Jon rolled out of bed, the mucus layer tugging against her foot as she pulled away from the mattress cover. She felt the texture of the vinyl against her bare skin; she'd slept naked last night. It wasn't something she made a habit of, even as a guy, but after seeing herself as a whole for the first time, it just seemed like the thing to do. No hiding, nothing covered, just her, as she was. But now that she'd gotten that out of her system, it was most definitely time to get dressed; actually, it was about twenty minutes past time to get dressed.
She didn't usually feel bound to schedule (aside from the basics of actually being fed and off to school on time,) but she was feeling...not very good, and she knew that if she just laid in bed waiting to feel better, she'd be late for real. She really wasn't feeling good, in fact; there was a dull pain in her gut, and she felt slightly queasy to boot. Had she slept funny and kinked a muscle or something? She sat up in what amounted to her "standing" position and made her way over to the dresser, grabbing the bra off it and putting it on. She winced at a further pain in her abdomen as she raised one arm; of all the times to cramp a muscle, why did it have to be on a school morning?
She looked around the room, trying to remember exactly how to work out a kink in a muscle. She looked over at her bed, wishing she could just go back to...wait, what was...was that blood?
Jon had a sudden terrible, sinking feeling as she looked down towards her waist. Seeing a little smear of blood down her front, she cringed. Now she really felt nauseous.
There was a visible black aura around Tiffany as she tried to pull herself out of bed, flickering haphazardly and making shapes that strongly suggested wings and horns. She felt like shit; it was lucky that she was suspended, or she'd have to go to school like this. Wasn't that a strange thing to think...lucky to be suspended? Gah.
Tiffany had not slept well the previous night; she'd had a rather gut-wrenching nightmare and been unable to get back to sleep for quite a while afterwards. The dream was about a harpy, but while she'd initially assumed it to be Sarah, she came to realize that it was actually her. She was on a balmy tropical island, surrounded by open ocean on all sides, for hundreds of miles. She'd known that, though she couldn't recall if she'd ever verified it. She had flown around for a bit; that was fun. But...she was too far out from the mainland to leave her island, and she was the only inhabitant, animals excepted.
It had seemed so enjoyable at first; she didn't like the thought of being a bird-thing now that she was awake, but it was fun in the dream, at least. The weather was pleasant, flight was fun, and nobody bothered her. It wasn't long, however, before she grew restless; there was no-one around to pay attention to her, nobody to interact with. Being a dream, everything happened in compressed, edited time, so she never exactly saw the empty hours in which she wished for a companion, but she knew they were there.
What she did see was a highlights reel her subsconscious had helpfully produced for her: Tiffany the harpy discovering for the first time that she laid eggs, growing grungy and unkempt with nobody to help her bathe, clothes growing tattered and finally disintegrating, gradually forgetting all human manners as she fed on the small animals she caught and ate raw, blood running down her chin, shivering in a monsoon with only the trees for shelter, unable to build anything to keep the rain off, finally descending into the life of a feral animal, forsaking everything that civilization had instilled in her to live alone.
So.
Very.
Alone.
And somehow she knew: it wasn't the harpy part that had driven everyone away. It was her.
It was at that point that she'd woken up in a cold sweat. She was barely able to breathe again until she'd confirmed that she still had her arms and no feathers were to be found anywhere on her body, but it was hours before she was able to sleep. Even now, in the light of day, she could still feel the terror that had overtaken her during the dream. She felt like throwing up; she didn't ever want to see a harpy again, let alone interact with one. Stupid freaking nightmare; it ought to at least have the decency to go away by morning!
Sarah arrived at school completely unclothed, with nothing in her bookbag but her books. She was officially no longer bothering with getting dressed, and if she was going to do this, there was no point in half-assing it. She took a deep breath, stood straight, and marched into the school. This time, people noticed. Apparently enough word had gotten around about the incident in the lunchroom that they were still leery of giving her a hard time, but that didn't mean they weren't staring. Sarah had to fight down the urge to turn and run; everything she'd learned from human culture said that was what she should do in a situation like this. No, she was going to stick with this. She walked straight to her classroom and sat down at her desk.
The teacher was a bit stunned at the sight, but not apparently that surprised. Sarah supposed they'd all been briefed on her or something. "Ms. McMillan," she said, "you should know that the school dress code has been amended; however, if you don't wish to cover yourself, then you will have to obtain permission first."
Sarah nodded. "Okay, may I be uncovered?"
The teacher was hesitant; she knew what the rules were, and she was advised this would probably be an issue, but this...this was still something pretty new to her. She was expecting some kind of confrontation, but not to be directly asked for permission to go naked!
Sarah saw her trying to figure out what she was supposed to do. "You might as well," she said. "I'm not going to deal with the hassle just so that we can pretend I'm still human; there's no reason for there to be a fight over it."
The teacher frowned, then looked thoughtful, then frowned again, then nodded. "For the moment, anyway," she said. "Technically you are supposed to submit a written request before coming to class like that, but I'll overlook it since the rules were just amended last night."
Sarah nodded; that was good enough. The teacher handed her a form, and she began to fill it out. She still wasn't sure what today would bring, but she knew she was stubborn enough to see this through.
