other day she'd been thinking about how much it sucked that you were alone with your thoughts when flying, but right now she'd happily take that over being with people. Gah... It was bad enough suddenly going from nobody to celebrity due to this, bad enough getting the looks she was getting due to her new body, bad enough getting peppered with awkward and uncomfortable questions due to the exact nature of her change...
But it was quite another thing to have some...some snot-nosed know-nothing lecturing her on her own private family matters, something he knew absolutely nothing about. Yes, certainly, Dalzin marriage customs were weird and unsettling, and of course she was upset about ending up in this situation when she'd never understood what she was getting into...but she had no reason to hate her mother over it!
Scott shifted position in mid-air, a few hundred feet above the school commons. She sighed...of course Lalaxi could've been more clear, and this whole thing could've been avoided, but she could've been clearer, too; she'd just assumed it was some empty, token ritual and had never bothered to clarify. After all, it wasn't her wedding; what did it matter to her?
If she'd only known...but she hadn't asked - and Lalaxi hadn't thought to mention it, because for them, in their weird alien culture, this was all somehow totally normal. But she definitely had no reason to think that her mother had intentionally tried to mislead her...!
It was at this point that she realized she was instinctively thinking of Lalaxi as her mother.
Scott flung herself moodily into a prone position, as if she were flopping onto a nonexistent bed, and grimaced as her breasts went lurching away from her and then sprang back, before settling into hanging straight down as far as her underwear permitted. She groaned; why was it only these things and her hair that remained affected by gravity? She didn't want to wear a bra, but this was bad enough even with one...
Shaking the thought out of her head (and her long pink hair out of her eyes) as she rolled over onto her back, Scott returned to the original topic of her brooding. The twit's words echoed in her head: A mother is not so easily replaced... She huffed and ground her teeth. What did he know!? As if he could speak for her...or her dad...
Far below, the thing scurried through the grass. The light had come and gone eight times since it had entered this biosphere, seven since it had found its current host. This had been useful, and it had obtained much essence and knowledge from the host. But the host's defenses were strong, and the nutrition it could spare for the thing was barely more than sufficient for survival, let alone multiplying and spreading.
This would not do. It would have to find another host; a creature higher in the food chain, more adaptable, and above all, easily lulled into a false sense of security.
And fortunately, the current host's instincts knew all about that.
A sudden cold breeze whipped up into her airspace, and Scott huddled up, drawing her knees to her chest and slowly turning forward until her hair slipped over her shoulders and hung over her like a blanket. It wasn't like she was really that cold - Dalzin bodies seemed to be better-insulated and run hotter internally than humans, which she suspected was...well, part of the reason why Zomu usually lounged around the house in her underwear - but with the feelings this line of thought was dredging up...it was just comforting, was all.
She thought back, remembering her mother - her actual-factual birth mother, minus any time-stitching shenanigans. It had been, what, seven years? It felt like an eternity; Scott was barely out of her- out of his single digits then. It had just come out of nowhere, or so it seemed...Scott had never had the impression, as a child, that she disliked him or was unhappy with him, but that hadn't stopped her from just leaving one day...
She sighed, wrapping her arms around herself. She'd learned a little more about it over the years, but nothing that actually helped much. While it was still a far-off thing for her, she could sort of understand how a person beginning to feel the onset of middle age might begin to feel trapped, like life was passing them by...but that didn't make it okay! It didn't change anything about what it was like for that person's only child to be abandoned by half of their whole framework of support...
She'd learned to deal with it as she got older, but it was still upsetting to think about. They still saw each other a few times a year, but it had never really felt normal between them again. "Normal" for a parent and child wasn't a middle-schooler getting postcards from the Bahamas with their mother and her current boyfriend while they hadn't seen each other since Christmas...like she was less her mother and more some flighty, wacky aunt who flitted in and out of her life...
She didn't hate her mother, mostly, but it was hard to feel a close bond with someone who'd just abandoned her like that. But...what, then? Was this like the movies where they just take the dog out to the vacant lot and see which of the characters it wants as its owner or whatever? What was she supposed to think about this!?
