Alex was struck with a sudden horror. A two-headed...no, that couldn't be right! No, no, no! He couldn't have gotten Sally into something like... He lurched upright, finding himself in a sitting position on a cot in the nurse's office. There was someone beside him on the cot; a blanket had been covering them, but had come off when he'd sat up.
"Oh, guess not," Tiffany said. "That'd have been pretty damn freaky."
The nurse frowned. "Ms. Sanders, please don't speak like that around new transformees."
Tiffany scowled. "Fine, whatever. As long as these idiots aren't dead or anything..." She turned to go. Alex realized that for some reason she seemed...a little less terrifying now. Still scary, though. As he watched her go, Alex caught a shape out of the corner of his eye. He turned to see, and saw that it was a mirror - and it wasn't him looking back at him.
The person in the mirror was a girl about Sally's age, with firey red hair in wild array around her face, like a halo of flames. The face was strong and...not exactly bestial, but ungentle - aside from its being basically recognizable as a girl's face, there wasn't much feminine about it. Still, it wasn't unpleasant: there were hints of a wild elegance about it. This was the face of a pulp-fiction jungle princess, or something like that.
Actually...it was Sally's face, now that he looked at it. Or almost Sally's face, as it had elements of his father's...of his own. The red hair hung off to either side of a pair of horns that jutted from the forehead; they were a few inches long, curving upwards, and delicately spiraled around the circumference, like an ice-cream cone.
Behind the head rose a pair of wings, folded up but still recognizable - a visible bone structure covered with warm red scales that caught the light in a not-quite-glimmer, with expanses of thick, leathery dark red skin between the...spokes? Or whatever you'd call them? Completing each wing was a claw-like horn that caught the curve of the main bone and extended just past where the others branched off. The rest of her upper body appeared to be human, but her arms had finer red scales from the elbow down, and she had short, bone-white claws in place of fingernails. They didn't look especially sharp, but still...
The girl in the mirror wasn't exactly stocky; she was more or less ordinarily proportioned. But she had a strong, sturdy look to her nonetheless. Sally was wirey and athletic, and this girl had a bit of that, but she looked more imposing, like she wasn't to be pushed around. She had the figure of a developing young woman - the softness of the little girl melting away into what would be the curves and angles of an adult.
In a daze, Alex stumbled to his feet, watching the girl in the mirror do the same. She was dressed in a hospital gown which had been tied around the neck and waist, leaving room for the wings to poke out the back, and for...her tail? She had a tail, hanging down between her legs, almost to the floor.
It was maybe a half-inch thick at the tip, but widened out towards the base, looking like it would cover the whole width of her pelvic region at the base. It was covered in the same scales as her wing-bones, except for the underside, which was a glimmering white. There appeared to be small triangular plates along the back ridge, with the same darker red covering as her horns. Her legs below the knee were much like her arms; essentially human in structure, but scaled and tipped with claws - she did have dewclaws on the balls of her feet, in addition to the ones in place of her toenails.
It wasn't until this survey was complete that it really hit home with Alex that this was him - or was that her? She was the girl in the mirror, the dragon-girl. This was what the sun had done to her - all her planning, all her caution, had been in vain. And...what about Sally? Oh God, why did she have to come along? She hadn't meant to drag her into this...
She turned to the cot, where the other figure still lay. It was another dragon-girl - she realized as she looked this other girl over that she was Alex's identical twin. Tiffany had seen them covered by the blanket, and assumed they were the same body, because they had the same face... Was this Sally...?
She couldn't hold it back any longer; she crumpled to the floor beside the cot and began to cry. It was bad enough that she had gotten changed, but to have gotten Sally into this mess...and after all she'd tried to save her, to have her change after all, and be stuck the the same as her...
Sally awoke to the sound of someone crying. Her last memories were a confused jumble of trying to protect Alex, and Alex trying to protect her, and something or other about Tiffany...who was this girl beside her? Where was she? The nurse's office? She looked around, and caught sight of herself in the mirror...wow. This was quite a change, but at least she was still a girl...
