Sarah was not having a particularily good day. She had, at least, managed to complete the unexpected test fairly well, or at least so she assumed from the fact that she hadn't been called to the office like some other students, but that was about it. If nothing else, she was quite adroit with her talons, and with her apparently greatly enhanced flexibility, she was able to write with very little trouble, using a wing to hold the paper steady.
But...it got her a lot of very strange looks. Sarah had a sinking feeling that however the students' changes shook up the social strata around here, she was going to wind up in a very different position than she had had before. It was like all of her hard work in climbing up the high-school social ladder was for nothing!
She stared at the plate before her. It had been nice of the cafeteria personnel to help her load up a tray and get it to a table, but she wasn't really very hungry, least of all for this...vaguely beef-like loaf product. She glumly picked at it, wishing she could just go home and forget about school entirely.
"Hiiii, Sarah..." She winced; that was the voice of Tiffany Saunders, the mock-sincerity temporarily replacing the absurd oversexedness from earlier in the day. She'd never much liked Tiffany in the first place, but she'd sort of tolerated her as a fellow "cool kid" rather than get into a war over it. Now, now that was gone, why pretend? She just hated her.
"Go away, Tiffany," she snarled. Tiffany smirked and stepped around front where Sarah could see her. "I love your new look," she smarmed, leaning in to violate the harpy's personal space. "Have you built a nice little nest for yourself yet? There's a nice little nook on the roof of the school that be a perfect place for you to lay-"
"Shut. Up.*" Sarah hissed. "Or I'll get Jon to crawl on you."
Tiffany's face flushed at that mention, and she began to seethe visibly. That was one thing about her, Sarah knew; she* hated *to be reminded of any time she'd been even remotely humiliated, especially in public. "Fine," she spat. "*Be *that way." She stomped off, leaving Sarah to morosely contemplate her "lunch."
Until, that was, Sarah felt a hand on the clasp of her sports bra, and before she even had a chance to react it had dropped into her lap. She leapt to her feet and whirled around to face her tormentor. Letting loose an extraordinary shriek of rage, she jumped into the air, curled one talon into something resembling a fist, and spread her wings, dropping into a very short dive that planted her foot firmly in Tiffany's ribcage.
Sarah grimaced as she dropped back to the floor; apparently her talon was* not *meant for punching. But nothing felt broken, and Tiffany was still the worse for it, curled up on the cafeteria floor with the wind knocked out of her. Sarah breathed heavily, grinning triumphantly at her fallen adversary...until she realized that they'd attracted a lot of attention, and every single person in the room was staring bug-eyed at her. A wide array of feelings rushed through her in that moment: shock, embarrassment, fear, anger. But...not shame. Somehow or other, she'd just officially given up caring.
Not that it made her less angry. She stood perfectly straight, wings outstretched, officially no longer giving a damn who saw what. "YOU THINK THIS IS* FUNNY!?" she roared. "Fine, LAUGH! I don't care! GO AHEAD!*"
No-one did. She huffed. "Then all of you, just* LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!*" She sat back down and the table while Tiffany gasped for breath behind her. One cafeteria lady rushed over to help the fallen girl, while another came to help Sarah get covered back up. The harpy shooed her away with one wing.
"If I give in," she said, "it's weakness. And if it's a weakness, it's just going to be 'hey you guys, it's open season on Sarah's bra!' this semester. Besides, I'm sick of waiting for people to dress me like I'm a goddamn* child.*" The cafeteria lady backed off, while trying to remember what, if anything, of the dress code still applied.
Jon looked around. The pool room hardly looked any different right now, but then, the plans for its renovation were only just being put into effect. Various aquatic transformees were either in the pool or not very far from it; Jon saw several traditional mermaids and mermen, along with one who appeared to be half-shark, her fish half going all the way up to the gills and including the pectoral fins that most mermaids tended not to have. Her sleek, angular lines were complemented by a wicked-looking set of teeth when she smiled at the slug-girl. Jon smiled back, if a bit nervously.
Karyn was stretched out in the shallow end of the pool, laying back in the water like it was the most comfortable thing in the world. Jon was surprised by how long she was - her tentacles, extended like this, were fully twice the length of her torso!
The cecaelia-girl stirred and looked in Jon's direction as she approached. She smiled and stuck her head out of the water. "Hey, Jon!" she said. "Care for a swim?"
Jon shook her head. "I'm not sure what'll happen to my, uh, lower half in water; I know it does fluid exchange very well one way, and if it does it the other way, I don't want to get water poisoning or anything..."
Karyn nodded and hauled herself out of the pool, doing a crude but functional "walk" across the tile to one of the deck chairs that had been set up around the pool. "So," she said. "Haven't seen you in a while; where've you been?"
Jon briefly explained about Zoe's ordeal, and Karyn nodded. "Yeah, I guess that would keep you busy," she said. "So...how're you doing otherwise?"
Jon sighed. She didn't want to go through this again, but if she could tell a stranger in the school office, she could certainly tell her best friend. "I'm...confused," she said. "I keep trying to tell myself that this is only temporary, and I can fix everything if I can just get through six months until the stone is recharged, but everybody's acting like it's permanent."
"Because as far as they know, it is," Karyn said. Jon nodded. "And...I think that's kind of rubbing off on me; even though I know it's temporary, I keep thinking like it's permanent, and I'm wondering if I'll be able to stay a guy in my head long enough to become one in body again, and I'm trying to figure out why I don't seem to be attracted to girls anymore, and I'm wondering if I'm as attractive as the people I'm not attracted to..." She trailed off. It was all so confusing...
Karyn smiled and wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and a tentacle around her waist. "Sounds like a mind-bender," she said. "Jon, maybe...maybe you shouldn't worry about it."
Jon gaped at her. Karyn shook her head. "I don't mean* embrace it and become a girly-girl or anything," she said. "You don't even have to change your behavior at all. It's just...it can't be healthy to be obsessing over this. Let it go and just be you, *and in six months you can go right back to being you again, because you never stopped."
Jon frowned; that hardly seemed like a solution to her. "Besides," Karyn said, a twinkle in her eye, "you actually do look pretty nice."
"Really?" Jon asked. "What about..." She indicated her slug half.
Karyn smiled. "Actually?" she said. "That too. It's weird, yeah, but...it just seems to* fit. *It's a good look for you - while you're a girl, at least."
The slug-girl frowned. Now she was* really_ confused.
