Jon slammed the snooze button on her alarm clock as soon as it went off, moaned unintelligibly, and rolled back over, then winced and readjusted herself so she wasn't smushing her breasts under her torso. Why did she even have that thing set, anyway? It wasn't like she had any kind of schedule to keep at present; school had been on indefinite suspension ever since the sun changed. She laid there for a while, trying to get back to sleep, but it wasn't much use. Sighing, she lifted herself to what amounted to a sitting position and slid out of bed. This was a bit of an ordeal, as the mucus coating on her foot tended to stick to the vinyl water-mattress she slept on pretty firmly. Still, it was better than sleeping on cloth sheets and probably building up a layer of lint on her foot in the process.
She yawned, stretched, and set about putting on a bra. By now she'd gotten the general hang of it, but it still took almost more fiddling than she had the patience for to get her breasts to rest comfortably in the cups. It was a pain, but Karyn assured her that it was better than having no support (though Jon wasn't as hampered in that department as her best friend.) Next came a shirt, then a skirt; she didn't like having to wear one, but she wasn't built for pants anymore, and it was better than having her girl-parts, uncovered by the yellow and translucent-white slug-skin that encircled the rest of her body below the waist, visible to the world. Besides, she'd found some skirts that were pretty much just denim tubes, practically like jean shorts without the leg divisions, and that was a lot easier for her to take.
Looking in the mirror, Jon straightened her hair out a bit. She'd considered getting it cut short, but to be honest, it wasn't all that long, and it wasn't enough of a pain to counteract the fact that she'd look stupid with short hair now. The only real trouble it gave her was arranging her bangs around her antennae; they were positioned so that she generally either wound up with hair hanging down in her face or a noticeable widow's peak. She fiddled with it for a bit, sighed as a few strands fell down in front of her face, and headed downstairs for some coffee.
Mikey was jolted out of her "sleep mode" by Jon's moving past her room. This was another odd thing she'd noticed. What sleep amounted to for her, as a robot, was a sort of low-power mode in which her conscious functions were memory-resident but inactive; as near as she could tell, while she was in this mode, her brain took care of background and housekeeping tasks, with a monitor process watching her sensory inputs for anything sufficient to trigger a wake-up. The rough effect of this was that she didn't so much gradually wake up as instantly regain awareness. Mikey thought there might be a deeper sleep mode for when her brain needed to do serious maintenance, but she'd yet to experience it, or even to sense when a need for it might occur. That was another interesting thing - she didn't get tired in the conventional sense, with slowed or impaired mental functions; instead, her brain alerted her to a need for sleep as a preventative measure so that she didn't suffer any performance impact. This left her in the odd position of knowing she needed sleep but never feeling sleepy in the sense she knew from being human. It had taken a lot of getting used to at first, and she still wasn't sure how she felt about it.
She looked around the room, but before she'd even spotted her alarm clock she knew that it was 7:43 A.M. CST. Mikey was finally beginning to get used to this instant recall of information, but she'd yet to start shedding the habits she had before, when she couldn't instantly find out what time it was or remember what Mom had asked her to take care of that afternoon. She got out of bed and pulled off her nightgown. Why was she wearing a nightgown? Oh right, her mother had thought that, since she didn't seem to be having as much trouble adjusting to girlhood as Jon, it might be good to get her used to dressing like a girl, or at least open to the idea. Again, she wasn't sure how she felt about the idea, but the nightgown at least wasn't a big deal; she'd typically worn an extra-large shirt as pajamas before her change, so it was nearly the same thing. Mikey got dressed and headed downstairs to join her brother-turned-sister.
Jon was in the middle of her morning rehydration as the coffee brewed, guzzling a large quantity of water to offset everything she'd lost over the course of the night, when there was a thump on the front door. Not a knock, more of a random series of whackings. Wondering what was going on, she headed over to the entryway and peered out the little viewer in the door. She was greeted by an unkempt, tear-streaked, but still familiar face, and she quickly opened the door.