The possibilities here were rich, Mary thought to herself. Two aliens ending up at her school in the same week, one of them a former human and a former guy...even if it were pure coincidence and there was no deeper, juicier connection (of which she was convinced not a bit,) this was fertile ground. And if there were, well...she honestly got a little giddy just thinking about it.
But that would all be in due time...she couldn't afford to get ahead of herself on this. Scott had already rejected her offer and would doubtless be on her guard, and who even knew how the other alien - "Pyxis," was it? - would react. As eager as she was to get to the story here, there was preparation and research to be done here first. Lucky that she had Greg to help her out...she smiled impishly to herself. Boys... All you needed was to know the right angles, the means by which leverage could be applied, and they'd play right into your-
There was a rustling of grass and a soft thump on the pavement behind her. Mary turned around to find that a cat had emerged from the weeds that bordered this side of the school grounds. A smile crossed her thin lips, and she crouched down and extended a hand, beckoning it over. It regarded her warily at first, but finally deigned to come within petting range. It was an orange tabby, grown but not old, and its duller, slightly scraggly coat made it pretty clear that it was a stray. She scratched it under the chin, which it clearly enjoyed; then it began aggressively rubbing its head against her hand. She chuckled and began scratching behind the ears.
This went on for a minute or two, but suddenly, without warning, the cat seized up. Mary quickly withdrew her hand; she'd been around enough cats to recognize the warning signs that preceded the inevitable claws-out okay-I'm-done-playing-now backlash. But this wasn't that; instead of twisting around and lunging for her, the cat began hacking and convulsing, trying to cough something up. She drew back, not wanting to get anything spit up on her shoes, but couldn't quite bring herself to leave before seeing if the cat was alright. If it was just a hairball, well, that was normal enough, but...
Her thoughts were interrupted by a final and particularly epic pharyngeal HHHORKK and the wet splat of something hitting the pavement. Mary cringed slightly, not eager to look too close, but wanting to make sure it was okay. She glanced down to see the cat, seemingly dazed, standing there on shaky legs and trying to collect itself. Must've been a heck of a hairball, she thought. But as soon as the animal had found its feet, it took off like a shot, not even stopping to look around, but bounding off into the bushes like the Devil himself was in pursuit.
Scott frowned, slowly turning over in mid-air like an asteroid tumbling through space. How did she really feel about Lalaxi? Her moth-er, her stepmother (it felt weird just forcing herself to think in these terms) was an alien, hailing from an alien culture, with an alien set of values...she thought things that were crazy were normal, and couldn't understand why Scott was freaked out by them...but she was a kind person, who genuinely seemed to care about Scott, and she seemed truly apologetic over the misunderstanding that had started this whole mess...
Scott sighed. She definitely didn't dislike the woman, even if her attempts to make up for what'd happened by helping her adjust had been a bit overbearing, but did that really make her qualified as a "real mother?" How did you even determine that? Was there some board of certification that decided these things?
Shaking her head, she righted herself, stretching upward toward the sky until she reached what would've been a standing position if she'd been on the ground. No, she thought, that was all nonsense. It wasn't the kind of thing that someone on the outside could point to and say that she should be doing it that way. She didn't even know how to feel about it herself; what kind of insights did that kid think he had to offer!?
That really was the key, wasn't it. Whether he was right or wrong or anywhere in between, it wasn't his place to say. Scott's family issues were for her to worry about - it wasn't as if there were anything illegal going on, or even anything that was straight-up immoral so much as just a case of what were, to most people's way of thinking, weird and twisted (albeit earnest and more or less internally-consistent) mores clashing with more normal ones. It wasn't like Lalaxi had intentionally deceived her, after all.
Which was another thing, she thought, as the autumn breeze whisked up a handful of leaves from the ground below and sent her hair streaming dramatically out to one side. The twit's attempts to insinuate that there was something nefarious going on with...whatever the hell this "time-stitching" was were so far beyond illogical that it made her head hurt. She knew she had been a human male, before becoming...this; what was he even trying to imply with "maybe your hair was always pink?" That they had...what, changed her from a Dalzin girl to a human boy, only to then turn her back? Or brainwashed her into believing that she'd been human? Why? To what end!?