Karyn followed a ways behind the naked harpy, trying not to draw attention to herself. It wasn't that she was all that embarassed about Sarah's being au natural, but she still wasn't sure whether she wanted people to associate her with Sarah. She sighed; she couldn't deny that it seemed kind of childish, but...for as long as they'd had bad blood between them, it wasn't so easy for her to just forget it. Still, it was embarassing that Sarah seemed to be having an easier time of it than she was; maybe it was because she was already being forced to reevaluate just about everything about her life. Karyn's change, for all its physical drasticness, hadn't changed her life nearly so much.
She caught up with Jon as she was wheeling towards the pool room; her best friend seemed to be in a worse mood than usual. "Hey, Jon," she said, trying not to sound perky enough to be annoying. "What's up?"
"Unnnngh."
Karyn made a show of checking her watch (a waterproof number she'd bought a week ago, after accidentally wearing her non-waterproof watch into the pool.) "Gee," she said, "let me guess what came up on your schedule today."
Jon sighed, hanging her head. "Is it always this bad?"
The cecaelia-girl shrugged. "That depends. How bad is it?"
"I'm queasy, and there's this dull throbbing, and I'm getting a headache..."
Karyn smiled sadly. "I, uh...I hate to break it to you, but that's actually not too bad."
"Fffffffffuuuuu..." Jon trailed off into a groan in the middle of the word, but Karyn could guess. She nodded. "Tell me you at least took something for it."
Jon nodded. "Mom gave me something after she showed me how to put in a tampon...it's helping, at least."
Karyn sighed. "Welcome to our world, Jon." She put a hand on her friend's shoulder, trying to display a little sympathy. She did find it kind of amusing, but she remembered the day not so very long ago when she'd had pretty much this exact reaction, phrased in the language of a pre-teen.
The slug-girl stared at dolefully at her. "Just try not to take too much sadistic glee in this, please..."
She chuckled. "I'll save that for your first OB/GYN appointment."
Mikey was encouraged when she saw Ms. Maple smiling at her as she entered the classroom. The principal was a mysterious authority figure, not someone she really looked up to, but she'd have been pretty depressed if her teacher was disappointed in her. She wondered if they'd caught the cracker yet; she hoped they had at least taken steps to secure the school computers. She looked around the room, wondering if the attack had even come from the Internet. She hadn't noticed any other robots in the library at the time, but it wasn't the only room with machines connected to the school network; there were teachers' workstations in many of the classrooms. Heck, the attacker might even have used the computer in the counselor's office while they were in the middle of a talk! If digital fairies like Effie could (however uncommonly) serve as proxies to a computer without a direct physical connection, the possibilities were near-endless. She supposed she should suggest some of this to the staff; maybe whoever made up the IT department here might be able to do something with the knowledge.
She was distracted from her thoughts by a voice. "So, you're a robot, right?"
She looked in the direction of the voice. It was the girl she'd seen yesterday, the one who appeared to be a statue. She looked no different up close; everything on her seemed to be fine white marble, except her clothes. The soft mottled patterns of the stone spread all over every surface of her body. She seemed...kind of stylized, not exactly what you'd get it you made a cast of a human girl and used it as the basis for a statue, but rather a good, if somewhat simplified, representation of what a human girl looked like. Mikey wondered if that was a facet of her transformation; were there people who were turned into other media? Paintings, or cartoons, or something? She wondered.
"Uh, yeah," she said. "Are you really made of stone?"
The statue-girl smiled and held out her hand. "Feel."
Mikey did; it certainly felt real enough. The "skin" surface wasn't polished to a fine gloss, but rather to a smooth satin finish that didn't really feel like, but suggested the feeling of human skin. Somehow or other, while it had some give to it, and obviously had to be elastic for her to move, it resisted her direct attempts to push and prod it like actual rock. It was, however, completely room temperature; compared to what she expected, it felt cold. She wondered what her own artificial flesh felt like to others. "Huh," she said. "Does that go all the way through?"
The girl shrugged, and Mikey watched the curtain of stone that was her hair gently ripple. "We don't know for sure," she said, "but it seems like it. They weighed me and they said I only weigh a bit less than what I would if that's true."
Mikey nodded thoughtfully; she hadn't even thought of that. "What do you weigh?"
The girl laughed. "It's not polite to ask a lady her weight!" she giggled. "But it's 150."
Mikey gaped. "Pounds!?" She didn't look it; she was a bit shorter than Mikey and only of average build. But the girl nodded.
"I'm Caitlin," she said. "You're Mikey, right?" Mikey nodded.
"The other kids are saying you hacked the school computer and changed your grades," Caitlin said. "Did you really?"
Bryan, who had wandered over to nearer where Mikey sat, scoffed. "No way!" he said. "Mikey wouldn't do that!"
The robot-girl smiled, a little embarassed. "Cracked," she said. "And no, I didn't. Someone tried to make it look like I did, though."
Caitlin frowned. "How did you convince them you didn't? Did you see the principal? What's he like?"
"I just explained to them," Mikey said. "There's things about me that the cracker couldn't copy, and I offered to tell them to the principal, and I guess he figured I was telling the truth. I didn't get a really good look at him..." She considered relating what she had noticed, but she decided that if the principal hadn't revealed himself to the school yet, she ought to respect that.
