Steve was extremely conscious of just how much of herself was open and uncovered as she walked out to the car. The petals in her "skirt" only reached about two-thirds of the way to her knees, and the area of full coverage stopped a ways before that - how could her mother seriously be suggesting this? A stiff breeze could...
Well, maybe it couldn't. These weren't cloth, after all - they were living tissue with blood vessels and everything. Even though they were thin compared to any other part of her body, they were thicker and heavier than normal girls' skirts looked to be. Maybe they could hold in place...she hoped this wouldn't be put to the test.
She felt the petals sway gently with each step, brushing against her legs and reminding her just how much of them were on display. Her feminine legs, slender and toned...why did they have to be like that? The rest of her was...not exactly ambiguous, but not so girly that she couldn't pass for the...the not-especially-masculine boy she had been. But her legs...there was no mistaking them for a boy's legs.
She made it back out to the car without a freakout, at least. She hated to think of going back out into the cool, moist air, of having another part of her change...but at the very least it hadn't happened so far. She sat carefully down in the passenger's seat, trying to let her petals come to rest in a position where they wouldn't be caught underneath her if she slid around on the seat.
Steve noticed a cheap, stapled-together pamphlet on the armrest. "What's that?" she asked.
"Oh," her mother said, "that's something the doctor gave me...it's a booklet on reproduction in transformees, particularily as concerns plant-people...I'm not sure you want to be reading that, though. You might get a little carried away...and you were upset enough earlier."
The flower-girl frowned. What? She wasn't upset about this - she hadn't even thought about it until now! But...well, anyway...
She shifted in her seat, frowning as one petal bunched up behind her, reaching back to straighten it out. "Mom...?" she asked. "Why can't I cut these off? I mean, you're okay with me getting a haircut. Is it because you don't want me...?"
Her mother nodded. "It's partly that I don't want you hiding from your changes, yes. But it's also...hair doesn't bleed when you cut it, sweetie. It doesn't have nerves in it, either. Those petals are a living part of your body - and if your nervous system is trying to tell you not to hurt them, you should listen to it."
"But they don't do anything! They just get in the way!"
"The exterior of your ear doesn't do a whole lot either, and I wouldn't let you cut that off. You need to respect your body, Steven, even if it's not what you'd like it to be."
Steve sighed. Why did she have to be stuck with this ridiculous...girly thing? It wasn't fair! And her mother was talking about that pamphlet like she was some kind of frail weak thing who would shriek and faint at the sight of blood...she picked it up and started leafing through it, turning on the passenger's-side reading light.
Mrs. Daguerre smiled. Score one for reverse psychology...
The pamphlet began with a basic overview of transformee reproduction as it had been observed so far. Of course, with the sun only having been changed for a bit over a month, there wasn't a whole lot of solid information yet, but they'd been able to make some observations from new pregnancies since the change, and from mothers already carrying children when they'd transformed.
For starters, it seemed that more than a few couples got changed into new forms that were directly compatible with each other - husbands becoming women to match wives who'd become men, for instance, or couples changing to the same species. It wasn't so common that it could be classified as a rule, but it wasn't at all unheard of. Some couples had even formed symbiotic relationships - Steve remembered, from her day visit, that she'd heard some bird-girl talking about her parents becoming a plant and...what, a swarm of bees? Weird. She shuddered at that thought.
From what could be discerned about new pregnancies, it appeared that two people of different species (human and non-human, or a couple different species of transformee) could conceive with no problems, at least thus far. However, with barely more than one month out of nine at the most, it was far too early to tell what the children were going to be. It seemed that in-utero babies changed with the mother (and even post-natal babies seemed to change to match when exposed, at least up to a certain age,) but they didn't know whether this need to match would apply for babies conceived post-change by mixed-species parents or not. It sounded like they weren't ruling out the possibility of a true mixed-species child, though.
Interestingly, it seemed that some varieties of transformee could reproduce by themselves, either by splitting off a separate individual, which would grow into an infant (some varieties of slime-person did this,) or, far more weirdly, by actually self-conceiving and carrying a baby in the normal fashion. In both models, despite there being only one parent, it seemed like the child was not a clone of the mother, though scientists had no idea where the genetic alterations came from.
(There were also androids who were attempting to build children for themselves, though scientists didn't classify this as "reproduction" per se, to differentiate it from androids who seemed to have biomechanical-alternative variants on the human reproductive system. It sounded like the variety of creatures produced by the sun was half-matched by the variety of reproductive strategies they employed.)
The pamphlet was careful to emphasize that all of this information was very tentative, based on observations taken from early transformees, and that medical science's understanding of the subject would likely change substantially over the next couple of years. None of this could really be considered "rules" at this point.
As far as specifics for plant-people went, the pamphlet had a short overview on the reproductive strategies of actual plants - first, sexual reproduction via pollenization of the "pistil," the female part of a flower, by a pollinator agent like a bee, or simply by chance landing of pollen there, and asexual reproduction via "runner" roots or spores. Some plants could apparently self-pollinate, though this was less common.
Plant-people seemed to be just as varied. Both sexual and asexual reproduction had been observed, as well as self-pollenization - it sounded like the one-parent approaches shared the mysterious genetic diversification of other transformees' self-reproduction.
However, that wasn't the only factor. Apparently, not all fertilizations in all plant-people produced children - some produced fruit, both of ordinary varieties and of strange new kinds. And some produced seeds, which had been planted but had yet to give indication what they'd grow into. It seemed, though, that self-fertilization had a tendency towards fruit and not children. Apparently the fruit could develop from a flower bud, like ordinary fruit, or it could...it could gestate inside a plant-woman like a baby. Steve cringed when she learned that - as if this wasn't frightening enough!
She was a little reassured to learn that the stamens in the center of her flowers were technically the male parts of the plant, and she patted them affectionately. It didn't make her situation all that much better, but it was nice to have something even vaguely familiar about her...
She looked at her fingers as they came off the flower atop her head, the tips lightly dusted in a yellow powder. This was pollen, wasn't it? That was what the stamens did, they produced pollen to fertilize...oh God.
For the first time it hit Steve that the implications of being female ran far deeper than looking different, being treated like a girl, and having to sit down to pee. She could...she could get pregnant...she could have a baby! She'd never actually seen what childbirth was like, but she'd heard some girls in school discussing the video they'd watched in health class...
She felt like she was going to throw up. Her flowers manufactured and emitted pollen - did she have a pistil? Was that what was in her...oh God, could pollen get in there? What if it did? What if she...what if she got pregnant!? What if a bee...
Her mother noticed the blanched expression of stunned terror on her daughter's face and pulled the car over. "I think I can guess what you've read about," she said. "Are you going to be okay? Do you want to talk about it?"