She turned back to the girl next to her cot, realizing suddenly who this was. Alex had to go through all that change and become...they were twins, weren't they? She leaned over and hugged the crying dragon-girl. "It's okay, sis," she said. "We'll be okay."
Muriel hated dealing with the press. That went doubly now that she was less than photogenic...her splotches of plating weren't exactly ugly, but they came across strange, like she had been frozen in the process of becoming something else and was neither one thing nor the other...she was mostly okay with it, but it tended to put TV people on edge.
And then there was the nature of the whole thing. A bomb scare at a school was a big, emotional issue...ratings gold for the more sensationalist stations, and difficult to cover in an official capacity. Downplay it too much, and they start talking about how you don't really care about the kids. Make a big deal out of it, and they ask why you didn't stop it before it started and how are you going to prevent it in the future - as if you can anticipate these things!
Oh well. There was really no getting around it, so she might as well get it over with. "Excuse me!" she said, waving in the general direction of the media throng. "I'm Officer Walsh with the police department, and I'll be answering your questions about this incident." Dammit, that was a bad way to start it off to begin with - like they had any answers!
A coyote-woman in a sharp power suit stepped forward. "Have you determined whether the school is truly safe?" she asked. "If the students are all still here..."
Muriel nodded. "We've spoken with the bomb squad," she said. "They assure us that the device found on the school roof is not explosive, nor is it emitting radiation. They've taken it for further study, but as far as we can tell at the moment, it's merely an elaborate fake."
She felt a nagging voice reminding her that Jenny and Tetra had believed it to be a weapon of whatever nebulous "Enemy" they were facing, but she couldn't very well go telling the media that it was planted by invaders from another world to get at a little girl who could stop them. What a field day they'd have with that!
"Do you know who planted it, or why?"
She frowned. What, did they think the culprit had left a forwarding address? "Not yet. We will be conducting an investigation into the incident, but as the device does not appear to be dangerous, it seems reasonable to assume that this was the action of a crank with some kind of grudge against the school."
A lizard-man raised his hand. "What about the reports of a flying woman? Could she have been responsible?"
"We do have her in custody at the moment," Muriel answered. "She does not appear to speak English, and we don't have a translator for her language, so we're having difficulty obtaining information. However, we have found her fingerprints on the fire alarm that got the building evacuated, so it would seem more likely that she was a passerby who attempted to help."
"What about the students?" another voice from the back spoke up. "How are you going to help them cope?"
It took quite a bit of restraint on Muriel's part to keep from slapping her palm to her forehead. Did these people even understand what the police department was? "The students made an orderly evacuation and are uninjured as a result," she said. "Dealing with post-traumatic issues is a job for trained counselors, and the school staff has assured us that they'll be making sure any student that needs such help will receive it."
The police had temporarily set up shop in the school's administrative office, and Anneza found herself a not-particularily-voluntary guest therein. She couldn't understand - if they didn't want to arrest her, why was she here? Or if they thought...if they knew she was responsible, why weren't they being more forceful? She wasn't even hancuffed or anything.
Were they just holding her here until they could figure out what to do with her? In a way, she'd almost rather have known she was in trouble than be kept in the dark like this. It...it wasn't like she didn't deserve it...
Jenny entered the office, looking over to where the strange lady was hovering, legs crossed in a sitting position in mid-air. "Can I...can I see her?" she asked the lieutenant, a harpy-woman with nut-brown plumage.
The woman gave a curious and somewhat exasperated glance towards Anneza. "All right," she said. "Go on in."
Jenny thanked her and walked over to the strange lady. Anneza stared in wonder at the little girl now approaching her - didn't she know what she'd done? Didn't she understand? She gently sank towards the floor until she was almost on level with the girl.
Jenny took the woman's hand in her smaller hands. "They said you helped everybody get out," she said, smiling. "I guess you don't understand me, but I just wanted to say thank you..."
