Jon stopped, and all three figures stood still as they listened to the approaching noise. She felt a little nervous, but tried not to let it show as she looked around at the others. Steve's expression was a mixture of anxiety and anger; obviously, he didn't want yet another person finding out about his predicament, but he must have been getting tired of running away from every intruder. Zoe just looked slightly exasperated. All three turned towards the sound, wondering what was approaching.
The first thing they saw was a brown streak; it erupted out of some dense foliage and barreled straight towards Steve, coming to a sudden halt a couple yards in front of him. It was an ordinary whitetail deer, the kind that pretty much infested the local wooded areas and had a knack for making life difficult for nighttime drivers. It stood in front of Steve, looking this way and that, trying to find an out, but Jon and Zoe had wound up positioned on either side of it, and it seemed to be afraid to move toward any of the three. In any case, it never got the chance to decide; another figure leapt from the brush, very nearly soared across the little clearing, and landed on the animal's back, knocking it to the ground.
The next thing anyone knew, there was a sickening crack as the figure snapped the deer's neck, and then it had begun to rip a chunk out of the animal's flank with its teeth. The two sisters and the donkey-centaur had just started to back away when the figure suddenly stopped and stood up.
With the mysterious figure no longer moving so rapidly, they could see that it was another transformee, a girl whose lower body had become the body of some kind of dinosaur, her human waist joining her dinosaur body where the neck would have been. Jon and Steve instantly recognized its general look as that of the Velociraptors from Jurassic Park, but Jon remembered that, as depicted in the movie, they were much closer in appearance to a later-discovered species dubbed Utahraptor. She was wearing only a sports bra and a makeshift skirt/loincloth made from an old undershirt wrapped around her waist; both were somewhat torn by the brush and blood-spattered from her activities.
She looked around at the other teenagers. "I...I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know anyone was out here..." She noticed Steve and goggled. "Farber!?" she gasped. "Is that you?"
Steve winced, then scowled. "Who the hell are you?" he asked.
The girl frowned slightly herself. "Um, Mike," she said. "From the soccer team." Suddenly Jon remembered; she'd seen this girl before, back on the first day of the new sun. "Mike from the grocery store, right?" she interrupted.
Mike sighed and nodded. "I'm sorry. I, uh, didn't mean to get all bloody in front of other people. I just got hungry, and I needed some excercise...I'll just be going..."
Neither of the three had paid much attention to the deer up until now, but Mike's statement drew their attention to it. All three regretted looking, but...for some reason Jon didn't think Mike seemed all that brutal or evil standing atop her prey. She was just hunting, right? And she did make sure to dispatch the thing before tearing into it...
"No, uh, you can stay," Jon said. "Uh, I guess it'd be nice if you ate that somewhere else, but you don't have to leave the area or anything."
Mike brightened, and picked up the deer with her human arms, lending a little support with the smaller, underpowered arms on her dinosaur half. She carried it off behind the brush she'd come from. Steve, freaked out by the sight of the dead and bleeding animal, and not wanting to stick around people who recognized him any longer, took off in the opposite direction.
Several minutes and a few unsettling noises later, Mike emerged from the brush, looking satiated and happy. She'd cleaned up as best she could with only the water from the stream that ran through the woods, though the bloodstains wouldn't be coming out of her makeshift hunting clothes any time soon. "I'm sorry for all that," she said. "I just...ever since I changed I get the urge to go out hunting whenever I get really hungry."
Jon nodded and Zoe shrugged. "Well...it's just a deer," Jon said. "And really, there's a million of them around here. I'm Jon Madison, by the way, and this is my sister Zoe."
Mike raised an eyebrow. "So you used to be a guy too? Glad to know I'm not the only one around here. Wait, weren't you the one that got attacked by that crazy lady in the store a few weeks ago?"
Jon nodded. "Yeah. As near as I could tell, she was freaked out because I'm half-slug. Gah, as if being turned into a girl isn't bad enough." Mike nodded sagely.
Zoe snorted. "Oh, right. You poor darlings think you have it bad now? Just you wait until you get to see what us girls really have to put up with."
The two ex-guys had to think for a moment before they realized what she was referring to, then blanched almost simultaneously. "Aw shit," Mike muttered, "we don't really have to...?"
Zoe shrugged. "Well, I know Jon's requisite bits are human," she said. "And I'm assuming that you're wearing that skirt-thing for the same reason?" Mike nodded. "Then it seems reasonable to expect that you'd both have a mammalian reproductive cycle. And, let's see, it's been a little over three weeks, hasn't it? That means you should be just about...oh God dammit!"
Jon went from cringing to concerned in an instant. "What's wrong?" she asked. Zoe groaned. "It's my period. That's what this life-cycle thing is. I was pretty close to due for mine when I changed, and suddenly I'm getting ready to fruit. Shit, this means I'm going to have to do this every month, doesn't it?" She put a hand to her forehead, the fingers sinking in and temporarily merging with her head. "And it probably means it's going to take three or four days for me to get back to normal..."
