How could it have come to this? How could his own daughter have become this...this monster? He'd heard of the sun doing a lot of things, but never this. His girl, twisted into a cartoonish mockery of the woman she was growing into, and infused with some...something that made her cruel and sinister...
Mr. Saunders wasn't blind. He knew Tiffany had had her faults before; was it her mother she'd got them from, or was it him? He didn't know. Probably both. She was a bit vain, arrogant, manipulative...but she was not a monster, she was his child. Yet now it was like her flaws had been magnified and distorted along with the rest of her...why? Why did this have to happen to his little girl?
He wanted to do something about it. He was her father, wasn't he? He should intervene, save her from whatever had happened to her...but how? He was just a man, an ordinary man...and whatever Tiffany had become, she was not ordinary. The way her own skin seemed like a shell hiding something darker, the way the shadows in the room all seemed to draw in to her...no, not ordinary at all.
He should get help...but where? Who could he turn to? It wasn't like there was anyone he knew of who would know anything about this. Nor was there much of anybody he could call at all, that he could think of. His ex-wife was off in Nevada with...what, Brad? He couldn't remember. She hadn't spoken to him in a year, and he didn't know how often she talked to Tiffany. He didn't know any of his daughter's friends, assuming they still were her friends...
And even if he could think of someone...how could he get out to go see them? He was terrified of his daughter. He couldn't leave the house in the day, and at night...if he tried to leave, wouldn't she just...be there? Waiting, at the door, that look on her face...he shuddered.
But today...she was in her room, he was pretty sure of that, but for her to be locked in there all day and still not have come out...what was going on? Was she all right? Or was she...was she growing worse? He couldn't bear to think of it. There must be someone he could go to!
Mr. Saunders wasn't sure why, but somehow his thoughts settled on her teacher. He didn't know the woman that well, but he had her number from a couple conversations they'd had in the past about Tiffany's behavior, when it went a little over the line. It was crazy to think she could do anything more than he could, but...if he could just talk to her, get confirmation, know that he wasn't going crazy...
He stealthily picked up the phone from its cradle, pressing his thumb over the speaker as he dialed to muffle the sound. Soon enough, it was ringing, and the other end picked up. "Hello?" said a woman's voice.
"Hello," he said, trying to keep his voice only enough above a whisper to be heard. "This is Bernard Saunders, Tiffany's father...I'm calling because...well, I'm having some issues with my daughter, and I...wanted to see if you had any input?"
There was a pause that seemed to stretch for an eternity.
"I'll be right over," the teacher said, sounding surprisingly intense. Her, coming here? Did she...did she know? He was about to ask, but she had already hung up.
The "cold shower" pretty much consisted of Andy standing stock-still under the shower head while liquid ice ran down her body - she didn't do any cleanup, as she was still too unused to her new body to deal with handling it, and she was afraid that would just set her off again anyway.
How could she be dreading her own body's instinctive reactions to her spouse? But if her body was giving her the wrong reactions...or was it wrong? They were married...yet she was supposed to be the man, not the woman! More than that, though, much more than that...she couldn't shake the feeling that she still owed her mate some kind of repayment, before she would be worthy of love...
She didn't like the idea of having to earn love, physical or otherwise...the notion that doing nice things for one's spouse was just setting it up so that they "owed" you sex...but she hadn't done much nice for Sue for any reason, not in a while. The way she'd treated her wife and her children...surely that was beyond the pale? She had to make some kind of restitution! It couldn't be as simple as...as Sue just forgiving her, could it?
Could it?
She finished her shower and towelled off as gingerly as she could manage, taking a little comfort in the discovery that rubbing herself dry was just as perfectly plain a sensation as it had always been, and not one of the little things she didn't know about that turned her new body on...and it seemed that the shower had worked. Her feelings were...damped, at least for the moment, though she could still feel them tingling at the base of her brain...had Maple been right?