The mind boggled at it. Scott's uncle could get a little "out there" with his conspiracy theories, but he'd at least have a semi-coherent (however implausible) answer for why the aliens would be doing...whatever it was he thought they were doing this week. This, on the other hand...what would that even be, double-reverse gaslighting? It was ludicrous...but then, that made it that much easier to dismiss. Which, she supposed, was about the best resolution she could hope for here.
Down below, the dispersed shouts and babble of the student body began to concentrate as the bell rang and the students streamed into the hallways to get to their next class. With a shrug, Scott drifted down to join them.
Mary watched it go, a little confused. Cats could be a little twitchy and erratic, to be sure, but this was the first time she could recall seeing one scared of its own... She frowned, then peered down at the mess in question. Her eyes widened; this was not any conventional hairball. Granted, there was a splatter of totally conventional gastric juices around it, but the object itself was a small translucent blob, soft and almost amorphous, but with thin, frilled edges; it looked like pictures she'd seen of jellyfish that'd washed up on the beach.
She hesitated briefly, not particularly eager to get too close to anything the cat hacked up, but curiosity overpowered her. She peered closer; the thing even had delicate little tendrils like a jellyfish. But...well, for starters they were a long way from any oceans, and even if it were possible for a cat to travel that distance with a jellyfish lodged in the back of its throat, it didn't seem terribly plausible. And, more to the point, she didn't remember jellyfish having intricate crystalline matrices flickering with tiny clockwork pulses of electricity in the center of their bodies. It'd been a long time since she'd been to the aquarium, but she recalled them looking more like something you'd find under a microscope than something you'd see in TRON, fluttery translucent tissue structures notwithstanding.
For a moment, she stood there in silent confusion, the crisp fall air stirred only by the distant buzzing of a transformer high up on a nearby electrical pole. Then realization dawned on her. If this wasn't a jellyfish, and it certainly wasn't any other Earthly creature that she knew of, then... Her mind spun. A third alien? It seemed too good to be true, yet here it was. And she...she was the only person who knew about it.
Barely able to hold back a grin at the thought of what a story this'd make, she leaned down to where the creature lay. She reached down and gingerly picked it up, scooping it into the palm of her hand, feeling it quiver slightly, wishing that she knew whether it was safe for the thing to give it a good rinse. Well, this might be a little gross, but if it was for a story like this, she'd even-
Mary's train of thought abruptly derailed when the creature suddenly drew up to what probably amounted to a "standing" position, launched itself onto her face, and promptly slithered up her nose. She had just enough time to reflect that now she really wished she'd rinsed it off before there was a sudden numb tingling sensation at the base of her skull, and everything went blank.
Lalaxi rolled over in mid-air a foot or so above the bed, clutching the blankets around herself. As strange as it was adjusting to the more human sleeping arrangements she now shared with her husband, she had to admit that the people of this planet made excellent blankets. The midday sun beat down on her little insulated coccoon, but at the moment she was too tired to pay it any mind. Her kind were too warm-blooded for this to be bothersome, particularly at the onset of Earth's winter season, and this far from the planet's equator.
She'd been up pretty much the entire rest of the night, after the silent alarm in her saucer went off and she'd had to deal with that whole mess with the miwi-miwi. Even after she'd sent the Gregs home with their mother, there'd been a pile of what humans still referred to as "paperwork" (whether or not there was actually any paper involved,) contacts to notify, arrangements to be made...by the time it was all done, it was nearly dawn. She'd taken the day off work in hopes of catching up on some of the sleep she'd missed.
Unfortunately, her rest was suddenly interrupted by a notification chime from her solawa, the Dalzin model of personal communicator. Worse yet, it was the soft but insistent grinding pulse that signified a high-priority alert, not something she could just go back to sleep for and deal with later. Groaning, the alien woman unwrapped herself from the blankets enough to reach out an arm and snag the device from the nightstand and tapped it, upon which the gem-like object flipped open on an almost-invisible seam, revealing a small display screen. She spent a brief moment reading over the message.