"Sarah?" she gasped. The harpy stood on the porch, completely naked, not even wearing the sports-bra that had been pretty much her sole item of clothing since her transformation. She was breathing heavily and irregularily, like someone who had stopped sobbing only because they were exhausted. She staggered inside, still breathing heavy, then collapsed on the living-room couch. Jon slid over next to her, concerned. "Sarah, what's going on? Did something happen?"
Sarah started to tear up again, and gave a couple little choking sobs before nodding and replying. "Yeah," she said, her voice quavering. "My parents went off the friggin' deep end." She buried her head in the throw-pillow, and it was several minutes before she had recovered enough to say anything more.
"Look," she said, when she'd managed to compose herself a bit. "My folks, they've...been acting weird ever since this whole thing started. And lately they've been treating me cold, like they don't quite trust me. I dunno, maybe they think I've sold out by accidentally getting transformed or something. But this morning, I..." She trailed off for a moment before getting ahold of herself. "This morning, I...found out that harpies don't have periods."
Jon tried to figure out what that meant, then gaped as the realization hit her. Sarah nodded. "Yeah, you think it sounds bad? You should try experiencing it. I, uh...I went to the bathroom this morning to take care of business, and I wound up l...um...hell. I wound up laying about three eggs. I guess they weren't all that big, but Christ did they feel huge. And by the time I'd finished, my mom came up to my room - we'd been doing this thing in the morning where she helped me get dressed, except she'd been putting it off or forgetting for the past few days, I think because she and Dad were starting to view me as maybe dangerous, I dunno."
Sarah paused to drink a glass of water that Mikey had offered her. "Thanks," she said. "So my mom came and found me in the bathroom. I was sitting on the floor, kind of just shocked, because how the hell was I supposed to anticipate that? But she saw me, and she saw the eggs, and she just got this crazy, empty look on her face. She kind of walked slow over towards the eggs, like she was sleepwalking, and I got so creeped out that I got up and side-stepped past her and got out of the bathroom. She...she picked up one of the eggs and looked it over, and all the while I was backing away. Then she turns to look at me, and she's got this same empty look, only now it's kind of pissed, too. I got scared and I backed out all the way onto the balcony. That's, um, my room has a balcony overlooking the backyard, and I leave the door open when the weather's nice. So my mom is coming towards me, and she's still got the egg, holding it like it's a grenade or something."
Sarah began to tremble. "All of a sudden she just whips it at me, right out of nowhere. She missed and hit the railing, but I was really scared now, and she just kept walking like nothing had happened. I don't know why I did it, but I hopped up onto the railing, and I looked around, like there was maybe some way out that I'd never noticed. There wasn't, but suddenly I just got the idea to jump and spread my...my wings." She noticed Mikey smiling, and nodded. "Yeah, guess you were right after all. I just took off flying, and last I saw of her she was just standing on the balcony, looking at me. I think I would've snapped right there, but I was too busy thinking thinking about staying in the air, so I guess I just kept it bottled up until I landed on the sidewalk up the block from your house. I...I know I'm not a family friend or anything, but you guys were the only people I could think to go to. I'm sorry, I just...oh Jesus, my parents went off the fuckin' rails! What am I gonna do now!?"
The harpy-girl broke down into tears, and Jon put an arm around her. "Look," she said. "It doesn't matter if you're a family friend or not. You're in trouble, and we'll figure out some way to help you. I don't know if we have room for you here, but if we don't Karyn might. We'll talk to my parents and figure out what to do from there."
"Of course we will," came a voice. Jon turned to see her mother and father standing on the other side of the living room. She briefly wondered what they thought of her letting a strange, naked girl into the house, but there was nothing but compassion in their expressions. "Mom! Dad!" she said. "This is Sarah; she's a classmate of mine and Karyn's. Sarah, this is my mom and dad, and you've met Mikey before, and...um..." She looked around. "Say, where's Zoe?"