The rabbit-woman re-dressed herself and set about trying to comb out her long black hair. It was a bit of a pain, but it did at least give her more opportunity to keep her thoughts focused, and not drifting back to...what she had been thinking about. As she was finishing, she heard the door open and Alex and Sally speaking. Good, the kids were back...that would mean she and Sue couldn't get up to anything...
But was that really what she wanted? She didn't know...
Jon sighed contentedly as she settled back in at home for the evening. Mikey and Becca were off somewhere, Zoe was squirreled away in her room, and her parents were just getting up, so it was just her for a while. Hanging out with her best friend again, getting to know another friend better, and making a new one...it had been a good day, really. Marred a little bit by that inexplicable bout of fatigue in the mall, but at least it had passed quickly.
The slug-girl made her way up to her room and pulled herself up on the bed, curling her foot around herself like a cushion. It felt so weird to feel slugskin on slugskin, with that layer of mucus in between...not bad, but weird. That was possibly the weirdest part of all this, that none of it was really uncomfortable. Her changed body could be a hassle to work with, and it still didn't feel right to her, but it didn't feel bad.
She wondered if that was how it was for everybody. Max certainly wasn't comfortable with her body, for instance, but even she didn't seem to be physically uncomfortable...at least no more so than having six unsupported breasts would warrant. Jon felt for her...just two was enough of a pain in the ass!
Then again, that criteria could be stretched pretty far - Tim's little sister, for instance, and her..."dragon problem," as her father had phrased it. That was merely a natural facet of her new form, but that didn't make it not a pain. Even though she didn't seem to be even psychologically uncomfortable with her changed form, to have to put up with *that...*Jon felt an urge to go and wish it away for her, but she knew she couldn't risk tampering with the stone...even something like Melody's travails would have to take a backseat to the well-being of the entire world.
She took another look at the book she'd received today. Even here in her room, it still smelled ancient...maybe even a little moreso. The leather covering was worn, a little torn and frayed around the edges, but still intact, the lock-strap still sturdy, and the paper...or the pages, rather, she wasn't sure they were paper, seemed fine...how old was this thing? How could it have survived however long it had and be so relatively pristine?
Well, okay, she could think of an explanation, but while she had no choice but to admit the existence of magic, she'd prefer to invoke it as a catch-all as little as possible. Besides, nothing about the book seemed particularily out of the ordinary...it didn't have an orichalcum lock or golden thread for binding or anything.
But then, she was the one who'd transformed the freaking Sun with a rock.
More baffling than the book itself, though, was the note. Give it to Brittany? She didn't have any objection to doing so, but...why such a roundabout approach? Why not give it to Brittany directly? Surely there had to be a better way than leaving it for a chance acquaintance of the Briton girl's at a shop she occasionally visited and trusting the whole thing to work itself out!
Strange indeed...she looked forward to Monday, and getting to ask Brittany herself what this was all about.
Steve frowned. After she'd spent a while trying to beat her old record, she'd decided it was time for a break and moved on to some other games for a bit. Which was fun enough, except that Hiro had been following her from game to game. Not always playing, sometimes just watching...
She didn't care for the feeling. She'd thought at first that he might be leering at her, which was terribly embarassing, but as it progressed it seemed he was more just...observing. Why? What was he looking for? In some ways it was almost less comfortable than if he'd been leering. She felt like a bug under a magnifying glass...
Still...she wasn't going to let it get to her. She'd ignored his "princess" cracks during the race, mostly, and he'd left off with them, so if she applied the same strategy, he should stop soon enough. And in the meantime, she'd just keep enjoying herself...
She glanced at the clock on the wall of the arcade. That late already? The sun would be going down pretty soon...no doubt Ben and company would be here not too long after - he didn't live very far from here. Her stomach sank. Was she really...was she really going to do this? To break the news to them? How would they react? How would they treat her? Like a girl, or like her old self, or something in between?
She didn't know...