And then she was very much awake.
Mary found herself sitting on a bench in a daze, on the perimeter of the school's common area. She was a little dizzy, her right nostril was sore, and there was an unpleasant taste in the back of her mouth. Had she been sick? She didn't feel sick...just a little tingly at the base of her skull, but even that was fading. What had she been doing? She remembered cornering Greg and convincing him to help her dig a little deeper into the mystery of Scott's transformation, but after that...?
Nope, it was all a blur. She didn't feel sick, but maybe she'd been pushing herself too hard? Maybe she should just go home this afternoon and take a nap. Or, heck, just take a nap right here and now...the pavement looked nice and warm, she could curl up in the sun and...
She frowned, wondering for a moment where that thought had come from. Anyway, she needed to get to class; a nap would have to wait until later. She stood up carefully, a little unsteady on two legs at first, but after a minute she found her feet.
Her residual dizziness now gone, she started off toward class. As she passed a nearby window, she noticed that her hair was a bit mussed, though she couldn't quite recall how it'd gotten that way. Shrugging, she delicately licked the back of her hand and smoothed it back down into place.
It could be worse, Lalaxi told herself, staring into her coffee cup with resignation. There were much worse lifeforms out there to have on the loose on an unprepared planet, at least in terms of what they could do to the inhabitants. Still, the fact that star jellies were comparatively benign in nature didn't make them any less of a nuisance as an invasive species.
The star jelly, as she recalled from exobiology classes, long ago when she'd first entered second-phase education to go into a diplomatic role, was a spacefaring parasitic organism, a sort of large-scale protozoan in most respects, except for the fact that it had a simplistic but highly space-efficient bioelectronic brain. They weren't sentient, or even all that intelligent, but they had a substantial memory capacity for their size and were adaptable enough to interface with a wide variety of host nervous systems. In a way, that reminded her of the miwi-miwi, but that species merely borrowed the knowledge and experience of other creatures for its own use; star jellies, on the other hand, had evolved independently of any one planet, and required a host body to handle different environments.
Which was the problem. The creatures' survival strategy hinged on finding and attaching themselves to a host that was well-adapted to the environment they found themselves in, hooking into the nervous system and tucking themselves away inside the body to stay safe and live off the host's nutrient supply. They weren't particularly obtrusive, most of the time (certainly nothing like the one Earth fungus that attacked ants!) but that only made them more difficult to detect in civilizations that didn't know what to look for.
Lalaxi sighed. It could be worse... At least this was an invasive (if symbiotic) parasite and not an assimilatory one...she always kept a scrap of wire and a book of matches handy, just in case, but even so...well, fortunately, that wouldn't be necessary here. But they would need to find a non-intrusive way to detect a human with a second brain, what was the Earthling expression, "riding shotgun...?"
Of course, it wasn't like the creatures had no effects on the host, either. Like many parasites, they tended to influence host behavior in ways that promoted their own spread. Fortunately, being relatively benign, they often attempted some sort of beneficial symbiosis; however, they were unlikely to discard information or behavior patterns once learned, and if they should leave one host and invade another, they could "get their wires crossed" in some interesting ways...
Greg meandered down the hall, vaguely aware that he should be getting to class, but too absorbed in the pile-up of disasters that had been the last twenty-four hours of his life to pay much mind to anything at the moment. It was bad enough that Mary had conned him into venturing into the UFO, getting him involved in that whole mildly traumatizing fiasco and saddling him with an unwanted houseguest - one that claimed to be him, no less! But now she expected him to go poking into something even crazier? Something even crazier from the same source!?
He shuddered just thinking about it. He'd had more than his fill of terrifying alien nonsense last night, but aside from the weird little critter currently claiming to be him, the worst he'd actually experienced was the eerie and deeply uncomfortable initial encounter. And that was just something these aliens apparently had lying around for safekeeping!
