There was a knock at the door. Harry sighed. "Who is it?" she asked. She knew very well it was her mother, but Harry didn't really want to talk right now, and she hoped her mother could take a hint.
That might have worked better if she'd thought to word things more strongly, but she'd never been a sharp-tongued sort, before or after her change. Her mother opened the door, looked inside to make sure the blinds were down, and stepped inside.
"Honey," she said, "we need to talk. I know this is still a big shock for you, but...this isn't healthy. Your father and I have barely seen you in the past two weeks. You're freer than we are, dear - why are you spending all your time holed up in here?"
Harry gulped. "I...I just don't want you to s..." She trailed off, trying to fight back tears. Her mother sat on the bed next to her and put an arm around her. "What don't you want us to see?" she asked. "Your new body is unusual, dear, but it's nothing to be ashamed of."
Harry couldn't keep from crying now. "But it's not me!" she said, voice trembling. "It doesn't even look like a girl-me! I don't even look like you, mom!"
Her mother smiled sadly. "Harry, dear," she said, "why does that matter? We all know that's you in there. There's a lot more that makes you our child than physical similarities. Certainly there's understandable reasons for you to have trouble adjusting, but your not looking like your father or I doesn't change the fact that we conceived you and I carried and gave birth to you. It doesn't take away any of the years you've been a part of our family, sweetie."
Harry smiled through her tears, wiping the trail from her third eye off her nose, and embraced her mother, who hugged her back just as she always had.
Iris stumbled off the plane after a long and mostly sleepless flight. It was one of those planes where the engine was inconveniently located directly beside the backmost coach seats, two of which had been removed as a concession to transformees who wouldn't fit in standard seating.
Granted, this was where Iris would have been flying anyway, as late as she grabbed her ticket and as low as her travel budget was, but the gesture still annoyed her. Typical airline, she thought. At least the TSA hadn't given her trouble beyond that ridiculous questionnaire.
Iris shivered and pulled her jacket, a colorful number woven from her own silk, closer; it was colder out here than in California. She looked at the clock in the terminal. Ten already? How could that...oh, right, time zones. She was going to have get used to that; if Sarah's hints were any indication, her sister's family might need her help for quite a while.
She was very curious as to the nature of their changes; Sarah she knew was a harpy, but her niece had only been willing to give vague hints about what had happened to her parents. Was she embarrassed to tell? Iris chuckled. She'd seen things far stranger than her niece could imagine; San Francisco was a haven for unusual folks even before the sun started transforming people left and right.
But that discovery would have to wait. She'd had a long flight (even longer thanks to the seemingly inevitable detour to Atlanta,) she had another forty minutes' drive to go, and she was dead tired. This drider needed coffee, bad.
Another morning came and went in Jay's new routine: wake up, eat breakfast, shower, brush fur, dress, off to work. Looking at herself in the mirror, she kept thinking back to Knight's "heels" comment; it was pretty interesting how her paw structure affected her gait. Ah well, it was hardly the strangest thing about her new form - and it did complement her semi-formal anchor wear pretty nicely, on the occasions when the camera caught it.
She wondered about what he'd brought her as she made her way to work. It wasn't that it was so farfetched to conclude that this was caused by "magic" - Jay had seen enough by now to know that physics was operating on a different set of rules, or perhaps the old ones had only ever looked like rules due to their seeming constancy.
But what she really couldn't understand was how it could ever be a "kill someone to cover up"-level secret. It wasn't exactly a difficult conclusion to reach. Heck, she'd basically figured it out herself, long before seeing the evidence he'd provided. She thought her contact was probably safer than he feared - but if not, someone in the government was being ridiculously paranoid about what was essentially an open secret.
The other photo, though, with the light pillar - that was something interesting. A satellite-caliber magic flareup, within a couple hundred miles? Well worth looking into. She'd have to see if she couldn't figure out where in the region that photo was taken from.
Jay arrived at the station as punctually as usual, dropping by the office to see how Toby was faring. She was as happy to be back in charge of her own news team as before, but she seemed...just a bit distracted. Well, more like "a lot" than "a bit." Certainly happy, though. Jay wondered what she'd been up to. Shrugging, she headed towards the newsroom, wanting to say hello to Lisa.
Harry had intended to make a beeline for the classroom when she arrived at school that morning, but she stopped in the hallway when she encountered Athena. The scorpion-girl still made her nervous, but she didn't seem harmful or anything - and besides, Zoe was there as well. The slime-girl she knew was a friend, after what had happened yesterday afternoon.
"Oh, hey, Harry," Zoe said. "How's it going?"
The Chinese girl smiled. "Um, okay," she said. "What's up?"
Zoe shrugged. "Not a whole lot - I was just talking with Athena about our visit to Mr. Andre-uh, Andrew Hayes's, why do I keep mixing that up - uh, his house."
Harry gaped, all three eyes wide. "You went to Mr. Hayes's house? Did you see him? How is he?"
