Jon looked around at the makeshift camp. Considering that she hadn't actually been out camping in about seven years, it didn't look too bad. Michael the raptor-girl had been nice enough to help her get the tent from the car and set it up, then left to rustle up some dinner. Jon looked over the food she'd brought along; there wasn't much to work with, but the instant noodles might work as a sort of soup with whatever meat Michael brought back. She just hoped that the butchering would be taken care of away from camp.
"Need any help?" Zoe asked. Jon looked over at her sister. She had been losing definition all afternoon, and was now mostly defined in terms of spheroid shapes; her head was a sphere with eyes and a mouth-outline, covered by a canopy of hair that was just a somewhat larger, oblong spheroid with pieces cut away. About the only surface irregularities were the many sporangia stalks that had been sprouting from her skin. She looked kind of like a character from the very early days of pre-rendered video-game cinematics.
Jon shook her head. "Nah," she said as she slid over to the log where her sister had parked herself, "I think we're okay for now. How are you feeling?"
Zoe shrugged, though by this point that just meant a ripple in the mostly-homogenous mass her torso had become. "Eh," she said, flatly. "Not so great, but no worse than a normal period. Shit, I still can't believe I'm going to have to do this every month."
That brought up something Jon had been unsuccessfully trying to avoid thinking about since Zoe's revelation earlier that afternoon. "How...how do you deal with that?" she asked. It wasn't something she actually wanted to talk about, but she was facing at least six times through this wringer, even if everything went well with reversing the wish. If not...well, she really didn't want to think about that.
Zoe looked at her slug-girl sister and smiled grimly. "You just get used to it," she said. "It's still a pain in the ass, but it's not quite so bad once you know what to expect. Hell, maybe in a year I'll feel the same way about this fruiting thi-" She paused suddenly, frowning, then gasped. "Oh God, here I go!" she said, more than a little discomfort in her voice.
Suddenly her sporangia began to burst, emitting little puffs of spores. It took a moment for Jon to realize what was happening, and she quickly backed away, so as not to accidentally inhale her younger sister. As the spores were freed, Zoe's body began to dry out and stiffen up, leaving a thin shell in the very rough shape of a teenage girl, like a shed snakeskin. Jon looked over the remains of her sister, feeling slightly nauseous.
Mikey surveyed the scene before her, trying to figure out what to make of it all. Things had gone fairly well when she escorted the little red-headed girl claiming to be Biff Meadows to her house. They'd gotten there okay, and Biff was mostly coherent by the time Mr. and Mrs. Madison started to question her.
She'd reiterated basically the same thing she'd told Mikey: someone had smashed their windows during the night and exposed the house to the sunlight. Biff had awoken the next morning as a little girl (with, they discovered, a third nipple,) and had found her parents transformed into bunny-girls, though her mother was now technically male. While Biff seemed for some reason to be limited to the vocabulary of the little girl she'd become, it was clear that she'd walked in on them naked, going at it like, well, rabbits. They had paid no attention to her, so she went outside, where Mikey found her. A bizarre and disturbing story, but a consistent one.
Then Sarah had walked in, wanting to get the sports bras Mikey had been sent to buy. Biff had looked the unclothed teenage harpy that had been her girlfriend up and down, spent a long moment with an expression like she was trying to remember something she'd forgotten, then burst into tears. Sarah was initially confused, but once she learned who the girl was, she began to cry, too. Now Biff was bawling her eyes out, head buried in Sarah's chest, as the harpy-girl unsuccessfully fought to control her own tears while trying to comfort her, and Mikey's parents were debating what to do, wondering whether the Meadows' neglect of their son-turned-daughter was deliberate, and whether they were still fit to take care of her.
As confusing as this chaos was, Mikey couldn't think of anything but what had happened to Biff. Her regressed vocabulary, and probably that look she gave her once-girlfriend, were clear proof that non-negligible mental changes did happen. Biff at least was aware of them, but who was to say that was always the case? What other changes could happen, and what did that imply for Mikey;s hopes of remaining herself?