This, on the other hand...this "assignment" was to find out about whatever weird device or secret technique they'd used, on purpose, to turn Scott into an alien girl! If...if they caught him, hell, if they even knew he was trying to find out their secret...!? He tried very hard not to think about it, but still a vision of a hypothetical alien-girl-him flitted through his mind. He cringed, and wondered briefly if there was a reason she had teal hair, a smaller frame, and smaller, perkier breasts than Scott. Did it make you what you imagined your alternate-self to be, or do you just imagine yourself the way you'd turn out? Or was it all just random flashes of brain activity, with no relevance to...
He shook his head. No. No, that wasn't going to happen. He was going to be careful; he wasn't going to get caught. He was...
...he was going to really wish he didn't have to do this. But dammit, there was no good way out of this; Mary had him exactly where she wanted him, and it wasn't like he had any leverage over her, or knew some dark secret of hers...!
With perversely appropriate timing, he was just making his way down one of the lesser-used hallways, brooding over the unfairness of it all, when a petite figure turned the corner and started toward him from the other end. Of course... He recognized Mary immediately, with a certain gnawing dread that was getting all too familiar by now. There was no point in trying to run; he was stuck with this, until he figured out something he could use against h-
Greg frowned. She was walking kind of funny, like she was dizzy or something, or...he couldn't quite put his finger on it. "H-hey, you okay?" he asked, a bit surprised and annoyed with himself for sparing her any concern.
She didn't appear to hear him at first, seemingly just staring off into space; then her focus snapped back to the present. "Huh? Oh, I'm fine," she said, with a smile that Greg didn't find reassuring. "Just fine...now how about you? Any luck?"
He frowned. "If you mean 'have you cracked my cosmic mystery for me in the last ninety minutes,' no." He watched her as she approached, and realized what he hadn't quite noticed earlier: she was walking on the balls of her feet, like she was wearing high heels or something, except she wasn't. It was odd, and made her seem a little taller (well, less short) than usual.
She gave him a wry tsk-tsk and wagged a finger at him. "You never know when or where an important discovery will crop up," she said, then frowned as if something were nagging at her memory. "We've had presidents brought down by people noticing something funny going on from a hotel room across the street. Who knows what might prove to be a vital clue here?"
Yeah, who-knows-what kind of clue might send me on my way to who-knows-what fate while you stand by waiting to make who-knows-what kind of story out of it...! Greg grimaced, trying not to think about what might lay in store for him again. "Easy for you to say, when I'm the one doing the footwork," he grumbled. "Do you even do your own research, or do you just blackmail people into awkward situations and write about them?"
Mary was incensed. "You...you...ooh!" she said as she stepped towards him, visibly bristling. "I'll have you know, I'm working on another story right now! Just as big as the one you're assisting with! One you don't even know about!"
"Yeah?" Greg snapped. "Like what, then?"
She jabbed a finger in his direction and opened her mouth to hit him with a well-deserved lecture about the legitimately amazing discovery she was going to write about...but the words escaped her. What was her story? A...a thing...a something...that she found...somewhere? She turned away, her expression of confidence turned to confusion as she wracked her brain. Why can't I remember...!? Every time she tried to recall, the details were maddeningly just out of mental reach...
Greg scoffed. "Right, get back to me on that."
Something inside her snapped, and she wheeled back towards him with a hiss and stalked towards him, back arched forward and shoulders squared. "You...you...!"
Greg was taken aback as she backed him into the wall. For all that she managed to project a menace far out of proportion to her actual size earlier, when she was still calm, this was on a whole other level - and it didn't help that with her unusual stance and the way her ears poked up from the top of her head, she was now a good bit closer to his height, not to mention the way her tail puffed straight up behind her...
...Wait. Ears? Tail!?
Mary was busily trying to assemble the most vicious, weaponized sentence she could muster for this arrogant cretin when she noticed that he'd gone from being irritated and smug to visibly intimidated and then what looked to be even a little frightened. Part of her was a little pleased by this, but part of her was confused. She was used to people getting a little worked up when she had to coax them into seeing things her way, but nobody was ever scared of a diminutive teenage girl. Was...was there someone behind her? Did she just have a scary look on her face because she was that mad right now? Or did...did...
