Jay stood tense for a moment, not quite sure what she should do. Run, or prepare for a fight? Would she stand a chance either way? What was in there, wherever "there" was?
After a minute or so, when the crack showed no sign of reappearing, she fell back a hundred feet or so, keeping a wary eye on the spot where the crack had been. Making a quick note of where she was, she turned and bolted for the nearest bus stop as fast as her two short legs would carry her. She almost thought of switching to four, but her glances back showed no immediate danger, and she didn't want to lose any of her things if it could be avoided.
After what seemed like an eternity, she arrived at the bus stop. There it was, waiting. She nearly leaped inside, paid her fare, and then took a seat as the fear caught up to her and she began to shake.
Jay wasn't unaccustomed to this. It had happened on occasion when she was doing a story in the few really bad parts of town; she'd stay cool through the whole experience, and then afterwards all the accumulated fear of looking over her shoulder and wondering if some dark alley hid a thug looking for easy money and trying to figure out if those were gunshots or something else would flood in and turn her into a nervous wreck.
But thugs were something she knew, and they lived in places where she knew she might encounter them. This - this was wholly unexpected. She didn't know what it was she'd heard, and it certainly wasn't something expected to encounter in the suburbs. Its motives, too, were something she was unprepared for. As a fox, Jay knew and understood the visceral thrill of the hunt - but she had never considered herself as possible prey before. It was deeply unsettling.
Other than the minor breakdown, her bus ride went quite uneventfully, and the most hostile thing she had to deal with was a passive-aggressive woman who glared daggers at her and clutched her purse in an iron grip with both hands, as if it was a kind of shield that would keep the strange little fur-thing away. Given that the lady herself was some kind of lizard-person, Jay wondered exactly how she figured herself superior.
Jay returned to the station and was relating the whole story to Lisa when Toby walked by, probably on her way to the coffee machine. She did a double-take when she overheard the conversation, and quickly joined their huddle. "Sorry, Jay," the blue-haired young woman said. "What's this about a crack?"
Harry was huddled up in one corner of the library. She'd eaten a bit, but she wasn't really very hungry, the way she was feeling.
She felt so empty. She had her memories of life with her family; she knew who they were. But who and what was she? She didn't know, and she hadn't known even before her change. Was she really such a non-entity that even she didn't know herself?
It wasn't a loss of self brought on by her change, after all; the sunlight had just illuminated how little of a self she'd displayed all along. Harry thought back over years of drifting from class to class all day, hoping just to get out of school, only to get home and immediately hole up in her room doing not much of anything. She remembered her parents encouraging her to broaden out, and her apathetic, noncommittal replies.
She hadn't wanted to not do anything, but there was just so much to risk by trying new things, and it was so much easier to put it off...it was like her whole life was a path of least resistance. And now here she was, her only defining features being the ones instilled by her change. No wonder Ken had so easily confused her appearance for her true nature; it was the only thing about her that stood out.
But there had to be a "real Harry" in there somewhere, right? People weren't just born as ciphers, she didn't think. Maybe if she could just discover herself... Maybe if she tried some things - the worst that could happen is she'd discover what she wasn't like.
But still the question nagged at her: am I a real girl? It was strange; the one thing she did know about herself, and yet it didn't seem to count. She was physically a girl, but was she a "real girl?" She didn't even know what the definition was.
She was distracted by movement and looked up to see a slightly alarming creature with a serpent body and a living mass of snakes for hair. She was startled, but she recognized this as the school counselor from some other students' accounts.
"You don't look too good," the Gorgon said. "Are you feeling all right?"
Answering "yes" to that question is a conditioned reflex in a lot of people, and Harry opened her mouth to say it, but what came out was first silence and then a soft whimper. The counselor looked sympathetic. "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked. "We could go to my office if you like."
