(Two chapters in as many hours? Man, don't I feel like a slacker...)
"We really oughta hurry," Zoe said. "It's already starting. See?" She indicated some nodular growths that were beginning to poke out from her skin. "Sporangia. They're the things that emit the spores. This is happening faster than I thought."
Jon let out a low whistle. "No kidding. But that should mean you'll be back to normal faster, right?" She began looking around for some kind of suitable environment.
Zoe shrugged, and Jon noticed that her body was already starting to lose definition; her shoulders looked less like they were part of a skeletal structure and more like simplified curves from her neck to her arms. "I don't know," she said. "Let's hope, but for all we know, it could take days."
"You're doing what now?" Steve asked. He still looked pretty pissy, but he was curious as well.
"Zoe's going to do a life-cycle kind of thing," Jon said. "That's what we think, anyway. From what we can tell, she's going to emit spores and then break down, and then the spores will reform into her. We think."
Steve raised an eyebrow. "She's going to die and then come back? That's...that's messed up."
Zoe shook her head, her hair reacting less like individual strands and more like a single mass. Her skin had begun to lose its human-like coloration, reverting to the translucent-orange it had been when she first changed. "Eh, sort of," she said. "Assuming we're right, I don't think you could really call it dying, but it is kind of unnerving to think about."
The donkey-centaur nodded. "So...what are you doing out here?"
"Nutrition," Zoe replied. "My individual cells will need the right kind of nutrients when they're growing back, and it sounds like a rotting log would be the best place to find the right mix."
"How about over there?" Jon pointed to a medium-sized log a couple hundred feet away. The sisters made their way over to investigate, and Steve followed not far behind, still looking on curiously. Jon couldn't quite get over how strange it felt to glide over the forest floor on her foot; the mucus layer she laid down kept anything from hurting her, but she could still feel the twigs and small rocks and such that she slid over. Even three-plus weeks after her change, she still found the sensation odd.
Zoe knelt down by the log, or did what passed for kneeling with her barely-distinguishable legs; they had been a bit ill-defined before, but now her lower body was almost a solid mass, stretching out as she "walked" like she was wearing a dress, the only definitive lines being the curvature of her hips. She paused for a moment, then nodded. "This is a good spot."
"You can tell?" Jon asked. Zoe shrugged as she sat down. "Yeah. Don't ask me how, though. Maybe I can just sense the chemicals. Hopefully having a spot with good nutrition should make it go faster."
"I'll get the tent, just in case," Jon said. Their parents had made them pack some camping supplies in case it took longer than an afternoon, but they'd left them back by the church. She turned to go retrieve them, but suddenly they heard a distant sound. As before, something was crashing through the brush, coming closer...
