Adam stared down at her body some more, still not quite believing what she saw. She was a harpy now, and she would be a harpy until...until when? For the rest of her life? That wasn't what she'd intended! Could she use her air-bubble thing to reverse this? Cautiously, she lifted one talon off the ground, finding that she could balance just fine on the other, and grasped the bubble, curling her scaly toes around it. She could grab it, at least. And strictly speaking all she needed was skin contact. But...
...well, for starters, what could she even do? She could wish to be human and male again, but it was possible she'd just wind up in another world where the sun would make her human and male...and then, if the examples of some of the townsfolk were anything to go by, she'd change right back upon returning to Earth. And also...was she serious about understanding this, or wasn't she? If she just took the easy way out because she didn't like how this had gone, she'd learn nothing about what the rest of the world felt...
But could she really live as this? She was small, she had no hands, she was naked and couldn't even dress herself as a result...what would become of her? Would she just...just do without, live half like an animal, or something...?
Sarah sighed contentedly as she dug into her dinner. Eating with no hands was a messy affair, but she managed all right. It helped that her legs were flexible enough for her to use her talons somewhat in place of them; she was able to use one talon to hold a rib while she tore bites off of it, and that was good enough for the purpose, as it didn't require Aunt Iris's assistance. Not that the drider-woman would have objected to helping, but Sarah didn't want to be more of a burden than necessary.
She set down the rib and daubed some of the barbecue sauce away from her mouth with a napkin; the little feral part of her mind thought it was silly, but it was better than getting it on her wing and having to wash dried sauce out from her feathers next time she showered. It struck the harpy-girl how strange her life had become, how six weeks ago she would've been grossed right out by her necessarily poor table manners, but now?
Now...she didn't really care anymore. For the first time in a long time, she really felt like herself, and not like the person she'd reinvented herself as for the popularity games at school. How could she have ever put up with that in the first place? She didn't know, but she didn't plan on going back to find out. She was done with that scene now; rather than reinvent herself, she was going to rediscover herself, discover whatever self she had in this new form. She was a harpy, and she no longer had any kind of a problem with that.
Erica shuffled through the woods, listening to fallen leaves rustle and crunch under her feet. How had it come to this? Not only had she been returned to this form after so brief a respite, not only had she been marooned in time with a ward who actually knew more about survival than she did, now she had...she had a man in love with her.
Male attention wasn't anything new, it had cropped up a few different times over the past month. But that had all been crass stuff, some guy in the bar checking out her butt or the man across from her on the bus staring down her shirt. Nothing at all like...like Sam. He was so strange, he was a young adult male, he must have feelings of that nature if he was attracted to her, but in some ways he just seemed so much like a boy. He couldn't be naive, not living in a place and time like this, but she wouldn'tve guessed it by the way he acted towards her...it was almost kind of...gentlemanly, or something.
But that tended to conjure up, in her mind, associations with some limp-wristed, helpless, useless feminine "ideal" - but that wasn't how he treated her. Respectfully, sure, but not condescendingly. Maybe it was her animal nature, more fully displayed in Nikki, or maybe it was just that a woman, at least a single woman, couldn't very well be useless and frail out here, in this environment, but in any case, she found it comforting that he didn't seem to think of her as some china doll to be sequestered away to prevent breakage.
But that still meant nothing to the real question: did she want to...to be a girl? Could she? For him? For her? What did it even mean? She certainly didn't know. The only thing she could deduce for certain is that...it would mean giving up. Resigning herself to life as a skunk-woman, to never returning to her old body. She didn't want that, did she? How could she give it up now?
What did she want here? She'd thought she knew, logically she should be objecting to the very idea of giving up, but...what would happen? If Sam wasn't with her..."with" her...would he even be open to coming with them? Or would he stay here, and...and...no! She didn't want him to die! He was still young, still with so much of his life ahead of him. He was a good man, a man who deserved better than this, and he was her friend. She didn't want to lose him to senseless violence in a rough past, or to whatever stupid machinations of fate or chance may or may not be aiming for him...not him, not with his kind demeanor and his handsome face and his-
"oh god," she whispered to herself. She...she was...attracted to him. She could hardly believe it, and yet at the same time it explained everything. Had she felt this way the whole time? Maybe she had. Maybe all along she was fooling herself into thinking she only wanted him to come with for his own good. She did, his well-being was still a motivating factor, but...she had wanted him around, hadn't she? She didn't want him to go. She...she liked him, too.
She couldn't really believe it. This couldn't be true, could it? Strictly...strictly as a test, she thought of him, thought of him kissing her, thought of him taking her in his arms and...and... Gah! She flushed deeply, feeling a warm feeling and a longing that she hadn't felt since...since...
Her stomach knotted up as she realized what this feeling was, why she had been feeling funny all day. "Oh no," she said, her voice trembling. "Oh no. Not here. Not now..." But biology was biology, and no more willing to listen to reason than when she was a man and had to deal with the foibles of male puberty and its attendant hormone flood. She...was entering her heat cycle, as she'd done four weeks ago, hardly more than a week after her change.
She'd dealt with it then by hiding in her apartment until it subsided, missing two whole days of work - and that wasn't counting the day or so of lead-up before she realized what was going on. But here...here there was no apartment, nowhere to hide, and she couldn't simply go off by herself anyway - she'd need Nikki to survive out here, and she didn't want to risk Sam's life by being separated.
But if she couldn't stop this, and she couldn't keep away from Sam, then what? She could keep herself under control at the moment, but by the time her heat reached its apex...she didn't even know what she'd do, she'd never been in the kind of situation to find out. But the desire was powerful, all the more so because, in her case at least, it was accompanied by an emotional need for companionship...it wasn't too hard to guess what would happen.
But...what about Sam? She trusted him, she knew he wasn't the type who looked to take advantage of a woman, but...he was already attracted to her...and she to him, they were both young, and with her in heat...how long could they keep their hands off each other? She could tell him, ask him not to comply under any circumstances, but...she hated the idea of dragging him into the middle of a war with herself, especially if they weren't going to be in a relationship...how would that be fair?
But what, then, should she do? Just give in? Just give herself over to these feelings entirely? She...she didn't know...
Hiro sighed as he looked around the room. That was about as clean as it was going to get, at least while he was the one doing the cleanup. Hitomi had helped as best as she could, but at hardly a foot tall, the fairy-girl could only do so much. And truth be told, Mom and Dad were probably going to be too tired from the trip to pay much attention to the state of the house.
Both of them were still worried about their parents. They'd heard so little from them since the sun changed...they knew they were alive and apparently okay, and that they were coming home sometime this evening. But the big question - had they been changed? That was something they hadn't asked. They didn't want to seem rude or anything by asking...
Had they changed? Were their parents still the parents they knew, or something different? Hiro was afraid that they'd have become something freaky, but he knew he wasn't one to throw stones there. Being a cyborg...neither human nor robot...he prayed that they'd understand, that they could deal with his change...