Her line of thought trailed off as she glanced off to the side, to a nearby window. Greg wasn't even visible in the glass from this angle, but another figure was: a petite Asian girl, with a pair of orange tabby cat ears growing from her head, and a puffed-out tail sticking straight up behind her.
Greg and Mary freaked out almost simultaneously.
"Wh-wh-what!?" Greg stammered. "How did...that's a...you...what are you!?"
"What the-ow!?" Mary shrieked, grabbing her ears and then wincing and letting go of them when she felt her claws digging into them. "What's happenying to me!?" She craned her neck back, trying to get a good look at her still bottle-brush stiff tail. This couldn't be real! ...and yet she could feel everything. How had this happened!? She had the aggravating certainty that she knew the answer, but she couldn't recall it...!
"You're...you're..." Greg trailed off. He couldn't bring himself to say it: monster. Something other than human, yes, but...well, for starters, if he was going to call her a monster for anything, he had bigger issues with her than the ears and tail. And, well, honestly, a were-cat (or whatever she was) was just a bit less terrifying than a werewolf...or at least he assumed, having never met a werewolf before, either.
Mary stared at herself in the mirror. This...if she could only figure this out..! "It's all connyected, I know it...!" she murmured to herself. She pulled back her upper lip, revealing canine teeth that had grown and sharpened into proper fangs. This must have something to do with her discovery...if she could only remember!
A long minute passed as the initial shock wore off for both of them, and Mary finally calmed down enough that her tail loosened up and she was able to bring it around for inspection. She could feel this, too...the fur was soft and silky, and it felt nice to have it touched...she clutched it to herself, taking in the strange new sensation, until she realized that it was lifting the back of her skirt up. Flushing slightly, she let it drop back down, settling into a comfortably curved middle position.
This can't be real, she thought. This can't...it just can't...I'm me, nyot some...some... She grimaced, her lower lip quivering. It felt real, all of it. Greg over there was reacting like it was real. But this wasn't her life...! She found stories and reported on them, she wasn't the story herself! She had her whole real story to cover, if she only remember it; she didn't need this distracting from...from...!
She focused and tried, in desperation, to will this all away. I'm nyot this, I'm me. I'm nyot this, I'm human. I'm nyot a...a...a cat...girl...? I'm a nyormal human being...!
Greg was watching her with some measure of curiousity, trying to figure out what she was thinking. The initial shock had more or less evaporated when he'd concluded that, whatever was going on here, she wasn't some bloodthirsty monster looking to slaughter him or anything. At this point, it was more just some sort of twisted curiosity, like he'd probably feel about "Pyxis" if she wasn't trying to intrude on his own personal life. Was this what Mary had always been? Was this all just some ruse finally failing, and her real self slipping out? He had to admit, he thought it'd be kind of fitting. He knew cats mostly for the way they carried themselves like the rest of the world was below them and everyone else existed only for their own amusement, and that was her to a tee.
But...on the other hand, she seemed so shocked by this; almost as much as he'd been. If this were the real truth, why would she be surprised by it? No, based on her own reaction, her true form must be...
...a normal human being. Which she now was. Greg stared at her, while she stared at herself. The ears were gone, the tail was gone. She gasped, and the canines in her mouth were ordinary human ones. She was...but no! No, that had...that had been real! He hadn't imagined it, he'd seen it with his own eyes...!
Mary stared down at herself for a moment, then looked over at Greg, who was staring at her. "Wh-what do you want!?" she stammered.
He said nothing for a moment, then found the words. "You...you were...?"
She flushed. "N-no! No, I don't know what you're...er, I was what? What are you even talking about!?" She stamped her foot for emphasis, but it was late on the draw and more de-emphasized the point than anything.
Greg thought for a moment, then chuckled. "Right, right. That wouldn't be convenient for you, would it. But y'know, that kind of puts us on an even footing, doesn't it? We both know what we saw, Mary. All I need to do is figure out what it was that triggered that..." He grinned. Maybe the tables were turning...or at least balancing...?
